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c h a p t e r e i g h t Because The Secret Garden and novels like it descend from the sentimental novel, they traditionally keep the mother out of the crosshairs of affective discipline . After all, the sentimental novel detailed the empire of the mother, and she guided rather than absorbed disciplinary intimacy. But, as The Secret Garden demonstrates, the mother can be stripped of her body just as can the father, allowing the spirit of motherhood to descend on the girl herself, with all its attendant rights and responsibilities. This trend is first explicit in The Secret Garden, but its origins go back at least as far as Anne of Green Gables, in which Marilla learns to laugh through Anne’s discipline and comes to prize the girlhood she has lamentably disciplined out of Anne. In Eight Cousins, too, the genre is already toying with how to change the symbolic mother when Alec selects from a variety of possible feminine modes of discipline—as represented by the various aunts— in his experiment with Sara. In the next novel in the genre’s history, Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 Pollyanna, the mother becomes the chief object of discipline, and the disciplined, disembodied father takes on a new role, one that dramatically extends the power at the command of the disciplining girl. Pollyanna opens on the titular orphan’s Aunt Polly, who is reluctantly but dutifully preparing her home to receive the only offspring of a marriage Polly tried to prevent. When Pollyanna does arrive, she is desolate in the wake of her beloved father’s death, but she displays a remarkable ability to concentrate on what is good. Indeed, Pollyanna herself frequently remarks on this ability: to the cook, another orphan, a fallen woman, her mother’s former lover, an invalid, a doctor, and just about anyone else who gives her an opportunity. In so doing, she Pollyanna and Anxious Individualism p o l l y a n n a 107 teaches her adoptive town to love her and enjoy their lives despite their personal sorrows. Pollyanna’s infectious joy, she reveals, is her only inheritance from her father, and it is with this power that she is able to discipline the people who, in very short order, come to love her. The central conflict of the novel is built out of the extraordinary resistance one person, Aunt Polly, shows to Pollyanna’s discipline. Polly begins the novel with a thin existence characterized by routine and repression. She ends it smiling , cheerful, with her libido again in bloom as she opens herself to a romance that she had forbidden years before Pollyanna’s arrival. Delaying her rebirth is her edict against Pollyanna’s favored disciplinary technology: the glad game. Pollyanna ’s efforts to heal her aunt repeatedly fail because Polly will not hear of the game in which Pollyanna attempts to find something, no matter how minor, to be glad about in the face of disappointment. To overcome Aunt Polly’s resistance, Porter’s novel expands the explicit scope of disciplinary intimacy to extents rarely seen in the domestic venues of previous orphan girl novels. In order to change her aunt, Pollyanna must first discipline the entire community in which they live. The glad game opens the hearts of the community to the orphan girl, who makes some dramatic changes in even the most trenchant misanthropes, chief among them John Pendleton. Pendleton is a confirmed bachelor and miser, and the other members of the community have grown accustomed to his condescending airs. Pollyanna, however, forces him into conversation, and, when he is incapacitated following an accident, begins a friendship with him that allows her to teach him the glad game and win his heart. Before long, Pendleton has been so drastically changed that he asks—or rather begs—Pollyanna to let him adopt her. As he makes his case, he tells her straightforwardly that if she would join him, all his privilege would be at her disposal: How do you suppose I’m going to be “glad” about anything—without you? Why, Pollyanna, it’s only since you came that I’ve been even half glad to live! But if I had you for my own little girl, I’d be glad for—anything. And I’d try to make you glad, too, my dear. You shouldn’t have a wish ungratified. All my money, to the last cent, should go to make you...

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