I hate Pollyanna. It is an awful book.
My daughter had suggested it. She’d been gifted with a nice old clothbound second-or-third-hand copy and had added it to the list of books to be read before bed. This nightly practice, which I’ve written about previously as a much-beloved part of the bedtime routine in our home, has developed such that the older children are now making suggestions of their own, which occasionally I do bow to.
The story of Pollyanna is well known, and I have vivid memories of having watched the old 1960 Disney ‘classic’ many, many times growing up (it was one of three or four VHS cassette tapes my grandma owned, and so was regularly viewed with all the cousins in dazzling technicolour). I’d not thought of the story in many years, and forgotten most of the details, so I had initially thought my daughter’s suggestion a good one. I was wrong.
After reading the first chapter aloud, our conversation turned on how the story so far was similar to L. M. Montgomery’s wonderful Anne of Green Gables, a genuine favourite of us all, (Anne was published in 1908, five years prior to Porter’s Pollyanna). There was a hopefulness that filled our hearts and minds as we began. But it was not long before the nightly routine became a godawful slog as we trudged through the 32 tedious chapters.
What was interesting to me was that the loathing I felt for the book was mirrored in the experience of the kids. It was not long into the text that the sickly-saccharine moralistic tone taken by the main character began to grate on all of us. The thin veneer of narrative, in the attempted renditions of heartwarming childish escapades, exist merely to serve as a vehicle for seemingly interminable servings of a simple moralism which amounted to little more than an admonition to “turn that frown upside-down.” How boring.
The practice of telling moral tales is one that seems to come to us from the distant ages, reaching into a cloudy pre-history. Aesop’s famed fables, which have been widely told and retold since the 6th century BC are no doubt known to us all. These are interesting, inspiring and even useful tales. And while we have come to expect a clear explicit statement of the ‘moral of the story’ at the beginning or conclusion of each fable, these are not original to the texts but are later accretions and, in my opinion spoil what could otherwise be great fodder for discussion and contemplation. These additions turn what is a moral tale into a moralising tale. And these are two very different things.
Let me explain: A contemporary standard publication of the well-known tale of ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ will conclude with a simple (and simplistic) moral, that “It is best to prepare for the days of necessity.” Now, this is certainly something that can be gleaned from the fable—but there is much more to such a tale that could be drawn out by a good teacher and/or an attentive student. The inclusion of that little epimythium serves to short circuit any further discussion and annuls any deeper thought. Such a formulation never considers for example that the work undertaken by the ant was made all the more enjoyable thanks to the singing and chirruping of the grasshopper. What I mean to say is that it is horribly reductive to assume that there is nothing else to be taken from the tale than a moralism akin to a simple Weberian protestant work ethic, but this is precisely the hermeneutic that the moralising post-script encourages.
Such a moralistic approach to literature has many adverse effects, the most obvious of which is that it renders it utterly boring, but I want to note two (for now). First, reading a text—any text—in this manner can have a negative habituating effect on the reader, such that it conditions ones approach to all texts in future to be one of simple analysis—to break down the text in search for ‘the meaning’, understood as a simple bullet point statement of ‘fact’ (not unlike what ChatGPT spits back after a question is inputted into its search field). The details of the story increasingly become irrelevant unless they pertain specifically to the meaning one has decided upon. Superfluous details of character, setting, or plot are then viewed as mere distractions that can (and perhaps should) be excised to serve the communication of the simple meaning (in this case, the moral). There is no need for world building on the part of the author, nor for any need for deeper reflection and contemplation on the part of the reader. Any sense of mystery has been well and truly evacuated. One is left wondering why there is a narrative at all. Why not simply cut the nonsense and just state the desired ‘moral’ and move on?
The second effect is related, and it pertains to the dulling of one’s moral sense, which seems to be precisely the opposite effect of what is desired in the proliferation of such moralistic tale telling. A moral education is one which should open one’s eyes to the reality of beauty, and of goodness, and of truth, and train one in the discernment of these attributes of being in one’s everyday experiences. Real moral education then should enable one to sift one’s experience and fortify one to strive for beauty, goodness and truth, accounting for the complexities of the everyday. The moralistic approach however ‘implies finally that moral truth is a matter of either arbitrariness or (mechanical) imposition from without, or both.’[1] Moralism conceives of morality not as something discerned by an encounter with reality wherein one is invested in genuine discernment, but as adherence to arbitrary rules or maxims imposed on us from some outside force.
In the face of such execrable moralistic degradation of literature (and of life), the only adequate response of ridicule. Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children are a classic of the genre, featuring such instructive anecdotes as Matilda, Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death or Rebecca, Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably. Our own attempt at ridicule emerged naturally when, a few days into our reading, my kids and I began mocking the eponymous Pollyanna, pretending to be “glad” about all sorts of things.
Unlike Pollyanna, or the moralistic post-scripts to Aesop’s fables, or a good deal of what gets passed off as ‘children’s literature’ today (both from woke or anti-woke ideologues, a-hem, I mean ‘authors’), good literature inspires all sorts of moral reflection without force feeding any pre-determined moral. It invites us to explore, to contemplate, and to see more than mere surfaces. We won’t be reading Pollyanna Grows Up, and I think I should get out the correction tape to ‘fix’ our illustrated edition of Aesop’s fables.
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[1] David L. Schindler, “Is Truth Ugly? Moralism and the Convertibility of Being and Love,” Communio: International Catholic Review 27, no. 4 (2000): 702.
