Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence by Julie Pfeiffer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence by Julie Pfeiffer Dawn Sardella-Ayres (bio) Julie Pfeiffer, Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence, UP of Mississippi, 2021. It is impossible for me to write a completely objective review of Julie Pfeiffer’s 2021 study Transforming Girls. Over the last two decades, I’ve been a student in Pfeiffer’s girls’ literature classes at Hollins, and have not only seen how her scholarship on this subject has developed in the classroom and at conferences over that time, but how scholarship around girls’ literature in general—including my own, building on much of Pfeiffer’s—continues growing. In Transforming Girls, Pfeiffer examines an illuminating subgenre, effectively demonstrating origins for what would now be identified as girls’ bildungsroman by showing its roots in a specific German tradition, the back-fisch novel. Pfeiffer’s text provides foundation for greater interrogation of books that are often identified today as “girls’ classics,” particularly as they pertain to a fictional heroine’s social role as an adolescent. Most of us can’t separate personal experiences with girls’ literature from this scholarship, including Pfiffer. As she notes, many of us in the field have to take seriously girls’ literature scholarship, as well as these novels and characters, because these books, and the “shared experience of reading” them (13) were integral to our own girlhood. Not only were many of us former girl readers, but former good girl readers, deeply internalizing the books’ depictions of ideal [End Page 334] girlhood and womanhood as “domestic, obedient, quiet” (3). These stories, the collective experiences of reading Little Women or Understood Betsy, of knowing what Katy Carr did, and how Anne Shirley became Anne of Green Gables, connect over generations. These moments construct shared cultures, demonstrate complicated relationships, and in many cases, provide us with friends, either through communal readership, or via our personal connection with the fictional characters themselves, who became like extended family. Accordingly, as adult scholars, we constantly must challenge and even reject some lessons we originally incorporated as child-readers. But we also take these texts seriously because, as Pfeiffer underscores, stories about adolescent girls and how they grow “deliberately, evocatively, called up an experience of transition and marked that experience as significant” (4). These stories have much to communicate today about the shifting roles of girls in society, because these questions and challenges have existed for centuries. Exploring the liminal space of adolescent girlhood in backfisch books allows scholars to explore and understand how contemporary concepts of girlhood, adolescence, gender, and social roles have developed under a variety of international and domestic circumstances. Backfisch books were highly marketable popular novels about adolescent girls published in Germany from the mid-nineteenth century until World War I, and can be considered part of the output of the Golden Age of children’s literature, as well as German Romanticism. Backfisch books can and do overlap, as do other girls’ lit subgenres (orphan stories, school stories, family stories) as well as general sentimental fiction and domestic realism that influenced girls’ literature. The “backfisch” herself is a girl beginning her adventure to womanhood, and while an exciting time, it’s also dangerous. However, Pfeiffer specifically sees this liminal space of adolescent girlhood as one of agency and empowerment for the backfisch heroine. A girl leaves her familiar world behind, including her family, and ventures into a new community, with new contexts and relationships to explore. She usually finds another mentor outside of her childhood community, guidance on her path to womanhood. The backfisch girl learns self-control, and shapes and molds her community, often “into a loving family” (9). Most powerful of all, “she is participating in a long tradition of heroines who must rely on their own resources to decipher the truth of their situation” (9). Men, romance, and husbands are generally not part of the backfisch journey until the very end, and the focus is always on the girl’s adolescent development, experiences, and perspectives. Pfeiffer’s approach includes questions that girls’ lit/girlhood studies scholars ask repeatedly: how are we defining “girl” and “girlhood”? How did these texts/authors/publishers define it? Do these novels...