Reader response

Try this rewarding reflection by AS Byatt on how she remembers some of the books she read as a child.  For me, she captures some of the ‘childness’ in these books, and what a child may take from them. I’ve pulled out some plums.

On Alices’ Adventures in Wonderland:

The texture of reading Alice is a series of linguistic puzzles, contradictions and jokes… [Alice's] main emotion is trying to make sense against increasing odds.

Peter Pan, Treasure Island (among others):

Children in these books have a kind of emotional and moral autonomy which is new in literature. The child reader feels their problems, decisions and dangers differently from those of either children in real fairy stories (Hansel and Gretel) or children in novels who will grow up – Pip in terror by his parents’ gravestone,  Oliver Twist in the orphanage, David Copperfield tormented by the Murdstones, Jane Eyre in the Red Room, or furious, sulky Maggie Tulliver.

On The Secret Garden:

One of the most moving orphans is Mary in The Secret Garden… My childish responses to Mary’s attempts to make sense of the world were the opposite to my response to Alice. I felt protective towards her and, at the same time, I did see the world from inside her. I was embarrassed with and for her…Yet her own cussedness and capacity for tantrums turn out to be a strength when she meets the cosseted and neglected invalid Colin, another self-centred child- seen by the reader, I think, through Mary’s eyes as she hectors  him into ordinary life.

On The Wizard of Oz:

… Dorothy does not have much character – less than her three companions who nevertheless provide no niche for the reader’s imaginiation to hang on to… What is splendid about Oz is the detail of things – yellow bricks, emerald glasses, oilcans.

On Treasure Island:

[Jim's] is a first-person narrative, which is as often distancing as it is involving. But the smells, the fear, the effort, the attempt to read strange and dangerous faces, or deceptively mild ones, become part of one’s own consciousness…

Fear goes with evil beings, and with dangerous landscapes. Blind Pew, and smiling, treacherous Long John Silver taught me much about fear, about the possibility of real danger.

In particular, as we are currently focusing on illustration, read her comments about Disneyfication, and the one Disney film which for her did not kill the power of the original:

…Snow White.. added considerably to my experience of wonderful fear and terror, even though its heroine was a doll. This, I have been told, was because it was made by German refugees who had a sense of the darkness of the old stories.

Ideology, compare, Little Women, Treasure Island

Thanks for clicking on the poll – which I’ll be taking down shortly. If it can be believed, 116 students, or nearly 7% of those enrolled on this course, have looked at this blog in November*.  Thank you for your support and helpful comments. And here’s a big welcoming wave to the 5 potential students – move to Derby then sign up next year to keep up student numbers in my area, please!

I am practically invisible to tutor colleagues. But they’re not searching for help with their TMAs, are they? One of the features of a wordpress blog is information about ‘search terms’ that have brought searchers here. I’ve put current ones in today’s title and I’ll let you know if the blog’s hit rate rockets

If I’ve tempted you here unfairly, here’s the sensible general help with OU assignments.  But the search terms might also have helped you find relevant articles: a search on google for  ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘ideology’  found  this one about how Jim has to leave domesticity to enjoy (and endure) romance in Treasure Island; and using ‘Alcott’ and ‘gender’  via the OU Library>online databases>Academic Search Complete turned up this on how the home is a ‘training ground for social behaviour’ where  ‘resentful little women’ learn the happiness of becoming ‘appropriately classed and gendered’.

The second article is a harder read than the first, I think; but both model exemplary behaviour by using close reference to the set texts.

 

*125 students, out of some 1700, when I closed the poll on 1 December.

Treasure Island covered

Oh to be in Minnesota, to browse the Treasure Island Illustrated Editions Collection.  However you can click here for three internal illustrations for an 1885 edition. Below there are some covers.  Hover over for dates and illustrators, where I could identify them. The first, 1883 image, is only tiny – see it better here.

Hard cash

Little Women and Treasure Island were both written with money in mind.*

As the introduction to our OUP edition of Little Women explains, Alcott’s father’s  impracticality did not support the family: he even thought it ‘demeaning to work for hire’ (page xiv).  Fortunately for her family, however,  Alcott presented herself as a children’s writer to a publisher at a moment when he had spotted a market for a girls’ story.

Her ‘little women’ are not hopelessly poor.  Unlike  the Hummels in their hovel, they live in a neighbourhood where a rich man lives next door, they employ Hannah, and  have some disposable income, even if they are not spared the embarrassments of relative poverty. I am struck – would this have happened in England? – that the genteel 15- and 16-year old girls  ‘are allowed to do something toward their own support’. Alcott’s characters know that work is a cross to be borne even if it humiliates or demeans.   I’m struggling to think of any attractive option for earning money, looking at the examples in the story. Everyone has to sacrifice themselves, apart perhaps from Laurie’s grandfather, who has accrued his wealth. But the reader cannot wholly admire him.

And like Jo who is not allowed to write the fiction of her choice and enjoy her success, Alcott seems to have  felt bound to the wheel of writing sequels to Little Women, and despite her wealth ‘continued to worry about financial security’ (Little Women, introduction, pxx).  It can’t have helped that her works were pirated in Britain.

Stevenson on the other hand seems more at ease. He writes frankly of  ‘my paymaster, the Great Public’ in his 1894 essay ‘My First Book’ and of how his writing before Treasure Island did not provide ‘enough to live upon’.  But then he had had the wealthier background and some family resources. Again, it was almost by accident that he drew his map and wrote his story and launched his career.  A new Stevenson website is rather worthy, but full of information: how satisfying that Stevenson travelled to Samoa and the South Seas – even if it was more for his health than for adventure.

In  Treasure Island, hard cash is morally darkened by connection with the pirates. Jim may earn his fourpenny pieces from the captain but at the cost of nightmares, and his mother puts their lives at risk by scrabbling in the captain’s belongings for the exact sum she is owed.   The fascination is with  uncountable coins :    ‘pieces of eight’ that are more squawked than seen; a hoard that is sorted and packed into bread bags  ‘for days and days’ but not quantified. We do know that one bag alone – such as Silver takes -  is worth perhaps  ‘three or four hundred guineas’; and we know that Silver has the sense to put his money in the bank; unlike  Ben Gunn, who gets through his thousand pounds in nineteen days and is back begging on the streets.  Cash is ruinous. The treasure becomes ‘abstract capital’, as Parkes points out in our Reader (p78).    Investment – in the bank,  in a pension, or in professional training – is wisdom.

I do hope Jim went on to a profession – although I have seen a youtube clip of Jim’s ‘Return to Treasure Island‘.

There’s hard cash for some in all these adaptations, perhaps.

 

* I’ve just been reminded of Samuel Johnson’s dictum, as quoted in Boswell’s Life: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’  Blockhead = bloghead? 

Pure story

Well, we know now that there is no such thing as ‘pure story’, is there? Every story is ‘inevitably didactic’, Peter Hunt has argued, and Block 2 develops this.  What lies beneath?

I ventured to the Treasure Island of Diana Loxley, in our Reader, and spent some time searching. Did I find any treasure?

Let’s go on the ‘pure story’, the adventure. Stevenson gives us

• a journal, a logbook, a map, a witness account, and, as a neat trick that may convince us even further, the writer withholds the island’s location so that we can’t actually go there
• a stuffy starting place (the Inn), making us long for a trip away
• scary, exotic stories to whet our appetite.

Meanwhile, underneath, we are being manipulated:

• we won’t find ‘savages’ and ‘dangerous animals’ but the tragedy of fellow citizens gone bad
• the class system will be challenged
• everything we cling to (knowing who is good or bad, who is honest or dishonest, who is civilised or barbaric) will be challenged
• authority is repeatedly challenged by treachery
• justice depends on the individual
• but the individual cannot be trusted.

Again, on the surface there is the ‘pure story’ of growing up: Jim moves from innocence to maturity.

But, underneath, he is experiencing metaphors for colonial adventure and exploration:

• pirates are corrupt, like those who should serve the British Empire but do not
• pirates are noble, like the British adventuring in the world
• treasure is corrupt, the result of ‘bloody colonial encounter’ (the multi-national  coin hoard)
• treasure is powerful, like the British identity
• the parrot is a witness of British colonial activity (‘wickedness’) over 200 years
• LJ Silver’s marriage to a black woman is ‘a far disturbing contract’ than a master/mistress relationship

And if we doubt the colonial basis of the story, check out the homeward stop-off when ‘so many good-humoured faces (especially the blacks)’ happily serve the adventurers. Perhaps the Europeans have been beastly, but not to worry – our heroes are still masters.

Do we still doubt that we are being made part of a colonial adventure? The adventurer’s role is to explore and discover.  The story shows this; it does not need to tell us. Jim’s freedom, individualism, successful exploration, impulse to gather further knowledge, observation of landscape, all show us the colonial mindset.

More than this, the story reflects the changing purposes of venturing to the colonies: no longer to settle them, but to exploit them purely for profit.  Robinson Crusoe may have ‘settled’ his island but the desperadoes left on Treasure Island show how the colonial adventure has become individualistic chaos at the end of the nineteenth century.