Little Girls without Their Curls: Female Aggression in Victorian Children's Literature

The expression of anger by female writers has become of increasing interest to literary critics. We are now far more aware of the rich implications—cultural, biographical, artistic—that this subject entails, especially for our understanding of nineteenth-century women writers who faced simultaneously new freedoms and new restraints on their creativity. Still, when, in The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar insist on separating the "decorous and ladylike facade" of Jane Austen or Maria Edgeworth from the more overt (and hence somehow more valued) depiction of aggressive impulses by those who " 'fell' into the gothic/Satanic mode,"¹ even the most comprehensive discussion of the subject remains slightly distorted.

The decorous and lady-like women who dominated the field of Victorian children's literature—such as Mrs. Gatty, Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, Jean Ingelow, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and others—were hardly gothic Satanists. As gentlewomen writing for middle-class juveniles, they, even more than an Austen or an Edgeworth, needed to maintain restraint and decorum. Paradoxically, the mode of fantasy also freed the same aggressive impulses that their fictions ostensibly tried to domesticate. Especially after 1865, with the playful anarchy of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland before them as a foil as well as a model, women writers began to portray little girls who were allowed to express hostility without the curbs on female rebelliousness that had been placed earlier, in children's literature as well as in adult fiction.² The fairy-tale realms depicted in Juliana Horatia Ewing's "Amelia and the Dwarfs" (1870), in Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911), and in Burnett's earlier, less well-known, but delightful fantasy, "Behind the White Brick" (1874), thus serve a double purpose. The surreal setting is enlisted, on the one hand, to mute the hostile behavior of girls on the road to socialization and maturity; on the other hand, however, it permits their creators to turn their own satiric energies against the deficiencies or complacencies of a society that frowned on expressions of female anger.

In the ensuing discussion I shall first look at "Amelia and the Dwarfs" and at the Irish folktale "Wee Meg Barnileg and the Fairies," on which Ewing based her story of an Alice-like descent into a claustrophobic underground. I shall then proceed to The Secret Garden and, after briefly noting the treatment of Mary Lennox, return to Burnett's "Behind the White Brick," which responds to Through the Looking-Glass just as Ewing's story had indirectly responded to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Like Jean Ingelow, who countered Alice in Mopsa the Fairy (1869), and Madeleine L'Engle, who still evokes Carroll in A Wrinkle in Time (1962), Ewing and Burnett follow—yet also subvert—their male predecessor by transporting their intemperate heroines into realms of open aggression.

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Ewing's Amelia, repeatedly called "a very observing child,"³ will be humiliated by underground creatures who correspond to her own anarchic unconscious, in a way similar to Carroll's "curious" Alice. As Nina Auerbach has shown, the aggression that Alice meets in Wonderland mirrors her own repressed anarchism, an anarchism suggested by her repeated identification with the predatory cat Dinah, who kills bats and mice and birds;⁴ it is Alice's long-suppressed outburst of anger at her primary female rival, the Queen of Hearts, that finally dissolves her dream and returns her to an unquestioning world of teacups and governesses. But if Carroll relies on mere inference to suggest the aggressive behavior, above ground, of a superficially dutiful Victorian little girl, Ewing devotes the first half of her tale to a careful documentation of Amelia's conduct as an aggressive little monster who deftly tyrannizes and exploits stupidly impotent Victorian adults. Indeed, it is Ewing's ability to identify with the naughty Amelia and, moreover, to make her readers empathize with this "very observing" child that gives the story its initial force. Whereas Carroll remains ambivalent about the girl-child he both worships and wants to humiliate, the author of "Amelia and...