only the lifelong challenge of acknowledging the reality of other people

August 29, 2016 2:03 AM

Nakul Krishna on the ethics & morality of Malory Towers.

Malory Towers was an early immersion for me in what the schoolmen call female subjectivity. The books threw me into a fictional world where being a girl was normal and fun. I’m not sure they converted me to feminism, exactly, but all that time spent with the idea of girls as agents certainly made it harder to see women as objects.

posted by terretu (22 comments total)

Thanks for this! I've not read Mallory Towers in ages, though I loved them as a kid. While a school boy I would often get quizzical looks for reading about girls schools (though to be fair the sort of person who thought that odd mostly found the idea reading for fun odd in and of itself).

I like the thought about the series not making one a feminist, but perhaps helping prime boys who read it as more willing to consider the subjectivity of girls.

I don't know that I'd relish reading the books now- would the midnight feasts and jolly hockey sticks patter now stick in my craw? I remember being uncomfortable with the treatment of a gypsy character (may have been St Clare's rather than Mallory Towers) and guessing that Blyton's little England view may grate even more now.
posted by Gratishades at 2:29 AM on August 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is beautiful, thank you so much.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:42 AM on August 29, 2016

Thanks, this is a very interesting essay. I don't always agree with it, but with Enid Blyton as unfashionable as she is these days, Krishna helps me understand my own struggle with the school stories as a child. I loved them, I was made uncomfortable by them, I longed to swim in that rock pool, I modelled my behaviour on the values they promoted (old fashioned concepts such as honour, never telling, etc).

This is an interesting passage:

Doubtless everything’s political. But it doesn’t follow, and it isn’t true, that politics is the measure of all things. Politics, like dust, is everywhere; but there are other things in the world, nicer things, and to attend to them we have to ignore the dust awhile. This is a kind of political view too, just one that puts politics in its place. The opinion pages of the newspapers are full of vulgarians who spend their days drawing up balance sheets for colonialism – railways on the one side, famines and massacres on the other – as if what we need is a moral bottom line to save us the trouble of telling the full, messy story. I reckon that one way for the ex-colonial to be post-colonial is to stop letting colonialism be the only measure of our attention. The thing is not to gawp, in admiration or horror or awkwardness, at that history, but to find ways of putting it to use.

As a Pakistani married to a Brit, how one thinks of colonialism is very much a living subject to me. Do I listen to my grandparents and their memories of humiliations which may never have happened to them personally, but form part of a national narrative? Or to self-congratulatory London dinner party conversations about women's rights and trains, and tut-tutting about Bradford ghettos? Neither side has dealt particularly well with our shared history; we barely accept that it's shared between equals.

Gratishades, are you think of the character of Carlotta? I think she was in St Clares. It made me uncomfortable too, because she was so clearly an other, and because she was always described as dark, which made like me, but she was also a wild animal to be civilised so much as she was capable of being.

Blyton's mixed-gender books were far more regressive than one would think from this essay, though. I never forgave Blyton for the one in which a young woman's ambition to earn her living was regarded with horror and the happy ending was that she came home and learned to bake.
posted by tavegyl at 3:09 AM on August 29, 2016 [10 favorites]

Politics, like dust, is everywhere; but there are other things in the world, nicer things, and to attend to them we have to ignore the dust awhile.

One could say the same about morality
posted by thelonius at 3:15 AM on August 29, 2016

tavegyl- that rings a bell (I thought it might have been "Roberta" but a quick google seems to have Roberta/Bobby as tom boy joker rather than an obvious "other" in Blyton's world).

The growth of myself as a reader and a person could probably be measured in my move from loving all Blyton, to realising that I had problems with almost her whole world. 'Fatty' Algernon moved from being a role model to a clipe with rich mates, the school books from an idyll to a class enemy...

That's not to say that Blyton has no place, and I loved many of her stories when I was young. I think the insular nature of the school books make the problems that Blyton had with "others" and modernity as a whole, less obvious in these series- as there is naturally less 'otherness' to rub up against, and within this narrow world Blyton seems a "good egg".
posted by Gratishades at 3:34 AM on August 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

While a school boy I would often get quizzical looks for reading about girls schools

I limited myself to reading my sisters copies in the privacy of my bedroom. No way was I ever going to be seen by anybody reading these things in public.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:02 AM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Georgie (Famous Five) and Bill from Mallory were my queer identity as a child. I had no clear conception of what gay or butch or anything much was except that there were girls who leaned out of windows breathless with excitement to see other girls ride horses into school, girls with boys' names and short hair and that it was possible to want to be both the girl in the window and the girl riding on the horse.

Then I went to an actual girls' boarding school years later. There was trifle and midnight raiding of the kitchen. And being sent to Coventry, although it wasn't called exactly that.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:16 AM on August 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Oh! And as a child, I had a memoir about a colonial Malay boarding school run for Eurasian and Chinese and other ethnic girls who had been English educated and were bundled off in the 1950s, just post-war, to a boarding school that was built along English lines but in the middle of the Malay peninsula jungle and taught by an assortment of missionaries, (in hindsight very drunk or ex-alcoholic) washed-up teachers and a few passionate advocates for girls' education, by a student who wrote with much affection and charm about her school days, making them a sort of Asian Mallory Towers.

I read it around the same time that I'd gotten the St Clair and the other school series, and it ended up blunting some of the racism in a weird way. Because the schools had truly existed, they weren't just an English Phantasy of fiction, but a template that people followed and did and parts of them had to have been awful, and yet - I knew some of the women who'd gone to those schools in the 1950s, my mother's older friends at church, and they reminisced about them too. Because boarding school is a class privilege, and they were fortunate to be wealthy enough to be well educated as Asian girls back then. The Blyton nostalgia is very strong here - her books are always in stock and most kids will read her by default because she's just taken for granted as what children read.

Damn, now I will have to try and hunt down that book again.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:26 AM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Darrell Waters. and Carlotta and gang.

Thanks for this post.
posted by infini at 6:23 AM on August 29, 2016

Malory Towers was a series (among many others) I grew up on. There was so much to like about this essay. There was something quite feminist about the Malory Towers series in particular, and I'm glad to see the writer attempt to dissect that a bit in the article. (trivia: Darrell, the female protagonist, was named after Enid Blyton's husband)
posted by aielen at 6:24 AM on August 29, 2016

This was wonderful to read -- I loved Malory Towers and St. Clare's (and, especially, The Famous Five) when I was a kid, but no one else that I know grew up with them, so it was a nice treat to read this essay. I definitely have issues with Enid Blyton's books now, but I will never forget how much they meant to me. (And I'll have to decide whether or not to share them with my daughters when they get old enough!)
posted by cider at 7:28 AM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Malory Towers is all about fitting in. The good girls are strong, athletic, sensible stalwarts of the British Empire, whereas the bad girls are evil, snitchy, weaklings. It is entirely appropriate for good girls to gang up on bad girls to emotionally (and sometimes physically) bully them till their lives are hell. Eventually, if lucky, the stupid weaklings will see the error of their ways. God save the Queen, the Towers, and the Empire!
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:36 AM on August 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Like calls to like, dear Gwendolyn!" is still a stock phrase in my family, decades after reading these books. Also, every time I hear about a baby with colic I wonder (sometimes aloud) if walking it round the paddock all night might be the solution.

Bookmarked for later!
posted by comealongpole at 11:03 AM on August 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I reread these books just about every year. Every year I take more issue with them, which is merely a demonstration of time and mental distance, but I love them all anyway. And In the Fifth is in fact the best one.
posted by Errant at 2:56 PM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

However our changing perceptions and worldview may judge her today, Enid Blyton played a role in our growing up, and in our reading habits.
posted by infini at 1:25 AM on August 30, 2016

It is entirely appropriate for good girls to gang up on bad girls to emotionally (and sometimes physically) bully them till their lives are hell.

Aw, that's not entirely fair. One way in which I still love Blyton -- and one way in which I find her school stories deeply soothing in a way a lot of other boarding-school Girl's Own material isn't -- is that the girls who are cruel, and these girls are always privileged, boastful and unkind, are ticked off by the majority. There's no majority Mean Girls group who is horrible to a powerless singular. The closest I can think of are the prefects, especially in St Clare's, who boss about Isabel and Pat, and these girls aren't nasty: they' re reinforcing the divide between leadership and new bugs. And that's affectionately done, rather than abusive.

It's why I find the character of Carlotta really interesting, because Carlotta is exotically Othered but also serves to be the girl who slaps the shit out of the cruel and nasty girls in a way that's subtly reinforced as the wrong thing to do but the right reaction. Carlotta's constantly slapping the rich girls. The other girls CAN'T fly into a fit and kick the shit out of them, but Carlotta is the sort of hand of God. The other girls are secretly satisfied, but have to tell her how it's not cricket anyway. Carlotta gets to be the reader's metaslap, and is also inherently British, in a way that, say, Claudine definitely is NOT. Carlotta is forgiving, roundly admired, and aware of her faults; the books celebrate her.

I remember there's basically a moment in Second Form at St Clare's when the exchange is basically:

CARLOTTA: I want to slap [MIRABEL/GLADYS/WHOEVER] until candy comes out
BOBBY: Ha ha ha, still slapping overprivileged twits, Carlotta, that's probably bad but God how we all enjoy you

Meanness never prospers in Blyton, and heavyhanded attempts at abusing other girls get slapped -- sometimes literally -- down immediately. And the slapping's obviously wrong, but the girls all understand where it came from.
posted by monster truck weekend at 6:01 AM on August 30, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yes. the OP framed it well, it was a lesson in ethics and what's not done or not cricket, as the case may be.
posted by infini at 2:37 AM on August 31, 2016

I'm not sure I read the Malory Towers books, but I recall the "Naughtiest Girl" ones and they sound similar-as you'd expect, of course. Has anyone read both and would like to comment?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:32 AM on August 31, 2016

If anybody is visiting Dorset and wants a swim in the Malory Towers sea pool, it's this one.
posted by tinkletown at 7:48 AM on August 31, 2016

Oh my gosh! The sea pool! Amanda and June! I used to re-read the whole series at the beginning of every new year of high school, and by the last two years I was a little bored but stuck with it anyway. What a world she built. Thanks for posting.
posted by trotzdem_kunst at 9:04 AM on August 31, 2016

Naughtiest Girl was more didactic and I remember thinking that they read like a schoolgirl's version of Pilgrim's Progress and that they got progressively duller and made being an adult seem like a dull dismal thing. Malory Towers was much more of a wide cast of different characters - she almost never wrote with a single heroine, although there might be a nominal focal - and she was much much insular in her childhood worlds than the Chalet or Naughtiest Girl series in comparisons. They had to deal with external events, families and teachers and so on beginning to treat the girls as young women as they grew up, while in Blyton, the schoolgirls are a quasi-separate community that exists alongside the adults around them.

(Separately - I note the nostalgia factor for adults looking back, but these books are still read widely by children NOW so they're not relics but active children's literature, and the ethics and so on in them should be IMO more actively engaged in rather than seen as an outgrown relic.)
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 9:04 AM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Okay I started reading these as a result of this post and I'm on the Fifth Form one now, and my simultaneous thoughts are:

1) Man, I wish I went to British boarding school.
2) No wonder the British had an empire.
3) No wonder the entire country needs therapy.

I wasn't so bothered by the bullying in the first couple books but as the girls get older and can't lay off Gwen it's bugging me more and more. I mean GEEZ just saying goodbye to your mother wrong lands you in the bad books!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:41 PM on September 12, 2016