Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls
Lois Keith
The Women's Press, £11.99, 274pp
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Now, what was it that Katy did? Do you remember? In Heidi , what is it that you most recall? Heidi's life on the Alp with her grandfather, her enforced exile in Frankfurt or the moment when Peter the jealous goatherd destroys Clara's wheelchair and Clara suddenly walks?
The stories we read and love as children stay with us into adulthood and endure as we hand them down to the next generation. My nine-year-old daughter is as enthralled as I was by the adventures of Katy Carr, defying her prissy Aunt Izzy and always getting into scrapes, Jo March, determined to become a writer, and the feral Mary Lennox, restoring bloom to the secret garden. Like me before her, she never questions why these wild, rebellious girls grow up to be such sweet, submissive women - why Katy's fall from the swing, subsequent paralysis and miraculous cure (certainly not one known to medical science) also brings about an astonishing change of personality in which the wild Katy is permanently tamed. Or why after the death of Beth in Good Wives , the sequel to Little Women , Jo sacrifices her ambitions and settles down with a duster and the dull, middle-aged Professor Bhaer.
Death, disability and cure, suggests Lois Keith, were pivotal to the novels of the golden age of literature for girls and young women that spanned the mid-19th century to the late-Edwardian period. The women writers of the era - Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Joanna Spyri and Ethel Turner, whose 1894 Seven Little Australians is still read worldwide - were brutal. They killed off their characters, or had them endure disability, particularly paralysing illness during their adolescent years followed by miraculous and generally improbable cures as womanhood approached, just so that they and their sisters could learn to be good, submissive little women.
Gentle Helen Burns in Jane Eyre and sweet Beth in Little Women must die so that the emotionally unruly protagonists Jane and Jo can be redeemed through their example of suffering and resignation. Similarly Katy Carr, Clara in Heidi and even the strongly feminised Colin in The Secret Garden overcome their natures and disability to take their dead mothers' places. Katy first comes downstairs on her deceased mother's birthday, Clara steps metaphorically into her dead mother's shoes, and Colin's father gasps when he finds his son walking in the garden, such is Colin's resemblance to his wife.
Disability as a punishment for boisterousness or a lack of femininity would seem to be a particularly Victorian way of thinking, but Keith argues that while attitudes to women may have changed substantially over the past 100 years, our attitudes to disability are still stuck in the past. We may now dismiss the moral lessons of these books as they apply to women, but we unquestionably accept what they tell us about disability: "(1) there is nothing good about being disabled; (2) disabled people have to learn the same qualities of submissive behaviour that women have always had to learn: patience, cheerfulness and making the best of things; (3) impairment can be a punishment for bad behaviour, for evil thoughts, for not being a good enough person; (4) although disabled people should be pitied rather than punished, they can never be accepted; and (5) the impairment is curable. If you want to enough, if you love yourself enough (but not more than you love others), if you believe in God enough, you will be cured." Keith argues the latter case particularly well, pointing to the continued popularity of the "overcoming" story. Clara is cured in Heidi because, according to Grandad, "she's made the effort and won the day".
Newspapers are full of admiring stories about the actor Christopher Reeve, paralysed in an accident, who refuses to accept life in a wheelchair and focuses on hopes of a cure in the future; many subscribe to self-help philosophies arguing that the individual is responsible for illness and can cure him or herself. Keith tartly points out that more mysterious conditions such as paralysis and cancer are particularly prone to this interpretation, but few attempt to cure chickenpox with willpower.
After an enthralling start, the book and its arguments slightly tail off, not least because Keith writes much more robustly and cogently about the classic books than she does about more recent fictions. But in part it is because Keith, who is disabled herself, is surprisingly forgiving of writers' continuing inability to accept that disabled people live fulfilled lives, and their reliance on murder and miracles. She seems resigned to the fact that disabled people will continue to be relegated to the realm of metaphor. This is a good book, but a little more of Jane Eyre's anger, Jo March's indignation and Katy Carr's militancy would have made it a better one.
