Beauty comes in all forms, but the institution of white supremacy demands that whiteness is the ideal.
When Lil’ Kim posted new pictures to her Instagram, people immediately noticed a glaring change. In addition to the blonde lace front, Kim’s complexion was noticeably whiter, almost ghostly pale. The iconic rapper and former Junior M.A.F.I.A. member looked like a complete stranger, unrecognizable when compared to the images of her in memorable videos such as the color-coordinated “Crush on You” and later hits such as “How Many Licks” and “No Matter What They Say.”
Filters and careful photo editing may have exaggerated Kim’s startling new look, but this transformation didn’t happen overnight. Over the years, Kim has revealed that her low self-esteem and low self-worth stem from the unconscious belief that blackness is undesirable. Like many young girls and women, Kim absorbed the poison of racist beauty standards. Although Kim has never confirmed to using skin-whitening or bleaching products, one cannot help but read between the lines. The pictures shared on Kim’s Instagram feature a person miles away from the woman who hit MTV’s VMA red carpet in a lavender wig, sequined jumpsuit, and matching pasty. In one display of irony, Kim is wearing a “Black Girls Rock” t-shirt. She’s got long, flowing, light blonde hair, her skin is several shades lighter, and her nose is slimmed down, probably contoured with heavy makeup. She looks like a combination of Kim Kardashian and Faith Evans.
“Guys always cheated on me with women who were European-looking. You know, the long-hair type. Really beautiful women that left me thinking, ‘How I can I compete with that?’ Being a regular black girl wasn’t good enough.”
In an interview with Newsweek, Kim reveals that an early age, she felt like she wasn’t good enough. Citing her father’s rigid standards as the source of her anxiety, she says, “It was like I could do nothing right. Everything about me was wrong–my hair, my clothes, just me.” This set the stage for Kim’s feelings of inadequacy. Later on, she says, “All my life men have told me I wasn’t pretty enough–even the men I was dating…Guys always cheated on me with women who were European-looking. You know, the long-hair type. Really beautiful women that left me thinking, ‘How I can I compete with that?’ Being a regular black girl wasn’t good enough.”
It seems that Kim has been unable to break free from ideology that cherishes whiteness and dehumanizes blackness. The seed planted in early childhood thrived on a succession of loves who upheld a color-struck hierarchy. The sexism and racism of the music industry only allowed such self-loathing to expand, burrowing deeper.
White beauty standards vehemently reject natural hair. … Black girls are sent home from school or threatened with expulsion for wearing their hair natural. Black women working as news anchors are criticized for wearing their natural hair on air. Mainstream society upholds the notion that wearing natural hair is a punishable act.
Notice how Kim mentions that her ex-boyfriends favored women who were the “long-hair type.” She’s not talking about black women with long hair. She’s actually talking about whiteness, or specifically, physical traits that denote whiteness. White beauty standards vehemently reject natural hair. Despite the growing number of black women who have put down the hot combs, straightening irons, and relaxers, natural hair is still viewed as “unkempt” and “unprofessional.” Black girls are sent home from school or threatened with expulsion for wearing their hair natural. Black women working as news anchors are criticized for wearing their natural hair on air. Mainstream society upholds the notion that wearing natural hair is a punishable act.
These racist standards are blazingly apparent when the fashion industry trips over itself to praise white celebrities for sporting familiar black hairstyles such as “boxer braids” (aka cornrows) and dreadlocks. Thus, when TV characters such as Annalise Keating from How to Get Away with Murder are shown removing their wigs and/or weaves, it’s groundbreaking. When Beyoncé calls out “Becky with the good hair” on Lemonade, she’s calling out the lie that kinky hair is ugly. The term “good hair,” when used in earnest, is carved from the language of white supremacy. Having good hair means that your hair is as close to straight as possible. Having good hair means you are reflecting white beauty rules.
Kim’s Instagram picture is the result of that money and level of access, not the aftermath of a spontaneous, irrational decision. It’s not that Kim simply wants to be white; she wants the acceptance that whiteness promises.
When people on social media wonder why Kim “looks like a white woman,” they ignore the fact that through personal experience and unconscious influence, Kim has learned to view whiteness as a marker of superiority. In an article for The Huffington Post, Zeba Blay notes, “Like millions of dark-skinned women, [she] has been socialized to believe she is ugly and unworthy because she is not white or light…The difference between Kim and so many others who struggle with this specific kind of low self-esteem is that Kim has money and access to doctors willing to indulge and encourage her need to change herself into a different person.” Kim’s Instagram picture is the result of that money and level of access, not the aftermath of a spontaneous, irrational decision. It’s not that Kim simply wants to be white; she wants the acceptance that whiteness promises.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye shows how the desire for whiteness is mentally, emotionally, and psychologically destructive. Pecola, a young black girl, yearns for blue eyes. In chapter 3 of the novel, the narrator notes, “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.” Pecola is fixated on blue eyes because she thinks that they are not only beautiful but also pose the opportunity to escape herself. Blue eyes would literally transform her perspective. She would shed the struggles of her current state of existence. For Pecola, blue eyes signify freedom from blackness.
Kim has fallen into the same trap as Pecola. Self-love seems impossible when external forces fuel their survival on your self-hate.
Instead of mocking Kim, we must remember that our society created this pursuit of whiteness.
At what cost has Kim become a sex symbol? Only she can truly answer that question. However, studying the trajectory of her image can provide some unfortunate and disturbing truths. Instead of mocking Kim, we must remember that our society created this pursuit of whiteness. Over at Mic, writer Michael Arceneaux reflects on what led Kim to this dramatic image overhaul and wonders, “If everyone had played nice, would Kim have stopped doing this to herself? Kim is continuously uploading pictures of herself online that depict her as lighter and lighter in appearance. Kim wants us to see her this way.”
One can only hope that Kim has finally found the validation that seems to have eluded her.
Rihanna has gone from Good Girl Gone Bad to bonafide style icon, pop culture heavyweight, and international superstar.
In the past few years, she’s successfully turned her name into that of an influential tastemaker, a woman often imitated but never duplicated, who does what she wants, when she wants, without fear or worry of judgment or disapproval.
The release of her eighth studio album, Anti, marks a decidedly different direction in the Rihanna sound. In an interview with Vogue, she admits, “It might not be some automatic record that will be Top 40. But I felt like I earned the right to do that now.” Anti, unlike previous albums, doesn’t settle for a theme-driven package of perfectly produced pop bangers and radio-friendly tunes. From the SZA-featured opening track, “Consideration,” to the Drake-aided, dancehall-infused “Work,” Riri’s Anti prefers the visceral power of atmosphere.
Despite the variations in style and production per song, the album’s overall intent is to conjure a certain mood. Whether she’s venting frustrations with overwhelming love affairs gone wrong or lust at first sight, the album wields Rihanna’s voice as both weapon and refuge. In a poem written by Chloe Mitchell exclusively commissioned for the album, Mitchell’s words provide an unapologetic mission statement:
I sometimes fear that I am misunderstood.
It is simply because what I want to say,
what I need to say, won’t be heard.
Heard in a way I so rightfully deserve.
What I choose to say is of so much substance
That people just won’t understand the depth of my message.
So my voice is not my weakness,
It is the opposite of what others are afraid of.
My voice is my suit and armor,
My shield, and all that I am.
Writing for Billboard, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd notes in her review of Anti that Rihanna “exists on the languorous edge of Carefree Black Girlness, all Instagrams from Saint Barts and red carpet stunting and relaxed dismissals of thirsty men pretending to know her.” Rihanna, both the brand and the public persona, does not thrive on attention, but rather the seductive thrill of self-fulfillment. Her image is not necessarily about accessibility or even likeability, but unabashed ownership of the self. She is not concerned with role-model status. On the contrary, obeying such strict demands would compromise her sense of authenticity. The Rihanna brand doesn’t just advocate independence, because independence without the foundation of self-fulfillment is a hollow achievement.
The Carefree Black Girl realizes that pain is a part of life, but she does not drown under the weight of struggle.
The concept of the Carefree Black Girl seems to have been born from social media and (Black) Tumblr culture. In an essay for Refinery29, Jamala Johns explains, “There are varying ways in which the title is bestowed, but a common tone connects everything. It’s the freedom and exuberance of simple moments and pleasures: clutching flowers, enjoying the company of your equally stylish friends, reveling in creative endeavors, and even finding the ethereal beauty in not-so-carefree moments.” She adds, “For women of color, such basic depictions continue to go underrepresented.”
In the world of Anti, to be in love does not promise salvation.
The Carefree Black Girl attempts to soften and humanize the crushing, insular cage of the Angry Black Woman. The Carefree Black Girl is radical in the sense that she does not submit to the expectations dictated by the establishment of white supremacy. The Carefree Black Girl realizes that pain is a part of life, but she does not drown under the weight of struggle. The Carefree Black Girl searches for freedom and self-fulfillment beyond society’s paltry offerings. She seeks what white supremacy routinely denies her: the ability to radiate inner peace despite the harsh cruelties of everyday life. This does not mean that the Carefree Black Girl is not allowed to feel self-doubt, anxiety, fear,or disappointment.
Anti is as joyous as it is melancholy. Tracks such as “Desperado” and “Never Ending” showcase the unraveling of romance and the portrayal of love as a force of destruction and ruin. In the world of Anti, to be in love does not promise salvation. Love itself is often two-faced, a fight for domination and control. “Desperado,” which samples background vocals from “Waiting Game” by Banks, talks about a lover who is on the run and the prospect of escaping with him. Rihanna sings:
If you want, we can be runaways
Running from any sight of love
Yeah, yeah, there ain’t nothin’
There ain’t nothin’ here for me
There ain’t nothin’ here for me anymore
But I don’t wanna be alone
It is not love that motivates this unexpected union, but the tortured desire to run away. Similarly, “Never Ending,” written by Dido and Paul Herman, contemplates the mixed emotions of opening one’s heart after a devastating breakup. She sings:
They’ll never understand
This feeling always gets away
Wishing I could hold on longer
Why does it have to feel so strange
To be in love again, be in love again, be in love again?
Love is not portrayed as a magnificent source of pure happiness and freedom, but an unpredictable and mysterious enigma with its own agenda. Anti’s vision of the Carefree Black Girl is not superhuman or inhuman. She is complicated and vulnerable and does not sacrifice self-awareness for the comfort of oblivious denial. Billboard notes the moody peaks and valleys of the album’s sound, declaring, “Anti is evidence that being America’s foremost Carefree Black Girl is a beleaguering endeavor, one destined to land a bad gal in a bout of depression now and again.”
Anti’s vision of the Carefree Black Girl is not superhuman or inhuman. She is complicated and vulnerable and does not sacrifice self-awareness for the comfort of oblivious denial.
Looking inward is not always pleasant, and the truth is not always flattering, but self-reflection can act as a healing salve and serve as a defensive barrier against the antagonistic violence of white supremacy. Rihanna’s Anti is fueled by the basic principles of the Carefree Black Girl ideology. Yet listeners cannot discount the unflinching chameleon nature of the album or the fullness of its emotions. Anti presents the idea that the Carefree Black Girl is not about blocking out negativity or distress, but about using these emotions to achieve self-actualization. In other words, Black girl, in all your contradictions, you are enough.
It’s always been assumed that I’m a “strong” person. The seductive dream of the Strong, Independent, Self-Sufficient Woman envelops unsuspecting black girls like veils of opium smoke.
You keep killing yourself so that others will live, as if you are a brown-skinned Joan of Arc, riding high on a chorus of persuasive voices, fooled into believing that you are learning the rites of warriors and not spells of decay and self-immolation. You keep thinking that to burn is to display a force beyond resolve, a dedication to stoic holiness. You are by no means a god but a sacrifice named “martyr.”
We are not regarded as superhuman, but inhuman, impervious to the violence of unpredictable emotions because we were not born with sensitivity.
Black girls are rarely, if ever, held in the same regard as other minorities. Between respectability politics and misogynoir, the space to exist is limited, constricted enough to turn a diamond-bright mind rabid. We are not the model minority, which is another form of racism and friend of white supremacy. We are not regarded as superhuman, but inhuman, impervious to the violence of unpredictable emotions because we were not born with sensitivity.
How long before I’m no longer asked to carry all this weight?
“I really wanted to grow into this person who could handle everything,” she says, “and I didn’t know that that’s just kind of impossible.”
In a revealing interview with Pitchfork, recording artist Janelle Monáe mistakenly confesses to the interviewer that she’s sought therapy for emotional issues, which were possibly exacerbated by a breakup while attempting to work on a new album. “I really wanted to grow into this person who could handle everything,” she says, “and I didn’t know that that’s just kind of impossible.”
The Kansas City native, who grew up and still is a devout Christian, adds that therapy was taboo in such a religious and cultural environment. She notes, “I didn’t like the idea of therapy at first. In the black community, nobody goes to therapy. You go to your pastor or you go to the Bible.” Mainstream American culture and black culture have little patience or empathy for mental illness. Mental illness is viewed as a weakness, a lack of self-control, as serious as a child’s temper tantrum dotted with forced tears.
To say that I grew up in a household that understood religion to be the shepherd to my immortal soul would be an exaggeration. On the other hand, my parents may not have shared religious practices, but the sincerity of their beliefs were equally fierce. My mother, who is Filipino, was born and raised in a country where the vast majority of the population identifies as Roman Catholic. She desperately tried to get me to mimic her unquestioning loyalty. In a way, my mother was just passing along what she already knew. Despite years of CCD classes, I didn’t pick up my mother’s enthusiasm.
They couldn’t understand how I could be so depressed. I had grown up in the suburbs with a dog and an impressive Barbie collection. There was a roof over my head, I had my own bedroom, there was always food on the table. What was the problem?
In contrast, my father hadn’t been pushed into religion by familial pressure to preserve traditions. My father’s mother did make him tag along to Sunday services. Yet no matter the consistency of her efforts, my father rejected the Episcopal Church. When he reached his midtwenties, he ignited his interest in religion and spirituality. He considered himself a Born Again Christian. The specifics of my parents’ beliefs may have greatly differed, but they practiced them with similar fortitude and humility. Neither liked the idea of playing around with a Ouija board; both cringed when someone admitted they didn’t believe in God.
My parents never could fully grasp the realities of living with a mental illness. I internalized a lot of things, bottled up darkness to feast on later, a form of self-sabotage. They couldn’t understand how I could be so depressed. I had grown up in the suburbs with a dog and an impressive Barbie collection. There was a roof over my head, I had my own bedroom, there was always food on the table. What was the problem? I knew my enemy, but I couldn’t flesh him out for my confused and frustrated parents. He was a lonely figure who could slip out of descriptions. He was a language I couldn’t articulate.
In the case of Janelle Monáe, resistance meant moving away from the super-fly cyborg persona of her debut and embracing a much more vulnerable perspective.
How do we escape this weight that seems destined to break our backs? It’s enough to make you wish for a fatal dose of oleander to drink.
Due to various barriers and the stubborn bigotry of gatekeepers, pop culture has yet to fully move away from harmful, emotionally compromised, stereotypical depictions of black girls and women. This is not to say that nuanced protagonists don’t exist. They’re just rare and under the radar.
In the case of Janelle Monáe, resistance meant moving away from the super-fly cyborg persona of her debut and embracing a much more vulnerable perspective. The aloof, technological sensation hailing from another galaxy traded in visuals reminiscent of George Lucas and Octavia Butler for multilayered R&B grounded in emotional fluidity. For example, in the track “Electric Lady,” Monáe mentions spaceships and outer space, but the core of the song is about women’s empowerment. She sings,
She’ll walk in any room have you raising up your antennas
She can fly you straight to the moon or to the ghettos
Wearing tennis shoes or in flats or in stilettos
Illuminating all that she touches
Eye on the sparrow.
If anything, the conflict between persona-heavy mythology and lyrical openness seems a bit more balanced.
Now that she no longer feels the “impossible” urge to be her own savior or no longer feels that she has to do everything, it has opened new possibilities in her art.
I can’t help but think that Monáe’s decision to reformulate the sci-fi-heavy aesthetic is the result of a shift in her thinking. Now that she no longer feels the “impossible” urge to be her own savior or no longer feels that she has to do everything, it has opened new possibilities in her art. She is no longer using the cyborg persona (as much) to filter the emotions and ideas that shape and inform her music. The world looks different when you feel as though you don’t have to constantly be on guard, vigilant against cracks in your appearance.
I grew up believing that seeking help was the coward’s impulse. But the Strong Black Woman and her sermons never brought me back to life. The Strong Black Woman consciously and unconsciously contributed to my shame. The preachings of the Strong Black Woman did not help my art or my will to live. The Strong Black Woman wants me to be Superwoman, but I would rather be a woman, receptive to the contradictions of being human.
At my first parent-teacher conference at my daughter’s kindergarten, one of the newer instructors asked me why my daughter would often re-read books that were “too easy” for her.
My daughter was already a strong reader by then. She’d taught herself, although we didn’t know about her new skill until sometime before her third birthday; she held up a cup at a restaurant, pointed to the words, and told us, “This says, Have fun.”
It did say, Have fun. We rushed through dinner and zipped home so that I could hold up magazines and novels and point to random (easy) words to ask her what they were. By the end of the evening, we had confirmed that she knew how to read.
There was no stopping her after tha—no.
That’s not true.
That makes it sound like it was never-ending progress: a rush toward fluency and proficiency when it was not like that at all.
Yes, every day, month, and year, she read harder, more complicated things. But as that teacher noted, she would also go back and re-read books—picture books, board books, books without words. She went forward. She went back. She re-read more than she read.
Yes, every day, month, and year, she read harder, more complicated things. But as that teacher noted, she would also go back and re-read books—picture books, board books, books without words. She went forward. She went back. She re-read more than she read. We didn’t push her; she was in charge of her pace. The main thing that we did was to make sure there was always something for her to read. We took her to bookstores and libraries. We let her pick out and renew what interested her. We read to her when that was what she wanted. We left her alone when she needed that, too.
It didn’t occur to us to do anything different. So when the teacher asked us why—more out of curiosity than judgment—why my daughter re-read so often, I was surprised. I muttered something about familiar books being comforting, and the teacher seemed content with that. It never occurred to me to tell my daughter not to re-read. I had done the same as a child, too. And for me, yes, re-reading was a way to soothe myself. But re-reading was also a way of marking how much I had learned.
The text of a book doesn’t change—most of the time. A couple of authors have on occasion gone back to update details. (For example, Judy Blume altered a scene in later editions of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret so that the protagonist used stick-on maxi pads instead of the belt and fastener that was prevalent when her classic children’s novel was first published in 1970.)
But for the most part, what changes is not the book, but the reader.
There are the jokes written for adults (by adults) in stories meant for children that most kids aren’t likely to find funny until later. Or there are the scenes where there are emotional currents that children—the protagonists of the book and maybe the young reader—don’t necessarily understand.
For example, I was reading middle-grade writer Susan Tan’s latest book, Cilla Lee-Jenkins: This Book Is a Classic recently, and came across this passage:
Until right as I was about to put together the triceratops’s tail, I heard a conversation that made me stop and pay attention.
They were still talking about the wedding. And my mom said, “Just remember, this is your day. All that matters is you and Paul. Everyone else will deal.”
“Yeah,” my dad said. “Also the trick is knowing how to manage Mom. She can be a handful, but you just have to know how to keep her happy.”
“That’s easy for you to say, big brother,” Auntie Eva said. “You’re the son—you just have to show up and be yourself and you’ll make Mom and Dad happy. I have to be perfect…”
Cilla is an optimistic, aspiring writer. She’s in third grade and happens to be biracial. Her beloved aunt is about to get married, and the event brings out tensions in the family that Cilla doesn’t quite understand. Adults may be able to unpack all that’s going on, but Cilla’s confusion—her growing knowledge that the grown-ups see all of the events of life quite differently—mirrors the younger reader’s. In a way, the fact that this book may be understood on more than one level means that this book is meant to be remembered and re-read.
But of course, sometimes, re-reading doesn’t make a book seem better.
It never occurred to me to tell my daughter not to re-read. I had done the same as a child, too. And for me, yes, re-reading was a way to soothe myself. But re-reading was also a way of marking how much I had learned.
This column, of course, is all about re-reading. It’s about looking at how books shaped me, and also at how my perception of those books has changed now that I’m an adult. At times it has been a delight and a comfort to greet my old friends. Sometimes it has been painful but rewarding. Sometimes it’s been shit.
Recently, my husband was flipping through the channels when he happened upon an episode of The Golden Girls, a classic NBC sitcom that ran from 1985 to 1992. As soon as I saw it, I said something about how often I’d watched the show in re-runs after school. I remembered watching TV in the basement, eating peanut butter sandwiches. I was a latchkey kid and spent hours alone except for books and the television. I knew even then that the show wasn’t perfect, but in a lot of ways it didn’t matter. It was a comforting place where I could settle.
Of course—of course—as soon as I said something about this to my husband, the following happened onscreen:
Teacher Dorothy, played by the great Bea Arthur, is doing roll call for her adult education class. She says, “Jim Shu.” No one answers. She says, “Oh, very funny. Gym shoe.”
Then an Asian man, played by Ralph Ahn, stands up and says, “I am Jim Shu.”
Dorothy apologizes profusely. She explains, “I thought someone was pulling my leg.”
Jim Shu looks at her up at down and says, “I don’t think I could drink that much sake.”
The live studio audience laughs wildly, even though the line doesn’t really make any sense. Also, sake is Japanese, Jim Shu is probably Chinese, but who can tell the difference? LOL ASIANS AND THEIR FUNNY-SOUNDING NAMES FOR THEMSELVES AND THINGS.
It was like a kick in the stomach. But at the time I first saw it, I probably thought I should laugh along. Even while sitting alone in the basement.
This column, of course, is all about re-reading. It’s about looking at how books shaped me, and also at how my perception of those books has changed now that I’m an adult. At times it has been a delight and a comfort to greet my old friends. Sometimes it has been painful but rewarding. Sometimes it’s been shit.
I guess it’s a measure of what a person I’ve become—Oh, look how I’ve grown—when the space for comfort is no longer comfortable.
And I don’t wish that the children’s books I’ve re-read as an adult were different, nor do I wish to unlearn what I know now in order to feel soothed by old, familiar fictional people and places.
But if I did have to do it over again, I might answer my daughter’s teacher a different way. If she asked why my daughter returned to books that were too easy for her, I would tell her that in re-reading, my child was exploring the spaces she’d been in, furnishing them with new knowledge. And in doing so, she was asking if she needed more.
As a child, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books.
I began them when I started third grade. When people ask about formative books, I think first of this series: of these books that I read when I walked around the house, that I carried to the dinner table, that I pored over during recess, and that I bugged my teacher to put on her curriculum even as the school year was ending. But I put off writing about them for a long time as it seems that I can’t bring myself to re-read them.
I still can’t.
I’m sorry.
Wilder’s semi-autobiographical children’s novels follow the pioneering Ingalls family as they move from Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods) to territory that was in reality an Osage Indian reservation in Kansas (Little House on the Prairie). The family then departs for Walnut Grove, Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek), where they live in a house made of sod, then to De Smet, South Dakota, the setting of By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years. One book, Farmer Boy, follows the childhood adventures of Almanzo, Wilder’s husband, as he tends to livestock, does chores, eats cake, and tries to get along with siblings in upstate New York. The Ingalls family (and the Wilders) sew their own clothes, endure blizzards, illness, and locusts, and still manage to find love, and joy, and adventure with family.
I say that the books are semi-autobiographical because despite the fact that the main character has Wilder’s name and the family travels roughly along the same paths that Wilder’s family did, the novels are very much fiction. Liberties were taken with Wilder’s real life story. And to a certain extent, this is acknowledged. Little House in the Big Woods, after all, opens like this:
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
The book has the opening for a fairy tale, with one solid fact thrown in—sixty years. Reception of the series—and certainly my feelings about it when I was young—concentrated on the harsh pioneer life, on details about playing ball with a pig’s bladder or making a doll out of a corn cob. I know I also identified with the setting of the story because I lived in the flat, cold middle of Canada (albeit in a city, in a house with indoor plumbing and heating). I know I also wanted to be resourceful and plucky, like the Ingalls family. I wanted to make my own bread, sew my own clothes, churn butter, and plant things.
(Basically, I wanted to do crafts and ride in horse-drawn buggies—but to have other modern conveniences.)
More recently, however, writers and scholars have turned their attention to the fictive-ness of the books—and to the mythmaking. Some memorable characters, the handsome Cap Garland, for example, are made up. More important, Pa Ingalls’s reasons for dragging his family across large swathes of Kansas and the Dakotas are elided. Pa Ingalls and his family weren’t benign settlers pitting their ingenuity against the dangerous wild; they were invading Native American territories. They had to do it on their own because they weren’t supposed to be there.
Indeed, Caroline’s Fraser’s 2017 book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, looks at the ways that Wilder’s books not only diverged from the realities of her life but made that life into one of the shaping narratives of American identity. The book also examines how Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a follower of Ayn Rand, extensively rewrote her mother’s books, often twisting facts to reflect Obectivist values.
But Fraser’s is only the latest in a series of sources that made me re-examine my feelings about the series. Among those:
Louis Erdrich’s books Birchbark House books, written from the perspective of Native Americans and set at around the same time as Wilder’s books;
Scholar Debbie Reese’s blog, “American Indians in Children’s Literature,” in which she talks about the depiction of Native Americans in the Little House series and in other books. This is just one example.
It was a conversation about Wilder’s books that Dr. Reese shared on Twitter that initially made me question what kinds of books from my childhood I wanted to give to my own child (which I talked about here) and, more important, why exactly I wanted to share them.
Does reading the Little House books lead to a greater understanding of history? Not on their own. Would it lead to my daughter understanding me or my life better?
Would it bring us closer?
If that were true, would this I want this particular story connecting us?
I am at a loss. I don’t know how to reconcile my memories, my newer knowledge, and my feelings about what is best to do right now. I have been told I should talk these issues out with kids, but so far I haven’t mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series to my daughter. I’m not actively hiding them. But I’ve chosen to put different books in front of her and to have her explore what she likes on her own. In any case, it’s likely that she’ll encounter them without my interference. She’ll be older.
By then, I hope I’ll be better prepared to talk about them.
In fourth grade, I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden. I owned a mint-green Dell Yearling paperback copy that I must have bought with my allowance money. It was a book that likely inspired my childish love of the idea of England, of the idea of gardens and nature.
In The Secret Garden, ten-year-old Mary Crawford is sent to England after her parents die in a cholera epidemic in India. She finds herself at the Yorkshire estate of her uncle Archibald, a widower with a tragic past.
Mary is described as an unpleasant child: sallow, thin, spoiled, unsmiling. She is used to ordering people about and having no other children to play with. But once she’s in Yorkshire, the maid Martha begins telling her tales of her family, especially her mother and Martha’s animal-loving brother, Dickon. Mary soon finds herself shunted outside to play, where she befriends a robin and grumpy gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and learns about a secret enclosed flower garden on the estate. Being outdoors improves Mary’s physical stamina and mental outlook: she starts running around and jumping rope. And once she finds the key and the door to the secret garden, she begins poking around in the earth.
She also meets Dickon and, later, her ten-year-old cousin, Colin, an invalid whose cries echo through the manor. She soon gets Colin out of the house and into the garden. Being outdoors enacts a transformation of Colin’s health and gives him a channel for his autocratic tendencies. Soon the children are running around singing, chanting, and speaking odes to the healing magic—sorry, capital M Magic—of “plain” English food, English weather, and English gardens.
Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in England in 1849 but spent a large portion of her adult life in the United States—moving first with her family to Knoxville, Tennessee, then Washington, DC, and ending her days in Plandome Manor on Long Island in 1924.
In addition to The Secret Garden, she was best known for her children’s novels Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Burnett was also a prolific author of plays, serials, and novels for adults. Her work was successful enough that she was able to spend time in Paris, across Europe, and at a home in Bermuda where she wintered. She also became interested in Christian Science, Spiritualism, and Theosophy, and the effects of those beliefs can be seen especially in the last quarter of The Secret Garden.
As a kid, I remember skipping over those “spiritual” sections a lot, although I can’t say it affected my enjoyment of the book. Our Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, had similar feelings when showed us what I think was probably the 1975 BBC miniseries adaptation. She said she liked it, although she mentioned the magical-spiritual garden stuff being very hokey.
Hokey is perhaps not the word I’d use today.
I’d love to say that tiny Mindy read The Secret Garden and was able to identify the shitty colonial ideology of the book.
But no, the opposite happened: the book helped make me an Anglophile in my stupid, stupid youth. I loved this idealized version of England with chatty robins and wild animals tamely following Dickon around the moors. I tried to speak with a Yorkshire accent. I wanted to like things described in the book, such as good thick porridge (even though in reality I didn’t like porridge, unless it was Taiwanese rice porridge), currant buns (I disliked currants), the chilly outdoor air (we were in Canada and it was often more than chilly), and running around in it (no). I even wanted to like gardening, though in my personal experience my parents’ and grandparents’ suburban Canadian vegetable patch was pretty terrible and certainly didn’t involve sweet-smelling flowers or fresh healthy air. Clearly I was willing and able to endure a lot of cognitive dissonance around the realities of what I liked and wanted in life versus the ideals described in The Secret Garden.
One thing I could not love even as a child, however, was Colin. And on re-reading the book, well … if anything, he’s worse.
It is very clear to me as an adult how much love and attention the narrator lavishes on Colin. He is often described as “beautiful.” He has a “beautiful smile.” He’s “quite beautiful in spite of his thinness.” His eyes are “beautiful” and strange, and he has long, thick lashes.
Despite not being introduced until the second half of the story, he takes over most of it; Mary—remember Mary? The girl we start off following and the one who finds the whole damn secret garden?—has no more than a few lines of dialogue in the last quarter of the story. Colin, by contrast, talks for pages and pages.
“The Magic in this garden has made me stand up and know I am going to live to be a man,” Colin says at one point.
After spouting off in kind for a few more paragraphs, he has Ben Weatherstaff, Mary, and Dickon sitting cross-legged in a circle with him:
“Now we will begin,” he said. “Shall we sway backward and forward, Mary, as if we were dervishes?”
“I canna’ do no swayin’ back’ard and for’ard,” said Ben Weatherstaff. “I’ve got the ’rheumatics.”
“The Magic will take them away,” said Colin in a High Priest tone, “but we won’t sway until it has done it. We will only chant.”
Colin becomes the expert on Magic—even though he’s not the one who came up with the idea. But Dickon and Mary and Ben Weatherstaff accept his leadership. He’s a budding cult leader, complete with questionable medical ideas, “beautiful”/hypnotic eyes, and an imperious manner.
In Colin the most annoying parts of Burnett’s spiritual-colonial enterprise are personified. The boy is often also described as a “the young Rajah.” Mary says:
Once in India I saw a boy who was a Rajah. He had rubies and emeralds and diamonds stuck all over him. He spoke to his people just as you spoke to Martha. Everybody had to do everything he told them—in a minute. I think they would have been killed if they hadn’t.
The “Rajah” epithet sticks because Colin is bossy as fuck. He is the master of the house while his father is away—and never stops reminding people of the fact. But what does it mean that Colin is continually compared to a young, spoiled non-Englishtyrant, when in fact, being cooped up in England on his own estate has made him the dictator that he is?
In the characterization of Colin, we run up against the fact that so much of the book depends on comparing India unfavorably with England, even as the book exploits Indian things that it finds convenient. The children cobble together a spiritual practice by referring to animal charmers, “fakirs,” transplanting Mary’s childish colonial cultural observations and bits from Colin’s books, mixing in the idea of the pastoral, and trying to mash all of these things into a kind of magical—sorry, capital M Magical—English-ness.
I live in Manhattan now, in an apartment.
My upstairs neighbors are renovating, so all morning I’ve been trying to write some sort of conclusion to this piece between the whines of drilling and the thump of a sledgehammer being taken to the walls. My life is the opposite of bucolic, and at times like these, I find myself wanting to agree with Frances Hodgson Burnett—an Anglo-American, city-loving socialite writer—that there is no location more magical and desirable than a great, green garden in England.
But that place is largely a myth—a nation-building tale from another time—and I don’t think the the rulers of that place would particularly welcome me.
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