it's a motherfucking paper!
Oct. 11th, 2009 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labellementeuseThis is my Honours thesis, in a slightly-less-edited-than-the-version-eventually-turned-in-version, because I have unfortunately lost access to the shiny version. However, this remains for posterity.
Introduction
Little Mothers and Sailors: Girls in the Heyday of Adventure Fiction
The Women's Movement, 1945-Present Day: A Potted History
Reworking Adventure: Jones and Modern Novels
Conclusion
They Couldn't Have Done It Without Her: Girls in Adventure Fiction
1. Little Mothers and Sailors: Girls in the Heyday of Adventure Fiction
Between 1930 and 1960, according to Victor Watson (76-77), a vast number of novels of a genre loosely described as “holiday adventure fiction” or “camping and tramping series” were published in Britain for children and young adults. In this genre, boys and girls, generally pre-teens and young teens, strike out on their own without their parents but with all the privileges that upper-class English children might expect. They have “tramping and camping” adventures, and the books frequently describe in detail their living arrangements and activities. Because children in these novels often do their work performatively, mimicking (either explicitly or implicitly) their parents, they offer a means to understand contemporary ideas about gender, work, and gender-appropriate behaviour for children, particularly when read with contemporary feminism. From this period I will examine the work of Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton, the former writing early classics of the genre, and the latter writing a formulaic but wildly popular series at the height of the genre's popularity. Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1930) was, if not the first, at least a very early camping and tramping novel (he would continue publishing novels in the series until Great Northern? in 1947) that remains influential, while Enid Blyton's Famous Five series was published from 1943 to 1963 and remains the best-known example of the genre.1
Despite their differing levels of sophistication these novels, and their contemporaries, offer a clear comparison in terms of the roles offered to girls. Girls are typically either tomboys, such as Nancy Blackett (Ransome) or George (Blyton), or they are little mothers such as Susan Walker (Ransome) or Anne (Blyton). The little mother role had been a familiar trope in children's and young adult literature for some time; it was familiar enough by 1900 that J. M. Barrie parodies it in Wendy Darling's relationship with the Lost Boys and Peter Pan, in which the boys want Wendy for a mother while Wendy wants Peter for a husband. L. T. Meade's 1896 A Little Mother to the Others is a slightly earlier, and more sincere, example. Tomboys would presumably have been equally familiar: Jo March (Little Women, 1868-1869) is a famous early (though American) example. While Ransome, at least, offers a slightly broader range of female characters (Titty and Dorothea are both writers, and his characters are generally well-drawn enough that they do not seem stereotypical in the way that characters in Blyton's more workmanlike novels do), the mother and the tomboy remain touchstones for female characterisation. Written over a forty-year span covering the interwar period, the Second World War, and the post-war era, it is useful to first contextualise these texts within their contemporary feminist movements and the situations of women at the time.
Both world wars offered opportunities for women to enter the workforce in non-traditional roles in large numbers. However, these opportunities were highly limited, typically understood and contracted as temporary roles for women who functioned as placeholders for the men who were away at war (Caine, 227). After the First World War, “womanhood [became] based more decisively than ever on an ideology of domesticity.” (Bruley, 60) Women left the workforce in droves, willingly and unwillingly, as a consequence of Britain's desire to return to its pre-war habits (officially sanctioned in 1919 by the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act (Bruley, 61)). Similarly, the Second World War “was followed by a powerful evocation of a traditional family, which ascribed to women a more domesticated role than they had ever actually undertaken.” (Caine, 228) Despite women's variously marginalised positions in the workforce during the wars, it was deemed necessary for them to immediately leave whatever positions they did hold in order to make room for the returning men; the domestic ideologies were merely a tool to ensure women did so with as little fuss as possible. Nevertheless both world wars were immediately followed by a few successes for feminist movements: notably in 1918, women's suffrage; from 1944, the gradual abolishment of the marriage bar which prevented married women's work outside the home; and others as detailed in Caine 222-226. Barbara Caine suggests that these successes, which led to the disbandment of the women's organisations founded to support them, along with a post-war conservative and anti-feminist backlash, led to periods of quieter and less radical feminism. Consequently, feminism in the 1920s and 30s, and feminism from 1945 to 1960, look remarkably similar, at least as described by Caine. Just as propaganda had mobilised women into the workforce during the wars, it mobilised them straight out again when the boys came home.
The Second World War stands out mostly by contrast; after two decades of relative quiescence, limited and difficult conditions for working women in the war became a rallying point for women activists including women MPs. Women engaged in a wide variety of tasks across the country, including working in munitions and engineering, piloting, driving, managing heavy machinery, farming, and felling (Bruley, 101-105); women MPs worked to ensure that they were adequately, and equitably, rewarded (Caine, 229) for their war service. Nevertheless, progress was limited (particularly when it came to convincing the Government that women ought to be remunerated equitably with men) and once more swallowed up by the post-war backlash.
Feminism was not immune to this backlash. Most women’s experience was likely to be that of a wife and mother, and social pressures dictated that good wives and mothers were increasingly devoted to their families (Caine: 182). After the First World War feminists were undoubtedly as pleased as the rest of Britain to return to a more traditional, less threatening way of life, and so interwar feminism became in many places preoccupied with reaffirming femininity, at home and in the workplace. A constant theme was the ways in which the workplace was constructed as a highly “masculine” environment: so Virginia Woolf, for example, dwelt on the emphasis of masculine tradition, dress codes, and language in the professions, and the consequent exclusion of women (210). As a contemporary wrote, “[I]n our man-made world we still permit the highest praise of a woman to be, ‘She has a masculine mind.’” (214) This celebration of femininity and feminine values was associated with an understanding of women and men as fundamentally different creatures, with different emotional and psychological needs. Such an understanding was not universal but it was extremely widespread and, according to Caine, “locked women into family life by stressing that it was only through heterosexual relations and motherhood that women could be healthy, happy, and fulfilled.” (175) Even women in the workplace or in education were bound to have a feminine perspective that needed expression. The question of sex difference – are men and women different? And if so, how? – became central to feminism in the interwar period. “New” feminism (i.e. interwar feminism), as exemplified by women like Eleanor Rathbone, president of NUWSS and then NUSEC (the most influential feminist organisations of the time), was committed to an understanding of women as fundamentally different from men, with different needs, desires, and concerns (Caine: 215). Nevertheless, some feminists, proponents of “old” feminism, remained convinced that there was little difference between men and women that was not socially constructed: so Winnifred Holtby argued that men and women’s occupations ought, as much as possible, to be the same, and to limit the fields which could be the sole province of either gender as much as possible (Caine: 216). Barbara Caine gives an ideal example of a median point in I. B. O’Malley, who argued that the feminine perspective ought to be able to be as freely expressed as the masculine, while worrying that she was not sure that any such thing as an inherently masculine or feminine perspective existed (216).
It is in this context that the figures of little mother and tomboy became ubiquitous in adventure fiction for children. Neither Ransome nor Blyton can have been able to ignore the legacy of the world wars in their awareness that women could, at least, participate in the working world with men; neither could they, writing in the interwar and post-war periods, neglect the domestic ideologies propagated by the desire to return to the traditional. I will explore each of these authors' treatments of the mother and tomboy characters and attempt to contextualise them within the sketch of social ideology about women I have provided.
Susan Walker of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of the Famous Five share a traditionally feminine, and motherly, preoccupation with neatness and domesticity. They enjoy setting up camps; one might compare these two passages from Ransome's Swallowdale and Blyton's Five Run Away Together, where each group of children has discovered a cave:
Five Run Away Together, 149.
These camps, and the chapters that contain them, bear significant similarities (apart from the caves, with their handy natural stone shelves and holes in the roof to let in air, they also have small pools nearby for washing up, other pools suitable for bathing and keeping cool those stores which need to be kept cool, conveniently located lakes and seas for boating, and so forth.) Anne and Susan's behaviours are also fairly similar; Susan is more proactive, making fireplaces while Anne merely wishes for one, but generally they put away stores and make the campsite quite homely. Where the novels differ is in their treatment of each girl's actions. Anne's delight in housekeeping amuses her family and they appreciate it well enough, but one somehow has a sense that George, Dick, and Julian would get on quite well without her. Although Anne fusses about making the beds with heather, Dick has already noted that sleeping on the sand alone is quite comfortable (143). Anne puts stores away, but it was Julian who thought to bring them; just as it was Julian who remembers to check the place where they are going to sleep and Julian who orders the children out of the sand. Anne makes the cocoa in the morning, but it is George who remembers that they will be cold after they bathe. Anne does not enjoy her responsibilities because she likes doing productive work; she enjoys them (like her peculiar pleasure in washing-up) simply because she can play at being mother. While Julian demonstrates here a quasi-domestic sensibility - he is responsible for his siblings' and cousin's wellbeing - the book never identifies it as such, preferring to continue identifying Julian as a father figure. Instead, Anne is a little mother, but a worthless one - and as the youngest she is not even fully able to participate in the children's adventures. She falls asleep while keeping watch; she is afraid to go down into the dungeons to inspect the smugglers' suspicious activities.
Susan's behaviour is quite different, as is the novel's assessment of it. Susan does enjoy her responsibilities, but the work she does is genuine, not play, and the books value it as such. While it is hardly radical to have the eldest girl child be the character chiefly concerned with the others' physical safety and wellbeing (although John is also concerned with his younger siblings' physical safety), including getting meals, nursing, and reasonably regular bedtimes, the novel's attitude to her work is utterly distinctive. Instead of Julian's rather condescending amusement at Anne's pleasure in domesticity, John is grateful for Susan's work and acknowledges her as an expert in what she does (including, but not limited to, the making of fireplaces.) Ransome, too, acknowledges her talents. "... [T]he number of things that would have been forgotten if Susan had not remembered them was very great", he writes early in the novel when the Swallows are preparing (4). Although in this passage he is gently ribbing Susan's somewhat obsessive attention to detail, he is more sincere in any number of passages from other books. In Peter Duck, Susan is the moral and pragmatic arbiter to whom the rest of the ship (including the adult Captain Flint) must defer on whether or not they may embark on their adventure; when they do so, it is Susan's attention to detail (and their water supplies) that allows them to be successful, which Flint acknowledges (213): "it was all due to Susan that things went off so well." In Pigeon Post, a more realistic novel than Peter Duck (and the realistic novel with the most genuine dangers, including hill fires and mine collapses), Susan is the one who can be relied upon to watch out for the adventurers and their fires in a drought (50-51) and therefore makes the entire adventure possible. Far from being merely mentioned in one or two books, Susan's reliability and hard work are consistently what enables her and her family to have adventures. And quite unlike Anne, Susan does have adventures; she is not as explicit about her enjoyment of them as the rest of her family, or Nancy, but she is an equal participant in all adventures. She advocates for their High Tops adventures, and signs her name to John's letter in support of their first adventures on Wild Cat Island; in the same novel she occasionally forgets her position as mother figure, so caught up is she in the excitement of being ship's mate and adventurer (51). She sails as well as John, if with less enthusiasm. Nor is her devotion to her family's well-being wholly self-sacrificing. When she has received a medical kit as a gift, Susan is described as almost wishing someone would get hurt so she might have a chance to practice her skills, a peculiar sentiment indeed if she were solely concerned with her family's wellbeing. (Peter Duck, 11) In short, Susan is a fully realised Anne who, instead of devoting herself to idle domestic play, is an expert in domestic arts without sacrificing her own pleasures and personality as earlier mothers like Iris of Meade's A Little Mother to the Others and Wendy of Peter Pan do, and whose contribution is valued genuinely rather than with condescension.
It is interesting that Peter Hunt, in Approaching Arthur Ransome, is unable to assess Susan quite as equitably as Ransome himself is; indeed, despite writing in 1992, he seems to have much the same attitude to her work as Julian expresses of Anne's, describing her as monomanaiacal (104), a word he also uses to describe Nancy. To Hunt Susan's work is “tiresome but also authorially endorsed”. He suggests that Susan's worry for the health of her family is a sop to the parental reader (who might be concerned at the absence of a parental figure), and so Arthur Ransome's appreciation for Susan's work merely functions to appease the child reader bored with this conservativism. This is a surprising analysis, coming as it does after many chapters in which Hunt dwells with approval on the detail Ransome uses to describe the Swallows' actions and his emphasis on the importance of the Swallows' skills: “Clearly, the attraction of the... adventures is as much in the details... as in the plot,” (72) and “there is great pleasure in descriptions of how to make a heather broom, how to plane and oil a mast, how to light a fire without paper, how to navigate using a compass, or how to cook corned beef.” (104) Hunt admires Ransome's devotion to detail when it involves John's obsession with mast-making, but is not so appreciative of Susan's work.
Nancy and George, like Susan and Anne, are characters drawing on similar stereotypes who are treated very differently by their respective series. Where Nancy is scornful of people who do not realise that she is a girl due to her boyish dress and behaviour (REF), George delights in being mistaken for a boy and often insists on being referred to as “Master George” rather than “Miss Georgina” (Five Run Away Together, 24). Nancy is also an assumed name; she has rejected her given name, Ruth, as pirates ought to be Ruthless (Swallows and Amazons, 113). However, “Nancy” is hardly to “Ruth” as “George” is to “Georgina.” "Nancy" is not a masculine name; indeed Ruth/Nancy seems to have gone out of her way to pick a girlish name, landing on a name that, then as now, functioned as slang for an effeminate or gay man (according to the Dictionary of Slang, “nancy” had been in parlance to denote homosexuality since the previous century). Perhaps deliberately, Nancy is a name that simultaneously evokes the feminine and the masculine. Nancy typically performs nearly identical tasks to her male counterpart, John Walker; both sail equally well, both row and perform the other difficult physical tasks typically associated with men, both are proactive planners (although Nancy is a highly imaginative character more given to flights of daring fantasy than the more stolid John and therefore more likely to propose plans and adventures, causing conflict in the later novel Secret Water.) They stand watches and are both referred to as “Captain” by the younger children; indeed there is a friendly competition between John and Nancy that seems to be more typical of novels featuring two boys. Julian's behaviour towards George is much less equitable; he frequently intervenes when George starts fights, insisting on fighting the (usually troublesome but much lower-class and much less physically impressive than brave Julian) boy in her stead. “'You're not fighting George,' he said. 'She's a girl. If you want a fight, I'll take you on.' 'I won't be a girl! I'm a boy!' shouted George, trying to push Julian away” (33). A tempting passage occurs earlier in the same novel:
A psychoanalytic reading of this passage is almost irresistible: George is ineffectual and rejected by her father, while cousin Julian, supposedly separated from George only by gender, is able to utilise a spurting hose to solve the problem. Yet a psychoanalytic analysis is not truly necessary to draw conclusions about Blyton's expressions of gender, since she repeatedly offers them through Julian, the 'real' male figure in the novels.
Julian is a startlingly explicit figure of patriarchy, able to confront adult women (especially in the lower classes) and have his way, protecting George from her own agency in fights with others, in setting out on her own, and so forth. In this novel, Five Run Away Together, George also acts to repress her own personality. Her mother is ill and she does not want to worry her with her usual ebullient personality, so she tries to avoid fights and direct confrontations. When her mother leaves to recuperate, however, George returns to her usual self.
One can immediately compare George's behaviour in the early part of the novel with Nancy's behaviour in The Picts and the Martyrs. Her mother is also ill, and like George's mother has gone away to recuperate; however, whereas for George out of sight seems to be more or less out of mind, Nancy is determined to be at least somewhat mature even when unsupervised, to live up to the responsibilities with which her mother has left her. This novel presents us with the unlikely spectre of Nancy not "being good" by attempting to live up to traditional gender roles (she dresses just as she always has, in boyish shorts, t-shirts, and caps, and climbs fences and trellises) (13, 25 and see also fig. 1)
or by repressing her ebullient personality with its penchants for piraticism and skull and crossbones decorations, but by also assuming the domestic responsibilities of the hostess or housewife. Dorothea, the guest, realises that "Nancy, who was very good at being a pirate, was now being a hostess instead" (13) - Nancy's practice at assuming alternate identities serves her as well to be a hostess as it does to be a pirate, and indeed Nancy's performance as lady of the house is just that - performative. It might seem anachronistic to suggest that Nancy's performance highlights the constructed and performed natures of these roles in reality. But Nancy’s behaviour functions much as Judith Butler describes drag as doing in her seminal Gender Trouble: people who perform or dress in drag highlight the constructed nature of gender through juxtaposing the gender they perform with their physical sex (Salih: 65), in acts Sarah Salih describes as repeating differently the typical gendered behaviour which is constructed by the social discourse (66). Nancy repeats her gendered behaviour differently: the shock the reader feels in Swallowdale catching a glimpse of Nancy in gender-appropriate frilly dress, hat, and gloves rather than her usual utilitarian shorts and shirt is as disruptive to the notion of Nancy’s identity and gender as the first sight of a man dressed in women’s drag is to our notions of gender as essentialist rather than as constructed. Meanwhile, Nancy’s ease in slipping into the roles of housewife and pirate regardless of the fact that these roles are deeply, and differently, gendered acts similarly to criticise any idea of gender as a coherent, essential whole, suggesting instead that it is a contingent set of actions, and that, for example, the notion that a hostess must somehow be feminine is a product of society rather than anything intrinsic to the act. Ransome's explicit comparison of Nancy-as-hostess with Nancy-as-pirate in the Amazons' elaborate "let's pretend" games, combined with the grim spectacle of Nancy-as-girly-girl when she is forced into the elaborate and frilly femininity preferred by her Great-Aunt, allow us to separate domestic responsibilities from gender as well as to identify gendered behaviour (in Ransome's apparent view) as artificial rather than intrinsic. Whereas for Blyton and George being a loving daughter means self-denial and self-effacement, for Ransome and Nancy being a loving daughter means performing domestic responsibilities while retaining one's own character.
Ironically, Peter Hunt once again singles out the most interesting part of Nancy's depiction and characterises it as a monomania (98). Nancy, he suggests, falls flat particularly in Secret Water because of her inability to let go of childish games, while the newly-mature Walkers (who have just undergone an extraordinary ordeal without the Amazons in We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea) are more preoccupied with mapmaking: “The Walkers have been given a task, to finish the map… Nancy and Peggy… wish to play games.” (143) Apart from Hunt's rather dubious assessment of fantasy mapmaking as a significantly more mature activity than fantasy pirating, he fails to understand Nancy's preoccupation with game play as a tool that allows her to escape her preordained identity. Hunt picks up (92) on a telling passage as early as Swallows and Amazons (356):
This is all well and good for John and Roger, as well as for Susan the devoted nurse and caregiver and Titty the writer (along with other protagonists Dick the scientist and Dot, also a writer of exciting romances.) Nancy, however, has a fairly clear idea of her responsibilities and likely adult future – as both she and Ransome demonstrate in The Picts and the Martyrs, which succeeds Secret Water. While Nancy is, or can be, a capable domestic when she needs to be, it will never be her first love; nor is she likely to make a successful teacher or nurse, the other professions open to a young woman in the pre-war period. Instead, as several characters remark, “‘[Nancy’s] Great Aunt is rather like her Great Niece.’” (The Picts and the Martyrs: 385) While the G. A. is formidable in her own way, Nancy detests her, and would hardly look forward to a life as a bitter and lonely woman. Nancy, I would argue, is not the simple, carefree “child’s child” that she appears to Hunt (92), and her embrace of child’s play is (or can at least be read as) a consequence of her self-awareness. Of course she embraces play: unlike John and Roger, she can never truly go to sea, and play is the only chance Ruth will ever have to be Captain Nancy. She does not willingly relinquish her leader’s role to John because it may be her final opportunity to be the leader, before she succumbs to the patriarchal family structure. Hunt does not fail to remark upon Ransome’s uncritical acceptance of this patriarchal family (91), noting that Mrs. Walker is subordinate to Cmd. Walker and this patriarchal structure has already been passed down to the Walker children (136). He also argues that “Ransome is undeniably sexist,” (140) apparently because in the sea voyages the boys are not seasick while the girls consistently are. This is accurate as far as it goes, but stands in stark contrast to Hunt’s earlier boredom with the “authorially endorsed” Susan and his assessment of the “monomaniacal” Nancy as “tiresome” whenever she attempts to contradict John’s leadership. He reads the Swallows’ acceptance of their father’s task as a sign of maturity; I read it as the intrusion of patriarchal adult society, where leadership is automatically assigned to John, into the Swallows’ and Amazons’ previously egalitarian culture, in which John and Nancy compete for leadership according to skill (as they do in Swallows and Amazons) and inclination.
Ransome's willingness to envision a range of femininities in Susan and Nancy (as well as Titty, Dorothea, Peggy, Mrs. Walker, and Daisy) draws attention to the fact that while domesticity is difficult and important, it is not natural to all women. In Susan and Nancy can be read the dilemma of interwar feminism: whether to celebrate femininity and encourage acceptance of it in traditionally masculine arenas, or whether to push persistently for men and women to be understood as fundamentally similar in their preoccupations. (It is worth noting at this juncture that it is rare for a Ransome boy, or man, to bother cooking.) Meanwhile, Blyton's range of femininities drifts from hyperfeminine, domestic, and easily frightened Anne to George, a character who might without much difficulty be read against the text as a transsexual character rather than as a girl; if read as female, George still attempts to entirely reject her gender in order to obtain agency and to participate in a broad range of femininities. Her family continues to thwart George's most socially disruptive rejections of gender norms, including preventing her from fighting with boys. In Blyton, writing somewhat later than Ransome, we may see a wholesale conservative backlash. Anne is sweetly contented by her household tasks, while George who struggles for literal equality is a generally unhappy character, repeatedly frustrated by her family and by society. She and Nancy are both aware of their positions as social oddities: but where Nancy is equipped to deal with this through a chameleon-like shifting from character to character, George has no tools to protect herself and must be resigned to Julian’s authority. Ransome's novels are longer and his characters correspondingly more well-rounded. Still, while Nancy offers more flexibility to women than George, and Susan's work is valued as women's domestic work rarely is in fiction or in reality, as the chief female characters in Ransome's novels they merely flesh out stereotypes, but do not challenge them.
2. Drastic Changes: The Women's Movement from 1945 to the Present Day (A Potted History)
In order to contextualise the changed roles for girls in modern young adult fiction – that is to say, fiction published within the last twenty years – it is necessary to look at the changes to women's lives and experiences, as well as cultural perceptions of women, effected by the Women's Liberation movement of the 1970s and early 80s. Bruley (117-146) and Caine (222-254) describe the period from 1945 to about 1970 as one characterised first by the post-war backlash, and then by mostly incremental improvements to the condition of women. Women increasingly worked outside the home, but were, and are, still underpaid relative to men and expected to bear the brunt of childcare, leading to a “double burden” (Bruley 121). Sue Bruley points to 1956's very familiar-sounding title, Women's Two Roles, Home and Work by Viola Klein and Alva Myrdal, which acknowledged the difficulty of both working and raising children and advocated for a phased model of a woman's working life (Bruley 126), so that mothers could leave work while children were small and return when they were at school. The notion that women ought to foster intense emotional bonds with their children to prevent psychological damage was widely accepted and helped to keep women in the home (131), along with the pay and promotion discrepancies that persisted between men and women no matter how skilled women were (123). These inequities were socially justified by the continuing notion of men and women as separate but equal, and the idea of the nuclear family, with the man as the breadwinner and the female as the caregiver and housekeeper, as the natural unit of society (172).
It was into this environment that hormonal contraception began to be introduced – gradually. At first offered to married women (from the mid-1950s) but increasingly from 1964 to unmarried women in committed relationships (or at least, women prepared to characterise their relationships as committed to family planning doctors (Bruley, 138)), the contraceptive pill began to offer women control over their status as mothers and childcarers. By the late 1960s, there was unrest in other areas and increasing dissatisfaction. In 1970, women meeting at Ruskin College committed to four demands that would characterise the movement for the next decade:
1. Equal Pay.
2. Equal education and opportunities.
3. Twenty-four hour nurseries.
4. Free contraception and abortion on demand.
(Bruley 149, Caine 256). According to Sue Bruley, at the heart of the movement was “a powerful attack on the sexual division of labour in society” (150); to Barbara Caine, the Women's Liberation was preoccupied with the “visual and cultural representation and conventional ideas of femininity [that] contributed to the oppression of women” (256). Bringing these ideas, some of which remain extremely radical, to bear on the concepts of femininity as demonstrated by Susan and Anne – little mothers devoted to their families, and happily so – illuminates the reason why these stock characterisations have fallen out of favour in adventure fiction, to be replaced by girls who can, at least in theory, do anything. Meanwhile, women at the beginning of the 21st Century seem almost to be relitigating, with advances, the concerns of women in the 1950s: reconciling family responsibilities with paid work outside the home.
Although the Women's Liberation movement has made great strides in improving pay equity and access to education, the fact that its latter two objectives – greater access to birth control and childcare – remain radical has meant that despite increasing support for women working outside the home, women still feel the pressure of the double burden. Indeed it is because of feminism's great strides in the workforce, coupled with very little movement on the domestic front, that has led to many feminists' preoccupation with the work-home division. Bruley suggests that the advances of the 1980s may have produced a crop of “burnt-out supermums”, entering the workforce while still fulfilling all their domestic responsibilities, and identifies a few modern feminist writers who are responding with the familiar ideology of the separate spheres: women in the home, and men working (179). These writers place a high value on domestic work and some call for remuneration. Nevertheless, they remain the far edge of a spectrum of women's responses to the desire, and need, to work inside and outside of them home. Linda Hirschman, in her brief and extremely direct volume Get To Work advocates the reverse, suggesting that women of means abandon the home; in her schematic, each individual ought to fulfill their potential outside the home, and pay caregivers to raise their children.
Meanwhile, a majority of feminists look for solutions that incorporate both needs into the lives of both women and men. Typical solutions involve both partners working part-time in and out of the home, or switching off; these authors tend to demand better accomodations for part-time work and paid parental leave. Mary Blair-Loy's Competing Devotions identifies the devotion to work schema and the devotion to family schema as cultural narratives that describe and proscribe the traditional behaviours of men and women. She describes the pressure on women to devote themselves to their families, and the further pressure on working people to devote themselves to their careers, and identifies the difficulty or impossibility of reconciling both as they are currently constructed, while observing the improvised solutions of a group of women business executives who have chosen to work part-time while raising children, defying both schemas. Patricia Thompson in The Accidental Theorist challenges male-centric public life in her “reclamation” of the hearth goddess Hestia and the messenger god Hermes, suggesting that each symbolises an important part of the experience of human life – housework and public work – and that the former has been devalued because of its association with the feminine. It is vital, she says, that both genders experience both spheres of everyday life, the Hestian and the Hermean. These writers, and others, are attempting to restructure the nuclear family so that housework and caregiving is not viewed as only the domain of women, while continuing to value the work done mostly by women in the home, and I believe that these questions are implicitly played out in girls' roles in children's fiction.
3. Reworking the Holiday Adventure: Modern Texts and Jones
The conceit of holiday adventure fiction, and the characters that tended to be found within it, have in modern children's fiction more or less parted ways. Children don't go off on holidays without their parents anymore, if indeed they ever did; the realistic trend in children's and young adult literature has resisted the conceit as a kind of sentimentality. Perhaps this is a fair assessment: Diana Wynne Jones herself remembers Coniston Water, the original for the lake where the Swallows and Amazons spent their summer, in the backdrop of her memories of the Second World War (Something About the Author), and a childhood friend, Nicholas Tucker, describes the lake as dangerous, gloomy, and threatening. Watson notes, in Reading Series Fiction, that he is always surprised when people identify Ransome's work (as merely one example of the genre) as realistic: “I regard him essentially as a magical writer.” (13) Instead, fantasy is the genre which has sustained the holiday adventure story. To escape their parents, characters tend to be thrown (typically without their consent) into fantasy lands. Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), and their contemporaries, are earlier explorations of this theme, just after the heyday of holiday adventure fiction. Children go out into the supposedly predictable English countryside, and find it rendered alien by fantasy. Modern novels tend to rip children right out of the realistic world and into a fantastic one in the portal-quest mode: N. M. Browne's Alavna novels (in which two ordinary British school children travel back in time to a pre-Roman magical Britain) and Garth Nix' Keys to the Kingdom (in which the generally fragile Arthur Penhaligan is summoned into a fantastic universe) are exemplary of this approach to series fiction, while J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels are an extremely popular example of the successful blending of this kind of portal quest adventure with another old-fashioned children's genre, the school story. The characters that these things happen to are rarely Susans, Johns, Nancies, or even Georges and Julians: practical characters who know what they're doing, in their element. They're asthmatic and wheezy Arthur Penhaligons, plain Janes and predictable Simons and Barneys. Even when characters who end up in these other worlds are relatively outstanding, like sporty Dan from Warriors of Alavna, they are always revealed to be quite unprepared for their adventures. Indeed, where John, Susan, Nancy, Julian, George and Anne remain mostly static characters, modern series in the portal-quest line tend more towards the bildungsroman: Dan's overweight and miserable classmate Ursula finds that Alavna grants her access to magic and to a means of developing her own physical strength3 , while popular, easy-going Dan discovers his own battle-madness. Meanwhile, thrown into a world they're unprepared for, the typical behaviours of performative adulthood have vanished. Girls are not mother or tomboy, and boys are not patriarch or mischief-maker. The willingly motherly girl has, in fact, almost vanished from adventure texts, and I speculate that this is because in the portal-quest fantasy the children venture much further from the Hestian home and hearth, as Thompson would have it, than they did in holiday adventure fiction. The landscapes of holiday adventure fiction were parentless, but they were still British: familiar and familial society, with parents and responsibilities, was always nearby and the reconstruction of the parental narrative is a cornerstone of the novels. The portal quest fantasy drags girls and boys alike into the Hermean domain, where the structure of the nuclear family is absent and unnecessary, even harmful: ironically, in these fantasy novels physical danger tends to be taken much more seriously, and the peaceful domestic life is far away.
The effects of second-wave feminism have also contributed to an understanding of this stereotype as a poor model for girl readers, and so she has left the pages of the holiday adventure novel, for practical reasons as well as political ones. Girls like Susan embraced the motherly role because it was valuable, a useful way she could participate in the family holidays. Thus, in portal fantasies, there is no point in performing these roles, because they are rendered irrelevant by the unfamiliar setting, just as Dan's sportiness is irrelevant in Alavna. Instead, boys and girls in modern adventure fiction are much alike in their rejection of the domestic sphere and of motherly work. Increasingly, too, there has been a division between emotional caregiving and physical housework; it is rare to see a novel in which the bulk of housework is done by women, but still not unusual to read a novel in which most emotional work is done by women.
The motherly girl has not entirely vanished. Instead, she has retreated to the pages of the realistic problem novel, where she (or very occasionally he) is stuck taking care of her family while her mother works, or occasionally plays. A classic New Zealand example is Margaret Mahy's Laura Chant, from The Changeover (1984). Laura embraces her parental role towards her brother whole-heartedly; while she occasionally regrets her responsibilities, generally she is tender towards him, describing herself at one point as feeling as if Jacko was really her own baby, rather than her brother. And this sisterly care is something of a theme in Mahy's early work: elder sisters devote their energies to their brothers, sometimes as in Laura's case actually going to far as to realise their own power solely in order to protect the child. Similar relationships occur in The Haunting (1982) and Aliens in the Family (1985), which includes a delightfully bizarre tomboy and motherly figure in the form of the androgynous Jake, who must care for her flighty, incompetent mother but embraces a “Lone Ranger” masculine persona to do so. A more recent New Zealand figure might be Sydney, from Kate De Goldi's The 10 PM Question (2009): Sydney sacrifices her own desire and need to go and stay with her father because her mother, a selfish and neglectful parent, would not take good care of Sydney's half-sisters. For Sydney and Jake, in contrast to Susan or Anne, caring is not a vocation, although Laura does take pleasure in caring for her brother: instead they are wearing responsibilities, clear realistic portraits of difficult situations for children.
In these novels, rather than being the natural backdrop to a character, their caregiving responsibilities are a significant part of the story. Which is not to say that caregiving in the problem novel is always a dispiriting burden. For Margaret Mahy, caregiving and mothering becomes the site of empowerment. When Laura Chant's brother in The Changeover is endangered, Laura undergoes the titular changeover in order to become a witch and gain the power she needs to save him. This changeover is a transparent metaphor for entering womanhood. Laura wakes from a trance to find that the lower half of her body has become soaked in blood, putatively from a nosebleed – but it is a strange nosebleed, surely, that soaks only one's skirt “from waist to hem” (151). Caring for Jacko is a site of empowerment for Laura – yet the novel's final scene depicts Laura coming home from school to play with Jacko while her elder boyfriend, Sorry, looks on paternally. Despite her so-called empowerment, the conclusion to Laura's story looks remarkably similar to the way Susan's might have! In The Haunting, magician Troy uses her awe-inspiring powers similarly to protect her brother – yet it is because of her relationships with her family that Troy is preserved from her own power; her power is limited and harnessed by her social bonds. If Laura and Troy are one end of the spectrum, exemplifying the best outcome of Blair-Loy's family devotion schema, Jake in Mahy's Aliens in the Family represents its nadir. Jake is trapped in a bizarre role-reversal, needing to care not only for her childlike mother but additionally for her aging grandparents. Here, perhaps, Jake's experiences mirror those of women who felt trapped into domesticity: she is unable to fully pursue her life and her aspirations – the work-devotion schema - because of her family's incompetence.
Farah Mendlesohn makes a case for Diana Wynne Jones as a self-consciously critical author, noting her several critical pieces on her own writing (XVII-XXIII). Charles Butler draws attention to her tendency to satirise, noting particularly The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and Howl's Moving Castle (239) as satires of Tolkienesque epic fantasy (the former two novles) and fairytale myths (the latter). Jones is a critical author with an interest in satire; she also admits to having read, and disliked, Arthur Ransome's novels. Two of her novels investigate and invert some of the more old-fashioned tropes of holiday adventure fiction in her fantasy settings, and the ways in which girls' roles in these satires construct Jones' response to the spheres-of-work problem.
Women's work, and the work done by parents, is a theme in many of Jones' novels. In The Merlin Conspiracy, Jones dwells on concepts of women's magic, men's magic, and the required balance, while investigating the consequences for one character of being forced to do caring work: Roddy, and her relationship to her friend Grundo. Meanwhile, housework is something of a motif in Jones' Moving Castle series (Howl's Moving Castle, Castle in the Air, and House of Many Ways), which are set in Ingary a land that might best be described as a kind of fairytale kingdom, where fairytale rules – the narrative law of the fairytale – are expected to be literally played out. Thus, for example, Sophie Hatter, the protagonist of the first Castle novel, believes that, as the eldest of three sisters her fate is bound to be boring, while her middle sister would have a good but ordinary life and her youngest sister is bound for adventures. Jones uses the Moving Castle series to satirise these mythical tropes – Castle in the Air explores the Arabian nights, while the other two both explore more European fairy stories. But House of Many Ways also satirises holiday adventure fiction. Charmain in House of Many Ways inverts both typical holiday adventure tropes, and is a relitigation of relationships described in some of Jones' earlier work – Jones here reworks both older texts, such as Ransome and Blyton's, and her own Howl's Moving Castle.
A great deal of questionable gender play features in in The Merlin Conspiracy. Men's magic is portrayed as rational, businesslike, broadly acknowledged and respected, and dependent upon innate skill and entrepreneurship.Women's magic is irrational, hereditary, and much less well-known or respected. Thompson would happily describe the masculine Court magic as Hermean, public magic, while women's magic is the Hestian magic of hearth and home (and garden.)4 Apart from the gender essentialism inherent in the ideas of men's and women's magic (which is, at least, subverted through Sybil, who is talented at Court (men's) magic, and occasionally Grundo who appears to struggle with masculine court magic), the characters who are representative of each side of magic are telling. The men have Roddy's competent, funny father, and powerful grandfather, along with the menacing but attractive Romanov; the women have the Dimbers, relations of Roddy on her father's side, comprised of her “vulgar” grandmother Heppy, her dippy and disorganised aunt Judith, and her cousins, the wonderfully ghastly Izzies.
However, Roddy and Grundo's relationship has the potential to present a powerful commentary on the way girls in fiction (and in life) expend their energies on others rather than on themselves. Roddy has spent much of her life (since she was five and he was three) taking care of Grundo; she says late in the novel that she had felt her behaviour towards Grundo was the only thing that really stopped her from being a true courtier like Alicia the Sneeze, Grundo's older sister and Roddy's least favourite person. This is typical woman's work: prioritizing others' needs, especially younger children's needs, over your own, and Roddy dislikes Alicia and Sybil, Grundo's mother, for how little of that maternal work they do. According to Nick she treats Grundo as if she were his “very fussy mother” (368) - something that Nick finds disturbing because he would prefer that she be sexually available to him, rather than fussing maternally after Grundo. It is a difficult experience for Grundo, too, when Roddy begins to focus on her own needs and interests rather than his. When Roddy has knowledge passed on to her that will allow her to save Blest, their home, Grundo is resentful that she is not paying enough attention to him. Roddy cannot understand his behaviour, but the reader can: Grundo recognises that Roddy's new knowledge is going to provide her with a powerful distraction from him, as well as a new way for her to define herself as different than Alicia and Sybil. Instead of defining herself by her caring for Grundo, Roddy begins to develop an internal life, the beginning of her own independence. Grundo's response is to accuse Roddy of behaving like Alicia, a calculated insult that Roddy manages to brush off, yet in a way it is true: Roddy, like Alicia, has begun to behave as though there is something more important than Grundo himself, a behaviour that disturbs him.
Finally, towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Grundo has actually been enchanting Roddy to prioritise him over herself. The revelation is a shock both to the reader and Roddy herself. Grundo has already recognised that the Izzies have enchanted their mother and grandmother to behave similarly, something that is also confronting for the reader, for she has been enouraged to think of Judith and Heppy's lack of discipline over the Izzies as a function of bad mothering, rather than as a consequence of manipulation by the Izzies. When it is revealed that Grundo has been doing the same thing to Roddy since he was three, the shock functions as a powerful criticism of Grundo's actions but also of the traditional self-effacement of the motherly figure like Anne, or Susan – or Laura Chant: there are no shortage of ready comparisons between Laura's relationship with Jacko, and Roddy's relationship with Grundo. Laura cares for Jacko as Roddy cares for Grundo; Laura is sexually pursued by Sorry as Roddy is pursued by Nick5. Jacko is metaphorically charming (Laura describes “staring at Jacko, quite entranced by him” (17)) where Grundo is literally charming. But where Laura embraces both Jacko and Sorry, Roddy is horrified by what Grundo has done to her and uncomfortable with Nick's attraction to her. The revelation almost destroys Roddy: in a novel where a range of disturbing things has happened to her, including being abandoned by her parents, discovering her family magically entrapped in an underground cavern, and actually unravelling the balance of magics in her own world, it is notable that discovering Grundo's manipulation of her is what renders her truly miserable. The novel is written in the first person, as the accounts of Roddy and Nick of the same events; when Roddy finds out she has been enchanted, a break in her narrative occurs which Nick's narrative must fill in, so great is the degree to which Roddy is upset. These passages are a thorough and careful deconstruction of the mother-child relationship, and the way young women are often enouraged into these caretaking roles, believing them to be natural. Grundo is only doing magically what society typically does to young women: encourage them to do the emotional caregiving and to neglect their own interests to do so.
Meanwhile, House of Many Ways is concerned with, not emotional caregiving, but physical caregiving – that is to say, housekeeping. In the novel Jones refers to, and plays around with, several familiar stories. It starts off with a peculiar inversion: instead of going off on her own to have a holiday, Charmain actually goes off to work. She is originally sent to work domestically in housekeeping, but she rather rapidly finds employment better suited to her talents: working in a library. The holiday is inverted and turned into a working summer, while Peter, a boy who shows up to learn wizardry, is the one who ends up doing most of what might be called the “women's work” - not Charmain, the girl actually asked to do it. (It is worth noting, at this juncture, that Charmain is much more talented at the rather masculine discipline of wizardry than Peter is: her spells always go right, despite her slapdash approach6 .) Charmain is as devoted to books as she is ignorant about housework: she is proactive about writing to the King for a job and the first thing she does when she's upset is sit down with a book. She appears to be more or less content to let dishes pile up, laundry go undone, pipes freeze or boil and bubbles ruin the upholstery as long as she can sit down with a book. She is supported in this by her mother who apparently feels that it is not respectable for her daughter to exert herself in housework; it takes the arrival of the slightly less respectable prospective wizard Peter for any of the housekeeping to get done.
The reader is rapidly presented with the charming scene of Charmain going out to work for the King while Peter remains behind, both cleaning and experimenting with his magic – a wry inversion both of the typical roles of men and women, and of Howl and Sophie's roles in House of Many Ways' prequel, Howl's Moving Castle. In the earlier novel, Sophie spends most of her time cleaning the rather revolting, neglected household, and in the process learning to harness her own magic, while Howl is out doing wizarding work. In House of Many Ways, the magical environment is still messy and neglected, but Peter is the one who cleans it and discovers its secrets. In one scene Charmain comes home to a magical disaster – the bathroom has flooded – and sets about helping Peter fix it, complaining that she's already done a full day's work. So, replies Peter, has he – taking care of Wizard Norland's house. The book dwells on the importance both of Charmain's work and of Peter's: like Ransome, it values the work done in the house, which is also a theme in Howl's Moving Castle. However, it is not content merely to invert the usual tired roles of the woman in the house and the man at work. Peter drags Charmain through several traumatic learning experiences including “doing the dishes” and “doing the laundry”, and she begins, and first unhappily and then with enthusiasm, to learn that domestic tasks, if not pleasant, may at least enable one to be independent of a protective mother. Meanwhile, Howl (who also appears in the novel, along with Sophie and their son, in supporting roles) is so uncomfortable with the idea of taking care of their son Morgan while Sophie has been called out to work (she too is a talented witch) that he literally regresses to childhood in order to return the responsibility back to Sophie. Neither Sophie nor the novel find this particularly impressive, and quite explicit comparisons can be drawn between Charmain and Howl.
Both novels conclude, as fairy tales ought, with each of the children's (and some of the adults') destinies fully sketched out, yet the novels are remarkably different in approach. Both deal with the organisation and distribution of magical power structures in their countries. In Roddy's Blest, the country is governed by the King, along with two people who represent the balance of magics – the Merlin, who governs men's and court magic, and is well-known throughout the kingdom, and the Lady of Governance, who governs women's magic, natural and domestic magics and is only known well to those who are likely to interact with her. Jones' emphasis on the balance of the two kinds of magic speaks to an appreciation of the equal value of two different kinds of work, but there is a strong strain of gender essentialism: the Merlin is always a man, and the Lady of Governance is always a woman. Although the novel's climax involves Roddy “raising the land”, which involves entirely destroying and re-making the way magic works in Blest, the tradition is continued in Roddy and Grundo: Roddy must apprentice herself to motherly Mrs. Candace despite having had her mothering abused by Grundo, while Grundo must prepare to be Merlin, despite his contempt for the Court and Courtly ways. House of Many Ways, too, is concerned with the disposition of power: a chief part of the book's plot has been finding an heir to the throne and a new Royal Wizard, as the current rulers (the extremely elderly King and his almost equally elderly daughter) and High Wizard are preparing to retire. Unlike in The Merlin Conspiracy, the gender distribution of these roles is disrupted rather than preserved. Charmain will apprentice herself to her Great-Uncle, the Royal Wizard of High Norland, while Peter is discovered to be Crown Prince and will begin to learn the management – the caretaking - of the kingdom. Whereas in The Merlin Conspiracy the two roles that balance the country – the Merlin and the Lady of Governance - are defined by gender, in House of Many Ways roles are defined by talent and gender esssentialism is resisted. The Crown had hitherto been managed chiefly by the elderly Crown Princess, the eminently practical Princess Hilda: it is fitting that Peter inherit the role, since he has already demonstrated practical thinking and good management skills in the household. Housework and housekeeping, in Jones' estimation, appears to be a reasonable approximation of the skills needed to run a kingdom. Meanwhile, bookish Charmain will spend time with her bookish Great Uncle to develop her own talents at wizardry, a future that is signalled by her easy facility with the Boke of Palimpsest, a symbol of dusty masculine knowledge.
For Jones, while domestic work can be as important as work outside the home – for one's own sake as well as for the sake of those around us – and women's work and magic is as applicable outside the home as inside, family relationships and mothering are a site of potential stagnation, ignorance, and entrapment. Grundo abuses and enchants Roddy's maternal feelings; Sophie's husband and son threaten her ability to work outside the home; Charmain's mother is so devoted to the idea of Charmain as the respectable child that she appears to spend most of her life ensuring that Charmain herself never washes a dish or bakes a cake (perhaps harkening back to the generation of women who were assured that their children would suffer tremendously without their constant attention.) Housework, on the other hand, becomes a tool for change and growth; Sophie's sweeping out of the ashes is metaphorical for her own growth and the change she creates in Howl, while for Charmain cleaning the wizard's house becomes a metaphor for self-control and self-determination. However, for Mahy, while housework can be meditative (in one scene in a slightly later book, Catalogue of the Universe, a mother is seen cutting grass with scythe by moonlight) the women in her books are generally unconcerned with it. Indeed, the memorable opening of The Changeover features Laura and her mother dashing around the house trying to find her mother's shoe (ultimately found on the mantelpiece (5).) It is ultimately in the bonds of commitment to the family that women may be appropriately empowered – Laura achieves her full power in order to protect her younger brother; The Haunting's Troy is protected from her wild nature by her relationships with her family. Jake is trapped by her responsibilities to her mother, but she is so trapped because her mother has reneged on her own parental responsibilities. Custody of Jake has reduced her from an urbane, social woman to a woman living with her aging parents and her teenaged daughter on an isolated farm. Both these authors present girls who have managed to combine, in one way or another, the domestic sphere with the public sphere. Roddy will grow up to be the Lady of Governance – a prestigious job that involves domestic care of an entire country; Charmain has learned that housework enables one to be independent and pursue one's career as a Royal Wizard; Laura is empowered by the very fact of her relationship with Jacko (and her relationship with Sorry). Yet the startling contrast between Laura's relations with Jacko and Sorry, and Roddy's relations with Grundo and Nick, are evidence of the deep chasm between Mahy's and Jones' approach to the dilemma.
Conclusion
Over the 20th century, a change in the understanding of women’s roles led to a change in the types of roles offered to girls in popular children’s fiction, away from the straightforward “motherly girl” and “tomboy.” It might have been anticipated that roles for women would have varied, that roles for girls would have incorporated both mother and tomboy and that opportunities for both genders to experience and enjoy caring for their siblings would have arisen and defied gender essentialism. Instead caregiving work has almost disappeared from the pages of adventure fiction. It has been reduced to just one more of the burdens offered to children in the problem novel, where it generally also becomes a stick with which to beat the neglectful mother (as in The 10pm Question or Aliens in the Family.) Fractured modern feminism remains invested in the “double burden” problem, and some children’s authors continue to respond to its challenge, as with Mahy’s empowerment of the mothering girl (however problematic), and Jones’ interrogation of both the motherly and the domestic girl. However the predominant, confused response to the unresolved issues that feminism has raised has been to elide the value of domestic work, nursing, and emotional caregiving and eliminate it from children’s fiction altogether. While the degraded Anne and her metaphorical sisters are not great losses to the genre, it does no service to girls, or to children generally, to further contribute to the invisibility of work done in the home and caring work by erasing the unfashionable Susan.
Notes
1.In this genre Blyton also wrote the Adventure series, which is somewhat more sophisticated and seems to be aimed at older readers, and the Mystery series; they are still in print but less well-known.
3.Ursula's story, in which she physically changes her own body into a man's, then back into a woman's, deserves more space than I can here give it.
4.An amusing detail from the Moving Castle series is that it features a fire demon, Calcifer, who is decidedly masculine – and who resides in the hearth, keeping the castle (home of Howl, Sophie, and occasional others) running. He is nearly smothered when Sophie, cleaning the castle, sweeps a great deal of dust onto him.
5.Jones' description of this pursuit is fairly restrained: Nick immediately recognises Roddy as his “ideal girl” (117), and Roddy is aware of his interest, feeling him “pushing at [her] all the time, in a warm, moist eager way that I didn't understand and didn't want at all.” (370) Mahy, on the other hand, is startlingly explicit: Sorry assures Laura that she has “very sexy legs” (62), and keeps a poster of a naked woman on his wall: “This woman had been photographed... and the picture was intended to be looked at by men. There was a small snapshot pinned to one corner of it,” (64) and the snapshot is of Laura herself.
6.Charmain has an illuminating encounter with a dusty spellbook, The Boke of Palimpsest: a dangerous tome that she has been explicitly warned off by her great-uncle the court wizard. She attempts to perform a spell to make herself fly, but the book is tricky and flips its pages when she is not looking, so that she ends up performing several different spells. Yet not only does she succeed in making herself fly, but all the other spells she has accidentally performed work too – A Spell to Find a Handsome Prince, for example, and A Spell To Find Hidden Treasure, both of which are key plot points. Later, the Witch of Montealbino will tell her, in assessing her magical power: “Don't tell me... that your magic doesn't do exactly what you mean it to, however you do it.” Indeed, Charmain's mastery over the Boke of Palimpsest will eventually dictate her future as Royal Wizard. Charmain's unusual approach to spells, and success with them, can be construed as a criticism of the reification of knowledge in a particular format. The Boke of Palimpsest's circular title (a Palimpsest being a book or parchment scroll that has been re-used) is symbolic of an organised and structured, yet empty epistemology, somewhat reminiscent of criticisms of the nineteenth century drive to completely taxonomise the natural world.
Works Cited
Works Cited
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Middlesex: Puffin Books, 1994 (First published 1868).
Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 (First published 1911).
Blair-Loy, Mary. Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives. Cambridge, Massachusets; London: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Blyton, Enid. Five Run Away Together. London: Hodder Children's Books, 2001. (First published 1942).
Brogan, Hugh. Arthur Ransome: A Bibliography.
Browne, N. M. Warriors of Alavna.
Bruley, Sue. Women in Britain since 1900. Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 1999.
Butler, Charles. Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. Maryland; Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2006.
Cooper, Susan. Over Sea, Under Stone.
Caine, Barbara. English Feminism 1780-1980. Oxford: OUP, 1997.
De Goldi, Kate. The 10 PM Question.
Garner, Alan. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.
Hunt, Peter. Approaching Arthur Ransome. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992.
Jones, Diana Wynne. House of Many Ways.
Jones, Diana Wynna. A Little Something About the Author. http://www.suberic.net/dwj/bio.html Accessed 05/10/09
Jones, Diana Wynne. The Merlin Conspiracy.
Mahy, Margaret. Aliens in the Family.
Mahy, Margaret. The Changeover.
Mahy, Margaret. The Haunting.
Meade, L T. A Little Mother to the Others.
Mendlesohn, Farah. Diana Wynne Jones: Children's Literature and the Fantastic Tradition.
“Nancy.” A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Vol. I Fifth Edition. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD, 1961.
Nix, Garth. Mister Monday et al.
Ransome, Arthur. Swallows and Amazons. 1930. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1962 (first published by Jonathan Cape, 1932).
Ransome, Arthur. Swallowdale
Ransome, Arthur. The Picts and the Martyrs. London: Red Fox, 2001 (first published 1940)
Ransome, Arthur. Secret Water.
Ransome, Arthur. Pigeon Post.
Ransome, Arthur. Peter Duck.
Salih, Sarah. Judith Butler (A Routledge Critical Thinkers book.) London; New York: Routledge, 2002.
Thompson, Patricia J. The Accidental Theorist: The Double-Helix of Everyday Life.
Tucker, Nicholas. Keynote Speech, Diana Wynne Jones Conference, [insert
date], Bristol, UK. Taken from his personal reminiscences.
Watson, Victor. Reading Series Fiction: From Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp.
Introduction
Little Mothers and Sailors: Girls in the Heyday of Adventure Fiction
The Women's Movement, 1945-Present Day: A Potted History
Reworking Adventure: Jones and Modern Novels
Conclusion
They Couldn't Have Done It Without Her: Girls in Adventure Fiction
He looked round admiringly. “My word, Anne – the cave does look fine! Everything in order and looking so tidy. You are a good little girl!” Enid Blyton, Five Run Away Together, 153.
Grundo shot her a wretched look. “... I've done it ever since I was three years old. I – I put a glamour on you to make you – you love me and – and look after me above everyone else.” Diana Wynne Jones, The Merlin Conspiracy, 401-402.Adventure fiction, in which children strike out on their own away from their parents, is an ideal genre from which to extrapolate cultural ideas about adult roles and parenting. As children take on adult roles, they reconstruct the society that surrounds them, and thus reveal the ideologies that have shaped that society. Early writers of the genre, Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton, have set the stage for this kind of fiction, a mode which subsequently has been adopted by writers of fantastic fiction for children. A hallmark of the earlier texts is the use of stereotypical gender roles, notably the mother and the tomboy. As cultural understandings of women have changed, so too have girls’ roles in fiction. Margaret Mahy has revisited the motherly girl and offered her a great deal more power than she had typically been given; in Mahy's work, emotional caregiving is the site of power and knowledge. Diana Wynne Jones (whose work resembles holiday adventure fiction in much the same way that J. K. Rowling invokes the school story) has reworked and parodied the old modes. She works within the genre to invert the novels' narrative structure and gender essentialism, and question the validity of the mother/tomboy dichotomy. Each of these authors, in their own way, reflects their cultural context and notions of how girls should behave, and what kind of women they must grow up to be.
1. Little Mothers and Sailors: Girls in the Heyday of Adventure Fiction
Between 1930 and 1960, according to Victor Watson (76-77), a vast number of novels of a genre loosely described as “holiday adventure fiction” or “camping and tramping series” were published in Britain for children and young adults. In this genre, boys and girls, generally pre-teens and young teens, strike out on their own without their parents but with all the privileges that upper-class English children might expect. They have “tramping and camping” adventures, and the books frequently describe in detail their living arrangements and activities. Because children in these novels often do their work performatively, mimicking (either explicitly or implicitly) their parents, they offer a means to understand contemporary ideas about gender, work, and gender-appropriate behaviour for children, particularly when read with contemporary feminism. From this period I will examine the work of Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton, the former writing early classics of the genre, and the latter writing a formulaic but wildly popular series at the height of the genre's popularity. Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1930) was, if not the first, at least a very early camping and tramping novel (he would continue publishing novels in the series until Great Northern? in 1947) that remains influential, while Enid Blyton's Famous Five series was published from 1943 to 1963 and remains the best-known example of the genre.1
Despite their differing levels of sophistication these novels, and their contemporaries, offer a clear comparison in terms of the roles offered to girls. Girls are typically either tomboys, such as Nancy Blackett (Ransome) or George (Blyton), or they are little mothers such as Susan Walker (Ransome) or Anne (Blyton). The little mother role had been a familiar trope in children's and young adult literature for some time; it was familiar enough by 1900 that J. M. Barrie parodies it in Wendy Darling's relationship with the Lost Boys and Peter Pan, in which the boys want Wendy for a mother while Wendy wants Peter for a husband. L. T. Meade's 1896 A Little Mother to the Others is a slightly earlier, and more sincere, example. Tomboys would presumably have been equally familiar: Jo March (Little Women, 1868-1869) is a famous early (though American) example. While Ransome, at least, offers a slightly broader range of female characters (Titty and Dorothea are both writers, and his characters are generally well-drawn enough that they do not seem stereotypical in the way that characters in Blyton's more workmanlike novels do), the mother and the tomboy remain touchstones for female characterisation. Written over a forty-year span covering the interwar period, the Second World War, and the post-war era, it is useful to first contextualise these texts within their contemporary feminist movements and the situations of women at the time.
Both world wars offered opportunities for women to enter the workforce in non-traditional roles in large numbers. However, these opportunities were highly limited, typically understood and contracted as temporary roles for women who functioned as placeholders for the men who were away at war (Caine, 227). After the First World War, “womanhood [became] based more decisively than ever on an ideology of domesticity.” (Bruley, 60) Women left the workforce in droves, willingly and unwillingly, as a consequence of Britain's desire to return to its pre-war habits (officially sanctioned in 1919 by the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act (Bruley, 61)). Similarly, the Second World War “was followed by a powerful evocation of a traditional family, which ascribed to women a more domesticated role than they had ever actually undertaken.” (Caine, 228) Despite women's variously marginalised positions in the workforce during the wars, it was deemed necessary for them to immediately leave whatever positions they did hold in order to make room for the returning men; the domestic ideologies were merely a tool to ensure women did so with as little fuss as possible. Nevertheless both world wars were immediately followed by a few successes for feminist movements: notably in 1918, women's suffrage; from 1944, the gradual abolishment of the marriage bar which prevented married women's work outside the home; and others as detailed in Caine 222-226. Barbara Caine suggests that these successes, which led to the disbandment of the women's organisations founded to support them, along with a post-war conservative and anti-feminist backlash, led to periods of quieter and less radical feminism. Consequently, feminism in the 1920s and 30s, and feminism from 1945 to 1960, look remarkably similar, at least as described by Caine. Just as propaganda had mobilised women into the workforce during the wars, it mobilised them straight out again when the boys came home.
The Second World War stands out mostly by contrast; after two decades of relative quiescence, limited and difficult conditions for working women in the war became a rallying point for women activists including women MPs. Women engaged in a wide variety of tasks across the country, including working in munitions and engineering, piloting, driving, managing heavy machinery, farming, and felling (Bruley, 101-105); women MPs worked to ensure that they were adequately, and equitably, rewarded (Caine, 229) for their war service. Nevertheless, progress was limited (particularly when it came to convincing the Government that women ought to be remunerated equitably with men) and once more swallowed up by the post-war backlash.
Feminism was not immune to this backlash. Most women’s experience was likely to be that of a wife and mother, and social pressures dictated that good wives and mothers were increasingly devoted to their families (Caine: 182). After the First World War feminists were undoubtedly as pleased as the rest of Britain to return to a more traditional, less threatening way of life, and so interwar feminism became in many places preoccupied with reaffirming femininity, at home and in the workplace. A constant theme was the ways in which the workplace was constructed as a highly “masculine” environment: so Virginia Woolf, for example, dwelt on the emphasis of masculine tradition, dress codes, and language in the professions, and the consequent exclusion of women (210). As a contemporary wrote, “[I]n our man-made world we still permit the highest praise of a woman to be, ‘She has a masculine mind.’” (214) This celebration of femininity and feminine values was associated with an understanding of women and men as fundamentally different creatures, with different emotional and psychological needs. Such an understanding was not universal but it was extremely widespread and, according to Caine, “locked women into family life by stressing that it was only through heterosexual relations and motherhood that women could be healthy, happy, and fulfilled.” (175) Even women in the workplace or in education were bound to have a feminine perspective that needed expression. The question of sex difference – are men and women different? And if so, how? – became central to feminism in the interwar period. “New” feminism (i.e. interwar feminism), as exemplified by women like Eleanor Rathbone, president of NUWSS and then NUSEC (the most influential feminist organisations of the time), was committed to an understanding of women as fundamentally different from men, with different needs, desires, and concerns (Caine: 215). Nevertheless, some feminists, proponents of “old” feminism, remained convinced that there was little difference between men and women that was not socially constructed: so Winnifred Holtby argued that men and women’s occupations ought, as much as possible, to be the same, and to limit the fields which could be the sole province of either gender as much as possible (Caine: 216). Barbara Caine gives an ideal example of a median point in I. B. O’Malley, who argued that the feminine perspective ought to be able to be as freely expressed as the masculine, while worrying that she was not sure that any such thing as an inherently masculine or feminine perspective existed (216).
It is in this context that the figures of little mother and tomboy became ubiquitous in adventure fiction for children. Neither Ransome nor Blyton can have been able to ignore the legacy of the world wars in their awareness that women could, at least, participate in the working world with men; neither could they, writing in the interwar and post-war periods, neglect the domestic ideologies propagated by the desire to return to the traditional. I will explore each of these authors' treatments of the mother and tomboy characters and attempt to contextualise them within the sketch of social ideology about women I have provided.
Susan Walker of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of the Famous Five share a traditionally feminine, and motherly, preoccupation with neatness and domesticity. They enjoy setting up camps; one might compare these two passages from Ransome's Swallowdale and Blyton's Five Run Away Together, where each group of children has discovered a cave:
“It's a fine place for keeping the stores,” said Susan. “As cool as anything. You couldn't have a better larder..... All right,” said Susan. “I'm going to make a fireplace.”
“And as soon as the fireplace is ready, we'll go down into the forest to bring wood. We'll explore now.” John knew very well that the mate liked making fireplaces her own way and that helping her was never much use.
Swallowdale, 163-167
'Let's arrange everything very nicely in the cave,' said Anne, who was the tidiest of the four, and always liked to play at 'houses' if she could. 'This shall be our house, our home. We'll make four proper beds. And we'll each have our own place to sit in. And we'll arrange everything tidily on that big stone shelf there. It might have been made for us!'
'We'll leave Anne to play 'houses' by herself,' said George, who was longing to stretch her legs again.
Five Run Away Together, 149.
These camps, and the chapters that contain them, bear significant similarities (apart from the caves, with their handy natural stone shelves and holes in the roof to let in air, they also have small pools nearby for washing up, other pools suitable for bathing and keeping cool those stores which need to be kept cool, conveniently located lakes and seas for boating, and so forth.) Anne and Susan's behaviours are also fairly similar; Susan is more proactive, making fireplaces while Anne merely wishes for one, but generally they put away stores and make the campsite quite homely. Where the novels differ is in their treatment of each girl's actions. Anne's delight in housekeeping amuses her family and they appreciate it well enough, but one somehow has a sense that George, Dick, and Julian would get on quite well without her. Although Anne fusses about making the beds with heather, Dick has already noted that sleeping on the sand alone is quite comfortable (143). Anne puts stores away, but it was Julian who thought to bring them; just as it was Julian who remembers to check the place where they are going to sleep and Julian who orders the children out of the sand. Anne makes the cocoa in the morning, but it is George who remembers that they will be cold after they bathe. Anne does not enjoy her responsibilities because she likes doing productive work; she enjoys them (like her peculiar pleasure in washing-up) simply because she can play at being mother. While Julian demonstrates here a quasi-domestic sensibility - he is responsible for his siblings' and cousin's wellbeing - the book never identifies it as such, preferring to continue identifying Julian as a father figure. Instead, Anne is a little mother, but a worthless one - and as the youngest she is not even fully able to participate in the children's adventures. She falls asleep while keeping watch; she is afraid to go down into the dungeons to inspect the smugglers' suspicious activities.
Susan's behaviour is quite different, as is the novel's assessment of it. Susan does enjoy her responsibilities, but the work she does is genuine, not play, and the books value it as such. While it is hardly radical to have the eldest girl child be the character chiefly concerned with the others' physical safety and wellbeing (although John is also concerned with his younger siblings' physical safety), including getting meals, nursing, and reasonably regular bedtimes, the novel's attitude to her work is utterly distinctive. Instead of Julian's rather condescending amusement at Anne's pleasure in domesticity, John is grateful for Susan's work and acknowledges her as an expert in what she does (including, but not limited to, the making of fireplaces.) Ransome, too, acknowledges her talents. "... [T]he number of things that would have been forgotten if Susan had not remembered them was very great", he writes early in the novel when the Swallows are preparing (4). Although in this passage he is gently ribbing Susan's somewhat obsessive attention to detail, he is more sincere in any number of passages from other books. In Peter Duck, Susan is the moral and pragmatic arbiter to whom the rest of the ship (including the adult Captain Flint) must defer on whether or not they may embark on their adventure; when they do so, it is Susan's attention to detail (and their water supplies) that allows them to be successful, which Flint acknowledges (213): "it was all due to Susan that things went off so well." In Pigeon Post, a more realistic novel than Peter Duck (and the realistic novel with the most genuine dangers, including hill fires and mine collapses), Susan is the one who can be relied upon to watch out for the adventurers and their fires in a drought (50-51) and therefore makes the entire adventure possible. Far from being merely mentioned in one or two books, Susan's reliability and hard work are consistently what enables her and her family to have adventures. And quite unlike Anne, Susan does have adventures; she is not as explicit about her enjoyment of them as the rest of her family, or Nancy, but she is an equal participant in all adventures. She advocates for their High Tops adventures, and signs her name to John's letter in support of their first adventures on Wild Cat Island; in the same novel she occasionally forgets her position as mother figure, so caught up is she in the excitement of being ship's mate and adventurer (51). She sails as well as John, if with less enthusiasm. Nor is her devotion to her family's well-being wholly self-sacrificing. When she has received a medical kit as a gift, Susan is described as almost wishing someone would get hurt so she might have a chance to practice her skills, a peculiar sentiment indeed if she were solely concerned with her family's wellbeing. (Peter Duck, 11) In short, Susan is a fully realised Anne who, instead of devoting herself to idle domestic play, is an expert in domestic arts without sacrificing her own pleasures and personality as earlier mothers like Iris of Meade's A Little Mother to the Others and Wendy of Peter Pan do, and whose contribution is valued genuinely rather than with condescension.
It is interesting that Peter Hunt, in Approaching Arthur Ransome, is unable to assess Susan quite as equitably as Ransome himself is; indeed, despite writing in 1992, he seems to have much the same attitude to her work as Julian expresses of Anne's, describing her as monomanaiacal (104), a word he also uses to describe Nancy. To Hunt Susan's work is “tiresome but also authorially endorsed”. He suggests that Susan's worry for the health of her family is a sop to the parental reader (who might be concerned at the absence of a parental figure), and so Arthur Ransome's appreciation for Susan's work merely functions to appease the child reader bored with this conservativism. This is a surprising analysis, coming as it does after many chapters in which Hunt dwells with approval on the detail Ransome uses to describe the Swallows' actions and his emphasis on the importance of the Swallows' skills: “Clearly, the attraction of the... adventures is as much in the details... as in the plot,” (72) and “there is great pleasure in descriptions of how to make a heather broom, how to plane and oil a mast, how to light a fire without paper, how to navigate using a compass, or how to cook corned beef.” (104) Hunt admires Ransome's devotion to detail when it involves John's obsession with mast-making, but is not so appreciative of Susan's work.
Nancy and George, like Susan and Anne, are characters drawing on similar stereotypes who are treated very differently by their respective series. Where Nancy is scornful of people who do not realise that she is a girl due to her boyish dress and behaviour (REF), George delights in being mistaken for a boy and often insists on being referred to as “Master George” rather than “Miss Georgina” (Five Run Away Together, 24). Nancy is also an assumed name; she has rejected her given name, Ruth, as pirates ought to be Ruthless (Swallows and Amazons, 113). However, “Nancy” is hardly to “Ruth” as “George” is to “Georgina.” "Nancy" is not a masculine name; indeed Ruth/Nancy seems to have gone out of her way to pick a girlish name, landing on a name that, then as now, functioned as slang for an effeminate or gay man (according to the Dictionary of Slang, “nancy” had been in parlance to denote homosexuality since the previous century). Perhaps deliberately, Nancy is a name that simultaneously evokes the feminine and the masculine. Nancy typically performs nearly identical tasks to her male counterpart, John Walker; both sail equally well, both row and perform the other difficult physical tasks typically associated with men, both are proactive planners (although Nancy is a highly imaginative character more given to flights of daring fantasy than the more stolid John and therefore more likely to propose plans and adventures, causing conflict in the later novel Secret Water.) They stand watches and are both referred to as “Captain” by the younger children; indeed there is a friendly competition between John and Nancy that seems to be more typical of novels featuring two boys. Julian's behaviour towards George is much less equitable; he frequently intervenes when George starts fights, insisting on fighting the (usually troublesome but much lower-class and much less physically impressive than brave Julian) boy in her stead. “'You're not fighting George,' he said. 'She's a girl. If you want a fight, I'll take you on.' 'I won't be a girl! I'm a boy!' shouted George, trying to push Julian away” (33). A tempting passage occurs earlier in the same novel:
Then George appeared, flying out of the door like the wind, to rescue her beloved Timothy. She rushed to the [fighting] dogs and tried to pull Timmy away. Her father yelled at her.
'Come away, you little idiot! Don't you know better than to separate two fighting dogs with your bare hands? Where's the garden hose?'
It was fixed to a tap nearby. Julian ran to it and turned on the tap. He picked up the hose and turned it on the two dogs. At once the jet of water spurted out at them, and they leapt apart in surprised. Julian saw Edgar standing near, and couldn't resist swinging the hose a little so that the boy was soaked.
Enid Blyton, Five Run Away Together, 16-17.
A psychoanalytic reading of this passage is almost irresistible: George is ineffectual and rejected by her father, while cousin Julian, supposedly separated from George only by gender, is able to utilise a spurting hose to solve the problem. Yet a psychoanalytic analysis is not truly necessary to draw conclusions about Blyton's expressions of gender, since she repeatedly offers them through Julian, the 'real' male figure in the novels.
Julian is a startlingly explicit figure of patriarchy, able to confront adult women (especially in the lower classes) and have his way, protecting George from her own agency in fights with others, in setting out on her own, and so forth. In this novel, Five Run Away Together, George also acts to repress her own personality. Her mother is ill and she does not want to worry her with her usual ebullient personality, so she tries to avoid fights and direct confrontations. When her mother leaves to recuperate, however, George returns to her usual self.
One can immediately compare George's behaviour in the early part of the novel with Nancy's behaviour in The Picts and the Martyrs. Her mother is also ill, and like George's mother has gone away to recuperate; however, whereas for George out of sight seems to be more or less out of mind, Nancy is determined to be at least somewhat mature even when unsupervised, to live up to the responsibilities with which her mother has left her. This novel presents us with the unlikely spectre of Nancy not "being good" by attempting to live up to traditional gender roles (she dresses just as she always has, in boyish shorts, t-shirts, and caps, and climbs fences and trellises) (13, 25 and see also fig. 1)
or by repressing her ebullient personality with its penchants for piraticism and skull and crossbones decorations, but by also assuming the domestic responsibilities of the hostess or housewife. Dorothea, the guest, realises that "Nancy, who was very good at being a pirate, was now being a hostess instead" (13) - Nancy's practice at assuming alternate identities serves her as well to be a hostess as it does to be a pirate, and indeed Nancy's performance as lady of the house is just that - performative. It might seem anachronistic to suggest that Nancy's performance highlights the constructed and performed natures of these roles in reality. But Nancy’s behaviour functions much as Judith Butler describes drag as doing in her seminal Gender Trouble: people who perform or dress in drag highlight the constructed nature of gender through juxtaposing the gender they perform with their physical sex (Salih: 65), in acts Sarah Salih describes as repeating differently the typical gendered behaviour which is constructed by the social discourse (66). Nancy repeats her gendered behaviour differently: the shock the reader feels in Swallowdale catching a glimpse of Nancy in gender-appropriate frilly dress, hat, and gloves rather than her usual utilitarian shorts and shirt is as disruptive to the notion of Nancy’s identity and gender as the first sight of a man dressed in women’s drag is to our notions of gender as essentialist rather than as constructed. Meanwhile, Nancy’s ease in slipping into the roles of housewife and pirate regardless of the fact that these roles are deeply, and differently, gendered acts similarly to criticise any idea of gender as a coherent, essential whole, suggesting instead that it is a contingent set of actions, and that, for example, the notion that a hostess must somehow be feminine is a product of society rather than anything intrinsic to the act. Ransome's explicit comparison of Nancy-as-hostess with Nancy-as-pirate in the Amazons' elaborate "let's pretend" games, combined with the grim spectacle of Nancy-as-girly-girl when she is forced into the elaborate and frilly femininity preferred by her Great-Aunt, allow us to separate domestic responsibilities from gender as well as to identify gendered behaviour (in Ransome's apparent view) as artificial rather than intrinsic. Whereas for Blyton and George being a loving daughter means self-denial and self-effacement, for Ransome and Nancy being a loving daughter means performing domestic responsibilities while retaining one's own character. Ironically, Peter Hunt once again singles out the most interesting part of Nancy's depiction and characterises it as a monomania (98). Nancy, he suggests, falls flat particularly in Secret Water because of her inability to let go of childish games, while the newly-mature Walkers (who have just undergone an extraordinary ordeal without the Amazons in We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea) are more preoccupied with mapmaking: “The Walkers have been given a task, to finish the map… Nancy and Peggy… wish to play games.” (143) Apart from Hunt's rather dubious assessment of fantasy mapmaking as a significantly more mature activity than fantasy pirating, he fails to understand Nancy's preoccupation with game play as a tool that allows her to escape her preordained identity. Hunt picks up (92) on a telling passage as early as Swallows and Amazons (356):
[Said Nancy,] “We'll be grown up, and then we'll live here all year round.”
“I shall be going to sea one day,” said John, “And so will Roger.”
This is all well and good for John and Roger, as well as for Susan the devoted nurse and caregiver and Titty the writer (along with other protagonists Dick the scientist and Dot, also a writer of exciting romances.) Nancy, however, has a fairly clear idea of her responsibilities and likely adult future – as both she and Ransome demonstrate in The Picts and the Martyrs, which succeeds Secret Water. While Nancy is, or can be, a capable domestic when she needs to be, it will never be her first love; nor is she likely to make a successful teacher or nurse, the other professions open to a young woman in the pre-war period. Instead, as several characters remark, “‘[Nancy’s] Great Aunt is rather like her Great Niece.’” (The Picts and the Martyrs: 385) While the G. A. is formidable in her own way, Nancy detests her, and would hardly look forward to a life as a bitter and lonely woman. Nancy, I would argue, is not the simple, carefree “child’s child” that she appears to Hunt (92), and her embrace of child’s play is (or can at least be read as) a consequence of her self-awareness. Of course she embraces play: unlike John and Roger, she can never truly go to sea, and play is the only chance Ruth will ever have to be Captain Nancy. She does not willingly relinquish her leader’s role to John because it may be her final opportunity to be the leader, before she succumbs to the patriarchal family structure. Hunt does not fail to remark upon Ransome’s uncritical acceptance of this patriarchal family (91), noting that Mrs. Walker is subordinate to Cmd. Walker and this patriarchal structure has already been passed down to the Walker children (136). He also argues that “Ransome is undeniably sexist,” (140) apparently because in the sea voyages the boys are not seasick while the girls consistently are. This is accurate as far as it goes, but stands in stark contrast to Hunt’s earlier boredom with the “authorially endorsed” Susan and his assessment of the “monomaniacal” Nancy as “tiresome” whenever she attempts to contradict John’s leadership. He reads the Swallows’ acceptance of their father’s task as a sign of maturity; I read it as the intrusion of patriarchal adult society, where leadership is automatically assigned to John, into the Swallows’ and Amazons’ previously egalitarian culture, in which John and Nancy compete for leadership according to skill (as they do in Swallows and Amazons) and inclination.
Ransome's willingness to envision a range of femininities in Susan and Nancy (as well as Titty, Dorothea, Peggy, Mrs. Walker, and Daisy) draws attention to the fact that while domesticity is difficult and important, it is not natural to all women. In Susan and Nancy can be read the dilemma of interwar feminism: whether to celebrate femininity and encourage acceptance of it in traditionally masculine arenas, or whether to push persistently for men and women to be understood as fundamentally similar in their preoccupations. (It is worth noting at this juncture that it is rare for a Ransome boy, or man, to bother cooking.) Meanwhile, Blyton's range of femininities drifts from hyperfeminine, domestic, and easily frightened Anne to George, a character who might without much difficulty be read against the text as a transsexual character rather than as a girl; if read as female, George still attempts to entirely reject her gender in order to obtain agency and to participate in a broad range of femininities. Her family continues to thwart George's most socially disruptive rejections of gender norms, including preventing her from fighting with boys. In Blyton, writing somewhat later than Ransome, we may see a wholesale conservative backlash. Anne is sweetly contented by her household tasks, while George who struggles for literal equality is a generally unhappy character, repeatedly frustrated by her family and by society. She and Nancy are both aware of their positions as social oddities: but where Nancy is equipped to deal with this through a chameleon-like shifting from character to character, George has no tools to protect herself and must be resigned to Julian’s authority. Ransome's novels are longer and his characters correspondingly more well-rounded. Still, while Nancy offers more flexibility to women than George, and Susan's work is valued as women's domestic work rarely is in fiction or in reality, as the chief female characters in Ransome's novels they merely flesh out stereotypes, but do not challenge them.
2. Drastic Changes: The Women's Movement from 1945 to the Present Day (A Potted History)
In order to contextualise the changed roles for girls in modern young adult fiction – that is to say, fiction published within the last twenty years – it is necessary to look at the changes to women's lives and experiences, as well as cultural perceptions of women, effected by the Women's Liberation movement of the 1970s and early 80s. Bruley (117-146) and Caine (222-254) describe the period from 1945 to about 1970 as one characterised first by the post-war backlash, and then by mostly incremental improvements to the condition of women. Women increasingly worked outside the home, but were, and are, still underpaid relative to men and expected to bear the brunt of childcare, leading to a “double burden” (Bruley 121). Sue Bruley points to 1956's very familiar-sounding title, Women's Two Roles, Home and Work by Viola Klein and Alva Myrdal, which acknowledged the difficulty of both working and raising children and advocated for a phased model of a woman's working life (Bruley 126), so that mothers could leave work while children were small and return when they were at school. The notion that women ought to foster intense emotional bonds with their children to prevent psychological damage was widely accepted and helped to keep women in the home (131), along with the pay and promotion discrepancies that persisted between men and women no matter how skilled women were (123). These inequities were socially justified by the continuing notion of men and women as separate but equal, and the idea of the nuclear family, with the man as the breadwinner and the female as the caregiver and housekeeper, as the natural unit of society (172).
It was into this environment that hormonal contraception began to be introduced – gradually. At first offered to married women (from the mid-1950s) but increasingly from 1964 to unmarried women in committed relationships (or at least, women prepared to characterise their relationships as committed to family planning doctors (Bruley, 138)), the contraceptive pill began to offer women control over their status as mothers and childcarers. By the late 1960s, there was unrest in other areas and increasing dissatisfaction. In 1970, women meeting at Ruskin College committed to four demands that would characterise the movement for the next decade:
1. Equal Pay.
2. Equal education and opportunities.
3. Twenty-four hour nurseries.
4. Free contraception and abortion on demand.
(Bruley 149, Caine 256). According to Sue Bruley, at the heart of the movement was “a powerful attack on the sexual division of labour in society” (150); to Barbara Caine, the Women's Liberation was preoccupied with the “visual and cultural representation and conventional ideas of femininity [that] contributed to the oppression of women” (256). Bringing these ideas, some of which remain extremely radical, to bear on the concepts of femininity as demonstrated by Susan and Anne – little mothers devoted to their families, and happily so – illuminates the reason why these stock characterisations have fallen out of favour in adventure fiction, to be replaced by girls who can, at least in theory, do anything. Meanwhile, women at the beginning of the 21st Century seem almost to be relitigating, with advances, the concerns of women in the 1950s: reconciling family responsibilities with paid work outside the home.
Although the Women's Liberation movement has made great strides in improving pay equity and access to education, the fact that its latter two objectives – greater access to birth control and childcare – remain radical has meant that despite increasing support for women working outside the home, women still feel the pressure of the double burden. Indeed it is because of feminism's great strides in the workforce, coupled with very little movement on the domestic front, that has led to many feminists' preoccupation with the work-home division. Bruley suggests that the advances of the 1980s may have produced a crop of “burnt-out supermums”, entering the workforce while still fulfilling all their domestic responsibilities, and identifies a few modern feminist writers who are responding with the familiar ideology of the separate spheres: women in the home, and men working (179). These writers place a high value on domestic work and some call for remuneration. Nevertheless, they remain the far edge of a spectrum of women's responses to the desire, and need, to work inside and outside of them home. Linda Hirschman, in her brief and extremely direct volume Get To Work advocates the reverse, suggesting that women of means abandon the home; in her schematic, each individual ought to fulfill their potential outside the home, and pay caregivers to raise their children.
Meanwhile, a majority of feminists look for solutions that incorporate both needs into the lives of both women and men. Typical solutions involve both partners working part-time in and out of the home, or switching off; these authors tend to demand better accomodations for part-time work and paid parental leave. Mary Blair-Loy's Competing Devotions identifies the devotion to work schema and the devotion to family schema as cultural narratives that describe and proscribe the traditional behaviours of men and women. She describes the pressure on women to devote themselves to their families, and the further pressure on working people to devote themselves to their careers, and identifies the difficulty or impossibility of reconciling both as they are currently constructed, while observing the improvised solutions of a group of women business executives who have chosen to work part-time while raising children, defying both schemas. Patricia Thompson in The Accidental Theorist challenges male-centric public life in her “reclamation” of the hearth goddess Hestia and the messenger god Hermes, suggesting that each symbolises an important part of the experience of human life – housework and public work – and that the former has been devalued because of its association with the feminine. It is vital, she says, that both genders experience both spheres of everyday life, the Hestian and the Hermean. These writers, and others, are attempting to restructure the nuclear family so that housework and caregiving is not viewed as only the domain of women, while continuing to value the work done mostly by women in the home, and I believe that these questions are implicitly played out in girls' roles in children's fiction.
3. Reworking the Holiday Adventure: Modern Texts and Jones
The conceit of holiday adventure fiction, and the characters that tended to be found within it, have in modern children's fiction more or less parted ways. Children don't go off on holidays without their parents anymore, if indeed they ever did; the realistic trend in children's and young adult literature has resisted the conceit as a kind of sentimentality. Perhaps this is a fair assessment: Diana Wynne Jones herself remembers Coniston Water, the original for the lake where the Swallows and Amazons spent their summer, in the backdrop of her memories of the Second World War (Something About the Author), and a childhood friend, Nicholas Tucker, describes the lake as dangerous, gloomy, and threatening. Watson notes, in Reading Series Fiction, that he is always surprised when people identify Ransome's work (as merely one example of the genre) as realistic: “I regard him essentially as a magical writer.” (13) Instead, fantasy is the genre which has sustained the holiday adventure story. To escape their parents, characters tend to be thrown (typically without their consent) into fantasy lands. Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), and their contemporaries, are earlier explorations of this theme, just after the heyday of holiday adventure fiction. Children go out into the supposedly predictable English countryside, and find it rendered alien by fantasy. Modern novels tend to rip children right out of the realistic world and into a fantastic one in the portal-quest mode: N. M. Browne's Alavna novels (in which two ordinary British school children travel back in time to a pre-Roman magical Britain) and Garth Nix' Keys to the Kingdom (in which the generally fragile Arthur Penhaligan is summoned into a fantastic universe) are exemplary of this approach to series fiction, while J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels are an extremely popular example of the successful blending of this kind of portal quest adventure with another old-fashioned children's genre, the school story. The characters that these things happen to are rarely Susans, Johns, Nancies, or even Georges and Julians: practical characters who know what they're doing, in their element. They're asthmatic and wheezy Arthur Penhaligons, plain Janes and predictable Simons and Barneys. Even when characters who end up in these other worlds are relatively outstanding, like sporty Dan from Warriors of Alavna, they are always revealed to be quite unprepared for their adventures. Indeed, where John, Susan, Nancy, Julian, George and Anne remain mostly static characters, modern series in the portal-quest line tend more towards the bildungsroman: Dan's overweight and miserable classmate Ursula finds that Alavna grants her access to magic and to a means of developing her own physical strength3 , while popular, easy-going Dan discovers his own battle-madness. Meanwhile, thrown into a world they're unprepared for, the typical behaviours of performative adulthood have vanished. Girls are not mother or tomboy, and boys are not patriarch or mischief-maker. The willingly motherly girl has, in fact, almost vanished from adventure texts, and I speculate that this is because in the portal-quest fantasy the children venture much further from the Hestian home and hearth, as Thompson would have it, than they did in holiday adventure fiction. The landscapes of holiday adventure fiction were parentless, but they were still British: familiar and familial society, with parents and responsibilities, was always nearby and the reconstruction of the parental narrative is a cornerstone of the novels. The portal quest fantasy drags girls and boys alike into the Hermean domain, where the structure of the nuclear family is absent and unnecessary, even harmful: ironically, in these fantasy novels physical danger tends to be taken much more seriously, and the peaceful domestic life is far away.
The effects of second-wave feminism have also contributed to an understanding of this stereotype as a poor model for girl readers, and so she has left the pages of the holiday adventure novel, for practical reasons as well as political ones. Girls like Susan embraced the motherly role because it was valuable, a useful way she could participate in the family holidays. Thus, in portal fantasies, there is no point in performing these roles, because they are rendered irrelevant by the unfamiliar setting, just as Dan's sportiness is irrelevant in Alavna. Instead, boys and girls in modern adventure fiction are much alike in their rejection of the domestic sphere and of motherly work. Increasingly, too, there has been a division between emotional caregiving and physical housework; it is rare to see a novel in which the bulk of housework is done by women, but still not unusual to read a novel in which most emotional work is done by women.
The motherly girl has not entirely vanished. Instead, she has retreated to the pages of the realistic problem novel, where she (or very occasionally he) is stuck taking care of her family while her mother works, or occasionally plays. A classic New Zealand example is Margaret Mahy's Laura Chant, from The Changeover (1984). Laura embraces her parental role towards her brother whole-heartedly; while she occasionally regrets her responsibilities, generally she is tender towards him, describing herself at one point as feeling as if Jacko was really her own baby, rather than her brother. And this sisterly care is something of a theme in Mahy's early work: elder sisters devote their energies to their brothers, sometimes as in Laura's case actually going to far as to realise their own power solely in order to protect the child. Similar relationships occur in The Haunting (1982) and Aliens in the Family (1985), which includes a delightfully bizarre tomboy and motherly figure in the form of the androgynous Jake, who must care for her flighty, incompetent mother but embraces a “Lone Ranger” masculine persona to do so. A more recent New Zealand figure might be Sydney, from Kate De Goldi's The 10 PM Question (2009): Sydney sacrifices her own desire and need to go and stay with her father because her mother, a selfish and neglectful parent, would not take good care of Sydney's half-sisters. For Sydney and Jake, in contrast to Susan or Anne, caring is not a vocation, although Laura does take pleasure in caring for her brother: instead they are wearing responsibilities, clear realistic portraits of difficult situations for children.
In these novels, rather than being the natural backdrop to a character, their caregiving responsibilities are a significant part of the story. Which is not to say that caregiving in the problem novel is always a dispiriting burden. For Margaret Mahy, caregiving and mothering becomes the site of empowerment. When Laura Chant's brother in The Changeover is endangered, Laura undergoes the titular changeover in order to become a witch and gain the power she needs to save him. This changeover is a transparent metaphor for entering womanhood. Laura wakes from a trance to find that the lower half of her body has become soaked in blood, putatively from a nosebleed – but it is a strange nosebleed, surely, that soaks only one's skirt “from waist to hem” (151). Caring for Jacko is a site of empowerment for Laura – yet the novel's final scene depicts Laura coming home from school to play with Jacko while her elder boyfriend, Sorry, looks on paternally. Despite her so-called empowerment, the conclusion to Laura's story looks remarkably similar to the way Susan's might have! In The Haunting, magician Troy uses her awe-inspiring powers similarly to protect her brother – yet it is because of her relationships with her family that Troy is preserved from her own power; her power is limited and harnessed by her social bonds. If Laura and Troy are one end of the spectrum, exemplifying the best outcome of Blair-Loy's family devotion schema, Jake in Mahy's Aliens in the Family represents its nadir. Jake is trapped in a bizarre role-reversal, needing to care not only for her childlike mother but additionally for her aging grandparents. Here, perhaps, Jake's experiences mirror those of women who felt trapped into domesticity: she is unable to fully pursue her life and her aspirations – the work-devotion schema - because of her family's incompetence.
Farah Mendlesohn makes a case for Diana Wynne Jones as a self-consciously critical author, noting her several critical pieces on her own writing (XVII-XXIII). Charles Butler draws attention to her tendency to satirise, noting particularly The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and Howl's Moving Castle (239) as satires of Tolkienesque epic fantasy (the former two novles) and fairytale myths (the latter). Jones is a critical author with an interest in satire; she also admits to having read, and disliked, Arthur Ransome's novels. Two of her novels investigate and invert some of the more old-fashioned tropes of holiday adventure fiction in her fantasy settings, and the ways in which girls' roles in these satires construct Jones' response to the spheres-of-work problem.
Women's work, and the work done by parents, is a theme in many of Jones' novels. In The Merlin Conspiracy, Jones dwells on concepts of women's magic, men's magic, and the required balance, while investigating the consequences for one character of being forced to do caring work: Roddy, and her relationship to her friend Grundo. Meanwhile, housework is something of a motif in Jones' Moving Castle series (Howl's Moving Castle, Castle in the Air, and House of Many Ways), which are set in Ingary a land that might best be described as a kind of fairytale kingdom, where fairytale rules – the narrative law of the fairytale – are expected to be literally played out. Thus, for example, Sophie Hatter, the protagonist of the first Castle novel, believes that, as the eldest of three sisters her fate is bound to be boring, while her middle sister would have a good but ordinary life and her youngest sister is bound for adventures. Jones uses the Moving Castle series to satirise these mythical tropes – Castle in the Air explores the Arabian nights, while the other two both explore more European fairy stories. But House of Many Ways also satirises holiday adventure fiction. Charmain in House of Many Ways inverts both typical holiday adventure tropes, and is a relitigation of relationships described in some of Jones' earlier work – Jones here reworks both older texts, such as Ransome and Blyton's, and her own Howl's Moving Castle.
A great deal of questionable gender play features in in The Merlin Conspiracy. Men's magic is portrayed as rational, businesslike, broadly acknowledged and respected, and dependent upon innate skill and entrepreneurship.Women's magic is irrational, hereditary, and much less well-known or respected. Thompson would happily describe the masculine Court magic as Hermean, public magic, while women's magic is the Hestian magic of hearth and home (and garden.)4 Apart from the gender essentialism inherent in the ideas of men's and women's magic (which is, at least, subverted through Sybil, who is talented at Court (men's) magic, and occasionally Grundo who appears to struggle with masculine court magic), the characters who are representative of each side of magic are telling. The men have Roddy's competent, funny father, and powerful grandfather, along with the menacing but attractive Romanov; the women have the Dimbers, relations of Roddy on her father's side, comprised of her “vulgar” grandmother Heppy, her dippy and disorganised aunt Judith, and her cousins, the wonderfully ghastly Izzies.
However, Roddy and Grundo's relationship has the potential to present a powerful commentary on the way girls in fiction (and in life) expend their energies on others rather than on themselves. Roddy has spent much of her life (since she was five and he was three) taking care of Grundo; she says late in the novel that she had felt her behaviour towards Grundo was the only thing that really stopped her from being a true courtier like Alicia the Sneeze, Grundo's older sister and Roddy's least favourite person. This is typical woman's work: prioritizing others' needs, especially younger children's needs, over your own, and Roddy dislikes Alicia and Sybil, Grundo's mother, for how little of that maternal work they do. According to Nick she treats Grundo as if she were his “very fussy mother” (368) - something that Nick finds disturbing because he would prefer that she be sexually available to him, rather than fussing maternally after Grundo. It is a difficult experience for Grundo, too, when Roddy begins to focus on her own needs and interests rather than his. When Roddy has knowledge passed on to her that will allow her to save Blest, their home, Grundo is resentful that she is not paying enough attention to him. Roddy cannot understand his behaviour, but the reader can: Grundo recognises that Roddy's new knowledge is going to provide her with a powerful distraction from him, as well as a new way for her to define herself as different than Alicia and Sybil. Instead of defining herself by her caring for Grundo, Roddy begins to develop an internal life, the beginning of her own independence. Grundo's response is to accuse Roddy of behaving like Alicia, a calculated insult that Roddy manages to brush off, yet in a way it is true: Roddy, like Alicia, has begun to behave as though there is something more important than Grundo himself, a behaviour that disturbs him.
Finally, towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Grundo has actually been enchanting Roddy to prioritise him over herself. The revelation is a shock both to the reader and Roddy herself. Grundo has already recognised that the Izzies have enchanted their mother and grandmother to behave similarly, something that is also confronting for the reader, for she has been enouraged to think of Judith and Heppy's lack of discipline over the Izzies as a function of bad mothering, rather than as a consequence of manipulation by the Izzies. When it is revealed that Grundo has been doing the same thing to Roddy since he was three, the shock functions as a powerful criticism of Grundo's actions but also of the traditional self-effacement of the motherly figure like Anne, or Susan – or Laura Chant: there are no shortage of ready comparisons between Laura's relationship with Jacko, and Roddy's relationship with Grundo. Laura cares for Jacko as Roddy cares for Grundo; Laura is sexually pursued by Sorry as Roddy is pursued by Nick5. Jacko is metaphorically charming (Laura describes “staring at Jacko, quite entranced by him” (17)) where Grundo is literally charming. But where Laura embraces both Jacko and Sorry, Roddy is horrified by what Grundo has done to her and uncomfortable with Nick's attraction to her. The revelation almost destroys Roddy: in a novel where a range of disturbing things has happened to her, including being abandoned by her parents, discovering her family magically entrapped in an underground cavern, and actually unravelling the balance of magics in her own world, it is notable that discovering Grundo's manipulation of her is what renders her truly miserable. The novel is written in the first person, as the accounts of Roddy and Nick of the same events; when Roddy finds out she has been enchanted, a break in her narrative occurs which Nick's narrative must fill in, so great is the degree to which Roddy is upset. These passages are a thorough and careful deconstruction of the mother-child relationship, and the way young women are often enouraged into these caretaking roles, believing them to be natural. Grundo is only doing magically what society typically does to young women: encourage them to do the emotional caregiving and to neglect their own interests to do so.
Meanwhile, House of Many Ways is concerned with, not emotional caregiving, but physical caregiving – that is to say, housekeeping. In the novel Jones refers to, and plays around with, several familiar stories. It starts off with a peculiar inversion: instead of going off on her own to have a holiday, Charmain actually goes off to work. She is originally sent to work domestically in housekeeping, but she rather rapidly finds employment better suited to her talents: working in a library. The holiday is inverted and turned into a working summer, while Peter, a boy who shows up to learn wizardry, is the one who ends up doing most of what might be called the “women's work” - not Charmain, the girl actually asked to do it. (It is worth noting, at this juncture, that Charmain is much more talented at the rather masculine discipline of wizardry than Peter is: her spells always go right, despite her slapdash approach6 .) Charmain is as devoted to books as she is ignorant about housework: she is proactive about writing to the King for a job and the first thing she does when she's upset is sit down with a book. She appears to be more or less content to let dishes pile up, laundry go undone, pipes freeze or boil and bubbles ruin the upholstery as long as she can sit down with a book. She is supported in this by her mother who apparently feels that it is not respectable for her daughter to exert herself in housework; it takes the arrival of the slightly less respectable prospective wizard Peter for any of the housekeeping to get done.
The reader is rapidly presented with the charming scene of Charmain going out to work for the King while Peter remains behind, both cleaning and experimenting with his magic – a wry inversion both of the typical roles of men and women, and of Howl and Sophie's roles in House of Many Ways' prequel, Howl's Moving Castle. In the earlier novel, Sophie spends most of her time cleaning the rather revolting, neglected household, and in the process learning to harness her own magic, while Howl is out doing wizarding work. In House of Many Ways, the magical environment is still messy and neglected, but Peter is the one who cleans it and discovers its secrets. In one scene Charmain comes home to a magical disaster – the bathroom has flooded – and sets about helping Peter fix it, complaining that she's already done a full day's work. So, replies Peter, has he – taking care of Wizard Norland's house. The book dwells on the importance both of Charmain's work and of Peter's: like Ransome, it values the work done in the house, which is also a theme in Howl's Moving Castle. However, it is not content merely to invert the usual tired roles of the woman in the house and the man at work. Peter drags Charmain through several traumatic learning experiences including “doing the dishes” and “doing the laundry”, and she begins, and first unhappily and then with enthusiasm, to learn that domestic tasks, if not pleasant, may at least enable one to be independent of a protective mother. Meanwhile, Howl (who also appears in the novel, along with Sophie and their son, in supporting roles) is so uncomfortable with the idea of taking care of their son Morgan while Sophie has been called out to work (she too is a talented witch) that he literally regresses to childhood in order to return the responsibility back to Sophie. Neither Sophie nor the novel find this particularly impressive, and quite explicit comparisons can be drawn between Charmain and Howl.
Both novels conclude, as fairy tales ought, with each of the children's (and some of the adults') destinies fully sketched out, yet the novels are remarkably different in approach. Both deal with the organisation and distribution of magical power structures in their countries. In Roddy's Blest, the country is governed by the King, along with two people who represent the balance of magics – the Merlin, who governs men's and court magic, and is well-known throughout the kingdom, and the Lady of Governance, who governs women's magic, natural and domestic magics and is only known well to those who are likely to interact with her. Jones' emphasis on the balance of the two kinds of magic speaks to an appreciation of the equal value of two different kinds of work, but there is a strong strain of gender essentialism: the Merlin is always a man, and the Lady of Governance is always a woman. Although the novel's climax involves Roddy “raising the land”, which involves entirely destroying and re-making the way magic works in Blest, the tradition is continued in Roddy and Grundo: Roddy must apprentice herself to motherly Mrs. Candace despite having had her mothering abused by Grundo, while Grundo must prepare to be Merlin, despite his contempt for the Court and Courtly ways. House of Many Ways, too, is concerned with the disposition of power: a chief part of the book's plot has been finding an heir to the throne and a new Royal Wizard, as the current rulers (the extremely elderly King and his almost equally elderly daughter) and High Wizard are preparing to retire. Unlike in The Merlin Conspiracy, the gender distribution of these roles is disrupted rather than preserved. Charmain will apprentice herself to her Great-Uncle, the Royal Wizard of High Norland, while Peter is discovered to be Crown Prince and will begin to learn the management – the caretaking - of the kingdom. Whereas in The Merlin Conspiracy the two roles that balance the country – the Merlin and the Lady of Governance - are defined by gender, in House of Many Ways roles are defined by talent and gender esssentialism is resisted. The Crown had hitherto been managed chiefly by the elderly Crown Princess, the eminently practical Princess Hilda: it is fitting that Peter inherit the role, since he has already demonstrated practical thinking and good management skills in the household. Housework and housekeeping, in Jones' estimation, appears to be a reasonable approximation of the skills needed to run a kingdom. Meanwhile, bookish Charmain will spend time with her bookish Great Uncle to develop her own talents at wizardry, a future that is signalled by her easy facility with the Boke of Palimpsest, a symbol of dusty masculine knowledge.
For Jones, while domestic work can be as important as work outside the home – for one's own sake as well as for the sake of those around us – and women's work and magic is as applicable outside the home as inside, family relationships and mothering are a site of potential stagnation, ignorance, and entrapment. Grundo abuses and enchants Roddy's maternal feelings; Sophie's husband and son threaten her ability to work outside the home; Charmain's mother is so devoted to the idea of Charmain as the respectable child that she appears to spend most of her life ensuring that Charmain herself never washes a dish or bakes a cake (perhaps harkening back to the generation of women who were assured that their children would suffer tremendously without their constant attention.) Housework, on the other hand, becomes a tool for change and growth; Sophie's sweeping out of the ashes is metaphorical for her own growth and the change she creates in Howl, while for Charmain cleaning the wizard's house becomes a metaphor for self-control and self-determination. However, for Mahy, while housework can be meditative (in one scene in a slightly later book, Catalogue of the Universe, a mother is seen cutting grass with scythe by moonlight) the women in her books are generally unconcerned with it. Indeed, the memorable opening of The Changeover features Laura and her mother dashing around the house trying to find her mother's shoe (ultimately found on the mantelpiece (5).) It is ultimately in the bonds of commitment to the family that women may be appropriately empowered – Laura achieves her full power in order to protect her younger brother; The Haunting's Troy is protected from her wild nature by her relationships with her family. Jake is trapped by her responsibilities to her mother, but she is so trapped because her mother has reneged on her own parental responsibilities. Custody of Jake has reduced her from an urbane, social woman to a woman living with her aging parents and her teenaged daughter on an isolated farm. Both these authors present girls who have managed to combine, in one way or another, the domestic sphere with the public sphere. Roddy will grow up to be the Lady of Governance – a prestigious job that involves domestic care of an entire country; Charmain has learned that housework enables one to be independent and pursue one's career as a Royal Wizard; Laura is empowered by the very fact of her relationship with Jacko (and her relationship with Sorry). Yet the startling contrast between Laura's relations with Jacko and Sorry, and Roddy's relations with Grundo and Nick, are evidence of the deep chasm between Mahy's and Jones' approach to the dilemma.
Conclusion
Over the 20th century, a change in the understanding of women’s roles led to a change in the types of roles offered to girls in popular children’s fiction, away from the straightforward “motherly girl” and “tomboy.” It might have been anticipated that roles for women would have varied, that roles for girls would have incorporated both mother and tomboy and that opportunities for both genders to experience and enjoy caring for their siblings would have arisen and defied gender essentialism. Instead caregiving work has almost disappeared from the pages of adventure fiction. It has been reduced to just one more of the burdens offered to children in the problem novel, where it generally also becomes a stick with which to beat the neglectful mother (as in The 10pm Question or Aliens in the Family.) Fractured modern feminism remains invested in the “double burden” problem, and some children’s authors continue to respond to its challenge, as with Mahy’s empowerment of the mothering girl (however problematic), and Jones’ interrogation of both the motherly and the domestic girl. However the predominant, confused response to the unresolved issues that feminism has raised has been to elide the value of domestic work, nursing, and emotional caregiving and eliminate it from children’s fiction altogether. While the degraded Anne and her metaphorical sisters are not great losses to the genre, it does no service to girls, or to children generally, to further contribute to the invisibility of work done in the home and caring work by erasing the unfashionable Susan.
Notes
1.In this genre Blyton also wrote the Adventure series, which is somewhat more sophisticated and seems to be aimed at older readers, and the Mystery series; they are still in print but less well-known.
3.Ursula's story, in which she physically changes her own body into a man's, then back into a woman's, deserves more space than I can here give it.
4.An amusing detail from the Moving Castle series is that it features a fire demon, Calcifer, who is decidedly masculine – and who resides in the hearth, keeping the castle (home of Howl, Sophie, and occasional others) running. He is nearly smothered when Sophie, cleaning the castle, sweeps a great deal of dust onto him.
5.Jones' description of this pursuit is fairly restrained: Nick immediately recognises Roddy as his “ideal girl” (117), and Roddy is aware of his interest, feeling him “pushing at [her] all the time, in a warm, moist eager way that I didn't understand and didn't want at all.” (370) Mahy, on the other hand, is startlingly explicit: Sorry assures Laura that she has “very sexy legs” (62), and keeps a poster of a naked woman on his wall: “This woman had been photographed... and the picture was intended to be looked at by men. There was a small snapshot pinned to one corner of it,” (64) and the snapshot is of Laura herself.
6.Charmain has an illuminating encounter with a dusty spellbook, The Boke of Palimpsest: a dangerous tome that she has been explicitly warned off by her great-uncle the court wizard. She attempts to perform a spell to make herself fly, but the book is tricky and flips its pages when she is not looking, so that she ends up performing several different spells. Yet not only does she succeed in making herself fly, but all the other spells she has accidentally performed work too – A Spell to Find a Handsome Prince, for example, and A Spell To Find Hidden Treasure, both of which are key plot points. Later, the Witch of Montealbino will tell her, in assessing her magical power: “Don't tell me... that your magic doesn't do exactly what you mean it to, however you do it.” Indeed, Charmain's mastery over the Boke of Palimpsest will eventually dictate her future as Royal Wizard. Charmain's unusual approach to spells, and success with them, can be construed as a criticism of the reification of knowledge in a particular format. The Boke of Palimpsest's circular title (a Palimpsest being a book or parchment scroll that has been re-used) is symbolic of an organised and structured, yet empty epistemology, somewhat reminiscent of criticisms of the nineteenth century drive to completely taxonomise the natural world.
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