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 Anne K. Phillips (bio) Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence, by Julie Pfeiffer. UP of Mississippi, 2021. Drawing on her own reading history, her devotion to nineteenth-century girls' books, overseas research opportunities, and her affinity for German texts and German culture, Julie Pfeiffer offers an analysis of the "Backfisch" tradition of girls' books that will have broad appeal. While Backfisch books offer conventional endings and patriarchal, heterosexual constraints, they nonetheless delineate space within female adolescence where heroines may explore beyond their familial boundaries, benefit from the protection and wisdom of female mentors, and learn habits, skills, and conventions that will enable them to succeed in their adult lives. These books center and respect the adolescent girl, emphasizing the value of her coming-of-age process. Neither family stories nor orphan stories nor bildungsromane, Backfisch books "reveal another strand in the development of the girls' book, one in which girls are loved, protected, and expected to function independently of parents and siblings" (12). Pfeiffer focuses on eight novels published between 1853 and 1885, four German and four American, with Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl (1869), Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did (1872), and Johanna Spyri's Heidi (1880/1881) perhaps the most well-known by twenty-first-century readers. In them, she finds "a context from which we can recover understudied early novels for girls, novels that portray adolescence not as a space marked by hormonal distress and social alienation, but as a period that is solemn and significant" (43). In her first chapter, "Defining the Backfisch," Pfeiffer delineates the genre's protagonist. Drawing from G. Stanley Hall's reference to the Backfisch in his essay on "The Budding Girl" (1909) as someone who is "no longer a little girl, but by no means yet a young woman, … something quite unique and apart" (42), Pfeiffer finds it helpful to draw from German language and German conceits because English "lacked a popular and consistent term for female adolescence until the beginning of the twentieth century. German texts name both the adolescent girl [the Backfisch]… and her short but crucial period of development [the Backfischzeit], … calling our attention to a shared German-American generic structure in girls' fiction of the 1850s, '60s, '70s, and '80s" (43). The texts used to exemplify Pfeiffer's argument in [End Page 199] this chapter include two German novels, Clementine Helm's Gretchen's Joys and Sorrows (1877 translation of an 1863 text) and Eugenie Marlitt's Das Heideprinzesschen (1871), translated in 1872 as The Little Moorland Princess, along with two American novels, Elizabeth Prentiss's The Flower of the Family (1853) and Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Girl (1869). Pfeiffer sketches the way that the heroines in these texts are given opportunities to focus on development toward "a mature identity" (36). Pfeiffer must provide enough summary of these novels that are to varying degrees unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers to promote her argument. In some cases, more context would be welcome, and there could be more cohesiveness between chapters. And readers who do know the texts might want to quibble with Pfeiffer's readings. Might Alcott's Grandmother Shaw, for example, play more of a role as mentor than Pfeiffer acknowledges? Such responses indicate that Pfeiffer's argument is engaging and accessible, and that readers have the tools to be able to find their footing within the discussion. Chapter 2, "The Romance of Othermothering," "examines mothering as a communal enterprise, drawing on the Black feminist concept of 'othermothering' to explore how the Backfisch encounters support outside of the home" (36). These novels end in heterosexual marriage and motherhood, but prior to their conclusions, "the romantic focus is on relationships between women" and men "are peripheral or absent" (65, 66). Generally, mothers are also absent, placing the Backfisch under the care of nonbiological female mentors (66), a trait that Pfeiffer traces back to Sarah Fielding's The Governess (1749). The Backfisch's "emotional connections, her gift giving, and her sense of finding a place in the world," then, "are tied to relationships with other girls and women" (67...