Jezebel
NPR's "Morning Edition" ran a segment this morning on what a groundbreaking work of young adult fiction Harriet the Spy was when it debuted in 1964. According to NPR correspondent Neva Grant, heroine Harriet M. Welsch was considered controversial because "Harriet saw too much, said too much. She even had to see a psychiatrist." Some schools banned the book, explains Grant, and some critics hated it, but readers, especially those who felt that they were outside the mainstream, appreciated that Harriet loved herself, disheveled hair and all. (You can get some more Harriet love in last Friday's Fine Lines column). Readers like Kathleen Horning, now a librarian in Wisconsin, liked the fact that Harriet was a tomboy who, unlike many 50s and 60s heroines, didn't have to go through a girlified redemption by the end of the book. In fact, as Grant reports, like Harriet, Horning was a "tomboy who didn't want to reform." Later on, Horning realized she was a lesbian.
"We felt like outsiders," said Horning, but "[Harriet taught us] we could be ourselves and survive." That message was an important one to young readers, and parenting blog Babble points out that Harriet paved the way for "beloved, fiesty girls" like Ramona Quimby, Eloise, Olivia, and Junie B. Jones. (But don't call them "tomboys." Apparently that term has term has been proclaimed sexist by a professor at Sarah Lawrence). The thing is, Babble writer Hannah Tennant-Moore then claims that "There remain few correspondingly gender-bending role models for boys. While it's become much more acceptable for girls to do traditionally masculine activities like play sports and crack smart aleck jokes, it remains largely taboo for young boys to play house, dress up, or quietly play with dolls."
I have to disagree with her. What about all the Roald Dahl heroes? I don't remember Charlie Bucket as a stereotypically wise-cracking main character. He loved his grandparents, wanted to help his mother, and was almost painfully earnest. What about James and his Giant Peach? Can you think of any other "gender bending" male young adult mainstays?
Unapologetically Harriet, The Misfit Spy [NPR]
Gender Roles In Children's Literature
Earlier: The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
Comments
I always thought Ramona predated Harriet. Must go research...
Also, he's not a literary character per se, but I always thought Linus from Peanuts was quite in touch with his feminine side.
Jonah, in The Giver, is very nurturing.
Um, how did I miss that Harriet is a lesbian? Does the book SAY she's a lesbian?
I didn't read books about boys...but I hope Harriet is somewhere burning bright with sister fire.
NPR SCOOP! Harriet the Spy: Fucking Dyke.
Wait...Harriet was a lezebel? How did I let that go sailing over my head? Well, I was nine years old at the time, so I guess things related to sex didn't really enter my brain yet. But, nonetheless I was probably slow on the uptake.
alls i remember is rosie o'donnel inthe movie version
@exelizabeth: Jonas, not Jonah. Woops.
Roald Dahl.... you and Ralph Steadman are cordially invited to the Phonetic household for an evening of Pictionary and Round-Robin storytelling. I'll even supply the booze.
Louis Sachar was pretty good at turning stereotypes around. Weren't there some femmy boys in Wayside School?
Hmmm... .I never liked this book. As I recall she seemed overly rude to "the help." Or maybe I just didn't like my heroines to be so neurotic.
@funnyface: No, Kathleen Horning, the woman who was talking about Harriet is the lesbian. Yeah, I read that wrong at first too!
Roald Dahl is the shit. I did a reading of "The Tummy Beast" for a performance some years back. However, I do think that his characters are not the norm. I also think that male young adult books are a woefully underserved area.
How did they decide Harriet was gay? She was eleven. Maybe they meant "weird-looking and sort of British"?
@funnyface: The way that's written, I got the same thing. I think it's "like Harriet, Horning was a "tomboy who didn't want to reform, and later on, she (Horning) realized she was a lesbian."
The lads in Eight Cousins could fling themselves a fine Highland fling. And Cousin Archie was particularly tender hearted and artistic. He was my favorite.
Le Petit Prince?
@exelizabeth: But that passage says "like Harriet." So that implies that Harriet, too, is a lesbian.
Didn't Avi write non-traditional male characters as well?
@BAngieB: hugging her legs with other women in friendship
Too much brilliance from that skit, I'm going to have to pace myself with my quotes
The Little Prince was gender bending as they come...bellbottom jumpsuits, asymetrical spiky haircut ala Pete Wentz and Ferosha Coutura?
@funnyface: It never said that, because that wasn't the point of the book. But if you ask a bunch of lezebels what their fave young adult book was, most of them say "Harriet The Spy".
I think Tennant-Moore is right. Charlie Bucket's character wasn't really defined by his gender but he wasn't overtly feminine either. It is way more acceptable for women to be masculine than for men to be feminine.
@funnyface: Aww, I misread that at first too. But they're talking about Kathleen Horning, not Harriet.
Unrelated: isn't the point that it's ok for girls to want to be like boys because obv boys are higher status, but not vice-versa because femininity is lower status so boys aren't supposed to identity with it? That's what my women's studies and psych professors in college said, anyway...
Reading this book as a kid, the unlikeable aspects of the character made me really uncomfortable. Probably it was made worse by the fact that my name's Harriet, but I saw things I didn't like about myself in her and it made me sad.
So pretty much I was a weird kid.I think it's an amazing book though.
Anybody here read Free to Be You and Me as a kid? Pretty much every gender convention ever was squashed in that one.
Also, I idolized Harriet as a kid and was super-happy to catch their piece on her on NPR. More kids like Harriet and less Gossip Girls, please.
@chunkymonkey: hugging other women with her legs in friendship
Damnit! Failure on my part
No sillys! The chick that is the librarian in Wisconsin is the lezebel! Re-read it again. It is not well written, but that Kathleen chick is the lesbian. Harriet never came out in the books.
I read Harriet the Spy like 14 years ago, and I still desperately want a dumbwaiter to hide in. I was always too paranoid to write things down like she did, but I wanted to be just like her, nevertheless.
they're not suggesting that Harriet was a lesbian, but that Horning the librarian IS and was inspired by Harriet. In"SPY"red even!
@BAngieB: I'm straight, but damned if I didn't spend a lot of time toting around a notebook and spying on folks because of my love for Harriet. But I loved all the outcast-girl books, like "Matilda" and "The Girl with the Silver Eyes."
@tiramisu: I don't think the point of the book was that she was SUPPOSED to be particularly likeable. Just real, and INTERESTING.
Um? Proof for lesbian allegation? I am totes in favor- just seem to have missed that news blast. I believe they mean that Horning realized she was a lesbian, not that Harriet did. The "like Harriet" business confuses it, but it's clearer in the NPR article.
I guess I didn't really read books about boys much, except Dahl's of course.
I think I read Harriet the Spy about 50 times...so good.
@LizClara: The Little Prince always made me cry. I loved St. Exupery. His book "Night Flight" is poetry.
Encyclopedia Brown got picked on by other boys a lot, I think. But he was smart and solved mysteries, typical boy things.
I love Roald Dahl so effing much!
@LizClara: haha. well, that's a good way of putting it. It's my favorite book ever and now the little prince has a permanent home on my arm.
Neville Longbottom, from Harry Potter: loves plants, is shy and well-meaning. Loves his grandmother.
Calvin, maybe? He prefered his imagination to organized sports, he was picked on at school. Loved his tiger.
How about Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain? (One of my favorite books of all time.) Yes it's billed as an "adventure" novel, and it's a pretty stereotypical bildungsroman, but the main character does nothing if not play house in a giant hickory tree for a year. I loved the descriptions of Sam sewing clothes out of deerhide, cooking frog legs, training his (female) falcon to hunt.
I recently wondered to my mother if there'd been any hint of homoeroticism in this book, but she reminded me that it was written in the 50s and it wouldn't have been appropriate for the professor character, who sleeps in Sam's tree when visiting, to be a woman.
Hm.
The grand problem with people's fretting over the protagonists of children's books as role models is that it kinda wants to normalize them into ideals and strip them of any character whatsoever -- something kids continually defy by liking characters who have STUFF going on, whether anyone else would deem it positive stuff or not. (The real ideal is that the protagonists of children's books might all be different: brave ones, naive ones, scamps, boyish, girlish, smart-aleck, earnest, whatever.) A lot of the boy protagonists I can think of who aren't "boyish" seem to be that way partly because they've been stripped of anything other than being models or vessels or ideals; they're polite and stand there and mostly get instructed, because whoever was writing them declined to give them any character beyond A Boy. (People rarely write A Girl in such a neutral position, because, you know, being A Girl is allegedly a quality that makes you behave certain ways.)
I did just think of one gender reversal though--From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The details are a little fuzzy (ok really fuzzy) but I think in that book the girl spearheads the whole running away and living in the Met thing and drags her wimpy little brother along. Maybe kind of a stretch. But that book rules.
@LizClara: Per the little prince: he's french. What can you expect?
Harriet rocks, lezebel or not.
@hatepaperdoll: aaah Calvin. but he was still a boy, just like, a weird boy who would grow up to listen to indie music and shit. hahaa
I loooooooooooved this book and wanted Harriet's life.
@hatepaperdoll:
and since we know about Dumbledore, Neville is a good choice.
@exelizabeth: the giver is my favorite book of all time. i reread it as an adult at least once a year.
my roommate and i have serious plans to make millions by turning it into a movie, possibly starring the younger fanning as rosemary.
I named my kitten Harriet after HMW. She's twelve now!
As for the boys, I always loved Victor from Lizard Music. Can't really go wrong with a little dude who idolizes Walter Cronkite, and D. Manus Pinkwater is the shizz.
@LuxieP: Yeah, I get that now. But at age 7 it was kind of just a focal point for my self-loathing.
Glad I read it though.
Ya'll. The point is that young lesbians identified with Harriet...and in retrospect it seems that she probably grew up to be one.
If you aren't a lesbian, then you don't get it.
I was so into Harriet the Spy that I kept a little notebook with "observations" about the kids in my 4th grade class. I inevitably got caught and destroyed the evidence before anyone else got to read my thoughts on why Scott ate 2 packs of Gushers at Lunch everyday.
Well, Harriet's creator, Louise Fitzhugh, was a big ol' sapphist, so the inference is not totally out of left field. (Yes, I know, characters are differnet from their authors, etc.) Actually, L.F. collaborated with Sandra Scoppettone a lot at the beginning of S.S's career. I think they wrote Suzuki Beane together, but I could be wrong about that.
Anyone as near to fossil-age as I am remember a YA novel called "Tunes for a Small Harmonica"? There was a lot of gender talk in that one. Certianly the main character, but also her best friend's little brother.