The second one was the next day, after I’d re-read some Anne.
May 25, 2009
But physical punishment or ‘correction’ has been morally unproblematic until very recently, some of you retort.
I don’t buy it. I’m at least very skeptical. I agree that it’s been widespread – but not that it’s been morally unproblematic. Of course it was morally unproblematic to some people, to many people, but I’m claiming that to a substantial minority it was not. (I’m talking about the 19th century onwards, if only because there’s so much more literature for children and about children starting then. I could talk about Hogarth on cruelty – but I won’t, for now.)
After writing about Anne of Green Gables from memory I started wondering…wasn’t there a subsidiary character, who did recommend beating? That neighbor? Didn’t she say at some point ‘You ought to beat that child, that’s what’? In other words wasn’t the issue made explicit at some point – didn’t Marilla have a choice, which she made, for our edification?
So I re-read the first half or so. (Don’t scorn; it’s a good book; sentimental, yes, but not too cloyingly so, though I skip most of Anne’s long speeches about the fairies in the glen and whatnot – I’m as bored by them as Marilla is.) Yes, there is. Rachel Lynde comes up to Green Gables to meet Anne, and promptly points out how skinny and homely and red-haired she is, at which Anne loses her temper and shouts at her; Marilla rebukes her and sends her to her room. Mrs Lynde says to Marilla, among other things, ‘You’ll have your own troubles with that child. But if you’ll take my advice – which I suppose you won’t do, although I’ve brought up ten children and buried two – you’ll do that “talking to” you mention with a fair-sized birch switch.’ After she leaves Marilla wonders what she should do. ‘And how was she to punish her? The amiable suggestion of the birch switch – to the efficiency of which all of Mrs Rachel’s own children could have borne smarting testimony – did not appeal to Marilla. She did not believe she could whip a child. No, some other method must be found to bring Anne to a proper realization of the enormity of her offence.’
Well…why couldn’t Marilla whip a child? Or why did she not believe she could? Because she found it morally problematic. She’s a very unbending character, who conceals her affection for Anne for a long time, yet she can’t whip a child. This is apparently plausible, and not unreasonable, and in fact subtly admirable, in a very popular children’s book published in 1908. It can’t have been an extremely eccentric attitude. It wasn’t universal, but it wasn’t freakish, either.
And after getting to know Mrs Lynde, a reader might doubt that she really thought beating a child with a switch was a necessary form of parental discipline. It’s just like her to advocate extreme measures that she’d never actually engage in herself (or believe that Marilla would undertake–she even says she supposes Marilla won’t do it).
Paddling disobedient children in schools I’ve seen far more of in old literature with kids, but it’s often played as being unfairly doled out if not outright cruel.
Oh that’s a good point. I hadn’t noticed that about Mrs Lynde – she successfully bullshitted me!
Also about schools.
OTOH, when I was in elementary school in the late ’60s in Arizona, every teacher was issued a wooden paddle. They weren’t often used, but they were used, even on me once.
In the Indian Schools, in the US and in Canada, where the aboriginal children were forcibly sent and imprisoned in, beatings and whippings were commonplace. These “schools” were run almost exclusively by Christian clergy, and the death rates for the unfortunate children were up to 60%. The last one in Canada closed in 1998; there were still almost 10,000 Native American children living in Indian boarding schools in 2007. The casualties continue in the form of violence, drug and intoxicant abuse, and incarceration. These children were *ruined*. In the name of Jesus, so that makes it okay, I suppose.
“there were still almost 10,000 Native American children living in Indian boarding schools in 2007”
*in the US O_O
” It’s just like her to advocate extreme measures that she’d never actually engage in herself (or believe that Marilla would undertake–she even says she supposes Marilla won’t do it).”
You’ve got to wonder about Bill Gothard (founder of the Quiverfull movement), unmarried and with no children of his own, telling other people to marry and have as many children as they can, and to beat them brutally. Sick joke gone horribly wrong?
Although–LM Montgomery DOES SAY that Mrs Lynd’s children had been switched. “The amiable suggestion of the birch switch – to the efficiency of which all of Mrs Rachel’s own children could have borne smarting testimony – did not appeal to Marilla.”
Don’t forget, though, Ophelia, that in another book when Anne has become a teacher, she ends up giving the cane to one of the Pye boys, in spite of all her ideals against it. He ends up respecting her because of it. Interesting complexity there, I guess.
My formative experience was in the Midwest in the late 60s and early 70s. The principal and asst. of our elementary school were the only ones who paddled people, but the principal, in particular, did it often. I doubt there were many students who weren’t paddled at least once — I was generally a good student, but I remember it happening twice, I think.
The most interesting side-note, though, is that the principal was just about the only black man I knew of in a factory town of Italians and Poles. Yet the racial issue of peoples’ kids being paddled by a black man never came up at all, to my knowledge.
Mrs. Lynde did switch her own children but she admits later to Marilla that she was right to not hit Anne.
Also, never apologize for reading Anne. Anne is a bit fanciful but the books have really stood up to the passage of time. I re-read the entire series in my soaker tub in a rented farm house in PEI last summer. Brilliant.