Week 10 - Little Lord Fauntleroy

I think that we would all like to believe that in an ideal world, an authors’ gender would not be associated with certain stereotypes of writing. But when we found out that Frances Burnett was indeed a woman, too many things about the text suddenly clicked for me to say that the gender of the author did not affect the way the story of Little Lord Fauntleroy was told. Indeed one of my first thoughts upon reading this text was how differently boyhood was depicted from that of Tom Sawyer or Ragged Dick, and I was looking forward to blogging on the topic. Gender of the author does play an important role in the telling of the story, though I think that the difference between the way Tom Sawyer and Little Lord Fauntleroy are told has mostly to do with how Twain based his story on how he remembered boyhood, and Burnett based her story on how she idealized boyhood from the perspective of a mother.

Cedric Errol is presented in Little Lord Fauntleroy as quite different Tom Sawyer or Ragged Dick in their namesake books. Tom is rough, tricky, impulsive, and frequently disobeys his aunt. Dick is wryly humorous, street-smart, and rebellious in a “cool” way. Cedric reminds me much more of Ellen Montgomery than either of these two boys. He is mostly friends with only adults, he cares a great deal for his mother (in fact neither Tom nor Dick had a proper mother), he wears his hair curly and long, and he is finely dressed. I have to imagine that these descriptions of Cedric as such a “beautiful” boy much have sounded effeminate to a 19^th century audience as well as this modern reader, and until we discovered that Frances Burnett was indeed a woman I had wondered at what the intent of creating him like this had been. Now I do not think it is too much of a stretch to compare this story more easily to the didactic tale of The Wide, Wide World than to the other depictions of boyhood we’ve read about so far; Ellen is the ideal daughter, and Cedric seems to be the ideal son.

In fact, Burnett tells us that Cedric’s “greatest charm was this cheerful, fearless, quaint little way of making friends with people.” She goes on to state that “he had never heard an unkind or uncourteous word spoken at home; he had always been loved and caressed and treated tenderly, and so his childish soul was full of kindness and innocent warm feeling” (446). That is certainly a very different description of a young boy than from what the male authors said of their own characters. Well we can see very plainly in Tom Sawyer that Tom causes his aunt no end of grief, and what mother would want to be put through all that with her children? Though we can’t take these texts as artifacts, we can probably argue that Tom is much closer to being a typical boy of the time than is Cedric simply because Burnett could never have experienced boyhood intimately enough to write of it as accurately as Twain or Alger. Little Lord Fauntleroy was probably intended by Burnett to temper troublesome boyish qualities and attempt to make young boys (like young girls) more manageable to a mother.