power, language, and literacy in the great gilly hopkins

Power, Language, and Literacy in The Great GillyHopkins

Sue Ann Cairns

Published online: 3 February 2007� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract To compensate for her feelings of anger and helplessness over her mother’sabandonment and subsequent displacements, the foster child Gilly Hopkins seeks powerand agency through the primary means at her disposal: through the use of language andfairy tales. She constructs a Cinderella fantasy of an idealized mother who will rescueher. She also resonates strongly with the Rumpelstiltskin story, as it is a story about thepower of language, and highlights a dynamic of exploitation that seems familiar to her.Through relationships with William Ernest, Trotter, Mr. Randolph, and Miss Harris,Gillie learns, however, to move beyond the habit of exploiting others as objects, and toexperience the beauty of language for its own sake. Her emotional and psychologicaldevelopment can be charted through her changing relationship to the imaginative andexpressive potentialities of language. Most importantly, literacy becomes not a basis forillusory control and manipulative power, but for the kind of human relationships thatmake possible the building of a self. Language becomes a rich inner resource, not simplya means for power over others.

Keywords Power � Language � Fairy tale � Rumpelstiltskin �Literacy

Introduction

It seems ironic that Katherine Paterson’s achingly honest, multiple award-winningchildren’s books such as Bridge to Terabithia or The Great Gilly Hopkins would bebanned in some school districts for having inappropriate themes, values, or language forchildren. While The Great Gilly Hopkins, which portrays a foster child’s emotional

S. A. CairnsKwantlen University College, Surrey, BC, Canada

S. A. Cairns (&)30 Wagon Wheel Cr., R. R. 13, Langley, BC, CanadaV2Z 2R1e-mail: [email protected]

Children’s Literature in Education (2008) 39:9–19DOI 10.1007/s10583-006-9038-9

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responses to her sense of displacement and abandonment, has been frequentlychallenged for its use of ‘‘offensive language,’’ its supposedly ‘‘unwholesome values,’’and its presumed prejudice toward women, blacks, or religion (Russell, p. 183), thoseconcerned with the teaching of values should note the way in which the book highlights‘‘the virtues of compassion, honesty, integrity, and responsibility’’ without preaching(Russell, p. 185).This book in particular ‘‘strikes a chord with students’’ (Russell,p. 184), especially reluctant readers. Paterson describes ‘‘a real-live Gilly’’ who wasdrawn to her fictional one (1981, p. 15); an educational mentor and consultant inVirginia reported that many ‘‘at-risk’’ seventh and eighth graders ‘‘said they couldn’t getGilly out of their minds and dreams’’ (Robb, p. 374).

Gilly is angry, mean, prejudiced, and manipulative. She is also vulnerable, capable ofgenerosity, growth, and love. She is, in short, a complex, multi-dimensional character.

Paterson, as she says herself, is not ‘‘sentimental about children’’ (2001, p. 67) but isconcerned with helping children find meaning by telling the truth, however unsettling:‘‘My books give kids permission to have real feelings instead of the false feelings peopletry to impose on them’’ (p. 68). The ‘‘truth’’ she tells allows for a range of emotions andbehaviors in her child-protagonist, including rage, jealousy, vindictiveness, and deceit.Gilly’s occasional profanities, which one might assume to be unobjectionable by thestandards of this decade, help to convey the authenticity of Gilly’s character andcircumstances. Paterson mentions a social worker’s insight that her abused child clients‘‘recognize their kinship’’ with Gilly even though Gilly’s life is ostensibly easier thantheirs; ‘‘a drop or two’’ of perfume essence is enough to evoke the aroma they recognize(2001, p. 59). Even those children whose lives are easier than Gilly’s may recognizekinship with a character who feels anger at adult betrayals and rejections, who fantasizesrescue or escape, and who struggles for power with the only means she has at herdisposal.

The Power of Manipulation

For Gilly who has no father and who has been abandoned by her mother, who hasmoved from foster home to foster home, and who is now, at eleven, at a less lovable agethan when she was younger, there are few ways to obtain power and agency. In order tofeel a sense of control, Gilly uses her intelligence, particularly with language, to scan herenvironment and search out others’ weaknesses. As the psychologist Alfred Adlerfamously taught, a misbehaving child is a discouraged child who seeks power tocompensate for feelings of powerlessness. A child who has been treated as disposablemay learn to see others as disposable also. When we first meet Gilly in Paterson’s novel,she displays a longing for the compensatory power of negative attention. She is deeplyinterested in being in charge in her new home (p. 7) and in power over people: Trotter,the adults and children in her new school, William E., and Agnes. Like someone bentupon basic survival needs, Gilly sizes up her opportunities for acquiring powerimmediately upon arrival in the Trotter household. She appreciates almost at once thatTrotter’s weakness is the boy William E. and that ‘‘power over the boy was sure to bepower over Trotter in the long run’’ (p. 17). She understands subtle tricks of gettingpower, such as the one she uses on the principal, staring at him without looking awayfirst (p. 29). She has also figured out that part of her power comes from keeping peopleoff guard, never knowing what to expect (p. 30). The power Gilly seeks over others is away for her to defend herself from her own vulnerability.

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Given that her own mother has gained magical power over Gilly by giving her onlythe scantiest information—a postcard of very few words and an almost indecipherableaddress—it is not surprising that Gilly at times seeks power by communicating only theabsolute minimum when it suits her to do so. Gilly imitates her withholding mother bywithholding language when she first arrives at Trotter’s household. Not speaking whenexpected to do so is an effective way for children to exercise power by frustrating adults,who can become childish in their rage. Consider, for example, the withdrawn youngadult narrator character in Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak. In a schoolconference, the voices exhorting the teen-ager to speak sound cacophonous:

‘Why won’t you say anything?’ ‘For the love of God, open your mouth!’ ‘This ischildish, Melinda.’ ‘Say something.’ ‘You are only hurting yourself by refusing tocooperate.’ ‘I don’t know why she’s doing this to us.’ (1999, p. 114)

While Gilly withholds meaningful response when her new foster mother tries to engageher in communication (p. 8), Trotter knows how to deflect power struggles and does notget drafted into the expected tantrum of frustration. Trotter can even be silent herself,as she is when Gilly comes to breakfast with her hair in a state of disaster. Gilly wants areaction, but Trotter does not rise to the bait. Enraged by Trotter’s calm non-reaction,Gilly feels ‘‘like an over-sharpened pencil’’ as she begins to realize that Trotter will notbe so easy to manipulate (p. 22).

It is likely that the anger Gilly shows toward adults, including Trotter and Miss Harrisas well the less sympathetic figures of Miss Ellis or the principal, is displaced from theoriginal anger at her mother Courtney for abandoning her. She cannot express angertoward the mother, not only because she is not present physically or emotionally, buteven more because the idealized mother of Gilly’s fantasy is too precious, and toofragile, to survive Gilly’s aggressiveness. Grief, which often manifests for Gilly as anger,is sustained, Judith Butler tells us, through the ‘‘prohibition against expressingaggression toward what is lost—in part because that lost one has abandoned us, andin the sacralization of the object, we exclude the possibility of raging against thatabandonment’’ (1997, pp. 162–3). Also, since Courtney is still alive, Gilly must wall offher anger toward her in the hope that the strength of her yearning might somehow willthe absent fantasy mother into presence. As she tries to push away the pain she has overher mother’s abandonment of her (p. 11) as well as subsequent rejections in other fosterhomes, Gilly displaces her anger at the rejecting mother onto more available adults.

Using Fairy Tales to Construct a Narrative Identity

A child as traumatized as Gilly finds it hugely difficult to map a personal identitynarrative that will help her make sense of herself to herself. As the Canadian criticDennis Sumara suggests, developing a coherent sense of self depends, to some extent,on some continuity in one’s personal narrative: ‘‘Maintaining a coherent sense of self,paradoxically, is not so much of project of self attention but, rather one of attending tothe many relations on which an ongoing sense of self depend. A sense of self, then,emerges as much from what is imagined as it does from what is understood as ‘real’’’(Sumara, 2002, p. 25). Gilly has also fortified herself against her very real losses throughmagical thinking borrowed primarily from fairy tales. This imagined power helpsher stitch together disconnected experiences and losses, but it also clouds her view ofreality.

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The fairy tale intertexts from which Gilly draws include Gilly’s reference to herself asa ‘‘child-eating giant’’ as in ‘‘Jack and the Beanstalk’’ (p. 33); the forbidden door in‘‘Bluebeard’’ (p. 139); ‘‘The Three Little Pigs’’ (p. 141); and transformation into theswan rather than the ugly duckling. She also refers to Cap O’ Rushes, Snow White(p. 149), and, of course, the Cinderella story. She dreams that her mother, envisioned asa kind of fairy godmother, will rescue her from her life with Trotter, and unmask Gilly’strue identity as the ‘‘beautiful Galadriel’’—the name of the queen in Tolkien’s greatfantasy of Middle-earth (p. 18). Since Gilly’s frame of reference includes muchexperience in the state welfare bureaucracy as well as fairy tales, her Cinderella rescuefantasy is conflated with a more legalistic one of her mother advocating for her by suingcounty welfare. Here Courtney is imagined not as ‘‘Mother’’ but as ‘‘CourtneyRutherford Hopkins’’ (p. 18), the three, official-sounding names perhaps connoting thestatus, power, and membership in a tribe sorely missing in Gilly’s life.

As psychologist Howard Gardner claims, learning is about changing our mentalrepresentations, sometimes referred to as the language of thought, or schemas, orimages. To mature, Gilly will have to surrender the fantasies that have sustained herthrough her experiences of dislocation. The cherished story of her mother, ‘‘sweeping inlike a goddess queen, reclaiming the long-lost princess’’ (p. 138), will be overturnedwhen the ‘rescuer’ who comes to the door later is no fairy godmother, but a ‘‘dumpy,old-fashioned’’ lady (p. 138), who claims to be Courtney’s mother (p. 136). Theanchoring points that fairy tales have provided will need to be loosened or replaced intime, as Gilly’s personal narrative of identity is revised.

Perhaps because Gilly’s primary means of achieving power and agency is through theuse, or withholding, of language, the fairy tale intertext that is ‘‘most prominent’’(Nikolajeva, 2002, p. 36) is Rumpelstiltskin. This story demonstrates the magical powerof language, as well as the dynamic of human expedience which has permeated Gilly’syoung life: use of others until they become inconvenient, disposable.

Rumpelstiltskin, we recall, was the small figure in the Grimm’s fairy tale who hadmagical powers to help the miller’s daughter spin straw into gold. However, thisassistance comes with a price—he extorts a promise from the miller’s daughter that shewould give up her child later if he would help her now. When the time comes tosurrender the child, the miller’s daughter, now a queen, balks, and Rumpelstiltskin saysthat he will let her keep her child if she can guess his name in three days.

The first two days she is unsuccessful, but on the third day, one of her messengersoverhears him dancing delightedly by himself and gloating that no one knows his nameRumpelstiltskin. Suddenly, she acquires power over the one who had power over her.The miller’s daughter has been exploited for her use value by her father, who had liedabout her spinning abilities in order to enhance his status. She has also been exploitedby her husband the king, who used her productive abilities to enrich himself. Now thelittle man Rumpelstiltskin intends to exploit her dependence on him by taking her child.But the queen’s knowledge of Rumpelstiltskin’s name means that power relations areinverted.1

1 Interestingly, while Rumpelstiltskin names the miller’s daughter as ‘‘Mistress Miller’’ when he firstapproaches her, once she becomes queen, she is never addressed by name (Hallett & Barbara, 2002,p. 179). While it is true that most fairy tale characters have generic epithets, we might speculate that in astory highlighting the power of naming, the queen’s lack of a name implicitly protects her from beingtricked by Rumpelstiltskin.

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The Power of Naming

As Katherine Paterson remarked in a 1979 lecture entitled ‘‘Words,’’ the knowledge ofsomeone’s name traditionally confers ‘‘a certain power over him’’ (p. 10). We may recallhow Odysseus was careful not to reveal his name to the Cyclops until he was safely outat sea, or how we ourselves may avoid giving our names to telemarketers. Uttering thename of Rumpelstiltskin gives the queen a magical power long associated with the act ofnaming. As the God of Genesis calls the world into being through the power of fiat, thequeen’s use of the word Rumpelstiltskin gives her a deliciously destructive power that isthe obverse of the creative power of language to call things into being. WhenRumpelstiltskin comes expecting to collect the child, the unnamed queen plays with thepower of her knowledge, teasing him, delaying the pleasure of announcing the namethat will cause Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two.

The image of a little man tearing himself in two is an odd one, but somehow weaccept that Rumpelstiltskin is a kind of figment of the woman’s imagination: aprojection, something that is signified by language, and when that language is uttered,the thing itself loses its potency. Just as Alice’s outburst in Wonderland that thethreatening and capricious King, Queen, and jury are ‘‘nothing but a pack of cards!’’dissolves their power over her (Carroll, 1998, p. 108), so the former miller’s daughter actof naming robs Rumpelstiltskin of projected power, revealing him as simultaneouslyreal and unreal, like a page in a book.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, Gilly understands that the knowledge of names confers power.The name ‘‘Gilly’’ works for her everyday self-representation as a manipulative fosterchild who can outmaneuver adults, but the name ‘‘Galadriel’’ is a source of secret,magical power. While Gilly is coupled with the adjective ‘‘gruesome,’’ the nameGaladriel is paired with adjectives such as ‘‘great’’ and ‘‘beautiful.’’ On her way to hernew foster family, she tells herself that ‘‘nobody wants to tangle with the great GaladrielHopkins. I am too clever and too hard to manage. Gruesome Gilly, they call me’’ (p. 4).Gilly has the power to irritate, but Galadriel has the power to awe. Her mother gave herthis name and addressed her by this name in the one photograph which Gilly carrieswith her: ‘‘For my beautiful Galadriel, I will always love you’’ (p. 10). This tantalizingbut empty promise of love is the basis for her idealizing fantasy of a beautiful womanwho will come to transform her ‘‘from gruesome Gilly into gorgeous, gracious, good,glorious Galadriel’’ (p. 36).

Gilly is understandably confused about the identity of ‘‘Galadriel,’’ but theslipperiness of this identity makes it perhaps even more important for her to keep itinviolable. If she can conjure Galadriel into her imagination, she can re-invent herself asher mother’s cherished daughter, not simply as an intractable foster child. She sensesthat she must control her name’s value, deciding when and how and by whom it can beused. With the social worker, she had used her real name as a trump card: ‘‘‘My name,’Gilly said between her teeth, ‘is Galadriel’’’ (p. 3). When she first meets Mrs. Trotter,she hugs her name to herself like a magical sign of superiority: ‘‘‘Galadriel,’ mutteredGilly, not that she expected this bale of blubber to manage her real name’’ (p. 4). In hernew home, she defends herself fiercely against Mrs. Trotter’s empathy, finding a secretsolace in writing the name ‘‘Ms. Galadriel Hopkins’’ in ‘‘huge cursive curlicues’’ in thedust on the dresser as soon as she is left alone (p. 9), and yet, when Trotter uses hername, she is ashamed and angry. She sees the principal’s comment that Gilly was ‘‘a finename’’ as a sign that she will be ‘‘surrounded by fools’’ at school (p. 23), and yet, when

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the new teacher Miss Harris tells her that her real name, Galadriel, is the ‘‘name of agreat queen in a book by Tolkien,’’ and asks if she can use the name, Gilly emphaticallydenies her this privilege (p. 25). If Miss Harris uses the name Galadriel, the name thatGilly’s birth mother gave her, Miss Harris would have the power to call another personainto being: that power rightly belongs to Gilly, and by extension, to the mother of herimagination. In addition, knowing the origins of her name gives Miss Harris aknowledge-based power that leaves Gilly disoriented and flustered: ‘‘Hell. No one hadever told her that her name came from a book. Should she pretend she knew all about itor play dumb?’’ (p. 25). Accustomed as she is to running rings around teachers, Gillyseems particularly disturbed to realize that Miss Harris, a black woman, possesses thissuperior knowledge or ‘‘cultural capital,’’ a term that sociologist Pierre Bourdieu uses inmore than one way, but which includes ‘‘verbal facility, general cultural awareness,aesthetic preferences, information about the school system, and educational creden-tials’’ (Swartz, 1997, p. 75). When the name Galadriel, and its etiology, are exposed tothe light of common day, its talismanic magic is compromised.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, Gilly would control the value of her name. When anunattractive child at her new school makes an overture to her, Gilly feels threatened,seeing her as the dwarf Rumpelstiltskin: ‘‘For a moment Gilly was reminded of the storyof Rumpelstiltskin. Like that little creature, this girl had power over her. She knew whoGilly was, but Gilly didn’t know who she was’’ (p. 31). She recognizes that she must beon her guard against someone who knows her name, who seems so unnaturally friendly,and who clearly must have a hidden agenda: ‘‘Rumpelstiltskin were always aftersomething’’ (p. 32).

The Power of Trickery

Like the queen, Gilly can seize an opportunity to use another. Seeing Agnes asRumpelstiltskin, Gilly remembers that ‘‘the queen had used Rumpelstiltskin, hadn’tshe? Agnes might come in handy some day. The trick was in knowing how to dispose ofpeople when you were through with them, and Gilly had plenty of practice inperforming that trick’’ (p. 51). However, after trying to use William E. and Agnes tohelp her steal money to get to California, Gilly, like the queen, later realizes that usingothers for one’s immediate advantage is more costly than it first appears to be (p. 78).

Manipulating teachers and staff through unpredictable behavior at her former schoolhad given Gilly perverse satisfaction. Her ‘‘time-honored trick’’ had been to ‘‘stopworking just when the teacher had become convinced she had a bloody genius on herhands’’ (p. 63). In the past, Gilly’s difficult behavior had ‘‘forced her teachers to make aspecial case of her’’ so that she felt ‘‘in charge of her own education’’ (p. 65), but MissHarris, a black woman who has no doubt endured much in a racist society, has too muchinner authority to dance attendance on Gilly in this way. She seems removed, impartial,‘‘a flawless tamperproof machine’’ (p. 66), who will not be flummoxed by a blank sheetof paper.

Television gives Gilly the way to gain a cruel power over Miss Harris. After hearingon the news that someone has been fired for making a racist joke, she uses her creativityto inflict pain. She cuts out a picture of a beautiful black woman, and on the insidecomposes a riddling rhyme:

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THEY’RE SAYING ‘BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL’BUT THE BEST THAT I CAN FIGGERIS EVERYONE WHO’S SAYING SOLOOKS MIGHTY LIKE A....PERSON WITH A VESTED INTEREST INMAINTAINING THIS POINT OF VIEW.

The visual pun caused by the mis-spelled word ‘‘figger’’ is so sophisticated that a studentin my university-level Children’s Literature class was puzzled by what seemed to her acharacter inconsistency. She asked why a girl who could use a phrase such as ‘‘vestedinterest’’ would not be able to spell ‘‘figure’’ correctly. I had assumed that theincomplete rhyme, which causes the reader to collude in the so-called joke byautomatically, silently, filling in the absent word ‘‘nigger’’ was so obvious it needed nogloss.

Despite her anger, Miss Harris does not give Gilly the power of reducing her adultauthority and dignity. Recognizing that she and Gilly share a deep anger, she is able toavoid retaliation, and even find a teaching opportunity through this painful incident.Following Judith Butler, I might even argue that Miss Harris’ ‘‘thank you’’ to Gilly isbased on the realization that being called an ‘‘injurious name’’ holds out a paradoxicalpossibility:

The injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may alsoproduce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to beinterpellated, then the offense runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech [inGilly’s case, through writing] who comes to use language to counter the offensivecall. (1997, p. 12)

Miss Harris’ use of language in this difficult context is brilliant. She recognizes Gilly’s angeras well as her own, and she names it. She discloses her anger in order to disclose herself as asubject who can be hurt, not as an object to be used for a trickster’s entertainment. She alsomodels a way to work through one’s rage and pain without harming others by revealingthat she has had a cathartic experience of creative cursing (p. 70).

The Power of Literacy

For a child as driven by the need for status and power as Gilly, even reading literaturebecomes a scorecard for the game that involves winning and losing. When she readsfrom the Oxford Book of English Verse to Mr. Randolph and Trotter, she is at firstpleased by her ability to ‘‘do something that none of the rest of them could’’ (p. 43),then easily frustrated when she encounters unfamiliar Middle English and suspiciousthat they are trying to ‘‘make a fool’’ of her (p. 44). She is a good reader, but anypleasure she has in reading is contaminated by her early experiences of shame in school(p. 47). Gilly remembers that when she was not able to read at grade level, she setherself the task of improving her reading so that she excelled. But her excellent readingability also became a source of shame when the teacher said she could not afford specialtime for Gilly to read independently.

It is interesting to observe that Gilly’s first experience of the pleasures of language forits own sake, not for the sake of status or power, occurs in a social, emotional contextremoved from school. Although Wordsworth, whose poetry is regularly anthologized, is

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a canonical poet if there ever was one,2 the social context in which Gilly experiencesaesthetic pleasure through hearing and speaking his poetry does not reproduce theunequal social relations of the school. In a rare moment of belongingness withMr. Randolph, Trotter, and William E. united in their common attention, Gillyexperiences, at least for a moment, a new way to experience language as she readsWordsworth aloud: ‘‘The music of the words rolled up and burst across Gilly like wavesacross the beach’’ (p. 44). Appreciating the musicality of Wordsworth’s poetry opensGilly to an aesthetic experience that is a ‘‘composite pleasure’’ (Guillory, 1993, p. 336),as it is mediated through Mr. Randolph, and through the rare experience of being,briefly, a member of a tribe. This small tribe includes a person of color who also has aphysical disability; two children, one of whom has an intellectual disability; and arelatively uneducated working-class woman who does not appear to possess much of the‘‘cultural capital’’ that John Guillory, following Bourdieu, describes. As Patersoncomments, ‘‘The ice that has long encased her heart begins to melt on her firstencounter with the warm liquid beauty of Wordsworth’s poetry’’ (2001, p. 97). It isperhaps a tad ironic that it is an adult’s happiness on hearing a poem about the glories ofchildhood that indirectly teaches her, child though she is, to have intimations of theaesthetic pleasures possible through language.

Unsurprisingly, Gilly immediately finds it necessary to defend herself against thismoment of softness, against admitting she has been touched by the beauty of the language.Betraying her own sensibility, she calls Wordsworth ‘‘stupid’’ (p. 47), elaborating that aflower could not ‘‘mean’’ or ‘‘blow’’ (p. 48). However, instead of taking offense, the blindman explains that ‘‘mean’’ here simply refers to a lowly station, and a flower can indeedblow; and as William, the child to whom she feels intellectually superior, points out, adandelion blows. When Gilly rushes from the room, taking the money that she has stolenfrom Mr. Randolph, she regresses by retreating into the fantasy of her idealized mother.However, she is already assimilating a fragment of Wordsworth’s poetry as her fantasy ofan idealized reunion with her mother is slightly reframed: ‘‘‘I’m coming, Courtney,’ shewhispered. ‘Trailing clouds of glory as I come’’’ (p. 49).

The money which Gilly steals from Mr. Randolph, ironically lodged in a book, givesher the impetus to test her cherished fantasy in the realm of action. She writes an S.O.S.letter to the fantasy mother whom she addresses formally and deferentially:

I am sorry to bother you with my problems, but as my real mother, I feel you havea right to know about your daughter’s situation.At the present time, it is very desperate, or I would not bother you. The fostermother is a religious fanatic. Besides that she can hardly read and write and has avery dirty house and weird friends (p. 92).

Although she begins and ends the letter in the first person, she also speaks of herselfstrangely in the third person, referring to ‘‘your daughter’s situation,’’ as if she hadsomehow appropriated the style of social workers’ official discourse. The repetition of

2 John Guillory complicates our understanding of ‘‘canonicity’’ by demonstrating that it is an imaginaryconstruct, subject to ongoing revision and expansion, as more modern works, often by women or bypersons of color, tend to displace older works. Guillory points out that while ‘‘gender, class, and race’’are often conflated, class is the marker which tends to get repressed in a pluralistic democracy.Interestingly, none of the four people participating in the performance of the quintessentially canonicalWordsworth here belong to the dominant class. Thus this small grouping may be said to embodyGuillory’s hopefulness that so-called ‘‘canon formation’’ might become ‘‘a much larger part of social life,because not restricted to the institutions of the materially advantaged’’ (p. 339).

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the statement that she does not want to ‘‘bother’’ her mother and her promise ‘‘not to bea burden...in any way’’ (p. 93) reveal her fear of rejection. There is a striking dissonancebetween the formality of her discourse style here (e.g., ‘‘at the present time’’) and thesimplicity of the naked yearning shown in her earlier, fantasized address to Courtney: ‘‘IfI wrote you—if I asked, would you come and get me? You’re the only one in the world Ineed. I’d be good for you. You’d see, I’d change into a whole new person’’ (p. 36).

After exposing this desperate fantasy to reality by sending off the letter, she isstricken when the letter produces, not a ‘‘fairy godmother’’ (p. 130) or ‘‘a goddess’’ whoexisted ‘‘in perpetual perfection’’ (p. 131) but an unexpected visit from a gray-haired,dumpy grandmother—a stranger who had come to call her home. She would like tocontinue her magical thinking, now imagining that her damaging letter could beoverlooked and that Trotter ‘‘wouldn’t let them take her’’ (p. 137). Gilly still draws froma fairy tale frame of reference, but this time it helps her to understand that some actionscannot be erased or undone, and her actions have consequences in the fleshly world ofthe here and now. The recognition of her own pain has opened her to the clarity ofsuffering through love: ‘‘Like Bluebeard’s wife, she’d opened the forbidden door andsomeday she would have to look inside’’ (p. 139).

The Power of Connection

Eventually she must accept the reality of a new life with her grandmother, as she learnsto face the human limits, and capacities, of Trotter, of her grandmother, and herself.Gilly has begun the life-long task of developing empathy for others, even the woman shehas been prepared to resent for taking her away from Trotter. When the grandmothermentions that she eats alone, the word ‘alone’ resonates with Gilly: ‘‘She knew what itmeant to be alone. But only since Thompson Park did she understand a little what itmeant to have people and then lose them. She looked at the person who was smilingshyly at her, who had lost husband, son, daughter. That was alone’’ (p. 159). In aninterview with Laura Shehan, Paterson observed that maturity ‘‘is when you realize thatyou’re not the center of the universe....gradually [children] begin to sense other people’sfeelings and other people’s lives. Part of growing up is being able to see the importanceof other people for themselves, not just for what they are to you’’ (p. 2). Nonnie is notsimply an instrument to be used or an object in Gilly’s way, but a woman with her ownpoignant story of loss and disappointment.

In Nonnie’s household, Gilly finds a measure of comfort for her own losses throughletter writing. In her letter to William Ernest, she allows her imagination to spin out asshe fantasizes about a horse race that could result in a prize ‘‘of half a million dollars’’(p. 164). Unlike her earlier letter to her mother, which mis-represented her circum-stances in a tragic way, this letter playfully, even comically invents a story for William E.She also generously encourages the boy to keep learning new words and to keep‘‘reading out loud to Mr. Randolph’’ (p. 164). Literacy, she seems to have realized, canbe a source of strength and authority, perhaps even more than the karate lessons thatshe has encouraged him to take.3

3 In the current climate of anti-bullying campaigns in the schools, it is interesting to remark the approvalfor fighting as a way for William E. to correct power imbalance expressed by the implied author throughTrotter in particular (p. 172). The roughhousing on the playground that involves Gilly and six boys is alsohandled rather casually (p. 28).

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The exchange of letters with Miss Harris is also largely based on the encouragementof literacy practices. After Miss Harris sends her books by J. R. Tolkien, she expressesappreciation for the books, which ‘‘help a lot because this school is terrible’’ (p. 166).The books have given her insight into a possible narrative of her own origins: ‘‘Now Iknow who Galadriel was’’ (p. 166). We may speculate that the image of Galadriel, apowerful and beautiful queen with several names, may give Gilly an intimation of otherpossible selves, or at least a less bounded identity, as she matures.

A sense of identity is never fully fixed, of course, at a particular moment, but isconstellated, according to Sumara, ‘‘when memory intersects with projected contexts,’’ atan intersection between ‘‘the remembered past and predicted future’’ (2002, p. 52). Fornow, the letters Gilly writes and receives provide the relational continuity that can helpGilly integrate her lived experience at the Trotters into her new life and her new identityas Nonnie’s granddaughter. Unlike the postcard from her mother with the letters of thereturn address so squeezed as to be almost illegible (p. 34), these letters also constitute adialogue, with words both the medium of relationship, and, to some extent, the subject/message. The final letter she writes about her mother coming is the only letter she writesthat does not contain a reference to books or reading. It is as if the private fantasy of hermother has re-surfaced, displacing the new resources of shared literacy.

When the yearned-for Courtney finally arrives, she is not the gorgeous, willowywoman whom Gilly has fantasized about, but a ‘‘flower child gone to seed,’’ with hair ‘‘adark version of Agnes Stokes’s’’ (p. 174). It is immediately clear that Courtney has not‘‘come because she wanted to,’’ and she will not stay (p. 176). Life, like the story, is notturning out ‘‘the way it’s supposed to’’ (p. 176). As readers, we may have wanted andexpected Gilly to be magically reunited with Trotter, William, E., and Mr. Randolph, butPaterson asks us, along with Gilly, to accept Trotter’s wisdom that ‘‘Life ain’t supposedto be anything, ’cept maybe tough’’ (pp. 176–7). As Gilly rejoins her grandmother andthe disappointing Courtney, she shows that she is beginning to grow into a more realisticacceptance of what is—no longer looking for Wordsworth’s far-off ‘‘clouds of glory’’ buttaking solace from Trotter, and learning wisdom through acceptance.

We might have preferred a different fate for Gilly, one that followed the trajectory ofthe fairy tale. The Romantic legacy from poets, such as Blake and Wordsworth, may leadus to construct childhood as a privileged time that should be immune from suffering, thelingering ‘‘golden gleam’’ that Lewis Carroll invokes after the comic nightmare ofThrough the Looking Glass (1998, p. 241). It is possible that the more troubling the news,the more we may long to imagine childhood as an uncontaminated space, and children asthe primitive other, more pure than adults who have traveled farther and ‘‘farther fromthe east’’ of Wordsworth’s fading, barely recollected morning radiance. Yet even apartfrom the realities of global child abuse, exploitation, and poverty, at a time when evencomfortable middle-class North American children are being exposed at younger andyounger ages to images of brutal violence, graphic sexuality, and harsh language throughthe media, we deceive ourselves if we imagine that fifth and sixth grade children live in atwilight zone of untroubled innocence. Perhaps, as Perry Nodelman suggests, the impulseto protect children’s ‘‘innocence’’ is unconsciously designed to protect cultural ‘‘clichesabout the ways in which children are closer to nature or to God, about how theirignorance is really a saving innocence’’ (1992, p. 40). We must remember that too muchimposed protection, whether for children or for women, is imprisoning. Those whoseinnocence is carefully insulated will have a hard time squaring life’s realities with theirbeliefs about how life is supposed to be. They may feel cheated and betrayed when fairytale assumptions are overturned by reality.

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Like Gilly, both child and adult reader must learn that recognition of one’s truedesires are not enough to make them come true, and one must learn, again and again, toaccept things as they are, not as one wishes them to be. Letting go of the magicalthinking that would ignore the laws of cause and effect and demand a certain kind ofhappy ending is necessarily painful, but the pain of facing truth is also its own salve.Gilly must learn to surrender her fairy tale fantasies of rescue, but by moving the privatefantasy into the public, actual realm, Gilly expresses agency. Her very disappointmentscan help begin to her integrate her losses and move toward greater maturity. In herwriting for children, Paterson embraces paradox—her vision, although essentiallyhopeful, is not ‘‘wishful thinking’’ or ‘‘conventional happy endings’’ (2001, p. 138), butis, for Gilly, a ‘‘proper ending’’ that is ‘‘rooted in this earth and leaning in the directionof the New Jerusalem’’ (p. 149).

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Carroll, L. (1998). Alice’s adventures in wonderland and through the looking glass. London, England:Penguin Classics.

Gardner, H. (1996). MI: Intelligence, understanding, and mind. Los Angeles: Into the Classroom Media.Guillory, J. (1993). Cultural capital: The problem of literary canon formation. Chicago: University of

Chicago.Hallett, M., & Barbara, K. (2002). Folk and fairy tales 3rd edn. Peterborough: Broadview Press.Nikolajeva, M. (2003). ‘‘Paterson’s Novels.’’ Bridges for the young: The fiction of Katherine Paterson.

Lanham: The Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press.Nodelman, P. (1992). The pleasures of children’s literature. Longman: New York.Paterson, K. (1978). The great Gilly Hopkins. New York: HarperCollins.Paterson, K. (1981). ‘‘Words.’’ Gates of excellence: On reading and writing books for children. New York:

Elsevier/Nelson Books, pp. 5–18.Paterson, K. (2001). ‘‘Hope and Happy Endings,’’ The invisible child: On reading and writing books for

children. New York: Dutton Children’s Books, pp. 134–149.Paterson, K. (2001). ‘‘The Invisible Child.’’ The invisible child: On reading and writing books for children.

New York: Dutton Children’s Books, pp. 41–61.Paterson, K. (2001). ‘‘Missing Persons.’’ The invisible child: On reading and writing books for children.

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Russell, C. (2002). ‘‘In defense of Gilly.’’ In Nicholas Karolides (ed.), Censored books II: Criticalviewpoints 1985–2000 (pp. 182–186). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press.

Sheahan, L. (Nov. 2006). ‘‘Can Play Heal?’’ Beliefnet. http://www.beliefnet.com/story/161/story_16122_1.html.

Sumara, D. (2002). Why reading literature in school still matters: Imagination, interpretation, insight.Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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