There is a strange twist to interest in Victorian and early twentieth century children’s literature in the many home school and Christian school groups in America. While able to see much that is wrong in modern children’s literature, they have replaced bad new lit with bad old lit. The worst case of this is the Elsie Dinsmore series for young girls . . . a recent subject for discussion inside of Torrey containing important lessons for Christians trying to renew American culture about how not to do it.
My students marveled at Christian schools and parents assigning these books. They are not well written . . . at times lacking a plot altogether and serving as one Victorian Sunday School lesson after another. As an eccentric I happen to like Victorian Sunday School lessons, but when I read a novel I anticipate such things as character development, plot, and some dramatic tension. Call me old fashioned, but when I read a book that advertises itself as a story and then it is a sermon, I feel cheated and a bit bitter.
If there was ever a child and young woman so “precious” and annoyingly good as Dinsmore in literature, I have yet to meet her. My grandfather used to talk about folk “so straight they lean a little.” By that standard, Dinsmore is so straight she is falling right over. Such people make the crooked look attractive and that is too bad.
If you have not met the fictional girl who puts the tyrannical in puritanical you can read the first book in the series here. If you want to know what made Mark Twain the cynical unbeliever he was, surely it was partly Christian fiction like that in the Dinsmore series.
Twain eventually studied the great Christian woman Saint Joan of Arc . . .and that transformed him late in life, but most Victorian readers were left with the preaching of the insufferable Dinsmore such as this “gentle judgment” on her recently bereaved father:
“But we may hope to meet her in heaven, dear papa,” said Elsie
softly, “for she loved Jesus, and if we love Him we shall go there
too when we die. Do you love Jesus, papa?” she timidly inquired,
for she had seen him do a number of things which she knew to be
wrong–such as riding out for pleasure on the Sabbath, reading
secular newspapers, and engaging in worldly conversation–and she
greatly feared he did not.
There is an important set of lessons here for Christians in this age. Great Christian women like Saint Joan can reach even the most cynical unbeliever, but the precious Christian fiction of the era with unrealistic and unlovable women produces skeptics.
As a fan of the Victorians (in general), the greatest value to me in the series was being reminded why Christian culture of the time did not endure. As portrayed in the series it is anti-intellectual, lacks Lewis’ joy altogether, is stuffy without mercy, and frequently confuses the important issues with the small. The end result (in my experience) is to turn off children to Victorians, morality, and the valuable lessons of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in utter terror of a kind of Christian totalitarianism with tea things.
C.S. Lewis would not have passed muster in any house run by Elsie nor would Tolkien . . . and that is enough for me.
Of course, the response will be that the books are moral . . . and in the sense that they are not “realistic” in the weary way of much modern fiction I am sympathetic, but a cure worse than the disease is not much good. Dinsmore cures our egalitarianism by a wicked form of patriarchy. She bids to cure our laxity in one area with legalism in several others. One does not, however, cure one vice by plunging boldly into the opposite. The way to solve the libertine state of our culture is not with the very joyless prudery that helped bring it on.
It also concerns me that calling Dinsmore “moral” misses gigantic moral failings of the books and suggests an overly limited view of morality.
Racism, which runs through the books, is (shall I dare say it?) at least as bad a moral failing as bad views toward sexuality. It is one that traditional Christians have not always noticed (as the Dinsmore books themselves prove). We should be at least as concerned in introducing stereotyped African-American characters as about “magic” in Harry Potter books. I have met real racists and seen the harm racism does, but I have yet to meet a Potter-inspired witch.
Of course in great authors (Dickens, Trollope, Shakespeare), we endure these bad things and try to glean the good out of them. But the Dinsmore series is not Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” in which the horrid view of Jewish persons must be endured to understand a great play. It is not anachronism for a Christian, who believes in universal and unchanging moral laws, to say that it was wrong for a great writer to have such attitudes. It is also not necessary to be so politically correct that we cannot recognize greatness in flawed material. We judge with the judgment by which we hope history will judge our best products.
If Dinsmore was great literature, we might have to endure the racism for the great literary value, but nobody thinks Dinsmore is even well written.
Finally, Dinsmore portrays women in a way that any traditionalist has to abhor. Women are given to fainting, could not be imagined as intellectual equals (heart over head for Elsie!), and are nothing like Saint Nina, equal to the Apostles, Saint Catherine, or even Dorothy Sayers. When traditionalists attack radical feminism (as I often do), they should keep the view of women in the Elsie series in mind. The dim and reactionary Dinsmore has made more than one woman I know think radical feminism must be her friend since she cannot see herself in the books.
The love of home, of country, and of tradition . . .the gentle manners of the Dinsmore books . . . which are the best part of them can be found in Trollope without the worst excesses of the Victorian age. One likes Trollope after reading him . . . and his female characters . . . the same can not be said for Elsie. Let’s assign more Trollope or Twain’s Joan of Arc and less Dinsmore.
The lesson: just because a book is old and politically incorrect does not make it any good. Let’s allow old Christian junk to stay peacefully buried.