Review: "A Little Princess", by Frances Hodgson Burnett

[x_los]

 “The Little Princess” is convinced that the climate of India is bad for children, despite the fact that an abundance of children obviously call the subcontinent home. The same writer opens “The Secret Garden” with a scene of mass epidemic death there, which treated as a matter of course apiece with the scenery. Per Aisha, “everyone in India is dead because that's just what India is like”. This is a recurring theme with varied textual presentations, but where it occurs it’s treated as quite a serious problem. “Martin Chuzzlewit” believes that the American midwest is similarly unhealthy, despite the area’s long settlement by Native Americans and current considerable population. “Treasure Island” thinks that the pirates won’t last a week encamped on the island before taking severely ill. There’s some discussion of a risk of malaria, but the onset of decay is almost instant: the night fog touches the pirates, and by morning they’re on the wane. It’s an almost science fictional conceit. The titular Treasure Island even has conifers (which does seem reasonable), despite what the cinematic imaginary of the story in adaptation had led me to believe: how much of a shock to the system can such a climate really be? What exactly are all these writers on about? 

Aisha, who specialises in post-colonial scholarship (and who, somehow, survived spending her early years in India), suggested a few probable causes. “One is obviously just racism: [the fact] that brown people are okay in these climates doesn't mean they're hospitable to real (white) people. But also, at least with India (I don't know as much about American colonialism, though probably there too), there's often a very determined attempt to live as Europeanly as possible (and I think that's exacerbated by fears of going native). So they do a bunch of stupid shit re: clothing and food that doesn't work in this climate, and then suffer for it. Though I also like the idea of hostile climate as a sort of manifestation of colonial guilt.”

For one thing, these are stories rather than historical records. Ailments afflict characters more as a matter of narrative convenience than as an accurate depiction of the consequences of white incursion into previously non-white space. Yet narrative events must, to a degree, feel plausible: these Victorian novelists and their readers brought a firm conception of extra-European climates as not just hostile but toxic, at least to white bodies, to their engagement with literature. 

Even so, this is a lot to simply invent out of whole-cloth. Were these writers drawing on actual experience? I feel they have to be fitting a theory to some form of data, potential preconceptions about the folly of leaving the mother country aside. Give or take a few poisonous snakes (a legit new one for you, if you’re British), what made American frontier settlements in “Martin Chuzzlewit” such a death trap in a temperate climate where dressing and living in a European manner would have been wholly appropriate? How the fuck do you manage to die due to the environment in like, Kansas? Seriously? Are we just talking about the struggle to build infrastructure for a new community? Is this a problem of sanitation? It’s bizarre that Dickens doesn’t raise similar objections to Australia, which arguably really is a landscape that wants people who don’t know what they’re doing dead. 

***

Frances Hodgson Burnett is a bizarre writer, intensely interested in class and empire but never quite interested enough to commit to the premises she herself chooses. She suggests that the problem with Sarah’s sudden fall from grace isn’t Sarah’s poverty, particularly, but that children go hungry, full stop. Yet throughout the book, Burnett remains fixated on Sarah’s inherent nobility, which she presents as a classed, raced quality. Even in the depths of her depravation, Sarah still thinks things like 'I suppose whoever comes to live in the attic opposite mine will only be an under-servant’. At this stage, Sarah herself is an under-servant. Wither this disdain? Acting like a princess can make you one, but in order to act like a princess, you have to know how to do so. Sarah’s is a “Prisoner of Zenda” level transformation, where you can pretend to be the King of Ruritania if you’re already an English noble—and in fact, already the king’s cousin. 

Nods to the general weal are undercut by Sarah’s dreamy recollections of how many servants she had back in India, a situation that Burnett never looks askance at in the way she does the internecine warfare of white classism. Aisha reminded me that similarly,  in “Secret Garden”,  “Mary's big problem is not understanding that servants in Yorkshire are real people, not like Indians, so you have to talk to them like they're human.” “Little Princess” is sometimes interested in Sarah’s being half-French, but never in her having lived her entire life up to this point in India (until suddenly and conveniently, she does speak rudimentary Hindustani).

When kindly strangers decorate Sarah’s bare attic room, the descriptions of the works indicate that what they have created is an Oriental fantasy. Given their descriptions and provenance the fabrics draping the surfaces are probably Indian textiles, though this is never explicitly stated. Some other furnishings and the general decorating style bolster this, but the narration is oddly coy on this point. You have to guess from the details. These are probably the sort of furnishings Sarah grew up with, and thus a source of comfort to her and the manifestation of an understanding and a connection between her and the giver. Yet for all this Sarah never asks herself, 'could my unknown benefactor be the Indian man I met, the only adult besides my tormentor who I've ever seen come into this attic?' You get the feeling that Sarah would have been disappointed if ‘the laskar’ himself had been the direct source of her life’s improvement rather than his employer, 'the Indian gentleman' (who is white). 

Burnett is, despite these points, quite skilled. She depicts the interior lives of her various strange, ‘old-fashioned’ children well. It'd be easy to dismiss her as twee, but you can't fully: she's smarter and weirder than that. There are moments when the book is reminiscent of “Jane Eyre”, and acquires some of its predecessor’s heft.

Frances Hodgson Burnett seems almost to know, at points, that she’s bitten off more class commentary than she can chew. She tries to force the book into a fairly conventional 'hot dog, I recover my fortune!!' shape that it no longer comfortably fits, complete with, because Burnett can’t neatly resurrect the dead, a replacement father. Like a Marvel movie, Burnett is obsessed with empire but either unable or unwilling to commit to a political project or even make any definitive comment on the subject—which is, of course, ultimately a political project in its own right. “Just accept the situation ¯\(ツ)/¯ .” Aisha felts this approach even risks becoming a Joseph Conrad affair, where "the situation is bad because it taints me, one of its beneficiaries”.

Comments

[kolleh]

I really loved your thoughts on the "evil airs" that seem to infect foreign countries in these stories! I do wonder if some of it was at all a real-life reflection of diseases they weren't prepared for. My friend's go-to example of the phenomenon Aisha is quoted mentioning is that apparently a set of British colonists in Australia literally starved to death because they refused to eat anything unfamiliar to them, or ask the clearly not-starving indigenous population where to get food.

My only exposure thus far to A Little Princess is a visual novel adaptation called A Little Lily Princess, which stated that it borrowed large amounts of the original text in its writing. I found it intensely charming, but it's clear from your review that it dialled back all the racist and classist aspects to the furthest extent it could while still preserving the gist of the story. (Something I had wondered about while playing it.) It probably helped that they also rewrote it as GL and that Sarah and Ermengarde's romance was heartstoppingly sweet and fluffy.