emma_in_dream

The great literary critic of the Elsie Dinsmore books writes: “it is the intersection of these two themes [that produces] an idealistically Christian, sadomasochistic, incestuous-erotic work for
children which, in spite of being a thoroughly bad book, gives Elsie Dinsmore its compelling and
abiding power, which elevates it to the supreme height of a great bad classic”.

The Elsie series became something like a soap opera, focussing not only on Elsie but her children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Wiki shows her family tree.


In this book one of Elsie’s daughters resents a female visitor who distracts her husband from her. She forgets that she really belongs to her husband! Oh, what laughs when he reminds her that her body actually belongs to him, so that if he dictates a letter to her it is still written with his hand!


In other developments, the step-daughter of one of Elsie’s other daughters accidentally kicks a small child down a staircase in a fit of anger. Luckily the baby survives, and the father announces that he will be quitting his day job in order to stay home full time, guiding his children (specifically his daughter).


And so the novel ends with patriarchal order restored.

Martha Finley, Elsie Dinsmore, 1867, Elsie's Girlhood, 1872

The *Elsie Dinsmore* novels are in some ways totally typical of a strain of Victorian evangelical children’s literature. Elsie is a bundle of Christian piety mixed up with tears, rather like Ellen Montgomery from *The Wide, Wide World* (1850). Indeed, she reads that novel with interest in the third book in the long, long series.*

But the series is also unique in that it has an active current readership. It is popular with twenty first century extreme Christian patriarchy movements in America. It has been reprinted and there are even dolls you can get for your daughters to add that element of pleasure to the religious inculcation.

And allow me to say that it is officially even weirder than *The Wide, Wide World*. A quick story summary: Elsie’s mother died at birth and she has been raised by her servant (slave) Chloe while her father, who was only 17 when she was born, travels overseas. She lives with her uncles and aunts who are children about her age. Chloe has taught her to be a devout Christian and goes around talking about how God loves her as much as he does white folk.** (Shudder.) Some of the other kids pick on her, particularly young Arthur who is clearly going to be trouble when he grows up. Elsie bears it with tears, patient fortitude and incessantly quoted Bible verses.

When she is eight her father returns and Elsie loves him timidly and from afar. (No idea why, just because.) He is an uber-patriarch, even though he must be only aged about 26 at this point. He constantly sets arbitrary rules for Elsie and if she fails to obey them, or read his mind on some occasions, she is punished. The climax is when Arthur literally blots her copybook and her father decides to whip her for her apparently careless school work. One of the other children informs on Arthur and she is spared. She continues to weep and to love her father. (Why? Masochism? Is that girl from *Fifty Shades* a descendant of Elsie’s?)

Here are Elsie’s words about submission to her father’s will.

‘If you’ll believe me,’ said Elsie. Laughing a gay, sweet, silvery laugh, ‘I really enjoy being controlled by papa. It saves me a deal of trouble and responsibility in the way of deciding for myself; and then I love him so dearly that I almost always feel it my greatest pleasure to do whatever pleases him’

There is a confrontation when her father tries to get her to read a secular novel on a Sunday and she refuses. A diet of bread and water does not make her repent, but only pray more that her father will be turned to the light of Jesus. (I’d want to whack her about myself). Eventually her father does become a true Christian, but this does not mean giving up his favourite game of setting totally arbitrary rules for Elsie. No warm bread for breakfast! No leaving the house except in the company of a cousin, during daylight hours, and while in direct line of sight of an adult! Meat only to be eaten for dinner! All purchases with her pocket money are to be audited by him on a monthly basis! No frills on her dress!

She is totally happy now she has the love of her father, but there are intimations that she will eventually marry her father’s friend Mr Travilla who lives on the next plantation over. He keeps hugging her and saying that he wishes she were ten years older so she could love him more.* Which, gross. And yet apparently a thing in nineteenth-century novels as the more I read, the more I see it. Spoiler: she does indeed marry him and they have many children together.

Here they are interacting when she is eight: ‘Nay, give me one, little lady,’ said he, ‘one such hug and kiss as I dare say your father gets half-a-dozen times in a day.’ She gave it very heartily. ‘Ah ! I wish you were ten years older,” he said as he set her down. ‘If I had been, you wouldn’t have got the kiss,’ she replied, smiling archly.” Perhaps a little too ‘archly’ for an 8 year old girl, in my opinion.

Here are Elsie and Mr Travilla when she is fifteen: Mr Travilla ‘stooped and snatched a kiss from her ruby lips, then walked away sighing softly to himself, ‘Ah, little Elsie, if I were but ten years younger!’

This is her father’s response: ‘You are mine: you belong to me: no other earthly creature has the least shadow of a right or title in you: do you know that?’

‘Yes, Papa, and rejoice to know it,’ she murmured, putting her arms about his neck and laying her head on his breast.

People in the period prior to the popularisation of Freudian thought just wrote the weirdest stuff.

The book is full of casual racism. I mean, what must have seemed like racism even at points in the nineteenth century. This was written immediately after the civil war and set in a period when there were abolitionists who were freeing slaves, but in the Elsie world the slaves are totally happy (except for that one time that Arthur frames young Jim for something he did and Jim is about to be whipped and sent out to the fields from the house until Elsie clears things up. Arthur is nothing but trouble.)

Also, the main dynamic of the book is that her father sets arbitrary rules and she is praised and caressed if she follows them (which also, yuck) and punished for failing to follow them. And Elsie does a lot of crying. She could be irrigating the cotton fields. Instead, she is set up as a good girl who will eventually marry her father’s contemporary (which, again, yuck).

And yet, I will say the series is strangely compelling, like a train wreck. I am now working through the sequel, in which Elsie’s father remarries and she acquires siblings to weep over.

· The first is set in the early 1860s and published in 1867. They progress through *Elsie’s Girlhood* to *Elsie’s Marriage* and *Elsie’s Widowhood* and *Christmas with Grandma Elsie* published in the 1900s.
· Even worse, apparently when Elsie teaches Sunday school she tells the black kids they will be white in heaven. Jebezus.