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4 - Adoptive Reading
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- By Kelly Hager
- Edited by Diane Warren, University of Portsmouth, Laura Peters, University of Roehampton
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- Book:
- Rereading Orphanhood
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 17 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 18 June 2020, pp 81-100
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- Chapter
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Summary
Consider these characters: Oswald Bastable (and his five brothers and sisters), Sara Crewe, Anne (of Green Gables) and Rebecca (of Sunnybrook Farm). Orphans all, at least in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, and also voracious, impressionable and, to use the parlance of our day, interactive readers. This chapter is about the coping strategies and pragmatic uses these orphan readers make of and take from their books, as well as the effects of that admittedly uncritical – relying as it does on projection and identification – reading. The co-incidence of all these orphans (all these fictional children in need, at least according to the novels and the culture that produced them, of a family) that act out and upon their reading in direct and very result-oriented ways indicates something significant about how they read and about what that kind of reading gets them.
Left largely on their own and to their own devices after their mother's death, the six Bastable children seek to ‘restore the fallen fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable’, a phrase that reveals how their reading defines and dictates their actions, reminiscent as it is of the books they have read (2). The title of E. Nesbit's first novel about the Bastable children – The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) – suggests its plot, but what the title doesn't indicate is that participatory reading is their strategy for finding treasure, nor does it indicate the more significant subject of the novel, which is discovering not treasure, but how to remedy their orphaned state. As Oswald, the eldest boy and the novel's narrator, says,
we were the Treasure Seekers, and we sought it high and low, and quite regularly, because we particularly wanted to find it. And at last we did not find it, but we were found by a good, kind Indian uncle. (The Wouldbegoods 137)
Similarly, Frances Hodgson Burnett's (riches-to-)rags-to-riches story, A Little Princess (1905), depicts in quasi-fantastic fashion the power of reading as a coping strategy, enabling Sara Crewe to endure abuse, neglect, hunger and alienation. But the real pay-off of Sara's belief that ‘Everything's a story’ comes when, in true fairytale fashion, she's rescued from her life of servitude by the fairy godfather figure that lives next door (89).
JASPER PACKLEMERTON, VICTORIAN FREAK
- Kelly Hager
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- Journal:
- Victorian Literature and Culture / Volume 34 / Issue 1 / March 2006
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 09 March 2006, pp. 209-232
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- Article
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ONE OF THEOED'S DEFINITIONS of the word “freak” is that of a freak of nature, “a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” The freak of nature I wish to focus on in this essay is marriage, and specifically, marriage as it is “exhibited” in Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). To refer to marriage in a Victorian novel as a freak of nature is perhaps surprising. To refer to the sacred institution as freakish in a Dickens novel may seem to border on heresy. After all, Dickens is the self-appointed novelist of hearth and home, the creator of conservative domestic plots that celebrate marriage as the institution that establishes closure for the novel and for the society it represents. Despite this apparent conservatism and despite our vague sense that most marriages in Dickens are as happy as David and Agnes's, Esther and Allen Woodcourt's, Biddy and Joe's, it is in fact the case that in all his novels, from The Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend, Dickens is fascinated–in a multiplicity of ways both large and small, in a manner that is alternately comic, tragic, melodramatic, ironic–with marriage's discontents. In fact, the disintegration of the institution is one of the things that Dickens makes fictions from, giving the failure of marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility and presenting the breaking of the matrimonial bond with remarkable clarity and persistence. Dickens novels are full of wives who leave their husbands (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind), breach of promise suits (in Pickwick and Our Mutual Friend most famously) and characters who try to find legal ways of escaping their marriages (Stephen Blackpool, Betsey Trotwood, Nickleby's Madame Mantalini). This essay, then, is an analysis of how Dickens undermines the institution early in his career, and of how the comic and grotesque display of the body, the sprawling, teeming physical surfaces of The Old Curiosity Shop, both conceal and reveal a story of marital skepticism.