This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. But, like, this one is more of a popular book for kids and stuff. We also have more of his gargantuan donation left, so continue pitching me your 18th and 19th century trash fiction stories.
When I was about ten or eleven years old, I had several favourite books on any given day. But I kept re-reading What Katy Did over and over again, and I wasn’t sure why. It had no drama or fight scenes, and certainly no love scenes, but there was something comforting in a quiet story where not much seemed to happen. Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did used to be a staple on children’s bookshelves and then fell out of favour, and teachers and librarians stopped recommending it to young people—girls, really, as this is a book by a woman, for girls, about girls. Its message was obsolete, you see. What Katy Did is a morality tale in an 19th-century pink striped dress (quite literally—in my copy of the 1872 novel, Katy is wearing a pink-and-white striped dress with her hair in a flyaway braid.)
Katy Carr is a tomboy—that hated word!—who loves to “make-believe” and play boisterously with her five younger siblings and best friend. She spends the first half of the book getting into never-ending scrapes with the best of intentions, much to the dismay of her stern aunt. On a beautiful summer day, Katy disobeys her aunt, and goes for a fateful forbidden swing in the barn. Like Icarus, she soars too high, and the swing breaks and dooms her to years of convalescence in her room following a terrible spinal injury.
(Although in the book the injury is described as a bruised spinal membrane followed by brain fever, today Katy’s injury would probably be described as a type of incomplete spinal-cord injury with subsequent temporary paralysis.)
After a period of angry rebellion, she learns that her life is far from over, and when her aunt dies she assumes the management of the house while unable to stir from her bedroom. Eventually Katy eventually becomes the “Heart of the House,” with moral support from her cousin Helen, who had been disabled and permanently paralyzed in an accident years before. While safely tucked away in an upstairs bedroom, Katy becomes the gracious and sweet-tempered young lady she was meant to be, learns to walk again, and everyone lives happily ever after. There are several sequels that follow the further adventures of Katy and the rest of the Carr family, although they lack the energy and verve of What Katy Did.
This was initially assumed to be a very suitable novel for girls and young women, with its wholesome message and happy ending. Despite its overarching theme that a sweet disposition and homemaking skills are the highest achievement for young women (which we must remember is not at all surprising for the time frame), What Katy Did is remarkably forward-thinking for its publication date. More typical literature of the period would be akin to the Elsie Dinsmore novels, a series of twenty-eight interminable novels about Elsie, a young girl who embraces Christianity to the point where she has a nervous breakdown at the age of eight from the inability to obey both her irreligious father and her religious ideals. In the second book, Elsie’s father embraces Christianity, and the next twenty-six books discuss Elsie’s marriage, family, widowhood, and grandchildren in excessive detail. (All twenty-eight are available free online for the devoted masochist or those in need of a sleep aid.) When put before this backdrop, Katy is marvellously vibrant and vividly realistic. Katy is active and poorly-behaved, and while her heart is in the right place, she makes mistakes, fights with her siblings, and loses things. Personality-wise, she is far better classed with modern heroines than with her contemporaries.
No one can suggest, though, that What Katy Did is a modern novel. It is very much a product of its times, during which the highest virtues for women were kindness, good manners, and selflessness. Katy’s injury leads her to a better understanding of her loved ones and accelerates her maturation far beyond her years (at the time of the injury she is twelve; by the end of the book when she has regained the ability to walk she is just past sixteen.) The book, like the culture that surrounded it, is rooted in a Protestant Christianity that flavoured nearly every aspect of public discourse. But, after the Second World War, the book became much less popular despite the occasional reprint, and now it is relegated to the dustier shelves of libraries and niche readers. “Modern girls won’t like this after reading about Hermione Granger and Katniss Everdeen,” or so the thinking goes. Because after all, nothing much happens in What Katy Did. It is set against no backdrop of a major war or conflict, it involves no love triangles or major interpersonal conflict, and it has no climactic scene. It is not the type of engaging historical fiction that will entrance young readers today.
But, of course, it is not historical fiction at all. “Historical fiction” very generally denotes works written in the modern era about the past, and is frequently maligned as a place for children’s novels and bodice-ripping romance novels. Regular old fiction, though, can sometimes be historical in that it is, you know, from history—a Jane Austen novel is an actual piece of history sitting right on the bookshelf. But books aimed at young people are often codified differently. Anne of Green Gables and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are often described, however erroneously, as historical fiction for young people, although at the time they were published they were quite contemporary. Would someone describe Moby Dick as historical fiction? Probably not, though it is fiction that takes place in history. Similarly, then, should we lump What Katy Did into the pile of historical fiction, and hold it to different standards as a result?
Perhaps it would be better to read the books for what they can teach us about the standards of the time. Reading Gone with the Wind may not tell the reader much factual information about Atlanta during the Civil War, but it can certainly describe the longing by some Southerners in the 1930s for a romanticized version of the past. Similarly, to read What Katy Did is to read a story about a girl from a time before feminism, with wildly different social standards for women. If it were written today, Katy would be a plucky girl at the centre of madcap misadventures in the hospital before walking, and then running to become the same zany girl she was before, only healthy. Today’s novels for young people tend to focus on relationships with other people, rather than personal growth, mirroring a demonstrable change in what young people value.
There are those who would argue that books like What Katy Did and its even more obscure cousins like The Pillars of the House by Charlotte Yonge and Daisy’s Dilemmas by “Mrs. Hart” (Elizabeth Hart) should be consigned to the trash heap of history and that young people cannot, or will not, appreciate them. But the real joy in reading What Katy Did or indeed any fiction from history (distinct from historical fiction!) is to use it as a primary source—an item originating from the time period in question—from which readers can explore the mid-Victorian period in Midwestern America.
But should these novels only be restricted to readers of a certain age? What Katy Did could be an excellent piece to include in a history class with a focus on social norms. Discussing the ideal of the “angel of the house” can be a difficult abstract concept for modern teenagers to grasp, since it is a societal construct at odds with modern ideals of femininity. It is also strongly marked for class, race, and religion, which is fascinating in the way it is frequently unnoted and unremarked-on in period novels. The way we understand our favourite childhood books usually changes over time, so that one can go from understanding the novel like a storybook (error, redemption, happy ending), to frustration (when Katy does not seek any other goal besides to love and be loved in return, and to enjoy keeping house and her family), to reading the novel as a period piece (understanding that Katy’s life occurs in a more restrictive world does not mean that her life is less worthy or enjoyable.)
To go so far and say that period novels for children can be harmful may be overstating things. Can reading novels like What Katy Did overcome a lifetime of experience in the modern world, and teach regressive social norms? I doubt it. Reading Pride and Prejudice or Little Women means that one is reading many similar societal ideals, but as classics they do not come with the same stigma that “popular literature” of the period does. But reading fifty pulp novels from the turn of the century gives the reader a sense of what the public likes in escapist fiction, which is usually rooted in a cultural experience or the zeitgeist of the period. And some classics are derided as “period trash” and studied as literature at the same time.
Should we look at these novels as a chance to experience a different era? Classics are wonderful and an important part of the educational experience. But there is something beautiful in losing oneself in a novel for no other reason than it is an entertaining story and not to bother about examining the different types of metaphor and simile for a term paper; to read a novel and realize that you are experiencing the story in exactly the same way as a child would have a hundred or more years before.
Tags: books, lindsey palka, susan coolidge, the gentleman scholar sponsorship series, what katy did
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This is great! And funny as hell (I’ll look into those sleep aid books on insomnia nights).
I think the part about revisiting childhood books as we grow up is really interesting. The one that stuck out in my mind was A Ring Of Endless Light, which can shift around drastically depending on how much of a moody teenager you are feeling like when you read it.
Generalized thank you to the Gentleman Scholar who sponsored this, he will likely be spared in the coming revolution.
I would understand if you decided otherwise.
ALSO I totally understand that this was a different time and that this was definitely progressive for that time, but the whole “girl only turns good and worthy when she is PHYSICALLY STOPPED” still weirds me out, yo.
ah I didn’t see this before I posted, but same-same idea!
Yours is stated better than mine! I’m glad I’m not alone in this thinking.
I read What Katy Did over and over and over again, but the beginning was always the best part. She tramps through the forest and drinks fairy cordial and has adventures! She turns into such a bore, at the end.
I also think a really interesting article could be written about disability and morality and femininity in What Katy Did. Her cousin, permanently disabled, is ‘good,’ while Katy is a bit of a wild child running through the forest and swinging forbidden swings. It takes a literal breaking of Katy’s body to put her on the path to moral goodness. As if her existence in an able body somehow allowed her to be too masculine/active and she has to be disabled to properly inhabit her appropriate feminine role.
See also: Beth from Little Women, maybe?
and Mary from the Little House books!
It’s been a bit since I’ve read it, but isn’t Melanie (in Gone With The Wind) bedridden for a while? Obviously she’s obnoxiously angelic even before then, but it would fit in with the whole quiet suffering thing. I may be remembering incorrectly.
She is! Melanie is delicate to begin with, and has a terribly difficult birth and almost dies, and then is carted (literally, in a cart) to Tara through the burning of Atlanta, through the woods, and then takes a zillion years to recover because there’s barely any food, etc. etc. And then later in the book after the doctor cautions her to avoid sex ever again because another pregnancy will kill her (which Scarlett knows and obliquely takes advantage of when hitting on Ashley), she (SPOILER ALERT) gets pregnant again and dies. Oh, Mellie.
I did remember something from Gone With The Wind! And at some point in this process she grabs a sword and attempts to kill herself a damn Yankee, right? (That’s the Mellie part I remember best.)
She does! While she is doing her endless recuperation, a Yankee soldier comes to the house with only Scarlett and Melanie the sick girls and the babies, and he implies that he is going to rape Scarlett and rob them all, and Scarlett shoots him with the pistol, and Melanie appears from her sickbed, dragging a sword, and ready to kill him, and Scarlett is just boggled. And then Melanie straight-up lies to the other girls, who are freaked the fuck out, that Scarlett accidentally shot off the gun, and then she cleans up the bloodstains off the floor and suggests they rifle through his pockets before Scarlett buries him.
A notable moment of clear thinking and ruthlessness from Melanie. You go girl, sometimes. Sometimes you are the worst.
Yes! Beth wasn’t subject to the same sort of authorial moralizing, though. She was the perfect, unattainable symbol of flawless femininity – so unattainable that she was to good to live.
She struck me as more of a criticism of that perfect, passive goodness – that no one could live long and remain that good, as the other March girls found whenever they tried to live up to her example.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me. She didn’t have any bad qualities to improve, and she was perfect, and then she was gone. (She couldn’t have survived, though, as a character–like you said, nobody is that perfectly good.)
Ooh, there’s actually some interesting work about the way pain disciplines unruly female bodies–I can’t recall the scholarship now, but another book that comes to mind is Louisa May Alcott’s JACK AND JILL: the wild girl has a sledding accident and has to spend a year in bed.
A completely amazing adult novel along the same lines (with a critique) is Elizabeth Stoddard’s 1862 book THE MORGESONS.
I haven’t rad Jack and Jill, but am intrigued because my favorite Alcott book is Eight Cousins which sounds like sort of the opposite scenario – a girl is too weak/frail and not adventurous enough & is forced to get out and explore the world in order to become hale & hearty & thus a whole person (though, of course, her exploration of the world also included lessons in domesticity & she is explicitly told that every woman must know how to sew a buttonhole.)
Eight Cousins sounds kind of like a genderswapped Secret Garden, almost?
Yes! It is a weird shift. I think my answer would be something along the lines of: Alcott is writing toward a specific helpmeet model of femininity, and most of her novels are about educating the protagonist into the right mode. Too wild? You’re going to have a crippling accident. Too docile? Your wacky uncle is going to make you eat porridge and wear pants.
This is also feels like part of the narrative structure for Pollyanna and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. And then as mentioned, this is all the opposite treatment of the boy in Secret Garden – he has to become more active in order to be healed.
This may be a job for JSTOR – I’m definitely intrigued by the pattern.
Yeah, I thought of Jack and Jill too. Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Daisy Chain and Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians also include spinal injuries (and I know I’m forgetting at least one other). It’s been a while since I studied them, but you’re right about pain being a way to discipline the female body.
Also, it never made sense to me as a child that Katy couldn’t leave her room once she had a wheelchair – I mean, she could at least visit the other rooms on the same floor right, even if no one wanted to carry her and the chair downstairs? – although as an adult it all makes a lot more sense to me on a thematic level.
Replying to an old thread, but if anyone is browsing past here and is looking for such scholarship, Lois Keith’s ‘Take up thy bed and walk: death, disability and cure in classic fiction for girls’ is the book for you. It covers ‘What Katy Did’ and ‘Little Women’, among others. It’s excellent scholarship but also very readable so rewards the more casual reader.
I was browsing! Thanks for the recommendation – I’ll definitely check it out.
Yeah, it sounds like the entire 2nd 2/3 of that book is one giant metaphysical corset/foot binding/choose your form of torture.
I loved What Katy Did, and also and perhaps even more What Katy Did at School. Yes, it is a book of it’s time in many ways, but Katy was a reader and an imaginitive thinker and the family values education and taking care of each other. I remember it more about accepting the practicalities and limitiations of growing up (admittedly not a modern American theme for children in general–but I would argue a valuable one), but maybe i should read it again.
I much preferred the other two as well – What Katy Did next is probably my favourite.
So how far back do authors have to write before it becomes “historical” fiction? When LMM wrote Anne, she was writing about the past. Only 20-odd years past, but still past.
Also, y’all should know that there is a What Katy Did movie with Alison Pill as Katy and Megan Follows as Helen. YouTube will give you more details.
I definitely don’t think that reading What Katy Did is going to teach our young women regressive social norms about female behaviour. I read it very many times, and I am slovenly, unmarried and fairly irredeemable in my selfishness. So that’s good.
Did anyone else read the “Mostly Mary” books growing up? They were intensely Catholic (written by a nun, if memory serves), and all about this little girl named Mary (of course).
Mary was the model, self-sacrificing, holy little Catholic girl, and her friend Wilhemina was something of a tomboy. All of their escapades seemed to end with poor Wilhemina being dejected because she couldn’t manage to be as sweet and holy as Mary, which was frustrating because Wilhemina was all kinds of funny, and kind, and exciting! And more than once, she got them out of scrapes because she actually kept her head under pressure, while Mary could only ring her hands and say Hail Marys.
I feel the same way about Daddy-Long-Legs. It was one of the few books that I read over and over again as a sixth grader, and looking back on it now…so many levels of uncomfortable.
Also, apparently they made an anime out of it??
Well, they had a movie out of it with Leslie Caron + Fred Astaire. Loved the dancing.
Daddy-Long-Legs does have many levels of uncomfortable, but wow is the sequel so much more problematic with it’s discussions of eugenics and feeblemindedness. Which is a shame, because I really like the main character
I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on, which included my grandparents’ bookshelves. There were some seriously strange-to-me novels – Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gene Stratton Porter, even Zane Grey – that actually served to wake me up to the way that gender, race and class are constructed. After all there’s nothing like a trip to an alien culture to illustrate for you how arbitrary many of your own basic assumptions are.
Thanks, Gentleman Scholar!
I loved these books as a kid – I don’t know how we had them. I think they were my mom’s? My favourite was always What Katy Did at School, where she and Clover go away for a year to boarding school. The sense of them being Of The Time is still very present, but the characters and ‘scrapes’ they get into are so fun. I recently got them all on Kindle for .99 each and still enjoyed the reread.
What Katy Did At School is so much fun. Their Christmas Boxes are the best Christmas presents in literature, I think.
omg yes. Something about the language in those books is absolutely delectable. When they make the flower chain things! Gorgeous.
You are welcome.
Gene Stratton Porter! I loved “Girl of the Limberlost,” which had been handed down to me. Only recently read “Freckles,” which preceded it, finding it online through the Gutenberg Project. I liked “Limberlost” as the heroine saw through her crazypants mother and was able to cobble together a support network of good friends, which led to her starting a business to pay for her schooling. She had her eyes on the prize, but it was an important subtext that she didn’t let go of her sweet feminine side.
Highly recommend Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner (1894) Contemporary not historical as above & a morality tale. Most beloved character Judy who is clever & naughty gets killed by a tree falling on her while rescuing her baby brother. You won’t behave let’s make an angel out of you! Older teen sister notably gets sick from tightening her corset too much to attract men (under influence of a bold school friend) gets told off for becoming fashionable & boy next door is there when she realises error of her ways.
This gives me a burning need to talk about Secret Garden and A Little Princess, because those two books have some real weirdness around money/class/goodness/poverty/health/gender etc. etc. (I could talk about Becky the Maid ALL DAY).
A Little Princess was one of my absolute favourites but I was always totally bored by the “all girls are princess” first half, so I only ever reread it from the point where Sara moves into the attic with Becky (who was so much more interesting than all the other girls combined). The chapter where Sara comes home and finds the first meal left in her room is so good I feel warm and cosy and well fed just thinking about it.
Look at you all published! (I say, like some kind of great-aunt for whom you will always be, at least a little bit, 14.)
I’ve actually seen What Katy Did discussed before as an example of moralizing disability, that it is something which will be healed if you just are good enough. It was interesting to see you analyze it from another angle.
Did anyone else have An Old-Fashioned Girl, also by Louisa May Alcott? Complete morality tale schlock, with sweet virtuous country mouse Polly teaching her city cousin (?) Fanny to be less materialistic and more modest, but I love love loved it as a child, and, actually, still love it as an adult.
This is so weird because the first time I encountered What Katy Did was as an adult, because there’s a musician named Katy Carr (I think after the book) whose schtick, at least on the first album, was sort of a “druggie thirty-something heroine of a cautionary book gone wrong but also gone protagonist.” It’s awesome.
The most fascinating thing about the book, and about Alcott’s “Jack and Jill” and “Little Women”s Beth, and other books of the era is the approach to disability. That disabled people, especially women, owe it to the others around them to act a certain way and be good and sweet and light and model feminine Christian virtues. It echoes into our current concept of how disabled people, especially people designated female, should act… they should be kind and grateful and patient and stoic and do what Good Works they can and ~~INSPIRE~~ people.
And stay out of sight. Let people come to YOU for inspiration in sweetness and patience, but for God’s sake, don’t go outside, don’t let the general public SEE your disabled self, and also don’t get MARRIED.
Cousin Helen had a fiance who continued to want to marry her after her paralysing accident — but she, heroically, refused because she wasn’t a good enough wife for him NOW.
I don’t have a lot of retrospective fondness for What Katy Did.