Harriet the Spy at 50

I never read Harriet the Spy growing up.

I’m not sure exactly how that happened, although I have some theories. The books I remember reading for fun in the years leading up to adolescence tend to feature boys as protagonists: The Hardy Boys, of course, along with John D. Fitzgerald’s The Great Brain series, Keith Robertson’s Henry Reed quartet, and the Danny Dunn novels of Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams. Apart from Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and Beezus stories, I can’t remember any “girl-centric” pleasure reading from that period; the one Judy Blume book we were assigned in elementary school was Iggie’s House. A book about an 11-year-old girl filling her diary with uncensored observations of her classmates and neighbors wouldn’t have been on my radar.

My loss, as it turns out.

Harriet the Spy was the first novel by Louise Fitzhugh, originally published in 1964. Delacorte Press has just released a 50th anniversary edition that features short tribute essays by several authors, including Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, and Gregory Maguire. When it arrived in a batch of other new books, I decided to check out the opening pages on my subway ride home. That opening scene, where Harriet’s nanny, Ole Golly, takes her and her best friend Sport out to visit her mother in Far Rockaway, and then Mrs. Golly breaks down when it’s time for them all to go home? I was not expecting the novel to get that dark, that fast… and that, as though of you who actually read the novel when you were kids know, is only the beginning.

I mean, “PINKY WHITEHEAD HAS NOT CHANGED. PINKY WHITEHEAD WILL NEVER CHANGE”? That’s just bleak.
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20 March 2014 | read this |

Women in Uniform: Revolutionary & I Shall Be Near to You

It would be easy to read Revolutionary, a novel about a woman who disguises herself as a man and enlists as a soldier during the tail end of the Revolutionary War, through a trans prism—especially since the author, Alex Myers, has told The Daily Beast that his own experiences as a transgender person informed his understanding of the real-life Deborah Samson, “how she might have felt as she tried to pass, to belong to this group of men at West Point.”

Easy, but too simplistic. “I don’t think that Deborah was transgender,” Myers immediately clarified. “I wanted to be very cautious not to transpose my 21st century notions of transgender identity onto her late-18th century notions of sexuality.” Though Deborah becomes so deeply invested in her adopted identity as Robert Shurtliff—”Robert after a favorite uncle, Shurtliff a middle name come down through the generations”—that the novel’s close third-person narration begins referring to her as “he,” Robert never considers himself to be a man in a woman’s body. By living as a man, however, Robert comes to enjoy a freedom that simply isn’t available to an unmarried young woman in colonial Massachusetts. “How easily men could say no,” Deborah observes early in her military career, “how readily they did as they pleased.” And yet, Robert tells another character who discovers his secret much later, “perhaps if society treated women differently, I wouldn’t mind being a woman.”

(In the same way that he avoids defining Deborah/Robert’s gender identity in modern terms, Myers is careful in his portrayals of sexual identity. Though Deborah’s closest relationship back home, with a young woman named Jennie, is emotionally intense and physically intimate, it’s never portrayed as a lesbian relationship, nor does Robert imagine marriage to Jennie as a possibility.)
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24 February 2014 | read this |