“She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time. ”
– “A Little Princess,” Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sara Crewe is, in fact, an old soul. She is compassionate and kind without being a Pollyanna, a waif with backbone and guts. Like the best literary heroines, she is brilliant and bookish, with an immense streak of imagination, and it serves her very well when terrible circumstances set her adrift.
Sara is a Romantic – in the big “R” sense of the word – trapped among very small-minded, petty Victorians, who understand neither her grand ideas nor her deep emotions. She ends by exposing the dark side of Victorian London, falling from princess to urchin; she’s not only aware of how far she has fallen, but also recognizes that her prior education and intelligence still give her an advantage over her fellow urchins – and uses those skills to help them. Sara is just as charitable when poor as when rich, but we’re allowed to see how much more that charity costs her, in particular, when she shares most of a windfall meal with a street child even worse off than she is.
It’s Sara’s self-awareness, I think, that’s so compelling, and it’s what gives her that “old look” in the quote above. She knows what’s happening to her is wrong, and it’s what her nemesis, Miss Minchin, hates most about her. It becomes unbearable for Miss Minchin to have Sara looking at her. Unlike her fellow servant, Becky, Sara knows children aren’t supposed to be starved and overworked, and Miss Minchin knows she knows.
Sara can give some modern-day adult waifs a run for their money: she’s an orphaned, destitute girl in Victorian England, but she is emphatically not a victim, trying her best to rationalize the terrible blow the universe has dealt her. She reminds herself to be resilient, and so she is.
Sara doesn’t have the same practicality Dorothy Gale exhibits, but she does have the same unshakeable common sense, somehow in perfect harmony with her flights of fancy. Their situations are not dissimilar: Dorothy is imprisoned by a witch in a dark fantasy land, Sara by a self-hating spinster who is the absolute monarch of her tiny and unimportant domain. (Sara’s London, full of adults either useless or cruel, smacks of Dorothy’s Oz). Both fight blatant injustice with a belief in truth and justice. Both win.
Best of all, once Sara is restored to her former riches, we see she hasn’t lost her self-awareness or her compassion:
The children stood and looked at each other for a few minutes; and then Sara took her hand out of her muff and held it out across the counter, and Anne took it, and they looked straight into each other’s eyes.
“I am so glad,” Sara said. “And I have just thought of something. Perhaps Mrs. Brown will let you be the one to give the buns and bread to the children. Perhaps you would like to do it because you know what it is to be hungry, too.”
“Yes, miss,” said the girl.
And, somehow, Sara felt as if she understood her, though she said so little, and only stood still and looked and looked after her as she went out of the shop with the Indian gentleman, and they got into the carriage and drove away.
Sara is trying to change the system, as only someone aware enough to notice the system in the first place can. I never noticed how subversive this book was before. Little girls: take note!
A Little Princess (Project Gutenberg etext)
Post a Comment