"Powders and Pills to Help Cure Children's Bad Habits": The Medicalization of Misbehavior in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle

The four Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books by Betty MacDonald (1908-1958), while extraordinarily successful as works of humor for children, also interrogate two issues: they provide illuminating insights into attitudes toward childrearing that evolved throughout the twentieth century, and they also address questions about the appropriate responses to children's misbehavior that still dominate childrearing debates today. Although MacDonald's satirical intentions in the series cannot be denied, in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle she creates a character she seems to view positively as a childrearing role model. An examination of attitudes toward childrearing revealed in MacDonald's memoirs indicates how Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle reflects MacDonald's values about childrearing. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's warmth, compassion, and sense of humor are clearly held up to the reader for approbation, particularly in comparison with the failed approaches of the parents in the books and of the other childrearing "experts" they consult about their children's varying forms of misbehavior. But it is also significant, and the focus of this paper, that in these books all children's misbehavior is treated by Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle in nonmoral and medicalized terms. While (benighted) fathers may occasionally pass moral judgment on their children's actions and character and threaten (usually physical) punishments, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle holds the authoritative and ultimately accepted view that children's misbehavior is best understood as a disease. And in two of the books, those that involve magical rather than commonsensical cures, the remedy for this misbehavior is magical medication that has uncanny parallels to today's wide prescription of amphetamine-derivatives such as Ritalin to treat a range of undesirable behaviors in children.

The debut book in the series, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1947), received a somewhat mixed but overall positive critical reaction. Library Journal sniffed that some of the stories "are not exaggerated enough to be funny," claiming that "Opinions will vary about this one" (Turpin 739), but the Kirkus reviewer, with greater prescience, wrote, "I shouldn't be surprised if Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is here to stay" ("Review" 127). Here to stay she is. Although the books have not been critically canonized (e.g., there is no entry for Betty MacDonald in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature), they have remained in print for half a century and are still selling steadily (Toberisky). HarperCollins has recently issued "adaptations" of "The Won't-Pick-Up-Toys-Cure" and "The Won't-Take-a-Bath-Cure" in a picture book format, illustrated by Bruce Whatley. Because of the books' continued popularity, I believe that the attitudes toward childrearing that can be distilled from the books are worth examining more closely, both for the light they shed on shifting trends throughout the century and to help us frame certain ethical questions about how we should approach childrearing today.

The books are certainly hilarious. From the names of the child characters to the wittily stereotyped portraits of the parents, from the preposterous advice offered by neighbors and friends to the exaggerated silliness of the cures offered, the books could be simply dismissed as highly successful attempts at humor. But I believe that there is good reason to think that MacDonald herself took Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle seriously as a role model. The satire in the books, I would argue, is addressed not at Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle but at the hapless and gender-stereotyped families in which she intervenes.

In the intact traditional families depicted in the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, mothers do not work but instead occupy themselves with club meetings of the Earnest Workers and the Driftwood Polishers, Bleachers, and Arrangers; they await the homecoming of their children from school each day with fresh-baked brownies and hot cocoa made from scratch. Fathers commute by train to mysterious and undescribed jobs, briefcase in hand, and complain if their wives call them at the office. This may reflect the culture of the postwar years in which MacDonald was writing, but it does not reflect MacDonald's own childhood experiences or her experiences as the mother of two daughters.

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