Two Newbery Medal Winners and the Feminine Mystique: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years and Miss Hickory

Abstract

Two Newbery Medal Winners and the Feminine Mystique:Hitty, Her First Hundred Years and Miss Hickory* Lois R. Kuznets (bio) Through the decades the authors of Newbery and Caldecott books have consciously, and perhaps sometimes unconsciously, revealed the concerns, manners and attitudes of the society in which they lived. This is true not only of realistic fiction, but of other genres as well, especially historical fiction and fantasy. As a consequence the books are interesting as documents of social history as well as literature for children. (Peterson and Solt 10) In the mid-twentieth century, two doll stories won Newbery Medals seventeen years apart: Rachel Field's Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in 1930 and Carolyn Sherwin Bailey's Miss Hickory in 1947. As well as doll fantasy, the first text can be considered historical fiction in the form of a personal memoir of American experience through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the second, while also a doll fantasy, seems ahistorical—set in a universal, seasonal time in rural New England; it also partakes, to some extent, of the Robinsonade—the tale of survival in the wilderness. What follows in this essay should be dubbed feminist analysis: I examine the nature and tradition of doll stories in general while comparing these two doll narratives in terms of both form and cultural history, actively responding to what I read in each text. At the ChLA Conference in San Diego in 1990, Valerie Cretaux presented a paper entitled "Beyond Gender Role Model Stereotyping: The Fate of Girls and Dolls in Nineteenth-Century France." She demonstrated that what Victor Hugo's narrator in Les Misérables says about little girls' [End Page 1] treating dolls as models of future babies is not confirmed by what the text shows about little girls and dolls.1 Cosette, the child, first cuddles a sword, and then treats her gift doll as a mother figure and a powerful female role model in a struggle not to conform to the passive feminine and benignly maternal stereo-archetype that both Jean Valjean, the doll giver, and the narrator seem to posit. In the same paper, Cretaux demonstrates that another nineteenth-century writer, Sophie de Ségur (1799-1874), writing specifically for children in her Les Malheurs de Sophie, shows the girl child to have aggressively hostile feelings toward her doll, which here takes the baby role, only to be mutilated and destroyed beyond repair; dolly's demise is celebrated in a grand and joyous funeral. The mutilated doll lying in state and then buried gaily contrasts well, as Cretaux points out, with that archetypal image of female life-in-death and sexual resurrection: intact Snow White waiting in her glass coffin for the prince's kiss. In the mid-nineteenth century, Juliana Ewing's mother, Mrs. Alfred Gatty, published a doll memoir, Aunt Sally's Life, which depicts multiple unsentimental doll burials along with multiple mutilations, all in the life of one doll.2 And familiar doll scenes from nineteenth-century British books not specifically for children, Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss, like their French counterparts, depict the idiosyncratic ways in which girls and dolls interact. Abused Jane Eyre treats her doll as a consolatory object and pampers it as no one pampers Jane, but rebellious Maggie Tulliver alternately babies and abuses her doll. Even more clearly, Frances Hodgson Burnett, in her autobiography, The One I Knew the Best of All, shows what a rebellious and creative little female can do with a doll and a plot line. Her doll played the heroine roles in a number of dramas taken from received texts and Burnett's own imagination while Burnett herself played all the hero and villain roles. The doll certainly learned to conform to the image of the culturally approved female in literature; whether her young mistress did the same is questionable. So, as Naomi Lewis notes also in introducing The Silent Playmate, "the doll and child relationship is not as simple and crude as the nondoll-liker desires to think. Make no mistake—unless this happens to be the play of the moment . . . the child is not the parent of the doll...