Week 7 - A Whisper in the Dark

By introducing the concept of insanity into the story, Alcott warns the reader not to get comfortable with what they are reading because they can no longer trust their perceptions. Being unable to know what is coming can be scary by itself, and introducing that into A Whisper in the Dark allows Alcott to manipulate that unease to catch onto and hold the reader’s attention. It makes the reader feel like they have to keep reading because unlike our other stories, this one doesn’t seem to have the guarantee of a happy ending. 

Since the story is being told in the first person, we are receiving all of our information from one source: Sybil. But in the second half of the book, she is committed to an insane asylum after throwing a tantrum. Though she loudly insists that "I am the best judge of my own health," we can't really be certain that she is (229). She could be unable to accurately judge her own health due to her skewed mental state and really does need to be put away.

As to how insanity being present in the story affects the reader is quite a different story. Even though when I started reading the story Sybil seemed like a perfectly stable young woman, being brought to the insane asylum really does make you doubt if what she is seeing is real or not. For example, when she is sleeping walking and hears “through the keyhole came a whisper that chilled me to the marrow of my bones, so distinct and imploring was it. “Find it! For God’s sake find it before it is too late!”” (235). The reader has no present guarantee that this is anything except the product of a deranged mind, so it begs you to continue to read to find out if Sybil really is insane or not.

Though we find out in the end that Sybil’s mother is indeed present in the story as the other resident of the asylum, she had no impact whatsoever on Sybil’s upbringing; the typical mother/daughter relationship was almost entirely absent. Almost. In many of the other stories we have read, the children typically have loving, caring mothers who try to help them to become successful in the world, such as Mrs. Montgomery in The Wide, Wide World and Marah Rocke in The Hidden Hand. Though Sybil’s mother has a very limited role in her life (that isn’t even discovered until after she is dead), she is the one who effectively hands Sybil her freedom from the asylum by hiding the key in the dogs collar.

But at the same time, her mother was legitimately insane. Though we again only find this out at the end of the story, Sybil must live with the knowledge that her mother was never a suitable guardian for her. For a society that put so much value into the relationship between a mother and a daughter, to have someone tell you that at times you may not be able to trust yourself, but also not be able to trust the people that are supposed to be looking out for you, would produce quite a chilling effect indeed. 

Week 6 - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin seems to be a perfect example of a "poster child" cause, in this case the cause being to abolish slavery. Throughout the 80 or so pages of the novel that we read this week, we were introduced to several different groups of slaves, most all of which featured a child. In the very beginning of the novel we are introduced to Eliza "leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered." (243) Though she was owned by a family that treated her kindly, she decides to risk her own life running away to spare her son the cruelties of being sold to the south, which as we read on we learn is much worse than being a slave in Kentucky. The main audience for this novel I assume was women and mothers, as the novel makes many more examples of children being split from their parents. And what mother reading this novel wouldn't be heartbroken by Aunt Hagar begging Master Haley "buy me too, Mas'r, for de dear Lord's sake!--buy me--I shall die if you don't!" (318) These passages are heartrending; I can imagine the horror white women must have felt back then in learning that every day poor black mothers were being separated from their children forever, and how much these feelings of horror and outrage must have galvanized the population into action.

I don't feel that the novel is drastically changing how we should interpret children's literature. I think what it does is to take the preexisting idea of children as being pure, innocent beings and shows how the institution of slavery perverts and destroys the rights children have to grow up safe and loved. There is no goodness in a 10-month-old child being sold apart from his mother, let along not being allowed to say goodbye to your child, no matter how you spin it. (326) Books like The Wide, Wide World and The Hidden Hand showed American audiences how children should be raised, how they should act, and what qualities should be encouraged. After reading these earlier novels and having formed a schema about what is "good" about childhood, we can see from Uncle Tom's Cabin that the "goodness" of childhood is absolutely absent in the black community of the time. Harriet Beecher Stowe plays on these conceptions like a master musician to show to the reader of the time that slaves have feelings and families, that this institution of slavery is tearing apart their lives, and that no child of any race deserves this kind of treatment.

So, though the theme and mood of this book are obviously drastically different from previous texts that we have read,  the theme of childhood as something to be protected is simply saturated in the text. In just 80 short pages we have three different stories of mothers being separated or threated to be separated from their children (if I've counted correctly), and one young mother even kills herself after the loss of her baby. (329) Uncle Tom's Cabin shows us how children aught to be raised by showing the audience story after story of children who obviously haven't had the luxury of a safe and comfortable childhood.

Week 5 - The Hidden Hand

Let me just start off by saying, wow! I really enjoyed reading the beginning of this novel! I was actually rather upset that we weren't reading more of it, and I couldn't have said the same about either The Wide, Wide World or The Lamplighter. I may go by the library in the next few days and see if they have it!


Well, seeing as how that just gave me the inspiration to write this blog posting, I'm just going to follow along with this train of thought. This novel is quite a departure from the previous two books we've read. The previous novels contained Ellen, a prim and proper young girl who is the epitome of a young lady, and Gerty, a not so nice or pretty young girl but one who strives hard to be 'good' all the same. Now, we have Capitola. She decided to dress in boys clothes so she can work to feed herself rather than starve. She talks back to Old Hurricane in a teasing manner, both dressed as a boy and after she is revealed. She is fearless when faced with the trapdoor in her room, and as is evidenced by her decision to even start dressing like a boy, she takes her future into her own hands. Capitola is nothing like either the perfect little Ellen or ignorant and helpless Gerty. Why does Southworth make this sudden departure from conventional domestic fiction? Both The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter were bestsellers in their times. Why try to reinvent the wheel? Or, is Southworth inventing something completely different, with a completely different message? This seems to be exactly like the "furious kind of a novel" (Warner 31) that we have been told is bad for women.

I believe that one of the biggest reasons that this novel is so much more rapidly paced and features so much stronger characters than the other novels is the manner in which it was first published. Professor Irvin mentioned in class that The Hidden Hand was first published as a serial in a newspaper. I can imagine that if I were an author, I would want to hook my audience right at the very beginning so I could continue being published. This explains the clean breaks between chapters as well, which reads rather well from the perspective of a modern reader. The characters I can imagine were created with specific purpose as well: Old Hurricane is that feisty old man everyone has encountered and loved to hate; Traverse is young and handsome, described as having a "nobel form [and] graceful air" (Southworth 190); Marah Rocke provides us with a delicious bit of drama and scandal; and Capitola is that tough little free-spirit that all girls wish they could let loose sometime. That is another part of why I believe that The Hidden Hand was so successful: though Capitola was not what you would call a conventional young woman of the times, she is edgy, spunky, and makes you wish that you could be having her adventures. Women who did not get out of the home much could pick up a paper and read about this girl who makes them feel that they are out experiencing the world as well.

Week 4

It is not a surprise to me to find that, a century and a half after Cummin's The Lamplighter was published, our expectations about the roles of women in society has progressed as far as it has. Women are now allowed to vote, most hold jobs even after they marry, and there is now less importance put on being a mother and having children. Some women choose to focus on their careers and never marry. Others may choose to marry young or stay at home and not work. The important thing is not that a modern woman does one or the other, it is simply important that that she have the option, and the ability to make her own choices. It's not that expectations are any different. The ideal role of a woman (in the eyes of a man) hasn't kept pace with progress. The difference between these two texts is simply the number of options available to either girl in their own time.

The first thing I noticed about the video prompt was the theme song singing "smart girls have more fun." Obviously, the message of this show is not going to be the same message should, for example, it had been produced under the values system of the 19th century. Amy Pohler features on her show different girls with different talents and says that they are all equally valid ways of living. In The Lamplighter however, as in our other readings, we are shown that girls of that time were all brought up and prepared and trimmed and shaped to fit the mold of what women were supposed to be. We can see from the examples of Nan Grant (and Gerty on occasion) that having a temper or being strong willed was a bad thing: it makes you kill kittens or gets you beaten.

However, we are encouraged to like Emily Graham and Mrs. Sullivan. Both represent the virtues Gerty should strive to embody: selflessness, piety, motherhood, and beauty. Both women are easily distinguished from Nan Grant, who was ugly and mean. Now of course modern women are told how to act and behave as well, but we really have the freedom to choose from many "socially acceptable" models to choose from; no one is going to alienate a woman in this day and age for reading books, playing soccer, or becoming a lawyer.
Gerty is simply encouraged to "be quite a nice little housekeeper."

In the prompt video, the little girl Ana says "don't think about what you have to do to get people to like you or to have more friends. You probably want people to like you for who you are." While this is a very common line of thought today, it was not the case in Gerty's time. To be a proper young woman Gerty is supposed to know how to clean the house, make toast, pray to God, and all these other things that are just expected of her. And she is taught that that is what she wants. Her opinion doesn't really matter. Amy Pohler's show is all about asking young girls their opinions which shows the difference between how many more options Ana has growing up in the 21st century even at such an early age.

Women back then had fewer options because they simply had fewer rights. Nowadays when a woman can do just about anything that a man can (at least in our country), there exist multiple ways in which she can choose to express herself without fear of social rejection.