4 - Adoptive Reading

Summary

Consider these characters: Oswald Bastable (and his five brothers and sisters), Sara Crewe, Anne (of Green Gables) and Rebecca (of Sunnybrook Farm). Orphans all, at least in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, and also voracious, impressionable and, to use the parlance of our day, interactive readers. This chapter is about the coping strategies and pragmatic uses these orphan readers make of and take from their books, as well as the effects of that admittedly uncritical – relying as it does on projection and identification – reading. The co-incidence of all these orphans (all these fictional children in need, at least according to the novels and the culture that produced them, of a family) that act out and upon their reading in direct and very result-oriented ways indicates something significant about how they read and about what that kind of reading gets them.

Left largely on their own and to their own devices after their mother's death, the six Bastable children seek to ‘restore the fallen fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable’, a phrase that reveals how their reading defines and dictates their actions, reminiscent as it is of the books they have read (2). The title of E. Nesbit's first novel about the Bastable children – The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) – suggests its plot, but what the title doesn't indicate is that participatory reading is their strategy for finding treasure, nor does it indicate the more significant subject of the novel, which is discovering not treasure, but how to remedy their orphaned state. As Oswald, the eldest boy and the novel's narrator, says,

we were the Treasure Seekers, and we sought it high and low, and quite regularly, because we particularly wanted to find it. And at last we did not find it, but we were found by a good, kind Indian uncle. (The Wouldbegoods 137)

Similarly, Frances Hodgson Burnett's (riches-to-)rags-to-riches story, A Little Princess (1905), depicts in quasi-fantastic fashion the power of reading as a coping strategy, enabling Sara Crewe to endure abuse, neglect, hunger and alienation. But the real pay-off of Sara's belief that ‘Everything's a story’ comes when, in true fairytale fashion, she's rescued from her life of servitude by the fairy godfather figure that lives next door (89).