You would think that after The Secret Garden, another Burnett book about a while child from India who is sent to England for some vague form of education would not be my jam. But I have a secret: the 1995 Alfonso Cuarón-directed A Little Princess is an extreme problematic fave of mine. I mean, there is literally a magic Indian man with a monkey in this story, but as a kid it represented everything I thought my life should involve–pretty dresses, a righteous comeuppance for an authority figure who thinks she’s better than a beloved little girl, and a vague connection to India in the background. In general, I was far more delighted by this book.
The little princess is Sara Crewe, whose father, a British Officer in India, drops her off at an English boarding school where she is the richest and most fawned-over student. In real life, she would probably be a total spoiled brat. But, at least sometimes, Sarah checks her privilege. “Things happen to people by accident,” she says. “A lot of nice accidents have happened to me…Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered?” That’s pretty amazing! More children should understand so deeply that life is chaos and it’s all meaningless and any second now everything could be taken away from you.
The way everyone interacts in this book is profoundly strange, probably because things are strange in a world where this wealthy and pampered child has no flaws. For example, during a French lesson, Miss Minchin, the harpy of a school marm, asks Sara if she has ever learned French. Sara says no, so Miss Minchin puts her in French class and makes a whole thing about this child not knowing French. However, it comes out that Sara is actually fluent in French because her mother was French, she just never took formal lessons. Which, okay Sara, you know what she means.
Have you learned French?
No.
Okay then you need to learn French.
But what I meant is that I haven’t learned it, I LIVE IT EVERY DAY. I PRACTICALLY BREATHE FRENCH.
Then why didn’t you say that?
You asked if I learned it, not if I osmosised it.
If I were Miss Minchin I’d hate this kid too.
(Sara isn’t actually perfect. In one section, she fantasizes about her life with “her servants and her slaves. It was like a sort of dream.” Eeeesh.)
Unlike in The Secret Garden, something actually happens to our protagonist. Her father, back in India, invests in some diamond mines (????) with an old friend of his, only to lose his fortune and also get some brain fever and die. Sara is left penniless and orphaned, and Miss Minchin is furious at all the money and time she has spent on her, so she sends her to live in the attic and be a maid to the school and basically makes her life miserable.
The point of the book is that Sara discovers that, even when she has nothing and no one is kind to her, she is a good-tempered person. It’s not her money that made her good, it’s her soul. Except it goes about it in a pretty backwards way. Sara’s big skill is having a big imagination, and she acts out a lot of stories and “pretends” she is a lot of different things, which helps when you’re stuck in a freezing attic. And she decides to pretend she is a princess. But not for the fantasy of wealth and privilege–for the goodness of it.
The book often equates richness and royalty with morality, which anyone alive on earth knows is not how it goes. In one low moment, Sara is inspired by Marie Antoinette “when she was in prison and her throne was gone and she had only a black gown on…she was a great deal more like a queen then than when she was so gay and everything was so grand.” Yes, that Marie Antoinette, she of “let them eat cake” and “build me a weird farm thing to play in while France burns” and Versailles in general. “She was stronger than they were, even when they cut her head off,” says Sara.
Later, Sara says “if I’m a princess–when they were poor and driven from their thrones–they always shared–with the populace–if they met one poorer and hungrier than themselves. They always shared.” I mean, [citation needed], Sara.
Sara does a lot of kind things in the name of being a princess. She buys hot buns with a sixpence she finds on the street and gives most of them to another beggar girl, even though she is starving. She minds her manners and speaks kindly to people. But there’s this underlying suggestion that she is doing it both because she thinks it’s how royalty acts, and because she was already of a higher class.
The plot eventually brings us in contact with a large, wealthy family across the street from the school, and a wealthy new neighbor nextdoor, both of which become charmed by Sara because of her aristocratic demeanor. They call her the “little-girl-who-was-not-a-beggar” because she didn’t look or speak or act like a beggar, and the little boy in the family even gives her a sixpence specifically because of the way she acts. How odd, to reward a poor person for not acting the way you believe other poor people to act! And for thinking that, because she acts educated, she is more deserving of kindness.
(This whole theme got me thinking about Coming to America, one of the most perfect films ever filmed, but with every subsequent viewing I realize everything people like about Prince Akeem is because he is rich. Lisa is taken with him because he’s educated, well spoken, generous and polite, and he is those things because he has been raised in a palace. Of course, the idea is that other princes could have been assholes and Akeem would be a kind, thoughtful and generous person even if he were broke, and that since rich people can, they should take care of the poor. But maybe if he were actually raised as a goat herder he would be a dick like everyone else! And Daryl is a jerk.)
Anyway, it turns out the man who moved nextdoor is Captain Crewe’s best friend and diamond mine partner, who did not actually lose the fortune, and has been searching everywhere for Sara so he can give her her half of the diamond fortune. He’s also had an Indian “Lascar” with a monkey who’s been sneaking into Sara’s room and leaving her presents, which nobody seems to have a problem with. Eventually it’s revealed that Sara has been nextdoor the whole time, and she goes to live as a rich person again, and brings Becky (the other maid who lived in the attic) with her as her personal maid where she is presumably treated much better. And Miss Minchin is all mad. And Sara then goes to a bakery and tells the baker that if any hungry girls are around, to give them food and send Sara the bill. It’s all very nice, but somehow I don’t think that’s how most princesses would act.
I genuinely enjoy ALP for nostalgic childhood reasons, but honestly you could hand it to someone and say “do you want a child size distillation of Victorian ideas about class and wealth? Here you go” and it would probably be the perfect explanation.
Yeah I love this book because childhood, but the best Becky gets is to be a fancier servant, so I think Sara’s theory of accidents needs a little more fine-turning tbpf.
YUP. Also, good book for discussions with children about colonialism.
Eh, Little Lord Fauntleroy is probably just as good and has a nice bit of the (English) Victorian disdain for crass, vulgar Americans thrown in for good measure.
ALP is infinitely better than Secret Garden (even if both the protagonists are little shits in their own ways). It’s such a deeply problematic book, but I loved it as a child (and the 1995 movie) and so I can’t not enjoy it.
Nooooo but the Secret Garden! I read it to my 3rd grade class my first year teaching and they were absolutely transfixed. It was the fastest way to get them to be silent. I would make them tea and scones every couple of weeks and spread out blankets and read a chapter or two and the only sounds I’d hear for 30 minutes would be my own voice and the sounds of meditative chewing. The Secret Garden has narcotics in it somehow.
That’s really sweet! I am totally picturing a perfect intersection of tea time and nap time. It’s making me a tiny bit jealous.
My second grade teacher read the entire thing aloud to us, and everyone loved it. One of my favorite memories of elementary school! <3
(No tea and scones, though! That sounds amazing).
Tea and scones! Third-grade me would have LIVED for that.
That is so wonderful! I bet your students loved you.
(One of my very southern teachers read it to us, and her Yorkshire accents were something else.)
Calling Sara Crewe a “little shit” is so very wrong that I don’t even know what to make of it.
Has she earned that title because she’s nice all the time and it’s easier to read something dark into that than accept it as a viable standard of behavior? Or because she’s a thoughtful, intelligent child who has some unfortunate point-of-view limitations typical of her time period & culture?
I love both books, but I used to own a paperback of The Secret Garden and reread it every year in the spring. I loved that she was a spoiled little shit at first.
I started reading the Secret Garden in third grade as a reading exercise (back when I was still a bad reader and was still getting in trouble for not reading enough instead of reading too much…sigh). Our teacher asked us our feelings about the books, and I distinctly remember saying I liked the Secret Garden because the main character was angry and intense and upset and I related to that. And she wrote it down!!! She did that for everyone, but I remember being scared I would get in trouble for saying that. I was too nervous to finish the book after that, to be honest.
Ooh ooh ooh! My favorite indie game developer has this title in development right now!
http://www.hanakogames.com/allp.shtml
I’m going to shamelessly plug it here because I got to pre-read one story line. I quite enjoyed it even though I had never read the book and don’t remember the movie.
…why did they make Miss Minchin hot? I’m a little concerned.
Everyone is hot in yuri.
….i thought Miss Minchin in the 1995 ALP was really attractive. Did everybody else not?
It’s yuri? that’s great!
So, I’ve never read A Little Princess but i’ve watched the Cuaron movie dozens of times so it’s quite a shock to read that Sara’s dad actually died and they didn’t have a heartrending moment where Liam Cunningham yells Sara so perfectly after she ripped out my heart with her pleadings.
I’m not completely distraught about this revelation at all. No, definitely not questioning my life.
Yeah, I went from thinking about the class lessons kids learn from both the book and the movie to uncomplicated upset because my favorite part is that her daddy isn’t dead after all.
NOTHING BAD IS EVER PERMANENT.
PARENTS DON’T DIE.
PARENTS NEVER DIE.
Last year when I graduated from grad school my mom started talking about her retirement and what she wanted for her final home and I nearly ran away with my fingers plugged into my ears screaming.
*lalalalala can’t hear adultness lalalalal*
God, my dad has been diagnosed with this 1 in 50,000,000 god-awful, so-fast-acting-that-doctors-usually-only-find-out-you-had-it-after-it-kills-you-but-he-got-lucky kidney thing, and now he’s on at-home dialysis (every night) and needs a transplant and I’m staring down the fact that if he doesn’t get one he’ll probably be dead within three or four years. Fuck. Sorry to unload on everyone.
I’m sorry that you are going through this. *all the long distance support from toastfriends*
I’m so sorry. That sucks ass.
Thank you. I didn’t really mean to just dump like that but apparently dying parents is now a trigger for me.
I’m so sorry. I hope that luck continues to be on his side and he’ll get the kidney he needs.
I’m really sorry you are going through that – I hope he gets a transplant soon. Some of my mum’s patients have lived 15+ years on home dialysis though.
A couple years ago my dad called me up because he was scheduling some heart surgery and wanted to let me know he and mom wanted me to be the primary executor of their will or some legal thing because I was the most established of all my siblings.
I got through the phone call very calmly like A Real Adult, and then promptly burst into tears as soon as we hung up.
(He’s fine! Heart’s working great!)
I saw the Shirley Temple version when I was very small. Sara’s dad lives in that one, too (he’s had amnesia the whole time! She finds him in a hospital all bandaged up!) I was NOT happy when I read the book a year later.
Ohhhhhhhhhh ye gods I just got a little misty-eyed thinking about their reunion, little sobbing Shirley Temple ohhhhhhhh
And the fact that she’s rescued from Miss Minchin’s cop brother by QUEEN VICTORIA HERSELF. That movie was kind of bananas, in retrospect.
That sounds amazing/ridiculous.
OMG, I had completely forgottwn about that! Bananas is exactly the right word…. shit, another viewing is *definitely* called for.
SAME. A THOUSAND TIMES SAME.
I was siting in a very fancy, very official place when I read that and I was all “I can’t start crying here. There are guards with guns and that will look bad. Plus I’d have to go through security to get to the bathroom.”
I agree that the movie (I haven’t read the book) is VERY problematic, but damn, that scene. I start bawling before it even happens because I know it’s coming.
I know! I’m not excusing the horrible racism and classism of the film but goddamn did that little girl actor crush it.
Papa, PLEASE! Remember India, Papa?! Please, Papa!
I just choked up at my desk. I mean it. I got that weird burn in my sinuses that signals tears and some weird chills.
God I’m tired.
Omg. That movie is STILL my go-to when I need a proper cry. Sara curled up in the chalk circle in the attic saying, “Papa?” Good lord.
Yeah, I think the ALP book/movie disconnect is when I first realized as a kid that the bar for “happily ever after” in children’s fiction used to be a LOT lower
Yuuuuuuup, ALP was the first movie that ever made me cry – I start getting sniffley when she first recognizes him in the drawin room and by the time she’s being hauled off to the workhouse, I’m full-on sobbing. I watched it like a year ago and STILL cried – especially because her dad is played by Liam Cunningham aka Ser Davos on GoT, who is my favorite.
Also, fun fact, the actress who played Sara is bonkers rich – her family owns Hyatt hotels, TransUnion Credit Bureau, and Royal Caribbean Cruise lines.
I’m a couple years younger than her, and lived outside of Chicago (she’s part of the Pritzker family) and I feel like it was a thing like for people (local child actors? rumors passed from New Trier High School district to my slightly less fancy but also basically ridiculous suburban high school?) to say at any reference to the movie that they totally, completely knew from a friend she was a horrible spoiled brat. (Like, I know literally nothing about her, except that she sued her father when she was 19 for misappropriating her trusts; it was just this thing people were very insistent on telling you they totally knew.)
My father worked in a fish market on Long Island in the 70s and he met all sorts of famous people (Gene Wilder was his obvious favorite), and he said that one of Henry Ford’s granddaughters (maybe it was a great-grand) was an AWFUL person – horribly spoiled, rude, etc. I never meet heiresses, just trust fund babies, but I think my father was probably right about Ms Ford.
That is crazy!
And I’ve been following Liam Cunningham since ALP. I love him so much and I’m so happy he’s Ser Davos, who is one of the best characters in the books and show.
Holy shit, that scene gets me every time! I watched it with my students one time and they were totally weirded out that I was crying. The same thing happens every time I watch Bolt with my class at the end of the year. Aaanyway, in my memory Becky basically got to be Sara’s sister and they had nearly matching outfits at the end. Right? I prefer that ending.
THANK YOU for reminding me why I had this lingering feeling of distrust and dislike towards this book.
Holy Dumplings that was Liam Cunningham.
He looks different with the beard.
Another quibble about ALP: how long were those girls at school?? I mean, Sara shows up when she’s six, and leaves when she’s 12, and it’s the same group of girls who were always there. No one leaves. No one joins. Lavinia must have been 18 by the time the book ended. And Lottie must have been 10 or 11, and still acting like she was four.
(Although, I did read and reread ALP over and over as a child, primarily because Sara was so compelling as a voracious reader — she wants books, but can’t get them! — and the descriptions of dresses, food, and luxuries are so sumptuous. Perfect for a cold night.)
Yes! I spent a long time trying to make the timelines work– “Maybe this is the kind of boarding school where you just dump kids for however long it takes for them to grow up”–but it still doesn’t explain the fact that NONE of the characters grow or age in any way, except Sara, sort of.
Why isn’t Lavinia out doing the London season, launching character assassinations in ballrooms and parlours?? Why is she still at Miss Minchin’s??
I would read that fic so hard.
I think she is seven at the top, & Lavinia is twelve, so five years…. It does seem not to be quite a school, yes? more like a boarding house for young females with an educational element. Like, your unwanted daughter can live here and spend time in the parlor schoolroom, a place is only available if a child is retrieved by her formerly indifferent family. Lavinias family are probably terrified to bring her home.
That’s a parlor boarder. Old maid aunts in training. They could stay there forever. The more marriageable daughters were taken home and sent to parties.
Or governesses. They might be governesses, perhaps for one of their marriageable cousins.
Girls’ boarding schools weren’t really schools until very late, though, were they? I think c. 12 young ladies living together in a large house and occasionally doing some lessons pretty much was a school until very late in the 19th c when girls’ boarding schools started to model themselves after the public schools.
I always got the impression that a couple of the girls were there because their parents didn’t want them at home/didn’t really know what to do with them. Like Lottie’s dad appeared to be recently widowed, Ermengarde’s parents didn’t really seem to think much of her, and Lavinia’s parents were probably the same way.
Yeah, didn’t they make a big deal about four year-old Lottie being the school baby, and say that she wasn’t really supposed to be there yet, but her dad didn’t know what to do with her?
The thing about A Little Princess is that there are two versions. The earlier one, Sara Crewe: or, What Happened At Miss Minchin’s, is much shorter and, IIRC, appears to take place over a much shorter time period.
I am actually reading ALP to my 9-year-old right now and we’re right on the verge of the birthday party at which everything comes crashing down, so can answer with some degree of specificity! Sara is 7 when she arrives, the terrible birthday is her 11th, and she describes The Last Doll as being something even the very oldest girls, who are nearly 15, will be interested in even though they’ll pretend they aren’t. Assuming Lavinia is one of those oldest, she’s 3-4 years older than Sara, must have been 10-11 when Sara arrived, and is 14-15ish but no older on Sara’s 11th birthday. Lottie was 4 at the beginning, can’t be older than 8 by Sara’s 11th birthday, and can’t be older than 9 by the very end. The whole thing takes place over the course of about 4 1/2 years (I don’t think it’s more than 6 months between Captain Crewe’s death and Sara’s discovery and rescue).
15’s a pretty reasonable age to still be in a young ladies’ seminary; Lavinia certainly wouldn’t have had more than another year or 18 months left, but at 15 or even 16 there’s no reason she wouldn’t still have been there. And I completely agree with everyone who said she’s such a horrid little shit that her parents are probably in no hurry to bring her back home.
Yeah, arrgh. A Little Princess has always given me uncomfortable feelings for all the reasons you cite, but on the other hand I kind of feel like I have to cut it a tiny bit of slack because for its time it was a bit more progressive than a lot of other children’s literature. I does have that “privilege is basically just an accident of your birth, and doesn’t have anything to do with inherent goodness” theme.
But then it shits all over its own theme by having Sarah prance around fantasizing about how all royalty is good, so… ugh.
Marie Antoinette has been unfairly maligned by history. For the record, she never said “Let them eat cake” and she did more than anybody else in the royal family did to try to hear and respond to the demands and needs of the populace. She was set up by her own family and thrust into a world of high-intensity politics for which she was woefully unprepared, but her essential goodness (speaking of privilege and goodness not being related, and privilege being an accident of birth) made her try to help the people even though she really didn’t have the skills or support to do anything effective. She has borne the brunt of history’s wrath, and seldom has any smear campaign been as long-lasting or as undeserved as the one that fell on her.
There’s a great two-part episode about her on the History Chicks podcast. Totally worth checking out. One of these days I’ll get around to writing a novel about her. She lived a grimly fascinating, depressingly doomed life.
I tend to agree on MA, because she’s been the poster child for brainless spoiled royalty for 200 years when in reality she was a young teen basically sold to another country and deliberately kept under informed and isolated from other Austrians, and while certainly she was the most visible symbol of a monarchy rotten with corruption and spending, she had very little to do with the underlying causes of the issues at hand. The smear campaign in the contemporary media about her was vile, truly, but had a ton to do with international issues rather than her just being a spoiled teen royal.
Right. And her older sister Maria Josepha would have been able to function fairly well in that crazy environment, having been raised to deal with it. But then… smallpox. MA was never supposed to marry King Louis; she was an afterthought, and her lack of aptitude and/or training for the role made her the perfect dupe for all the political forces at play. 🙁
The more I think about this, the more I want to write this book. I’m going to have to look at my schedule for the next year and see where I can work it in.
You write that book, and I will surely read it.
When I read the Fraser book, one of the saddest things to me was how terrible her handwriting was. She was so undereducated she could barely write her own name legibly. She tried, but she was set up for failure from the get go.
I am ALL HERE for Marie Antoinette defenses!
Where is the hate of Jacques Necker, y’all?
+1000 Thank you for sparing me the brain cells coming up with a Marie Antoinette thing because I don’t have them, it’s been raining for like four days and I’m tired and my MA rant was going to be so much less coherent than that lovely paragraph.
A teenager forced to become a political figure and used as both a scapegoat for the (justifiable) wrath of the Republicans AND the desperately-propped-up embodiment of fading aristocratic privilege is not my idea of a villain really?
Wait is Katniss a Marie Antoinette figure
Who’s going to write that essay.
Thank you for the defense of Marie Antoinette! I can’t believe that after everything people still think she said the cake thing and is still number one scapegoat. No one ever mentions her husband who actually squandered the country’s treasury away on the American Revolution. No one ever mentions the fact that french queens had little to no power and were mostly breeding stock. All the corrupt men and courtiers and advisors with actual power are forgotten – we’ll just blame Antonia forever.
That someone who was a teenage bride sold to a country that always hated her is somehow still the pariah they made her is absurd.
a country that always hated her
Oooh, this just reminded me of the Necklace Affair from when she was traveling from Austria to Paris through Strasbourg and if I remember correctly, she was already being set up for scandal then – and hadn’t even had the marriage ceremony or anything yet!
Oh yeah. The French people and courtiers hated Austrians with a passion. She was always going to be unpopular no matter what she did or said. She was known as the “L’Autrichienne” (ie the Austrian bitch).
That she and Louis didn’t have sex for the first 7 years of their marriage only made the rumours and gossip worse.
Sorry I have a lot of feelings about this.
french queens had little to no power and were mostly breeding stock
Right? FFS, the Royal Mistresses could wind up being more respected and influential than the Queen.
Wait, so like, are you guys saying that a female person is held to blame disproportionate to her actual power in the situation, using vilifications that feed into negative tropes about women? Whaaaaat?
And they made her leave her PUPPY BEHIND
I’m not terribly happy when I’m on the same side as Edmund Burke, and yet here I am, stanning for Marie Antoinette.
Edmund Burke had a lot of dumb things to say. But occasionally also some not-dumb things!
Confession: I really loved the Sophia Coppola film because it was basically, “she’s a teenager with no parents around and no real responsibilities, aka a middle-class undergraduate.”
that description actually makes me kind of want to see that now??
It’s a fun movie if you don’t take it too seriously. They were able to actually film in Versailles! And the costumes! If scenery and costume porn are your thing you will enjoy it. (I did.)
SAME. Man, some folks were so mad at that movie but I loved it. Freaking teenagers. And spoiled, coddled, isolated teenagers at that. Plus the clothes and wigs and sweets and mmmmmmm it was the best.
Same here too! It really made me understand their teenagers-at-court culture better. Because if you have unlimited wealth and nobody to tell you no, why not just party with your friends like it’s 1799?
My favorite scene is just the quick tiny snippet with her daughter and the little lambs, so sweet. If I was rich, I would love to have a little hamlet with lambs and bees too, where I just got to cuddle the cuties and somebody else did all the hard work (and raked all the poop away so I could sit in the grass).
I never knew this, wow!
The “good” princess who is kind and loving and Above It All, no matter what her circumstances, is a trope that goes back to (surprise!) Victorian times. You can still see it — anyone else see that Selena Gomez princess film? It has nothing to do with historical figures, though it is rooted in the classicism of the time, which, let’s be honest, we haven’t escaped. Our entire welfare system is based on the concept that you need to prove yourself worthy to get any scrap of aid, and if you were really worthy, you’d just work harder and work/educate yourself out of your situation, now wouldn’t you? If you were inherently worthy, it would show, and the world would treat you differently! Easy peasy!
Anyway, if you feel like doing important internet research, Sara is Princess Classic and Spoiled Sweet. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Prince… http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Spoile…
Oh my goodness, did you just reference The Princess Protection Program or was Selena Gomez in a second princess movie that I have somehow never heard of?
Do you have a particular biography you’d recommend? I’ve always meant to read more about her.
Antonia Fraser’s is excellent.
Thank you!
Loving all y’all for the collective MA knowledge!!
This book and the PBS miniseries they made from it was my absolute favorite thing as a child. Of course reading it now I can see the issues and how my fave was problematic, but when I was young and really really poor this was a beautiful escape for me. It helped me cope with really crappy cirumstances.
I worship at the shrine of the PBS version! It was essential to my childhood. Also, unlike all other versions of ALP, it DIDN’T go for the happy magical ending where Sara reunites with her father, but preserved the book/Mr. Carrisford ending instead. That was a very important lesson for me: my child-self could never articulate the relief I felt from it, but it taught me that even when you’ve suffered great loss and are without your family, there is a very special but very real magic in finding your family of choice, unrelated by blood but there for you just the same.
ITA – the endings of all the movie versions except the PBS always seemed like such a cheat – the worst, most devastating loss imaginable happens to you, you suffer and endure and cling by the skin of your teeth to your sense of self, and your reward for all that suffering is just that it was all a huge mistake and the universe just hit a giant reset button? Screw that. I always found so much more to hold onto in the original Sara, who survives the worst loss in the world, and finds her way to happiness again — but a different happiness than before. Her old world, her old self, are gone forever; it’s a stubborn solid fact that nothing will ever undo that, but also a stubborn solid fact that her changed self can find and build a new world. Things getting better doesn’t mean all the bad things un-happen and your life goes right back to where it was before. That’s not just bullshit, it’s dangerous bullshit.
I remember rereading both this and the Secret Garden shortly after college and honestly wondering if they were some kind of stealth class criticism, with the social flattening of the garden and the Minchins. But I think that was wishful reading on my part.
Okay I love ALP and also I love this a lot and it’s totally spot on. BUT I have a nerd correction: The little boy doesn’t give Sara a sixpence because she doesn’t act like a beggar. He gives her the sixpence because he thinks she *is* a beggar, and then her gracious and kind response makes the kids go, “Wait, she’s way too classy to be a beggar.” Maybe even more problematic!
You have the right of it, and now I understand this scene to be tied into the idea of “genteel poverty” – which is certainly classist! But yeah, the fact that accent and manners were (and hell, still are) code-markers for which level of society you were born into underlies this interchange.
*Lower class* women of course, could beg or work as vendors and servants, but these avenues were denied to women of the upper classes, particularly if they wanted to maintain whatever class-privileges they had in absence of wealth. Mostly this would’ve meant being able to visit and preserve your friends and family connections and be recognized in public. So the older siblings are sensitive enough to social rank and class markers to understand Sara as someone who somehow has fallen into genteel poverty, who they would expect to be offended by offers of charity – and maybe sophisticated enough to get that an upper class female who *accepted* charity or worse requested same, was doing so at the risk of losing her class-status.
Colleen McCollough’s “The Ladies of Missalonghi”, although set in AUS and not the UK, is one of my favorite explorations of this.
The genteel poverty thing confused me for such a long time, like in Dickensian stories where a rich person offers to help a poor person they’ve befriended, and the poor one says irritably “I don’t want your charity,” when they clearly do need help. I always thought “Why don’t you just accept it? Your family’s starving and your roof is leaking and you’re going to get sick and die here!”
Or the rich people talking together say “She’s very proud, she’ll never accept charity.” So they have to make an elaborate scheme to make the old lady think she is providing a necessary service that they can pay her for.
Dickens was actually deeply suspicious of traditional Victorian ideas of charity in part because he came to believe the government had a responsibility to provide for its citizens in need, and that the social safety net should not be left to the whims and moral codes of individuals or evangelical institutions. (See Jane Smiley’s book on Dickens!)
I dunno if you’ve read Christine de Pizan, but she wrote a book of advice to women of all classes–but mostly royalty–in the 1400’s.
One of the things she does discuss is what to do you if you’re widowed or otherwise fall into poverty, and what occupations are “proper” for a woman with a title. (Apparently, laundress is okay.)
Ooooooh, that book sounds interesting. I do love Colleen McCollough…or at least I love her Masters of Rome series; I’ve honestly never been able to get into any of her Australian novels. But I’ll give this one a go, maybe it’ll break the record.
Oof. “The Ladies of Missalonghi” is plagiarized from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “The Blue Castle”. But yes, it does explore class-privileges.
Yes, the connections between class, wealth, & morality in the book are very strange and interesting!
I read a book about the history of politeness at one point that explained that the aristocratic ideal in manners was and is self-control — not restraint or repression, as people often put it, but self-mastery. A stoic ideal. Politeness was a form of self-mastery. And, crucially, part of this ideology was that it is impossible by definition to be polite to someone of a higher rank than you, and maybe even of your own rank, because you are constrained to be so out of self-interest. The only true, disinterested politeness is politeness to your social inferior. So, being polite to a servant *is* the sign of politeness of a true gentleman. Likewise, politeness to women is a key sign of aristocratic manners because all women, ipso facto, are a man’s social inferiors (except maybe a queen or a duchess) and so being polite to them is its own disinterested end.
It’s a messed-up ideology in many, many (many) ways, but I do like the emphasis on everybody learning self-mastery and making disinterested actions a central goal of manners!
Do you remember the name of this book? It is exactly what I need!
It’s still true that rudeness to cashiers, wait staff, custodians, etc, is a sign of a person’s true class.
I can kind of understand the kids being weirded out by “the girl who isn’t a beggar,” and teasing or feeling embarrassed about their brother giving her money.
Maybe like if today a random guy stopped on the street to sit down and tie his shoe, and he set his coffee cup down on the sidewalk, and a rich person walked by and dropped a coin into his cup. And he looks up and says with the plummiest poshest accent you can imagine, “Oh. This is for me? Well, thank you, that’s quite kind.” That would be kind of embarrassing all around.
I may have done something like this. (I’m not sure, but I’m really embarrassed imagining it.)
You’re in good company.
Haha! At least it was a costume and not his normal clothes.
My god, but I’d be furious at someone who ruined my coffee by dropping a quarter in it!
At my old workplace, we would pay for our coffee by the honor system, putting money in a mug next to the machine. One of my coworkers, in her hurry to get coffee, dropped her quarters in the wrong mug. She realized the “plunk!” noise didn’t sound right, and looked over to see that it was actually our supervisor’s coffee, not the money cup. (Don’t leave your coffee unattended!)
That reminds me of the character Elizabeth in Frankenstein. She’s rescued as a beggar orphan child by Frankensteins family, and they adopt her as their ward. They describe her as an aristocrat born into poverty, who deserved to be rescued (you know, unlike all those other poor children, who have no one to blame but themselves???)
Gotta love 19th century class ideals.
I guess that’s also when they studied physiognomy and believed in literal good breeding (because obviously no one from the peasant classes would have an attractive face or elegant bone structure. That could only be someone with noble blood.)
Come to think of it, there are a lot of characters out there who have unknown parentage, but everyone knows that they’re obviously from good stock, some rich person’s offspring from the wrong side of the blanket, because they are attractive/good/intelligent. And if they’re attractive/good/intelligent and definitely not a rich person’s byblow, then it’s absolutely REMARKABLE.
Those other poor children are in their element, where they belong, and of course they’re happier there.
See also: Parkington, Samantha, i.e. the lamest of the American Girl dolls.
Hey now
WAIT, didn’t Samantha have the tea set with tiny cakes? Because… because… tiny cakes, man.
I believe that they were petit fours (and, yes, I am appropriately embarrassed by this pedantry).
When I finally got to eat petit fours I was so disappointed, because they used fondant which isn’t that tasty.
Take that back! In addition to having the best stuff (Molly clearly had the worst of that, at least of my contemporaries), she totally gave that speech against child labor! Her aunt was a suffragette who rode in cars!
And not making women quit their jobs if they had a baby!
And giving her favorite beloved doll (that reminded her of her dead mother) to her child-laborer friend who had no dolls!
And that freaking HOUSE she lived in, which did anyone know actually EXISTS? It’s in Mount Kisco, New York–the town Mount Bedford was based on–and looks exactly like the illustrations, and dammit, I WANT IT. http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/81-W-Main-St-Mo…
OMG!!!!!!!! I had no idea the house was real!!
I only discovered it a few months ago after someone who lives in the town brought it up in a thread on another site. It’s so pretty!
I think it’s pictured in the history section in the back of one of the books. (I loved those history sections and the photos of real things that inspired the story and doll items.)
Those were my favorite parts of the books, but I guess I totally forgot about the house being real.
And then she rescued Nellie and her sisters from the orphanage!
For real though.
ACCURATE.
CORRECT.
I always wanted her the most (never got her) but mostly that was because of her coat and her horse.
I think maybe you’re thinking Felicity? Don’t recall Edwardian Samantha having a horse….
FELICITY. Always my favorite, both because she was the farthest back in time and because she had red hair, like me. (This was long before they actually came out with a Native American doll, who would have been my favorite if she had existed. I was always upset that “American Girls” never included any, you know, actual original Americans.)
Yeah, Felicity was my new favorite within a year after getting Samantha, (that Christmas dress and red cape and riding outfit and bed and everything) but unlike today’s kids, (some of whom apparently get a new “girl of the year” every time they’re released) we pretty much stuck with building the collection of whoever we’d decided on initially. My sister, who had Molly, was wishing she’d chosen Kirsten less than a year in. 🙂
I still, some days, wish I could have Felicity’s blue dress with the lace stomacher in my size.
I remember a little trick-or-treater coming to my door wearing that blue dress, and I was jealous of her as an adult.
In their “Girls of many lands” they had an Alaskan doll (who I still want). But why can’t she be an American Girl too?
Those were after my time, but I still want the Indian one. And also maybe the one from Tudor England….
Oh they were after my time too. I think I was 30 when I discovered them. 😀 And the Indian one is the MOST BEAUTIFUL. (Ooh, maybe Sara Crewe can grow up and go back to India and befriend the Indian young lady and start an orphanage together.)
FOR IT.
I’m willing to fight you on that. Samantha is the best, and so is A Little Princess.
I’m #teamMolly, but might you be so kind as to consider a different adjective?
Also Team Molly all the way. I’m sorry about the bad adjective, you’re totally right, but IntenseDebate won’t let me fix it.
*shakes fist* at IntenseDebate
🙂 at Frumiosa
Oh, man, Samantha. American Girl was obviously so conflicted about her; they really struggled with the tension between “accurate representation of her class and time” and “stories that would resonate with modern girls and make them want to grow up egalitarian and independent”. I wasn’t surprised at all when they retired her. I never liked her much, but I did respect that her stories were at least *trying* to highlight some of the social inequalities of the day, even if they fell short on so many levels.
They brought her back out of retirement a couple of years ago. She was one of the most popular historical dolls they ever had. Granted, despite the encouraging-girls-to-read facade, The Pleasant Company was always about selling a product, and I’d wager that her popularity had a lot to do with the fact that (until Felicity) she had the best clothes, furniture, and accessories.
Really? I’m surprised to hear that, actually, I assumed she was one of the least popular, because of how difficult it is for modern girls to relate to her life. But she *did* have the best stuff, and that means a lot when you’re a kid.
Yeah, the doll sold out three months before the company archived the rest of her stuff. Part of that may have also had to do with how much more the people at The Pleasant Company seemed to prefer her over the others. (I think she was the doll in the logo.) Also, though, she lived in a fairy tale-like mansion, had big bows and pretty dresses and probably looked more the part of classic, fancy doll than any of the others. I imagine she was easier to relate to for modern kids than the pre-industrial revolution characters. I mean, her uncle had a car, and realistically, a substantial portion of the people buying the dolls probably didn’t have a hard time relating to the wealth, either.
I think the whole draw for a lot of the kids who were into it was the historical aspect, though. My sister had Molly, but she didn’t interest me as much because her clothes and furniture and house and life (minus the war stuff, obviously) didn’t look that different from mine. Samantha’s life was recent enough that I knew people who’d lived through the era, but far enough into the past to be exotic. She was my favorite, hands-down, until Felicity.
When I heard that they were selling her again, though, I went and looked at the website and an annoying amount of her new accessories (and the dress she comes in) were predominately pink and less historically accurate, so I’m not sure her current look would have appealed to me, but, man, did I ever covet that birthday table set. I attended an American Girl fashion show as a child and some kid won that as a door prize, and I’m not sure I’ve ever hated a stranger that much. 😀
Speaking for myself, she was hands-down my favorite, primarily because of A Little Princess being my favorite childhood book (and Sara Crewe’s “last doll” that has the wonderful trunk full of fans and opera glasses and slippers and dresses…). Plus the whole notion of a Victorian doll is so common and so popular.
And if kids can relate to fiction characters like Sara Crewe, or Anne of Green Gables, or Little House on the Prairie, of course they can relate to a girl like Samantha. Though I didn’t want to relate to her, I just wanted to bask in her Victorian glory. (Same with Little House on the Prairie. I liked it because it was different from my life, not because I related to it.)
PS, Molly was too modern for me, too much like me (she had GLASSES, for gunny sacks!) and at the time I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting her. Kirsten was like Little House on the Prairie, so she was good. (Those were the only three dolls when I first got interested. Oh I loved those catalogs so much.)
So maybe kids are all different, and some want the ones they can identify with, and others want the ones that are very different? (I also loved reading stories about runaway slaves and Native Americans and different eras of history and different countries. Stories about modern kids like me didn’t interest me very much unless there were dogs or horses.)
Molly was my favorite because of the glasses + brown hair combo! She was the doll that looked the most like me. I think Samantha was my second favorite, due to her stuff.
Thinking about it, I actually think I liked reading about people/stories/etc. that were different than me/mine, when I was a kid. I didn’t really get into reading about people like me until I was a teenager/adult. I think it’s because kids are learning so much still, and want to learn more about the world. I usually never thought about whether a character was like me, when I was a kid. Just physical obvious things like glasses and maybe have the same amount of siblings as me.
In a similar vein, I loved writing stories, and I was always discouraged by the “write what you know” guideline because I wanted to write about Victorians or aliens or detectives or fantasy pegasus girls, and I thought the guideline meant I could only write about 12-year-old modern girl things, which was boring.
(I think their modern dolls and clothes are boring too. Would you rather have a modern soccer uniform for your doll or a lace and taffeta dress with puffed sleeves? I definitely prefer the latter!)
To your question marks about the diamond mine: I’m not sure if because of new technology or new discoveries or the bubble effect or some combination of all of these, but mining investments seem to have been all the rage right around that decade. “Adventure of the Dancing Men”, which leads off with Holmes and Watson talking about South African investment (in context, probably mining again), was published 1903, two years before ALP.
I’d guess it was the Second Boer War (1899-1902) which was fueled in part by the British desire to hold on to the gold & diamond mines.
And Victorian literature is full of exotic diamonds from India set as the eye of a god in some forbidden temple, and stolen with a curse. (Right? I’m sure I’ve seen those sorts of stories in multiple places. At least in “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins.) And lots of famous diamonds like the Koh-i-noor and the Hope Diamond came from India.
I’m drawing a blank, but I feel like “lost money in a diamond mine scam/evil partner” was used at least a few times to set off a rich children/young lady suddenly falling into poverty plotline.
When I was a kid I had no fucking clue what this movie was about, despite seeing it many times. Like there was this girl who was rich, and then she was poor, and then there was this blind guy who was her dad but probably not? IDFK. I still don’t understand what the hell happened in that movie. (Never read the book.)
I realized recently that I had pretty shit comprehension when I was a kid, especially when movies were involved. I guess I just looked at the people and the stuff they had?
I loved the movie so much growing up, and I just read the book for the first time a few years ago. And I ultimately liked the movie better, actually. I liked that it put the emphasis on all girls (even Ms Minchin!) being princesses in their own way. I also like Becky more in the movie, and the fact the she got to live as Sara’s sister rather than her maid in the end.
You guys. Someone wrote a sequel. It’s really good. It’s all ermintrude, and at some point she actually says to Sara – isn’t Becky going to be a princess too? Awkward silence ensues. It’s called Wishing for Tomorrow
I mean, I loved a little princess, but come on, how hard would it have been for Rich Brain Fever Partner to check the address to which all those school fees were being paid?
The fact that Becky’s big rewards is to be, like, a slightly less terrible type of maid was the one thing that even seven-year-old me side-eyed.
The same thing happened in Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom! Except Rose also, like, sort of adopted Phebe which just made it weirder? And there’s this stuff about how Phebe looooves to do special little tasks for Rose like adjusting her footstool even while they also are all “Oh, we educated her to be a great singer GET YOUR POOR ORPHANED PAWS OFF OUR SCION!”
It all seems super uncomfortable.
I know it’s very classist by today’s standards, but I thought Becky being Sara’s maid was a pretty fabulous step up. She’ll get to be with her friend, and eat as much as she wants, and get comfortable clothes and housing, and Sara will of course be a nice boss, and Becky will get to accompany her on all her adventures. That’s pretty fabulous for a little Victorian orphan waif.
(I kind of felt the same way in Emma, where it turns out it was a bad idea for Emma to raise Harriet Smith so much in society that she now dreams of Mr. Elton and even Mr. Knightley instead of the more equal Mr. Martin who she liked in the first place.
But now I get it, that’s just how society was then. People stayed in their allotted spheres.)
And when they’re adults, Becky will be Sara’s lady’s maid, like Anna in Downton Abbey, and meet a nice Mr. Bates of her own.
Or like Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter, or Jeeves and Wooster.
Oh, sure, and, realistically Becky would never have been allowed to be educated with Sara. But I didn’t understand the class politics at the time and just knew that it wasn’t fair.
True, as a child I probably didn’t think it was as nice as it could have been (and also the poorer beggar girl now getting to be the one who worked in the bakery and gave away Sara’s freebies). Probably children in that time would have understood it from their own era’s viewpoint.
Yes! Hilary Mckay! I love that author so much
The Exiles! The Cassons! She is my favourite kid’s writer
I loved this book so much — one of the only books I re-read as a child, apart from Sherlock Holmes. It captured, for me, that particular brand of hatred some adults have for precocious, adult-oriented children. In my recollection, Miss Minchin actually makes it pretty hard for Sara to clarify that she speaks French, what with all her emphasis on not telling “falsehoods”. And the genuine trauma of her father’s death and the subsequent abuse in the boarding school … I still get shivers thinking about Sara and Becky appearing the morning after their final punishment starts, unable to hide the sense of well-being that comes from having been (secretly) well fed. But the “lascar” / magic monkey situation is pretty weird, and the classism is just… well, classic.
Yeah, Miss Minchin’s deal is that she only wants Sara as a “show pupil” then once she impoverished she becomes free labor.
I re-watched the movie version a few years ago for nostalgia feelings, and instead found myself PROFOUNDLY uncomfortable with the way the father-daughter relationship is portrayed in that movie. There’s swearing to never leave each other, and huge amounts of devotion, and all this is set against the backdrop of a love story.
I’m just now remembering the scene where she gropes her father’s face, with the closeups and soft golden lighting and breathy voices. Like, I get her father is her only relative and being left behind at seven is no doubt traumatic, but auuhghghuh
Victorian ideals of childhood and parent-child relationships were pretty f-ed up, tbh.
To be fair, I think part of the problem there is that the films always age her up significantly. In the book, she’s supposed to be barely seven. It’s literally the beginning of her education and why she’s being sent away from India. It’s a little easier to understand the level of hero worship in a child who’s barely out of her formative years than in the preteen they usually portray her as. Films pretty much have to either hire more than one kid to play the part, or shorten the timeline significantly, but the book spans five or six years, at least. She goes from being a small child whose doll is nearly her size to a preteen who is teaching classes. Part of the reason Lavinia scorns her so much is because she’s a good 3-5 years older than Sara, rather than her peer. A lot of that is lost in the film versions because she’s so much older. So maybe you don’t have to be quite as grossed out about the father-daughter thing? I know five and six year-olds who don’t understand (beyond the fact that he’s married to mommy) why they can’t marry their father, and Sara’s not supposed to be much older than them when he leaves her at school.
Also, the timespan thing makes the drama over their parting make more sense. He leaves her when she’s seven, and dies when she’s eleven or twelve, but they didn’t see each other in between those two events. She’s basically a first grader who knows she’s not going to see her only parent again until she’s practically an adult. It’s pretty understandable on her part, at least. As for the father, I think it’s mentioned once or twice that people find his devotion to his daughter excessive, (although I think that has more to do with the fact that he’s a man paying attention to his kid than anything else) but it’s possible he’s mixing up his feelings for her with his feelings for the mother she never new, but, god, I HOPE that wasn’t the author’s intent. But yeah, the 1995 film version used an 11 year-old girl, and something about the inflection she used in their interactions felt seriously off.
So, granted, there are some problems with this book, I think mostly due to the time period in which it was written.
However, I grew up in an abusive home under the thumb of an older female relative who was A LOT like Miss Minchin, and this book had a profound effect on the way I coped with the situation and the abuse, and honestly helped me survive and not turn into a terrible hate-filled person.
As a kid who grew up bullied and with substantial food insecurity, Sara Crewe was a huge comfort and role model for how not to let other people’s shittiness become an excuse for shitty behavior of my own. I mean, minus the classism and colonialsm, which although weeIrish-me didn’t fully grok, I understood as a part of this sort of “Benevolent Monarch” kind of fantasy that didn’t belong in real life. It was an attitude that infused the Oz books as well.
Do Toasties know about Girl ebooks? It’s an online vendor of ebooks written by (collated by & reviewed by) women, and is the source of some excellent stuff I’ve never found elsewhere.
Relevant to interests in this thread are the “Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette” written by Madame Campan, who served her http://girlebooks.com/blog/free-ebooks/memoirs-of…
Also, I never had any idea before that Burnett was better known at the time for her adult books. Girl ebooks has “The Shuttle” which I really liked, and I think shows her ideas about monarchy and class – and certainly about women! – were more complicated than her children’s books presented: http://girlebooks.com/blog/free-ebooks/the-shuttl…
Wow, just realized how deeply I long for a Toast article (or series) on the Oz books.
The Shuttle has some freaky eugenics content though.
I will have to reread with a closer eye to this! There is a lot of classism/social darwinist stuff in her work, which is interesting, as she personally experienced a social mobility not at all reflected in TSG or ALP or The Shuttle. Eugenics came out of social darwinist thought, so it wouldn’t be surprising if it came through.
“More children should understand so deeply that life is chaos and it’s all meaningless and any second now everything could be taken away from you.”
And by children, I think you mean ADULTS, because basically like 2% of adults understand this.
I’m increasingly unable to be part, even as a passive observer, of other social places on the interwebs (ahem, Facebook) because I am consistently bombarded with people unaware of their privilege and how it shapes them as human beings.
I think the fact that Sara is always so good and loving and kind is why I vastly preferred Mary Lennox’s cross, angry, little self.
Same.
I’m actually right there with you. I am forever a fan of Mary Lennox BEFORE she finds the garden.
Misanthropy forever. Misandry in perpetuity.
This.
In the musical soundtrack, the line reading of “Did my mother have any. . .other. . .family?” is literally perfect.
I always loved the way Sara is good and loving and kind and TOTALLY SPOOKS PEOPLE because of it. I remember her as actually a pretty eerie character.
Caveat: I have never watched any movie version, nor have I read the full novel. The only version I have ever read is the novella, “Sara Crewe”, which was later expanded into A Little Princess.
Here’s a link to the novella: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/137/137-h/137-h.ht…
Yeah. I never read The Secret Garden as a child, only as an adult, but when I did I found Mary to be a much more compelling and well-drawn character. (I especially love that she stays kind of prickly and crotchety even after GARDENS and ROBINS and DICKON and COUSINS and etc.)
Apparently there’s a sequel – anyone read it? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6432425-wishi…
Yes. Lavinia starts to become upset by her future as a Victorian Woman, which is great.
I’ve been outlining a version of this story from Miss Minchin’s point of view. Sara is a nice enough child, but constantly living in her own head, rather than following anything going on around her. (“I assume your father would like you to study French…” does not mean discuss why you have a French maid, kiddo.) Miss Minchin’s school is always teetering on the edge of sustainability, and Maria Minchin herself lives in a bare room with no comforts, though she keeps a nice “parlour” to put up a good front for prospective students’ parents. She buys all the expensive things Sara’s father orders, often on credit, as he has always paid up to that point, but gets stiffed the last enormous birthday party bill. Sara is now a pauper and the school is even closer to going under. But Sara is a well-educated pauper, and Maria Minchin thinks she might make a passable schoolteacher, possibly even to inherit the school later, if she’ll just focus on the tasks at hand. Sadly, Sara continues to wander around in dreamland, and worse, is distracting some of the other girls from learning with her constant fantasies. Sara can’t even be relied upon to remember to bring coal up to her own room to keep the place warm! (She is also attracting rats to the house by feeding them.) Eventually it turns out that the new next door neighbor is able to pay off Sara’s debts and take her off Maria’s hands, also relieving her of the care of Becky, a developmentally delayed girl she’d helped off the streets out of charity. After a month or so, the new guardian has a full sense of how unreliable a narrator Sara is. He has a business conversation with Maria Minchin and invests in her school so she can finally get another decent teacher in to help cover classes (as Amelia Minchin is clearly not capable), sponsors several scholarships for more promising but less financially well-off pupils, and starts looking for a psychiatrist for Sara Crewe.
11/10 would read
I am interested (or maybe a little worried?) about how this version would deal with the fact that the elder Miss Minchin beat and starved children. I guess I am wondering mostly about how making a victim of child abuse into an “unreliable narrator” goes.
Don’t get me wrong, a rebooted, “female entrepreneur in a time that is very unkind to working class women” story sounds great to me.
That said, another part of ALP’s narrative I personally found compelling is that here was this person who is abusive, but is able to front b/c “children be lyin, amirite”, and FINALLY there is a form of reckoning for her, which is something that sadly, does not happen often enough IRL, when it comes to people who abuse kids. Altogether too often, abusers reframe kids as Lyin McLyersons Wot Had It Comin Anyway, so I kinda see some danger in an approach that attributes this aspect of Minchin to a fantasy of Sara’s, as a for instance.
(edit for grammar)
Well, I do see your point. I was worried about how to handle the starvation part, myself. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s stretching the point to say Sara is an unreliable narrator, even when she’s wealthy and not being hit or starved.
I do like Sara’s resiliency in the face of bullying (by adults OR children). I have always liked the quote “There’s only one thing stronger than anger, and that’s what makes you hold it in– that’s stronger.” At the same time, this isn’t an entirely healthy point of view.
Maybe it would be better to write it not portraying Maria Minchin as a saint, but acknowledging that she hits and starves Sara and Becky (well, I can think of two instances of each) out of fury, but hates herself for losing her temper. Maybe she even admires that part of Sara, even while she’s pulling her hair out with frustration at trying to get Sara to show up on time to teach kids at morning classes.
Good points. Maybe the starving is part of Sara’s unreliable narrative too. (I remember my parents saying things like “There are children in the world who go to bed hungry!” and at the time, I thought to myself “Well that happens to me all the time when you won’t let me have some crackers before bed. Why are you even mentioning this?”)
Oooh maybe Miss Minchin is even the one who supplies the “Indian” magical things in the attic. “No, Sara, a magical Indian man with a monkey has not been in your room. I put that old rug up there myself, you foolish child. Why have you hung it on the wall? It was meant for your feet when you get out of bed. FINE, I have another blanket in a chest, I’ll bring that up for you later.”
Hmm. The idea that a kid’s perspective of being abused and neglected = unreliable and a fantasist, and indeed that the child is the real victimiser of the adult, is not sitting very well with me.
This is brilliant. I would love this.
ALP is my favorite children’s book, but your version does sound intriguing. Now that I’m an adult myself, it’s strange and fascinating to look at children’s stories again and think about it from the adults’ perspective.
I read both books MANY times when I was small, and yet with each passing year, ALP and The Secret Garden have become deeply and confusingly entangled in my grownup brain.
Am I the only one this happens to? I can never quite remember offhand which plot points and people go where (the fact they were both made into musicals…does not help).
I recently watched the Shirley Temple version and I cannot believe more professors don’t explain imperialism by popping that in for their classes.
Becky and Sara are gay
Someone call Mallory Ortberg, I think we’ve got a Femslash Friday in the making.
Listen, even as a general Book Purist, I’ve got to say — this was one of the few times I was glad they changed a significance part of the book for the movie. (Spoiler warning, I guess? If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie??)
I WAS SO GLAD they kept Sarah’s father alive in the movie!!! I don’t know if it is just young Liam Cunningham (aka the Onion Knight from GoT, by the way!) or my Daddy Issues or what — but that scene where he SUDDENLY FINALLY REMEMBERS and then bursts out into the storm and yells “SARAH!!!!” and she runs to him and lifts her up and they’re all crying in the rain and then Becky comes over and he hugs Becky too even though he doesn’t know her at all??
BRB sobbing just thinking about it…
WAIT, PAPA CREWE IS ALSO DAVOS? I have not seen the ALP movie for at least a decade so never connected the two, and my mind is now blown.
Ugh, not me. Little child literary purist, I did not like ANYTHING changed from book versions to movie versions. Even if it was happier, it was WRONG.
Yeah, same here– literary purist, despite my alternate retelling above. When I do this kind of POV retelling (and I do it fairly frequently, if only as a mental exercise) one of the rules I set for myself is that I have to account for everything that was in the original. For example, Sara says she was denied food, as we’ve discussed above. I need to take that into account, whether Maria Minchin really told her “no meals for you tomorrow” or that was just Sara dramatizing in her head after Maria caught the girls eating junk food in a cold attic (because Sara forgot to bring up coal again). I can get away with claiming that Maria has a bare-bones bedroom, because that’s never shown in the story. 😉
But sorry, the dad is dead. The only way I could accept him appearing alive is if it happens AFTER the narrative in the book, i.e. Sara goes to live with neighbor Tom Carrington (I think that was his name) and then at some later point, Ralph Crewe wanders, feverish, into a hill station in India and gets repatriated to England, to the surprise of all, and it turns out he was mistakenly reported dead because he had wandered off in a fever and saying he was dead was easier for his caretakers than trying to explain that they hadn’t been watching him all that closely.
Or possibly he faked his death for tax reasons or some other fraudulent purpose, in which case Tom Carrington might even be in on it, but that’s a different book. In THAT book, Tom C. probably has very nefarious plans in mind for Sara, and Maria Minchin may need to save the girl from a Fate Worse than Death. (Or maybe Becky could save her. Those who want to ship Becky and Sara would probably like that option.)
Nice. I approve this message. This is also a great thing about books that’s harder in movies, where you can consider there might be an unreliable narrator. But in a movie, if they SHOW us a scene happening, it’s harder to doubt that.
PS – Kids are very unreliable narrators.
Yep! (I was trying to find a way to add in “and also I really love it when characters in children’s books die” here without sounding like an actual serial killer, but… guess there’s no getting around that one.)
Yep. Sara’s papa dies and is dead, it never gets better, she WILL find happiness again but the PAIN WILL NEVER GO AWAY. I have literally refused to watch any version where this is not the case from childhood on and see no reason to change now.
OH THIS EXPLAINS MY FONDNESS FOR THE ONION KNIGHT BUT ONLY AS PLAYED BY LIAM CUNNINGHAM
I adore me some Onion Knight as Captain Crewe, but I have to take sides against the too-tidy happy ending of the movie. Amnesia and unexpected survival during the Great War? Nope. Too melodramatic for kid-me, too much like childish wish-fulfillment, an easy out. I always preferred the (in my childhood opinion) more complicated but satisfying Mr. Carrisford ending. A Sara who can find joy again after losing the one person she loved is the one I want to read about. It’s tragic, but more real to me. And in the book he died of a fever, not in a war, so there was no heroism to his loss. It just happened. And Sara lost everything. And then she found something else, and was able to be happy again. It was a very important message for me, even before I’d ever experienced real loss, myself, that there could still be unexpected magic around the corner, and that you could continue finding people who loved you/new family members throughout your life.
ALSO, reading this just sent me down a Jaya Catches Up k-hole and somehow I missed her reading Alanna by Tamora Pierce as well as the excellent Roll of Thunder/To Kill A Mockingbird article and also the original A Secret Garden article and now I can’t stop.
YES PAPA CREWE IS ALSO DAVOS GO REWATCH ALL OF IT NOW
I never thought to interpret Sara’s veneration of princesses as an endorsement of actual, real-life aristocracy– probably because, as a kid growing up in the U.S. in the 90s, I put princesses into the same mental category as fairies and dragons. “Princess” generally meant “a beautiful girl who has cool adventures and wears the prettiest clothes and maybe has magic powers” — basically, Disney movies trained me to assume “princess” essentially means “heroine.”
And the qualities that Sara ascribes to princesses– that they are kind, dignified, and generous even in the direst of circumstances– make me think that her definition of “princess” is also based on a sort of mythic feminine ideal, rather than the actions of any actual princesses. So I took Sara’s thoughts on princessery as general guidelines for how to be a good heroine in your own life story: it’s easy to be kind to everybody when everybody is kind to you, but what’s important is that you treat people with respect and kindness even when everything is shit and all you want to do is scream and punch things.
I wouldn’t say ALP equates wealth/royalty with morality, I’d say it accurately reflects the (still problematic) way that little girls see “princesses” as the best thing ever, and what Sara is doing is taking the traditional princess role model and deciding that the “being nice to everybody” part (which, yes, is not actually a feature of real princesses but it’s definitely part of the fantasy) is more important than the “having all the fancy stuff” part.
100% this
That would be a fair assessment if it were recent, but the book was written 110 years ago and Sara refers to Marie Antoinette at one point as an example, so I think it’s pretty safe to assume she’s talking about actual monarchs.
Whether or not the author meant it that way, I can say that much like the commenter above, that was also how I mentally interpreted it, because I also grew up with Barbie and Disney and 80’s-era cartoons.
The point is that Sara wouldn’t have, so as far as literary analysis goes, Jaya’s interpretation of “where is Sara’s idea coming from” makes more sense. She was constantly referencing characters in books and mythology, and I think even accused (probably by Lavinia) of turning heaven into a fairy tale at one point. The kid was definitely fanciful and even romanticized the idea of being a prisoner at the Bastille. So, it’s less likely that her idea that princesses are “nice to everybody,” which wouldn’t have been the standard assumption at the time–certainly not in regard to someone like Marie Antoinette–probably comes more from the fact that she’s a weird and wonderful kid, not because she’s been given any reason to do so by society.
In that era, everything from furnishing to apparel to the decision to decorate a tree and send cards out at Christmas was based on mimicking royal behavior. People wanted to be just the actual monarchs, not fairy tale versions.
In any case, I’m not all that convinced that her vision of herself as a princess was merely a kind and decent person. She specifically tells her friends that she’s no longer a princess when they go to visit her in the attic, plays more at being a prisoner than a princess once she’s impoverished, and makes a big deal about “behaving like a princess” rather than actually being one. I think she even says something along the lines of “so I really AM a princess after all,” when she discovers that she is rich. The kid discovers that she’s actually a decent person, money or no, but she’s still a product of her upbringing and a society that would have based merit more on one’s wealth and status than behavior.
Also, the kid was a voracious reader and never cites children’s books as her inspiration. Her father even brings it up when he leaves her at the school, I think. Something about preferring to read large, adult books to children’s stories. Most of the books she references are non-fiction. Even as a kid, (who also grew up with Barbie and Disney and cartoons) I always got the impression that the behaving like a princess thing was because that’s how she was raised. She’s repeatedly appalled by Lavinia’s ill manners, but charmed by Becky’s shortcomings precisely because she would have been raised to believe that Lavinia was better than that, but Becky wasn’t. I mean, her father owned PEOPLE back in India, and before getting her bearings and thanking the kid for the money he gives her, she gets pretty angry at being mistaken for a beggar. She’s no Mary Lennox, but she’s not exactly an egalitarian despite the “it’s just a lucky accident that Becky and I aren’t in each other’s shoes” mindset. The whole princess thing always seemed a lot more steeped in her social position and upbringing than in the fairy tale aspect to me, even as a grade-schooler. Then again, I was pretty into history from a young age, so I can see how someone who’s more likely to associate princesses with Disney might interpret it differently.
Princesses were magical heroines of fairy stories before Disney (and Sara does talk about, and make up, fairy stories a lot), and had considerable currency as such in Victorian popular culture. Disney capitalised on and inflated the concept of “princess” as aspirational heroine, but they didn’t invent it. And even if Sara literally never read or heard a children’s book, which I doubt (given her reveries on being specifically a “*fairy* princess” at times), her author and her audience certainly had. I think even as a child I read Sara as looking to history to *validate* her existing ideas of what it was to be a princess, not actually getting the ideas from history in the first place.
And I don’t think it’s ever said that her father owned people? And I don’t think he could have? I mean, not that “his” diamond mines in India aren’t a massive, violent, colonialist problem or that he wasn’t involved in major exploitation, but A Little Princess was published 1905. Slavery throughout the empire, including India, had been illegal for decades.
She also doesn’t say “so I really am a princess after all.” MISS MINCHIN says “so you are going to be a princess after all”, and she says “I *tried* not to be anything else.”
My VHS of this movie came with a reproduction of Sara’s locket, and I loved it so much. so much.
MY FRIEND HAD THIS LOCKET AND I COVETED IT LIKE NOTHING ELSE.
She didn’t even CARE about it, and I planned to STEAL it but I chickened out because I knew Sara would disapprove.
I still have mine- I was a book purist and never loved the movie as much as a book, so it I stuck it in my childhood jewelry box and never wore it. I’d be happy to mail it to you, if that isn’t too weird of an offer.
I was obsessed with the locket too! I liked the movie as a kid but didn’t actually read the book until I was in college. I bought the paperback from the children’s section of Barnes & Noble because it came with a (very cheap, already tarnished) locket 🙂
I think my sister ended up getting to keep her locket, but I’d already been allowed to keep the Secret Garden key which I thought was so much cooler at the time, even though it was obviously far too small to open any garden gate. 🙂
So in an odd little “Portraits of Authors” books when I was a kid, I learned that Frances Hodgson Burnett was a) basically a writing machine from about age 16 or so, like, enough to buy her near-Dickensian poverty-stricken family a new house and support everyone until death or marriage and b) was what I saw later described as “complusively” philanthropic, especially after Lionel’s death. So while I totally get what is wrong about the sort of fetishizing of “princess” I do kind of get Burnett’s feeling something about the rush of being rich meaning you can give people crazy stuff (dolls who have a grand piano and a shower! And. . .their own servants, okay) that is sort of all knotted up?
idk, this isn’t much of a point, but I do think there was kind of a personal dynamic of being the rescuer/lavish gift giver that is a little bit more warped than just “royals GOOD! peasants BAD!”
I think it’s a rule that all ALP covers have to feature an awesome outfit. My version had a blue dress (this one? https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a3/68/b… and I think I spent most of second grade/third grade daydreaming about wearing it.
I think Sara wanted to be an Audrey Hepburn type of princess, one who is always gracious and good, a champion of the less fortunate. (If there are stories of Audrey Hepburn being horrible, I have never heard them and do not want to hear them now so don’t tell me.) It sounds like both Sara and Hodgson had similar experiences of poverty (as did Audrey Hepburn, come to think of it, starving during the war), so it makes sense that they would want to be compulsively philanthropic if they could.
Good news, I know quite a bit about Audrey’s life and she was on the level as far as I can determine.
Wonderful! I’m glad to hear it, and not at all surprised.
So in an odd little “Portraits of Authors” books when I was a kid, I learned that Frances Hodgson Burnett was a) basically a writing machine from about age 16 or so, like, enough to buy her near-Dickensian poverty-stricken family a new house and support everyone until death or marriage and b) was what I saw later described as “complusively” philanthropic, especially after Lionel’s death. So while I totally get what is wrong about the sort of fetishizing of “princess” I do kind of get Burnett’s feeling something about the rush of being rich meaning you can give people crazy stuff (dolls who have a grand piano and a shower! And. . .their own servants, okay) that is sort of all knotted up?
eta: I also have to say that was the cover I had (or at least the art; the typography is different) and I was obsessed with Sara’s dress.
I bought this dress pattern 100% because it looks like that dress. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/ab/6b/6… Someday I will actually make it!
Did anyone else have the experience of watching A LITTLE PRINCESS as an adult and going “huh. This movie has a lot of really great shots. Man, this children’s film is has such great cinematography!” and then getting to the end credits and being like “HOLY SHIT! NO WONDER! ALFONSO CUARON DIRECTED IT!” ? That was me. You know once I got over crying until I threw up over Sara’s father not recognizing her.
Yeah it’s definitely a problematic fave childhood movie (and book for me). Part of why I remember it with fondness is that THE PRINCESS DIARIES books frequently had quotes in the beginning of it that basically equated being a princess with being kind, brave and good and Mia Thermopolis tried her best (even if she did fail from time to time) to live up to that.
i had a similar experience! I rewatched it some years ago and I definitely remember thinking “um wow, this is as pretty as I remember it and that’s surprising? Like this has some really beautiful shots that i did not expect from a children’s film?”
The movie was tainted for me by the early scene of Sara in India swimming amidst drowned Buddha heads and then plopping her wet bottom on top of one of them. It was so disrespectful in a culture where women don’t even touch a monk with their hands — it took me out of the movie._
OK so like, to be fair to Marie Antoinette, the French literally MADE HER INTO WHAT SHE WAS, and then literally crucified her for it, and the weird little farm was the only place where she could get away from that bullshit. Like, innocent, free dairymaid was essentially her princess fantasy.
“If I were a milkmaid, I wouldn’t have to marry a disinterested prince in a country where everyone hates me and blames me for problems that are completely out of my control. Man, that would be so cool.”
So the 1995 film was the one I always loved, and I knew the Shirley Temple version as well, but I recently discovered this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz6R-hKfL9s and it’s the closest to the book I’ve seen, in case anyone’s interested.
Also, did anyone ever read the 90s Princess Trilogy based on the book? http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5679863-molly-… I remember loving them at the time and would be very curious as to how they hold up now, but they seem to have disappeared into the ether….
I was obsessed with that adaptation — I watched it over and over! And I was so snobbish about the Cuaron film when it came out because it wasn’t as faithful. Thus setting the template for my response to many future BBC adaptions and Hollywood movies (*cough*Pride and Prejudice*cough*).
I would have LOVED it if I’d known it existed at the time. I really liked the Cuaron film because it was so freaking pretty, but so many aspects of it (her father not actually dying, Sara herself not fitting the physical description at all, and countless other, smaller details) were frustrating to me. I’m still waiting for someone to take the time to do a version with a child who’s actually odd-looking and too thin, with black hair, and young enough.
Another thing that always bothered me was that every version, save maybe the Shirley Temple one which is just weird, honestly, and not at all true to the book, started her out several years older than in the book. I’d prefer to see a version that had two or three, similar-looking sisters portraying her at different points over starting her out as a 10-12 year-old. I think it loses something when she’s aged up, even though I understand why they do it. It’s easier to see why Miss Minchin has a such a hard time with a child who has more poise, wealth, and status, and is better-read and multi-lingual when you realize that the kid she’s dealing with in the beginning is a freaking seven year-old. I don’t exactly RELATE to a spiteful, materialistic child abuser, but it’s easier to understand her initial irritation–as well as Sara’s hero-worship of her father–when you realize how young she’s supposed to be.
ME I DID! Man, I LOVED that trilogy. I had all three as a kid (I think I ordered them through Scholastic, remember book fairs and those thin paper catalogs?) and I LOVED them. I think they kick-started my obsession with heart lockets. For those of you who haven’t read them, they were a 3-part modern AU (1990s) adaptation of ALP. Sara is now Molly, her dad is a famous movie director and he’d always take her on set/location with him and he did die. The boarding school is co-ed and Minchin (also given a different name) makes the work-study kids do manual labor. She’s still horrible, but more …empathy? explanation? is given to her in terms of why she hated Molly. I think the school is an elementary/middle school with a spring dance; a big deal is made of poor Molly not having anything to wear to it. The next-door neighbor turns out to be her dad’s producer; instead of a Magical Man with a Monkey, the mysterious benefactor is actually the producer’s intern or something. Everyone is still somehow okay with an adult man breaking into a young girl’s room to leave her presents. At one point Molly tries to Run Away because she can’t take her horrible existence and she thinks going into foster care would be worse than death, which I side-eyed even as a swallows-everything-she-reads kid. Very weird attitude to have towards the foster system.
Sorry for the word vomit but it’s alllll coming back to me now. I feel like I could tell you the entire story right now, and it’s been decades probably.
Yeah, I definitely got the first one from a Scholastic book fair. I never ended up owning the other two because my dad (we saw him on weekends due to divorced parents) never really knew what to do with me and my sister & would let us spend hours roaming around Media Play, (sort of a Borders/Best Buy hybrid that existed in the 90s for those who don’t know) and I had enough time to read the second and third books IN the store, and ended up going home with books I hadn’t read instead.
I grew up on the Amelia Shankley version and loved it SO much!
yes!!! this is the one I taped off of PBS and watched over and over until the tape wore out.
(I apologize if this posts multiple times — tried to post is an hour or two ago as a guest and it didn’t work. But maybe it is being saved for best deleted comments? I hope not!)
So many thoughts and feelings about this. A Little Princess was my absolute favorite book when I was a child and after an adult re-read five or six years ago I freaked out about all the problematic things outlined above and in comments and have since then been working on a sequel of my own struggling with what I loved about it and where its worst flaws are, and how to reconcile those things (and also my love for Victorian/Edwardian England and my knowledge of how fucked up it was).
I mostly love the book because it resonated really strongly with me as a child. I lost my father at a young age, first to enforced absence and then to death (he was in prison for most of my childhood and then died when I was 10). I was poor but privileged (we were on welfare but white/my mother had a college degree/I had wealthy grandparents) and struggled with what that meant and what to want or not want or ask for or not ask for. I was bookish and precocious and a total goody-two-shoes, and got both praise and censure from adults and other kids for those things in confusing amounts. Sara’s struggle to be good (which she frames as being like a princess, but as at least one other person said, I think that was more a mythic feminine ideal than an actual obsession with royalty) and to hope for the future and try to escape bleak reality through her imagination… all those things really meant a lot to me as a kid.
Of course as an adult I can see all the massive problems with the worldview advanced in the book, and it made me think a lot about what Sara, the character as I always understood her, would do and think when she grew up into an increasingly modernist world. So I’m trying to write about that! It’s so interesting/good for me to get a gut check about how other people view a character and story I’ve spent so much time thinking about… The Toast always knows just what I need.
Oh, man. I had similar feelings–complicated experiences with privilege and poverty… When you write “praise and censure from adults and other kids for those things in confusing amounts” that really hit home for me. Even given my mother’s tireless efforts towards that end, ALP was very protective in my life against a certain sort of assumed superiority that adults sometimes push on precocious kids. Sara is trying to be good from an inner aspiration to goodness, not because it will make her better than everyone else around her.
Honestly I think my favorite thing about this book was the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that the rich man next door and his servant did on Sara’s attic room. There was something so cosy and appealing about the idea of a grim, bare, cold attic transforming itself into this colorful room with a fire burning and food on the table and a comfortable bed.
But I do kind of think, well, what if the diamond mines hadn’t materialized? Like, Sara has this unshakable faith that she really is a princess, that carries her through everything, and in the end she’s right, she is a princess, LITERALLY – which kind of undermines the idea that being a princess is all about how you act, not about how many diamonds your guardian has.
And yet that is the version of “what princess is” that I absorbed and layered over the Disney version, topped off with a healthy dose of Leia, and went on to become the perfectionist feminist I have been from about age nine on. Lots of problems and yet also not as many problems as there *could* have been. Which I know is weak, but it was one of my all-time faves and dammit, I cut it slack for that.
Also, let’s consider that Sara might be one of those undiagnosed Aspie girls who internalized a very strange rubric for what “princess” meant and also took questions like “Did you learn French” too literally without meaning to be a smartass. Because that meant things to me too, favorite, slack, etc, etc.
All of that said, imagine my surprise when I read about Marie Antoinette somewhere other than this book for the first time. OOPS
Yes indeed, she takes the lesson “princess = kindness to all” rather than “princess = wealth for me.”
I took Sara’s princess fixation like Don Quixote’s knight fixation – a way to cope with a world where you are faced with deprivation and degradation even when you do everything right. (No comment on how much this resonated with an eight year old me.)
I think the author was going for a realistic fantasy, rather than trying to promote monarchy.
I took Sara’s princess fixation like Don Quixote’s knight fixation – a way to cope with a world where you are faced with deprivation and degradation even when you do everything right. (No comment on how much this resonated with an eight year old me.)
Tangentially related, but does anybody else remember Merlin’s Keep, by Madeleine Brent? (aka Peter O’Donnell, who wrote the “Modesty Blaise” stories.)
It’s like a combination of “Secret Garden” and “Little Princess,” for adults– there’s this little girl, see? And she’s the daughter of the Maharani of an Indian state and a British Army officer, so she really is a princess! And her parents get assassinated, and her father’s Sergeant-Major flees with her into the Himalayas, where she’s brought up in poverty, but she can magically talk to animals! And then the Sergeant dies, and she’s sent back to an orphanage in England, but she gets adopted by a rich family and educated back up to her proper station (the servants-by-birth housemaids are not in the least resentful about that), and she can still talk to animals! And she rescues her adopted sister from an evil magician, and cures her lover of magically-induced blindness, and gets her snooty bigoted neighbors and the entire British army to treat her as a princess while never forgetting how to talk Cockney when necessary, and she can still talk to animals!
It’s amazing, that’s all. I haven’t thought of it in years, but somehow Sara Crewe brought it all back.
Yes! Those books were ridiculous but I adored them as a teenager. So very Perils of Pauline, but with such sturdy self-actualized heroines.
Oh yes. I’m a big Peter O’Donnell fan and loved his nine novels as Madeleine Brent. The thing that made them different were the heroines who were, as aqueousmedium says, “sturdy self-actualized” girls. My favorite is the one set in Australia with the white girl abandoned in the Outback and brought up by Aborigines, who saves a white man and is taken in by him. Many adventures later, she turns out to be (not an actual princess) a wealthy heiress of British nobility. They were all great fun, set in exotic climes, and had quite a bit of historical veracity to them. I reread them occasionally.
I always wanted a grown-up sequel where Sara doesn’t get out of Miss Minchin’s until she turns 18 and then leaves to be a governess. It also would contain her deciding to be a writer, meeting a wealthy young man who figures out who she is and proposes to her and promises to make her filthy rich again, and her turning him down to live life on her own and return to India. Basically, a combination Jane Eyre, Pygmalion, and Frances Burnett herself.
My grow- up sequel involves her falling in love with an Indian nationalist who rejects her because India is more important to him, and then her going back to India on her own years later. So sort of related? But no governess-ing, which sounds like a key part of the story.
The “little-girl-who-was-not-a-beggar” scene is actually worse than reported.
The little boy wants to give her a sixpence because he thinks she IS a beggar.
She doesn’t want to accept it, because she doesn’t think of herself as a beggar and taking money is therefore demeaning (that’s not said explicitly but it’s clearly in her mind). The rest of the little boy’s family hears her polite speech and therefore agrees that she is NOT a beggar.
However, the little boy insists. He wants to do a good deed by making a poor child happy, because he has only just found out that sad things exist and he wants to fix them. Sara can’t turn him down when he insists, since that would be impolite. So she accepts the sixpence, and then strings it on a necklace as a memento and never spends it. EVEN WHEN SHE IS LITERALLY STARVING. Because spending that money would be accepting charity and demeaning to her class status.
I think the family hears her accent and therefore thinks she’s not a beggar — even though that is not explicitly stated, an accent would be a much more clear class marker than any specific words she says.
That said, I think the more charitable (no pun intended) interpretation of Sara’s actions is that her reaction is less about not wanting to be demeaned and more about inclusion/exclusion from the family. She’s a horribly lonely and isolated child who literally watches this family all the time wishing she could be one of them, and then they finally speak to her but only in a way that totally distances themselves from her (by giving her money, Donald is totally Othering her). I think she keeps the money to feel closer to them in a weird way.
I can sort of see that, I guess.
I have some general issues with works that promote “refusing to take charity” as a virtue, which affects the way I look at this. I see it a lot in stories where the good, virtuous, hard-working poor protagonist refuses to accept help, in contrast with the lazy, greedy, good-for-nothing poor people around them who leech off the system.
This attitude can lead to some dangerous places in the real world when pride drives people to hide their problems and refuse all assistance, even to the point where it kills their families, because that is less shameful than taking charity.
agree
Even in the narrative, it’s a complicated moment for Sara — for one thing, it makes her conscious of how she looks from outside. Until offered money, she doesn’t realise quite visibly neglected and distressed she looks. I think that’s legitimately humiliating without it being *solely* about “oh no, my class status”. But it’s also the first act of kindness she’s experienced in ages, which is explicitly why she keeps it. She also believes that although hungry, she isn’t starving (though she really kind of is), and it’s true that the sixpence wouldn’t make much of a dent in her external problems.
I also don’t think it’s quite true about the condemnation of those who take charity as moochers. Sara herself is, at least according to Miss Minchin, living on Miss Minchin’s inadequate charity. Without this, as Miss Minchin explicitly threatens her more than once, she would herself be out on the streets. The cook also mocks the idea that, living on charity, Sara has any right to enough to eat or free time — a view clearly condemned by the narrative. Later Sara buys several buns and gives nearly all of them to the beggar. The baker inside thinks “wait, maybe I should not actually let kids starve outside my shop?” and, inspired by Sara’s example, takes the girl in and gives her a home. That’s clearly charity but the girl’s dignity is shown to be enhanced, not demeaned, once she’s not so hungry she literally can’t think about anything else.
I’m not denying there are some weird class things going on, or that it isn’t notable that Sara *isn’t* reduced to literal begging. And no one comes along and goes “maybe we should not only feed but also educate this beggar kid, and also Becky, because maybe their opportunities in life shouldn’t look any different from Sara’s” but I think there’s psychological truth in those scenes too.
One scene I remember was the French teacher thinking that Sara spoke French so well it reminded him of ‘his own warm home’, and that led eight-year-old me to conclude France must be near Singapore. But no, it’s right next to England. PEOPLE SWIM FROM FRANCE TO ENGLAND. What a let-down.
(long time reader, second time poster)
toastie, I am adapting this for my old youth theatre company – to hopefully direct next year & have been struggling with the colonialist elements and reading all your comments has been super helpful to clarifying some of my thoughts so THANK YOU. You’re all Princesses (IF YOU WANT TO BE)
Maybe Sara will grow up into a Lady Sybil type of young lady, charitable and using her power and wealth to help the less fortunate, especially orphans. I don’t think she would ever be able to quite support Indian nationalism, so maybe she should fall in love with an Irish nationalist (chauffeur) instead.
I was introduced to ALP through the awesome Disney/PBS Wonderworks adaptation. Hallmark Hall of Fame for Secret Garden.
And Becky stays a maid! http://eveninaustraliakidlit.blogspot.com/2013/12…