Abstract
Taking its cue from Sara Ahmed’s recent (2014) exploration of the ‘willful’ subject in literature, political philosophy and cultural history, this chapter applies this concept to literary constructions of childhood in the British world and beyond. Tellingly, Ahmed writes, it was the character of Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss that sparked her interest in willfullness. Her investigation thus begins with an evocation of the ‘many willful girls that haunt literature’1 — a haunting that I take up here in part to resuscitate these girls and answer Ahmed’s call for their existence to be recorded in an ‘archive’ of willfulness, but equally to explore the ways in which literature itself (and sentimental domestic literature aimed at girls in particular) is a complex disciplinary agent that simultaneously documents expressions of willfulness even as it offers blueprints for its eradication. Literature for girls in the latter half of the nineteenth century has been critically acknowledged as a mechanism for ‘straightening out’ wayward children,2 and the sentimental domestic novel, as it evolved into a genre specifically aimed at young women, was one of the primary agents in naturalizing certain behaviours as girls matured into womanhood. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) stands as the foundational example of this genre, in which a family of girls are shaped into ‘good wives’.3
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Notes
Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
See also Sanders’ note about the almost anthropological representation of girls’ national character in the novels of this period (Disciplining Girls, 18). James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Elizabeth Barnes, Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 18.
Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6.
Claudia Nelson, ‘What Katy Read: Susan Coolidge and the Image of the Victorian Child’, in Sylvia Patterson Iskander (ed.), The Image of the Child: Proceedings of the 1991 International Conference of the Children’s Literature Association (Battle Creek, Children’s Literature Association, 1991), 217–22.
Lois Keith, Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls (New York: Routledge, 2001), 22.
Ellen D. Kolba, ‘Out on a Limb’, The English Journal, vol. 73, no. 7 (1984), 38–41, 39.
Kerry White, ‘“True Blue Alcott”: Lilian Turner’s Reworking of Little Women and What Katy Did’, The Lu Rees Archives Notes, Books and Authors, vol. 4, no. 9 (1987), 2.
Kerry White, Founded on Compromise: Australian Girls Family Stories 1894–1982 (PhD thesis, Department of English Literature and Drama, University of Wollongong, 1985), 2.
Brenda Niall, Seven Little Billabongs: The World ofEthel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce (Melbourne University Press, 1979), 61.
Ethel Turner, Seven Little Australians (Auckland: Lux Aeterna, 2010 [originally 1894]), 1.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (Oxford University Press, 2002 [originally 1860]), 4
Margo Hillel, ‘Voyeurism and Power: Change and Renewal of the Eroticized Figure in Australian Books for Teenagers’, in Thomas Van der Walt et al. (eds), Change and Renewal in Children’s Literature (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2004), 67.
Michelle Smith, ‘Transforming Narratives of Colonial Danger: Imagining the Environments of New Zealand and Australia in Children’s Literature, 1862–1899’, in Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (eds), Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 183.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1993 [originally 1910]), 97.
Danijela Petkovic, ‘“India Is Quite Different from Yorkshire”: Empire(s), Orientalism, and Gender in Burnett’s Secret Garden’, Linguistics and Literature, vol. 4, no. 1 (2006), 87, 91.
Hilary Emmett, ‘“Mute Misery”: Speaking the Unspeakable in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Books’, in Holly Blackford (ed.), 100 Years of Anne with an E: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009), 86–90.
L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon (London: Virago Modern Classics, 2013), 126, 6.
Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L. M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 145–46.
Lindsey McMaster, ‘The “Murray Look”: Trauma as Family Legacy in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon Trilogy’, in Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature Canadienne Pour La Jeunesse, vol. 34, no. 2 (2008), 50–74, 57.
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© 2016 Hilary Emmett
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Emmett, H. (2016). The ‘Willful’ Girl in the Anglo-World: Sentimental Heroines and Wild Colonial Girls, 1872–1923. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_12
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