Transforming Girls

The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence

Julie Pfeiffer

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496836281
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls' book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls' book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl's essentially good nature neutralize the girl's own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls' book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur ), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls' book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.

• CHAPTER ONE •

Defining the Backfisch

It’s such a solemn thing to be almost fourteen, Marilla. Miss Stacy took all us girls who are in our teens down to the brook last Wednesday, and talked to us about it. She said we couldn’t be too careful what habits we formed and what ideals we acquired in our teens, because by the time we were twenty our characters would be developed and the foundation laid for our whole future life.

(ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, 1908, CHAPTER 30)

When Anne Shirley comes home from school one day to muse with Marilla, “It is such a solemn thing to be almost fourteen,” she seems a long distance from the child with a tear-stained face who arrived at Green Gables three years earlier. She is now valued for more than the work she provides; she has succeeded in making a place for herself in a family and in a community. Even more significantly, for the purposes of this chapter, Anne has the luxury of paying attention to herself as one of the “girls who are in our teens.”

A year after the publication of Anne of Green Gables, G. Stanley Hall published an essay in Appleton’s Magazine entitled “The Budding Girl.” He writes,

“Backfisch” is a colloquial German term for a girl in the very earliest teens, and I use it here because I know of none in English or any other language so expressive…. She is no longer a little girl, but by no means yet a young woman, nor is she a cross between or a mixture of the two, but a something quite unique and apart…. That is one reason why she is now the most intricate and baffling problem perhaps that science has ever yet attracted.

While Hall, like Miss Stacy, sees adolescent girlhood as worth acknowledging, he also sees it as a “baffling problem.” Hall’s assertion in 1909 that female adolescence was both a mystery and a “problem” reflected the perspective of scientists and politicians who saw the dual identity of unstable adolescence and hysterical femininity as a dangerous combination.¹ As I discuss in the introduction, his model of adolescence became the dominant one of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it shaped a paradigm of adolescence based on the expectation that teenaged girls are defined by their mysterious difference from adults and the conflict that difference constructs.

Many girls’ books of the time took a different perspective, portraying female adolescence not as perplexing difference but as a natural period of identity development; indeed, they suggest that girls have a right to a protected space for growth. While Anne of Green Gables begins as an orphan girl novel, by the time Miss Stacy takes Anne down to the brook she has repositioned herself as a valued member of her community. In its insistence on the girl’s own agency and ability to shape her life rationally and productively, Anne of Green Gables draws on earlier novels for adolescent girls as well as on stories of neglected children. These novels provide a space by the brook and between their covers that recognizes adolescence as perhaps the most important phase of a girl’s life, and they model how to make good use of that space. While these early girls’ novels are unlikely to be popular reading for contemporary girls, they do provide an alternate, less fraught vision of adolescent girlhood and encourage us to ask how the successful strategies offered to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century girl can be adapted to support twenty-first-century teenagers.

When Hall described female adolescence in his 1909 essay, he didn’t use the word adolescent, a word he introduced into public discourse in 1904 (Adolescence)—instead, curiously, he used the word backfisch. While Hall appeals to the German language to understand the category of female adolescence, I use this term as a point of entry into an important genre of girls’ fiction—books for adolescent girls published between 1853 and 1885. Starting with Clementine Helm’s 1863 novel Backfischen’s Leiden und Freuden (Gretchen’s Joys and Sorrows), the German adolescent girl had not only a word to describe her liminal state but also a literature to entertain and instruct her. American authors both recognized and wrote for their own adolescent girls as early as 1853, when Elizabeth Prentiss published The Flower of the Family, but the English language 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, or adolescent time), calling our attention to a shared German-American generic structure in girls’ fiction of the 1850s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

A German-American lens allows us to focus on the early novel for adolescent girls, in which mid-nineteenth-century authors in both countries acknowledged and created a space where the adolescent girl could be profitably uncomfortable and awkward, where she could make and learn from mistakes. Using popular examples of the genre from both countries, this chapter shows that both German Backfisch novels and their American counterparts highlight the ability of individual girls to engage in identity formation through the protection of a Backfischzeit. I argue that the term Backfisch provides 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.²

Also called Wandlungsgeschichte (transformation stories) by German-language critics, these novels acknowledge the confusion of this period in a girl’s life but redefine that confusion as a creative space. This liminal space is both physical—the girl moves to a new location, away from her childhood home—and psychological—she enters into a period of self-reflection, provoked both by her own sense that her life is shifting and by new expectations exerted by others. Away from the expectations of her family, which sees her as a child, she can refashion herself. The experience of coming into contact with new ways of being and new ideas opens up a wider variety of choices, allowing her the flexibility to shift her identity.

The Backfisch’s story is located in the space between her father’s house and her husband’s. She leaves home not because she must, but because she or her parents desire a different kind of life for her from what her parents’ home can provide. Unlike the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman, which moves from the childhood home through a brief period of independence to maturity (which for nineteenth-century women meant marriage and the confines of a husband’s home), these novels take as their focus an adolescent heroine. They are framed more narrowly than the Bildungsroman in that their focus is the hard work of adolescence, not the organic growth of an individual over a lifetime.³ Backfisch novels often introduce the girl’s loving family to make it clear that she is not an abandoned orphan. The girl goes on a carefully mentored journey that provides opportunities for growth and even transformation, and her successful completion of this journey is marked by the appearance of a suitor/husband.

This chapter examines four early novels for girls—two written in English and two in German—to explore the significance and value of adolescent identity formation in the Backfisch book. I use translations of two German Backfisch novels—Clementine Helm’s 1863 Backfischen’s Leiden und Freuden (translated by Helen M. Dunbar Slack in 1877 as Gretchen’s Joys and Sorrows) and Eugenie Marlitt’s 1871 Das Heideprinzeβchen (translated by Mrs. A. L. Wister in 1872 as The Little Moorland Princess)—to lay out the qualities and complexities of the genre. The chapter then moves to two American girls’ novels of the same period—Elizabeth Prentiss’s 1853 The Flower of the Family and Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 An Old-Fashioned Girl—to show how the pattern of the Backfisch novel appeared and developed in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Helm’s Gretchen’s Joys and Sorrows is the paradigmatic Backfisch book. It describes Gretchen, a sixteen-year-old girl and “poor little backfisch,” who leaves her loving family in the country to visit her aunt in the city of Berlin (8). First published in 1863, the novel has gone through thirty-five editions, with the most recent edition published in 1998. The novel was translated twice into English—the United States edition cited here and a British edition, A Miss in Her Teens, both initially published in 1877. Gretchen is a “simple country girl” who is “pretty” and “dark-eyed” (32, 36). Her biggest faults are carelessness and an “excessive desire to please” (33). While her aunt has no problem with her country clothes, she does want her to learn to keep her things neat, clean, and well mended. Gretchen is tall and seems not quite to have her limbs under control. Her awkwardness is both physical and psychological—she is unsure of how to play her role as young lady (versus child) and as city girl (versus country girl). She is also a “natural” child, a term that appears again and again in descriptions of the heroines of the earliest books for girls (46). Her naturalness emphasizes her innocence and lack of artifice but also causes her trouble, as when she forgets her handkerchief and is unprepared to deal with a runny nose.

As with most Backfisch heroines, Gretchen’s experience of the liminal space of adolescence is reflected in the literal transition of her journey from country to city, comfortable home to exciting society. Home was a place of simplicity, lack of correction, and familiarity. In Berlin, the spaces and people are foreign, and she is expected to follow different rules. The consequences for ignoring these rules are embarrassment, ridicule, unwanted attention, and shame; her excessive desire to please means she is horrified at every error. While her mortification aids her education, it is also a characteristic she needs to overcome. Gretchen needs to learn to move more cautiously through society and to be aware that her impulsive actions may be interpreted differently from what she intends. For example, after Gretchen receives an undesired proposal of marriage, her aunt scolds her, explaining that “many girls have fallen into coquetry simply because they were led by their thoughtlessness to say and do things which offend against the established rules of society” (38). Gretchen’s aunt sees her flirtation as unconscious error rather than as reflecting her developing sexuality. This attitude is typical of the Backfisch story, which defines the girl’s sexuality as something perceived by others.

Gretchen’s education and the novel as a whole focus on the importance of making good choices and becoming a responsible woman. Gretchen learns partly by negative example; her uncle made a poor choice of second wife, who is a misery to him and a barrier to his daughter’s proper education. Gretchen tells us, “His experience showed me what an important thing a proper education is, which nips in the bud all wrong and pernicious influences” (93). But unlike in earlier stories that frighten girls into good behavior, Gretchen and the reader also learn through her successes. Gretchen reflects, “I understood better and better how well for my intellectual development it was for me to spend a part of my youth with Aunt Ulrike, and the inexpressible love which she showed me, carried me more lightly through the thousand faults and mistakes against which I, poor backfischchen, had daily to struggle” (39). Moving to the city helps make Gretchen aware of her need for change. One of the essential qualities of the Backfisch story is that it acknowledges and values a Backfischzeit as both challenging, “die schwierige Backfischzeit” (“the difficult Backfisch time”), and rewarding. By leaving home and her everyday life, Gretchen can benefit from a protected period of education.

Gretchen’s new world is full of rules, and the key is for her to learn to balance her natural, artless character with education, which will teach her how to act with appropriate restraint. Her friend Marie tells her, “We must quite too often place our feelings under restraint when we are among others, and still keep a quiet face, while in our hearts we may be as sad or joyful as we will” (16). The goal is to guard one’s natural, emotional, loving heart behind a public persona of manners and restraint. Like Mrs. March from Alcott’s Little Women, who hides her anger so well that Jo is surprised to learn she feels it, Gretchen must learn to keep her anger and her joy to herself. Her childlike effusiveness is lovely, but unchecked, it will subject her to the disdain of better-educated people, suggest that she is in love when she is merely being polite, and leave her open to excessive familiarity from people (especially men) she does not know. Ultimately, Gretchen must be both loving and self-restrained, a child of nature and a woman of society. Once mastered, these combinations will make her both sexually attractive and suitable as a wife. Without her artless charm, no man would be attracted to her; without self-control (and clean gloves), no man would want to marry her.

The tension here is between attracting the right man and avoiding the wrong ones, and the text repeatedly stresses this lesson. Men make rude comments to her, follow her through the streets, and even chase her through the woods. According to the narrative, it is the responsibility of those around her to protect Gretchen by teaching her the rules that apply to ladies: she must shape her appearance to match her virtue so that she can take advantage of the protections offered “good” girls. The plot of this novel, like the plots of most Backfisch novels, ends with Gretchen’s marriage as a marker of her successful transformation into a young woman. Gretchen’s happiness depends not on changing her community or her future partner but in using her Backfischzeit to learn how to take her proper role in a larger world.

My second example is Marlitt’s The Little Moorland Princess, which was quickly translated into multiple English editions to huge acclaim. The novel focuses on the story of Lenore von Sassen, only daughter of a renowned scholar, and on her transformation from wild moorland child of seventeen to a loving, domestic bride who is not much older. Like Gretchen’s Joys and Sorrows, the novel is written in the first person from a point in the future and hints at an educational purpose. These texts are conduct books as well as entertaining stories, and the first-person narrative allows the reader to enter into the heroine’s emotional experience intimately.

We meet Lenore on her seventeenth birthday in the midst of a wild moorland scene, where we are introduced first to her “two small brown feet” standing in a stream and then to “two sunburnt hands” (4–5). Lenore describes herself in the third person and as part of the landscape. At this point, she is so much the natural child that it is hard to tell where nature ends and she begins; she comments, “I had grown up untrained and merry-hearted, like the willows

by the stream” (34). The premise of the novel, however, is that at this point—despite having reached the age of maturity—she has not actually grown up. For that she will need to be removed from this wild natural environment and sent to the city. This journey is instigated not by her age, but by her grandmother’s death (she has lived in the woods with her grandmother and her nurse, Ilse, since her mother’s death). Once the grandmother dies, Ilse decides that Lenore deserves a proper education and writes to tell the girl’s father that she is bringing Lenore to the city. Ilse is aware of what is lacking in Lenore, even if Lenore does not see it for herself, and insists on bringing the “child” to her father in the city:

Once for all, the child shall not run wild on the moor! Look at Lenore! She can hardly read; as for her writing,—Lord have mercy on us!—you should see what work she makes of it. She can climb trees, and peep into birds’ nests, but not a decent stitch can she sew, or knit a row upon a stocking; all I could do I never could teach her. (96)

While Ilse’s concern is with practical skills, the novel’s concern extends beyond these matters to moral ones: the ability to know whom to trust, how to speak with integrity, and how to make the choice of a mentor and a husband.

In the city, Lenore’s wildness becomes even more pronounced in contrast to the civilization around her. She is described (with racial overtones I discuss in chapter 4) as a “little black creature” with “dark elf-locks” (106). She is embarrassed by both her darkness and her clothing; in one passage, she tells us: “I looked down at my shoes, as they sprawled their clumsy proportions upon the gravel, and then I pulled at the skirt of my black dress, to lengthen it, if I might, by even a fraction of an inch” (89). In the city, her perspective changes—now the standard of behavior is not her comfort but the opinions of others, and those others clearly are both attracted to her wildness and amused by her lack of polish. Upon first interacting with a group of young people in the city, she laments, “If I had been standing in the pillory, my shy face could not have worked and flushed more painfully than it did, exposed to the fire of all those strange, curious eyes” (89). This sense of mortification pushes Lenore to consider herself in a new light, and at this point, she does not like what she sees. Dagobert Claudius, who had first seen her on the moor and who owns the city estate where her father lives and works, is surprised to see her in the city. Laughing, he exclaims to his friends: “The little moorland Princess I told you about!—the barefooted little creature that slipped through the heather like a lizard,—a lizard, to be sure, with the Princess’s crown!” (89). Transplanted from the moor where she reigned as “princess,” dressed up in her nurse’s idea of proper city clothes, with a black dress and heavy shoes, Lenore has regressed rather than progressed. However, the pain of these interactions starts her on a different path—one that suggests life in the city might actually be more than something to be endured.

Unusually for Backfisch novels, Lenore is not sent away from parents but to her father, whom she has not seen since she was three, when her mother died. While contact with her father begins her transformation, he in no way serves as a mentor for her. In fact, one of the challenges Lenore faces is that it is not immediately clear who is to teach her to be a woman. Many people might fill that role, but her first choices of models quickly prove to be inadequate and even detrimental to her education. In many ways, this novel is more complex than other Backfisch books.⁴ While it takes the basic plot of a Backfisch story—a brief period in the life of an adolescent girl, a journey from home, an education that results in marriage—it also addresses issues of race, class, and religion at more sophisticated levels than is typical of other examples of the genre.

While Gretchen’s task is t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One • Defining the Backfisch
• Chapter Two • The Romance of Othermothering
• Chapter Three • Converting Girls into Women
• Chapter Four • The Backfisch and Fantasies of Growth
• Chapter Five • The Homesick Heroine
• Conclusion • Loving Girls, Loving Growth
• Notes
• Works cited
• About the Author