Girl, Intercepted
Representations of girls before they hit puberty often downplay femininity in favor of other traits — and other successes
One of the most subversive things a storyteller can do is put a story in a young girl’s hands. Particularly between the ages of 7 and 11, girls are peculiar forms of human being which appear designed to self-destruct: not yet fertile, active and inquisitive, noisy and game, they display qualities which will typically doom them as mothers and wives. Such girls are dangerous, powerful, and rare.
New to herself and to the world, the young girl is often a pioneer on a vast frontier, but in the autobiographical Little House books Laura Ingalls Wilder gives also her two loving parents, thrilling adventures, and a Manifest Destiny which both clears the way and curbs her in; in sharp contrast are the nine- and ten-year old MacTeer sisters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, who have less freedom to roam but are still allowed to express their anger and tell us openly about their constraints. Younger girls are vocal and rebellious, but more often their disruptive emotions are cured or silenced or simply sloughed off like unbecoming clothes which don’t fit — not nearly as pretty as what well-behaved young women will wear, or say, or become.
Just like unpopular feelings, the bodies of young girls typically don’t help them do anything they’ll need to do later, even if we might wonder what a training bra is supposed to train. Often unaware of of what will limit and prevent them from attaining full humanity, young girls — despite inborn abilities to run, think, climb, and play — seem especially vulnerable to indifference or obsolescence. In earlier centuries or in other regions, they might even take up space as surplus material, disposed of by being sent off to convents or more roughly dumped on the road.
Admittedly focusing on an older cohort, the 1999 movie Girl, Interrupted explores what happens to young women who refuse to conform and continue instead to insist on following their own impulses. The film is harrowing and ultimately discouraging, but fortunately there are literary examples like The Bluest Eye which keep (some) girls safe and relatively unharmed. Morrison likens them to the dandelions which the central character Pecola delights in near the start of the novel. “So many, strong, and soon,” these flowering things are admired for their numbers and confidence and strength, although what makes them ready right away also makes them fragile. These flowers arrive with a premonition of their disappearance.
If the term “girl” seems flexible, I think it has real boundaries, however: “children” designates a younger grouping, and “teens” and “tweens” describe females undergoing social and biological processes which change their bodies and reshape their thinking. Fairy tales map this territory with a sharper focus, routinely uncovering what girls can do and where they can go. Sent on an important errand through the woods, Little Red Riding Hood evades the wolf’s clutches only to get trapped at her grandmother’s: household space is much less safe for this girl than the world outside, something Gretel knows much sooner and keeps absorbing, leaving a dangerous home and then rescuing her brother from an oven. In both cases, girls demonstrate their skills by skirting the treachery of domestic space. Being beautiful or neat or kind or sweet counts for nothing.
The new interdisciplinary academic field of “Girl Studies” combines sociology, psychology, anthropology, and history to tell us more about girls who range outdoors and come alive at night, who might be orphaned as a way to explain their travels away from home, or who almost compulsively track their thoughts in letters and diaries. Still, I think we might narrow the lens in thinking about the girl. A new scholarly journal called Girlhood Studies includes articles, for instance, about child marriage and teenage mothers, but I wonder if there’s a separate window for girls before they discover boys or feel confused about their bodies. The 10 yr-old heroine Marji of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis might qualify, but I think the incandescent Anne Frank, who was 13 when she went into hiding with her family, had already aged out by the time we get to meet her.
Like Katniss and Rue from The Hunger Games, Jo March might similarly be too old for this category, but there are still others who qualify, so many, strong, and soon, and thinking about them often brings into view a fiercely independent figure with few debts to pay or obligations to discharge. She is impolite, sometimes reckless or cruel, honest, and unusually clear in her thinking. Here I’d put Harper Lee’s Scout, age 6 at the start of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Hermione Granger, age 11 when the Harry Potter series begins. Eleven is also the age of Harriet the Spy and Anne of Green Gables, illustrated above as towering over a boy and using her slate to hit him — knowing how to write something less important than knowing how to deliver a blow. All of these girls share intelligence and bravery, curiosity and a willingness to challenge the rules of the world.
There are more examples. Dante’s Beatrice was only eight when she met the poet (himself a tender nine), and our first encounter with Maya Angelou’s central character in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings occurs when she is 3, old enough to walk and talk, too young to know any better. Often these girls speak truth to slightly older women with slightly more power. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is 10 yrs old when she takes on her formidable aunt, not only instructing this woman about what Jane requires from life: “You think I have no feelings, and that I can live without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so; and you have no pity” but also pronouncing her own verdict on this miserable aunt’s character: “People think you a good woman; but you are bad — hard-hearted.”
The 8-yr old Judy Moody belongs to this category too, and we might make special note of her smart-alecky pose and the word list on her website which highlights her confidence in her “bad-i-tude” and ride-or-die world view “for sure and absolute positive.” These girls are spies and interlopers, content behind a curtain; they know how to be loud and when to be quiet, and seem pushy but can quickly and sometimes demurely shift into second gear. Perhaps they are already in command of female skills women will rely upon later, but for this brief period they use their gifts for their own advantage.
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At the risk of contradicting myself, I’ll include Shakespeare’s Juliet, whom we know is 13 but still has a nurse, and The Faerie Queene’s Britomart, who needs not only her nurse but heavy armor to make her way into the world. Both of these young girls are thrown headfirst into encounters with their future husbands, and while neither character feels ready for marriage or sex, their innocence and purity are mixed together with heavy doses of courage, honesty, and sensitivity to themselves. Staying who they are can save them, and before she meets her mate, Britomart even rescues another young woman; trying to grow up too soon, the “impatient child” Juliet, eager to try on “new robes” and ease herself out of old behaviors, winds up married and dead. Indeed, feminist philosophers like Carol Gilligan and Mary Pipher explain that the window for such demonstrations of female virtue, intelligence, and strength slams shut around 13 or 14, the age when girls go underground, deferring to men and silencing themselves.
Girls are often too busy to offer testimony about this kind of experience, but paintings and stories handle these years with care and respect. Peter Vilhelm’s image of Two Girls Playing (above) balances innocence with conspiracy and agency with secrecy: what girls do together and keep from us seems threatening mostly because they don’t need our approval to turn a space into a room of their own. Isn’t this what happens when 8-yr old Lucy Pevensie hides in a wardrobe at the start of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, stumbling into a separate universe in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek? Repositioned alongside other magical creatures, Lucy now appears to us more clearly, as an instrument for redeeming Eden.
John Milton’s first picture of Eve in Paradise Lost invites us to imagine her similarly, with her girlish curiosity and expressiveness important parts of her character. Eve is later “reposed” or re-positioned to be Adam’s wife and helpmeet, but when we first encounter the newborn Eve she is staring at her image in a “clear, smooth lake,” entranced by her appearance in a world filled with growing things like herself. Many readers of Milton’s poem describe Eve as vain or simple-minded compared to the Adam who instantly intuits the presence of God after inspecting himself, but Eve is contented with her own company in a lovely world, in little need of sacred instructions or reassurances. Like Lucy Pevensie and Harriet the Spy, Milton’s Eve seems capable of operating on her own and confident in her ability to do so, but she is quickly cropped short. Interrupted in her imaginings, Eve is led away by a voice which introduces her to her spouse who calls her Woman and announces her fate as Mother.
As far as I know, only Milton’s picture of Eden offers this brief glimpse of Eve before she’s brought into the patriarchal fold, schooled about her womanly fate, and “in-formed “ about her future. Yet Brueghel seems to hint at her immature state in the image above which I’ve enlarged below: Eve is tiny but fully formed, cradled like a doll by God while Adam sleeps. A dog is ready to greet her, however: the young girl’s connections to nature and animals that we see in Narnia are at work in this rendering, too.
Milton ultimately yields the way Eve must, closing off this picture of girlhood in favor of the female future outlined and punished in Genesis. But a 14th century poem called Pearl provides additional information about a girl’s powers while also telling us more about where she can find safety.
Usually religious stories with children focus on Christ in the manger, but written around the same time as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Pearl describes the dream-vision of a man who has lost something precious and receives consolation from a young girl. Heavily allegorical, this poem spreads meanings in all kinds of directions. Maybe this man was a jeweller and perhaps he’s actually grieving the loss of a daughter who now returns to him as a heavenly maiden stationed in the New Jerusalem, now one of Christ’s many brides. So striking is the dreamer’s grief, and so powerful is the consolation offered by a young girl: everything that makes her lowly or insignificant and therefore easily lost also translates her into something rare and holy but still delicate. The daughter, a Pearl of great price, shares her wisdom with the patriarch, and while this carefully-wrought poem has been crafted to contain sacred truths, I also think it’s been fashioned to display and protect the unusual perspective of someone rightfully seen as otherworldy. Sophie Jewett’s 2004 translation of the poem nicely underscores how the dreamer regards the Pearl’s preciousness and precociousness:
“My Pearl, though queries rude I pose.
To try thy fair wit were unjust
Whom Christ to His own chamber chose.
Behold, I am but dung and dust,
And thou a rare and radiant rose,
Abiding here in life, and lust
Of loveliness that ever grows.”
Scholars believe that Pearl was produced by the same poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a story about a relatively immature young man who learns that the real tests of virtue happen inside bedrooms rather than on battlefields; unlike the gallant Gawain, the heroine of Pearl has already made her way to heaven, not needing to fight or prove her loyalty or even prove anything at all about herself. Strangely, there are no special lessons here, no secret teachings usually reserved for Latin. We might conclude that Pearl insists upon female purity as the requisite non-skill for entrance into heaven, but I think instead about Jane Eyre’s ability to tell the truth, even when it costs her. This Pearl’s price is even higher, and the dreamer, unable to be with the girl or watch her life unfold on earth, finds solace in knowing where she is, hearing her speak, and being sure that she’s cherished. Small and simple, she is the treasure she talks about, and she helps the dreamer merely by showing him what she sees.
My final example brings us to another court, but this time Velasquez has included himself inside it as a key player, one of many figures crowding around the Spanish Infanta in the 1656 painting Las Meninas. The painter is working on another painting while the Infanta Margaret Theresa is attended by her ladies in waiting (these are “las meninas”). The mirror in the background has caught the image of two bit players, the King and Queen, but they are overshadowed by an array of figures in the foreground including the Infanta’s other attendants and a large dog. Have we viewers—like the King and Queen — stumbled upon a party before it’s started? And what might it mean that the little girl — unformed perhaps, but not shapeless — already has a little world spinning completely around her?
The triangle groupings which organize this painting begin with the Infanta’s dress, which helps the girl dominate the center, and although other arrangements of triangles shape themselves across this space, she confidently meets our gaze while presenting herself as a stop sign, showing us what’s important while keeping us at bay. Velasquez needs to arrange other groups of people in order to replicate what she can do on her own. How can a five- or six-year old girl command things so capably and wordlessly, and what else is she preparing to do?
This painting has charmed and baffled audiences for centuries. What kind of picture records a King and Queen merely as a reflection on a mirror, an accident of light and shadow? Is the Infanta looking at them, or past them, at us? Might the painting which Velasquez works on here be an equally disruptive picture? But there are two things we can know for certain, both of them concerned with the Infanta at the center. First, we can be sure that this girl is thinking, using her mind to place her in her world and keep her steady, locking her in place. Second, Velasquez shows us that her thoughts are private, indestructible, and indistractible — that, unlike us, this girl cannot be interrupted, even if she needs to wait for us to disappear.
