Marilla and Mr Murdstone
You know, I’ve been thinking. There’s this line the religious involved in the Irish nightmare have been giving us – this ‘we didn’t realize beating up children and terrorizing them and humiliating them was bad for them’ line. It’s Bill Donohue’s line too – ‘corporal punishment was not exactly unknown in many homes during these times, and this is doubly true when dealing with miscreants.’
You know what? That’s bullshit. I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s absolute bullshit. It is not true that in the past it was just normal to beat children, or that it was at least common and no big deal, or that nobody realized it was bad and harmful. That’s a crock of shit.
Think about it. Consider, for instance, Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908. Marilla doesn’t really want Anne at first, and she’s less charmed by her than Matthew is. She discourages Anne’s fantasies and her chatter, and she’s fairly strict – but she never beats her, and the thought doesn’t even cross her mind. If it were so normal to beat children – wouldn’t Marilla have given Anne a good paddling for one or more of her many enthusiastic mistakes? Wouldn’t she have at least considered it? But she doesn’t. Why? Because she’s all right. She’s a little rigid, at first, but she’s all right – she’s a mensch – she has good instincts and a good heart. She can’t be a person who would even think of beating Anne. Well why not? Because we wouldn’t like her if she did. So it’s not so normal and okay after all then. And this was 1908.
Think of Jane Eyre. There is beating and violence and cruelty to children there – Mrs Reed treats Jane abominably, and Lowood school (based on the Clergy Brothers School that Charlotte Bronte and her sisters attended) was very like Goldenbridge, complete with starvation and freezing and humiliation and beating. But it’s not okay! It’s not normal, it’s not just How Things Are – it’s terrible, and shocking, and wrong. Think of Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield – he’s not okay; he’s a very bad man. Think of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby – not okay. Think of the poor house in Oliver Twist – not okay. Think of the way Pap was always beating Huck Finn – not okay. Think of Uncle Myers in Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood – very Goldenbridge; not okay.
I’m having a very hard time thinking of any classic fiction in which children are beaten or smacked and it’s treated as completely routine and acceptable. I don’t think that’s some random accident, I think it’s because most people have always known that it’s wrong to treat children like punching bags. Beating and other cruelty may have been much more common a few decades ago, but it was by no means universal, and it was not universally acceptable. So if you hear people peddling that line – tell them it’s a crock.
Yes, you’re right, it is a crock. The other unbelieveable thing that was said was something to the effect that they didn’t know that it would have any effect on them once they had grown up! It’s okay to bully little kids because they won’t remember! (Of course they do, but that wasn’t the point.) It’s bullshit, but of a particularly repellent variety. It has a very peculiar smell, blended with all the candles and incense.
I think you are partly right. ‘Beating’ children has always been a word for what the speaker feels is too severe. If the dividing line shifted the word used might still be the same, just signifying relative to current standards.
When I was in primary school the cane was in normal use. This use declined over the seven years to 1970, but the fact is it was used a lot for unacceptable behaviour in kids less than 12 years old pre 1970 – up to six cuts on the palm of the hand. I never had it myself but I knew lots who did, repeatedly. We went on to government high schools that used the cane less and less until it was almost never used by about 1974. A classmate was sent to a Catholic high school run by the Christian Brothers, and described how boys would be flogged with the cane until they wet themselves in front of the class. That level of brutality WAS actually normal Catholic education in many people’s memory.
During my school days myself and other kids were caned regularly and as far as I can remmember this was regarded as quite normal, I think what has always been frowned on is beating children with malice like the sisters at Marie,s industrial school did.
I would just say that I am glad that beating kids is no longer seen as normal.
Interesting point, Ophelia. But do you think it possible that perhaps people inclined to write are a bit ahead of their time, maybe because they can imagine a better world and might be a bit more intelligent? I wonder how many people were even literate in the periods you mention, especially in the working class. Maybe those books were a concerted effort by the authors to push the moral zeitgeist forward.
It is important to retain a distinction between ‘correction’ in various forms, which in earlier times was both legally and morally unproblematic, and systematic violent abuse. Bear in mind that Dotheboys Hall is not just a strict school, it’s a murder-camp – children sent there are literally unwanted, and not necessarily expected to survive the experience. Dickens was exposing a real horror when he wrote about such things. But ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ [not to mention ‘he whom the Lord loveth, He chastiseth’] was conventional wsidom into the late C20.
I have memories of varying degrees of corporal punishment from the 60s and 70s (little of it on my own person) and what was relayed to me by the previous generation was that more extreme methods were common then. As literature is literature and memories can be highly subjective, I did a quick search of Google’s news archive for “corporal punishment” and “school,” and glanced at stuff from the 1880s on. Very interesting, some of it.
‘We didn’t realize beating up children and terrorizing them and humiliating them was bad for them…’
… also, we just assumed that $507 we found sitting in the locked register after we accidentally and not on purpose cold conked the night cashier with the pistol wasn’t anyone’s, especially…
(I mean, hey, it was just sitting there, right?)
Rose, yes – that’s pretty much what I meant. The idea wasn’t that fiction mirrors reality but that authors presented things this way for a reason. Marilla would not have been the stiff but basically sympathetic character she is if she had been a beater. I think that fact in itself offers food for thought. If we can’t think of a lot of routine beaters – or ‘correctors’ – in fiction, I think that indicates that correction wasn’t as routine and acceptable as we’re often told.
“But ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ was conventional wsidom into the late C20.”
But how conventional? I think not all that conventional. Conventional in some circles of course, but I think decidedly not in all of them.
In other words, I disagree that ‘correction’ in the sense of physical correction was universally morally unproblematic. That’s what I’m claiming – that it wasn’t. I think if it had been, we would have had 1) lots of routine unproblematic physical ‘correction’ in fiction and 2) no or at least much less fiction from the pov of physically ‘corrected’ children who were emotionally damaged by the process.
This is a conditional counterfactual; JS please note.
I think we should be careful here, though. I think one cannot really deny that corporal punishment was quite common up until two decades ago.
But…what happened at Goldenbridge and their ilk was systematic, unrelenting abuse allied with effective slavery and all held together by a lovely glue of utter, cold hearted, mean-spirited contempt and lack of empathy and lack of love and lack of concern for the mental health of the children. Not to forget the sexual abuse, of course.
So…rather than argue about whether our parents were swatted (even rather hard) buy their parents, I think we need to focus on the institutionalized monstrousness of the Irish system of abuse????
Rose: I don’t actually think people who write are ahead of their time, necessarily. Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were all in favor of corporal punishment. But they all knew it was a moral issue–which is why they had snide little jabs in their writing at anti-child abuse advocates.
The point OB is making is that it always was an issue and there were always people opposed to it–a significant minority of them, in fact. And even those who weren’t categorically opposed to it would dislike someone who hit children routinely.
Yeah – that’s the point I’m making. Brian I’m not denying that corporal punishment was quite common – I’m saying that revulsion at it was an available response.
This is very like the argument over Jefferson and slavery (for instance). A common claim is that Jefferson was simply a man of his time. Well he of course was a man of his time, but that does not mean (and it is not the case) that opposition to slavery was not an available response. There decidedly were opponents of slavery; some of them corresponded with Jefferson; some of them were friends of his.
I don’t think we are arguing about whether our parents were swatted, we’re arguing about whether it was impossible or almost impossible for anyone to think corporal punishment was wrong (or simply to recoil from it).
Mind you, I did put it too strongly in the second para. I withdraw that. I mixed the two claims in the second sentence – I withdraw that. I should have said it wasn’t universally considered normal to beat children.