Question for the historians re: Elsie Dinsmore

[clarinetpower]

Made my way through the frist book, and while Elsie is certainly an extreme character, the most extreme part of her religious observance seems to be to "keep the sabbath".

Does anyone remember "Little House in the Big Woods"? Laura tells in it that she has been punished for playing too loudly/wildly on sundays, and that she and her sister were only allowed to play quietly with dolls, and that her father was never allowed to go sledding on holy days.

As this topic seems to creep up in victorian children's literature now and then, I'd wager that her particular behavior is unusual as insofar nearly nobody lived up to this ideal of keeping the sabbath, but that it was a commonly accepted ideal nontheless.

My grandfather was born in 1923 (I think) and recently he got upset with my uncle for harvesting on Sunday. Monday morning was the time my uncle was scheduled to have prostate surgery, so he wanted to get it done so he'd have recovery time. Grandpa was still ticked.

So yeah, there are people that still do "keep the sabbath". BTW, Grandpa, not a fundie at all. But Sundays, he goes to church and sits and has coffee and visits and spends time with his family. Period. No farming! (Maybe golfing.)

[FloraDoraDolly]

I don't know if you can say there were no idealized boys in Vic lit. I've never read Little Lord Fauntleroy, but I understand that he was quite cloying. The plotline seems similar to Elsie Dinsmore: little boy is mistreated but eventually wins over his abusers because he's so perfect.

There are plenty of idealized boys in the schoolbooks of that era. McGuffey's Readers are full of stories that contrast the difference between a good boy who does the right thing vs. a bad boy who wants to play hooky or steal or get into something his parents have told him to stay away from. Mark Twain played around with the idealized boy stereotype, especially with the Cousin Sidney character in "Tom Sawyer". The idealized boy was still around in early silent movies, usually sporting long curls and dressed in a Fauntleroy suit. In the Our Gang comedies, such boys either end up getting beat up by the Gang or else they ditch the suit and curls so they can join the Gang. Inevitably, the boy's mother shows up and faints when she discovers her little Percy or Sidney all dirty and grubby, playing with ruffians.

[CanadianHippie]

The girl in The Secret Garden was far from perfect and wasn't always nice. The only reason a fundie would read The Secret Garden is because it is an older book.

Not the book, but one (?) of the movie versions. My favourite line was always in Colin's bedroom, he threatens to scream and she tells him "If you scream, I'll scream too and I can scream much louder and much longer than you can!"

[Cran]

Sorry, needto post again, I feel towards Elsie now like towards many of the bloggers: Like a trainwreck you can't look away from.

A real gem, after her father had refused a suitor, who was a fortune hunter and deluding Elsie:

"Elsie, have

you ever allowed him to touch your lips?" he asked almost sternly.

"No, papa, not even my cheek. I would not while we were not engaged;

and that could not be without your consent."

"I am truly thankful for that!" he exclaimed in a tone of relief; "to

know that he had--that these sweet lips had been polluted by contact

with his--would be worse to me than the loss of half my fortune." And

lifting her face as he spoke, he pressed his own to them again and

again.

Somewhat familiar, these sentiments... :roll:

[Avalondaughter]

I am up to chapter 8 and I'm becoming slightly obsessed. How many times can this little girl be unjustly punished, cry her heart out, and beg for little scraps of affection from her father?

I think the notion of a grown up man waiting for a sweet little girl to grow up so he could marry her was something of a trope in Victorian fiction. Of course, now I can't seem to think of any other examples. I do think something of this sort occurred in one of L.M. Montgomery's books -- maybe the Emily of New Moon series?

Yes, that did happen in the Emily series, but the suitor, who was impious and freethinking and seemingly an atheist, used deception to win her over, offering her marriage at a low point in her life. He was a caring and intelligent man on the surface, but he had issues with jealousy and manipulation. Emily was feeling sad and desperate and lonely when she agreed to marry him. In the end, she realized she couldn't do it. Very un-Elsie-like.

[AnnoDomini]

Haha, I loved The Secret Garden. That Mary was kind of a girl after my own heart, though hoopefully I was a little less overtly spoilt. One of my favourite (and most quoted) lines from the movie (don't know which one) is "Might is only maybe and I don't care if you scream til you're blue in the face!"

[tehgoobster]

Sorry, needto post again, I feel towards Elsie now like towards many of the bloggers: Like a trainwreck you can't look away from.

A real gem, after her father had refused a suitor, who was a fortune hunter and deluding Elsie:

"Elsie, have

you ever allowed him to touch your lips?" he asked almost sternly.

"No, papa, not even my cheek. I would not while we were not engaged;

and that could not be without your consent."

"I am truly thankful for that!" he exclaimed in a tone of relief; "to

know that he had--that these sweet lips had been polluted by contact

with his--would be worse to me than the loss of half my fortune." And

lifting her face as he spoke, he pressed his own to them again and

again.

Somewhat familiar, these sentiments... :roll:

:shock:

That's some freaky-deaky shit right there.

[Guest Anonymous]

So I am up through chapter 12 of the first Elsie book. None of it so far quite tops the freaky deaky shit quoted above, but it's all pretty messed up.

There is one peculiar episode in which her father tells her she is never to go to the meadow, but he refuses to explain why when she asks him. One day, she forgets and finds herself in the meadow. While she is there, all of a sudden she remembers her father's command. So naturally, she runs home to her father and tearfully confesses her disobedience. Although she explains that she hadn't intended to disobey him and that she had merely forgotten his command, he nonetheless decides to punish her "severely" by sending her to bed at 3 in the afternoon. A couple days later, he shows her a rattlesnake he killed in the meadow. This makes her feel even more repentant because she now realizes that her father had an excellent reason for telling her to stay out of the meadow.

Now, of course, anyone else in the world would say to herself, "Why the hell didn't my father mention the rattlesnakes in the first place?" Also, it seems to me that if her father was really interested in protecting Elsie, rather than just playing BDSM mindgames with her, he would have mentioned the scary-ass snakes up front so she would have an additional motivation to stay out of the meadow besides just his word.

[sugaree]

I firmly believe that if Martha Finley had been born in our time, she would be writing D/s erotica. Woman may have lived an exemplary and unremarkable personal life, but I am left thinking that she must have been a stone freak with a feverish fantasy life.

[Guest Anonymous]

I also have to cut author Martha Finley some slack because I gotta believe she has some major Daddy issues. The book reads like the efforts of a victim trying to come to psychological terms with the abuse she suffered. I am guessing that Miss Finley suffered at the hands of an abusive father and identifies strongly with the Elsie character.

Part of what is difficult for childhood abuse victims is that abuse forces you to think either, "I must be really bad to deserve this," or "My parent is really bad and doesn't love me," both of which are intolerable emotions for a young child. Martha Finley reconciles these difficulties by creating a scenario in which the the Martha/Elsie character really is saintly and punished only unjustly, but at the same time IS actually loved by her abusive father, who is also supposed to be a basically good and just guy. There is surely some Stockholm Syndrome shit going on here.

Also, abused children really have little choice but to submit to their abuse. There is nothing you can do about it and that's part of the shame of the abuse. Miss Finley copes with this psychologically by turning Martha/Elsie's submission into a virtue which awes and influences those who know her.

[Guest Anonymous]

Oh, and I agree that Martha F. must have been a bit kinky.

I am guessing all the little budding spanking fetishists being created in families that worship VF's sick power dynamics are going to start producing Elsie Dinsmore D/s fanfiction in a few years.

[Guest Anonymous]

To go back to the original question posed in this thread regarding the attitudes of the Victorians towards Elsie:

Google "little Pharisees in fiction by agnes repplier" (sorry my cut and paste feature is broken) and you will find a deliciously snarky take-down of Elsie dating from 1896.

[sugaree]

Oh, my God, Doomed Harlot, I love that.

Better surely to kick a wilderness of babies than to wallow in self-righteousness like this!

Who is this Agnes Repplier? Was she always this awesome?

[Cran]

It seems she has written quite some things, judging from the titles some alike to her critique of Elsie - and grew beautifully old! (95 years)

http://www.onread.com/writer/Repplier-A ... 50-138653/

[Hane]

Because I am both a bookaholic and a masochist, I just finished reading the first two Elsie books (free on Project Gutenberg).

Holy fucking fuck. Elsie is the filial equivalent of Chaucer's Patient Griselda. Times, well, the number of books in the series (28--OMFG).

In Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, the Clerk posits not that the story tells the right way to treat a wife, but that we, as Christians, should patiently bear suffering as Jesus did. I can kind of see this coming through in the Elsie books, but it's trumped by the patriarchal crap and the major-league daddy issues.

All the crying in the first book was giving me sympathetic dehydration, and I was getting major child-abuse flashbacks from the second book: Elsie would be off on a long-term visit, having fun with her friends, then POW!!!--some damn issue "demanding" Daddy's attention would pop up.

Off to meet my new friend Agnes Repplier!

ETA that Ms. Repplier, in awesomely referring to

children who belong to an order of beings as extinct, I believe and hope, as the dodo

presages the characters in Sarah Maxwell's sad and pathetic little Moody books.

[GenerationCedarchip]

To go back to the original question posed in this thread regarding the attitudes of the Victorians towards Elsie:

Google "little Pharisees in fiction by agnes repplier" (sorry my cut and paste feature is broken) and you will find a deliciously snarky take-down of Elsie dating from 1896.

I love it!

[jenny_islander]

Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote novels for adults that are out-and-out romantic thrillers or even psychological horror; some are available at Project Gutenberg. Her kids' books are the same sort of thing cut down to kid size. She was also a spiritualist IIRC.

[Hane]

Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote novels for adults that are out-and-out romantic thrillers or even psychological horror; some are available at Project Gutenberg. Her kids' books are the same sort of thing cut down to kid size. She was also a spiritualist IIRC.

I agree re the kids' books. A couple of generations back, they developed an undeserved bad name as totally saccharine because of early movie versions (Shirley Temple's "The Little Princess," anyone? *gag* ).

Regarding more-or-less contemporaneous kids' books, I notice that the ones that have stayed the most popular are those that don't wham the reader over the head with "Christianity."

Things that chap my @$$ about the Elsie books:

• The assumption that all the "right" kinds of Christians are some form of conservative Presbyterians (the thing about being "born again" notwithstanding).
  
• The classism. Let's forget that the slaves are simply called "servants"--but I shudder when she trots out that hoary 19th-century trope about how "funny" the lower classes, black and white, dress and talk. (Yes, I know--Alcott and Twain are guilty of this, too, but are, overall, far more democratic in their outlook [though far from perfect].) In the second book, she tosses in characters and scenes that have little to do with the progression of the story, just to provide some racist, classist "comic relief." When the goofball landlady Mrs. Schilling invites Elsie and her aunt to a party in the second book, Elsie instantly assumes that her father wouldn't approve of "such a person," until her aunt assures her that the woman attends her church.
  
• The WTFF-is-this-cra-zazy shiznit about Catholicism. The crap about "they'll torture me for not kneeling down and worshipping the crucifix and the Virgin!" had to come from somewhere, and I think the dress code there would be pointed white hoods.

[AnnoDomini]

Catholicism? I forget that part. Refresh my memory pretty please? It's been at least ten years since I read them.

[Cran]

Can supply a nice quote for her racism:

But she was often down at the quarter visiting the sick, the aged and infirm, seeing that their wants were supplied, reading the Bible to them, praying with them, telling of the better land where no trouble or sorrow can come, and trying to make the way to it, through the shed blood of Christ, very plain and clear. Then she would gather the children about her and tell them of the blessed Jesus and His love for little ones.

"Does He lub niggahs, missus?" queried one grinning little wooly head.

"Yes, if they love Him: and they won't be negroes in heaven."

"White folks, missus? Oh, dat nice! Guess I go dar; ef dey let me in."

Well... yeah. Nice. It'sout of "Elsies Womanhood", and its plot begins a few years before the war, which Elsie and her closest family (husband, father and stepmother plus their children) spend in Italy.

[Cran]

Catholicism seems to be mainly treated in "Elsie's Holidays at Roselands", her father threatens to have her brought to a convent school because of her "disobedience":

"Poor darling!" murmured Adelaide, clasping the little form more closely, and pressing her lips to the fair brow; "I wish I could save you from it. He says that if you continue obdurate, he has quite determined to send you to a convent to be educated."

As Adelaide made this announcement, she pitied the child from the bottom of her heart; for she knew that much of Elsie's reading had been on the subject of Popery and Papal institutions; that she had pored over histories of the terrible tortures of the Inquisition and stories of martyrs and captive nuns, until she had imbibed an intense horror and dread of everything connected with that form of error and superstition. Yet, knowing all this, Adelaide was hardly prepared for the effect of her communication.

"Oh, Aunt Adelaide!" almost shrieked the little girl, throwing her arms around her aunt's neck, and clinging to her, as if in mortal terror, "Save me! save me! Oh! tell papa I would rather he would kill me at once, than send me to such a place."

And she wept and sobbed, and wrung her hands in such grief and terror, that Adelaide grew absolutely frightened.

"They will not dare to hurt you, Elsie," she hastened to say.

"Oh, they will! they will!—they will try to make me go to mass, and pray to the Virgin, and bow to the crucifixes; and when I refuse, they will put me in a dungeon and torture me."

"Oh, no, child," replied Adelaide soothingly, "they will not dare to do so to you, because you will not be a nun, but only a boarder, and your papa would be sure to find it all out."

"No, no!" sobbed the little girl, "they will hide me from papa when he comes, and tell him that I want to take the veil, and refuse to see him; or else they will say that I am dead and buried. Oh, Aunt Adelaide, beg him not to put me there! I shall go crazy! I feel as if I were going crazy now!" and she put her hand to her head.

Later on, when she turns terribly ick, she will put up quite a scene when they cut their hair (because it seems somehow to hinder her getting better?), as she thinks she is shorn in order to become a nun.

"No, no, you must not! Papa will not allow it—he will be very angry—he will punish me if you cut off my curls!" and Elsie's little hand was raised in a feeble attempt to push away the remorseless scissors that were severing the bright locks from her head.

"No, darling, he will not be displeased, because it is quite necessary to make you well." said Mrs. Travilla in her gentle, soothing tones; "and your papa would bid us do it, if he were here."

"No, no, don't cut it off. I will not, I cannot be a nun! Oh, papa, save me! save me!" she shrieked.

"Dear child, you are safe at home, with none but friends around you."

[Hane]

Later on, when she turns terribly ick...

Cran, this is a MAGNIFICENT riffle. :dance:

Oh, and the thing about cutting off a sick person's hair? Back in the days of leeches, it was believed that growing hair sapped a sick person's strength, so they cut it off. Another reason was that the tossing and turning of a delirious person would get the hair all matted and knotted, so it was kind of a preventative measure.

[Bookworm]

Cran, this is a MAGNIFICENT riffle. :dance:

Agreed! Elsie Dinsmore, the heroine who is always ick in one way or another.

[Guest Anonymous]

OMG. I think I have to retract all my sympathy for Elsie. Now I'm rooting for somebody to brain this insufferable little girl.

[Hane]

It gets better in "Elsie's Womanhood," where she becomes a good little slave-owner. She abolishes flogging in favor of jailing and bread and water, and hires a full-time chaplain.

I am starting to be convinced that Dougie loves these books so much because they're so vehemently pro-antebellum South. The sins of the evil, conniving, murderous Tom Jackson are lumped in with those of abolitionists, and the abusive overseer can't possibly be fired because he knows so much about the "business" of running a plantation. Oh, and he's an evil New Englander.

I can't wait to see how the Dinsmores deal with the aftermath of the Civil War.