Harriet the Queer

[caitri]

I reread Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh for the first time in, like, almost thirty years. This came about because I read a review of a new biography of the author which talked about her life as a queer woman midcentury--her various partnerships intellectual and domestic--and it's really one of those things where once you've seen something in a new light, it can't be unseen.

Harriet is queer.

If you didn't read the book (I know the 90s film was popular but I never saw it--it came out when I was an older teen uninterested in babyish fare), Harriet is an 11 year old girl in 1962 New York who wants to be a writer and a spy. She carries a marbled composition notebook--seen clearly in the illustrations Fitzhugh created--which I did remember led to a lifelong preference for such notebooks. She writes about everything she observes with the acerbic voice and casual cruelty of a child, dismissing various schoolmates and neighbors as ugly, dumb, etc. The final third of the book is when this notebook is found by her classmates who turn against her.

If this isn't a parable of outting, what is?

On top of that, the beloved nanny Ole Golly who has done the better part of raising and caretaking Harriet leaves/is fired, leaving a hole in the kid's life and sinking her into a depression on top of the bullying at school. Her parents take her to a therapist, and Ole Golly writes a letter telling her to grow the fuck up and imparting an invaluable piece of adult wisdom: Sometimes you have to lie.

What I had remembered of the book most clearly was Harriet's "spy route" as she walked through her neighborhood making observations and writing them down, and the other kids' finding her notebook and being angry. I had forgotten how thoroughly cruel they become, stealing her lunches and pouring ink over her. The fix at the end with the apology isn't convincing, except as a metaphor for the social contract. If Harriet acts in a certain way, she will be "accepted." 

To recap this androgynous girl, with her short hair, jeans and jacket, writing constantly, always at the outskirts of her peers whom she despises, learns that lying is the way to fit in. FASCINATING.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

That book had an enormous impact on me. I remembered Ole Golly's support and the beginning of the book and Harriet's personality much better than the cruelty of her peers at the end. For some reason that part didn't stick with me. But as a budding writer I loved the spy aspect of it.

It is indeed a very queer book. :D

[caitri]

It so is!! I am mystified as to how I repressed the kids' asshattery--self-preservation I suppose.

[minoanmiss]

I feel like you just pointed out cracks in a house from a long ago earthquake, but I am the house and the earthquake is the book.

[caitri]

RIGHT!!!!!!!!!