Transformation: Arrietty and Does She Transform Too Much?

The new A-Z List is about characters, some in disguise, who transform or reveal themselves. I find this particular theme particularly captivating. Unlike other lists, which went by author, this list will go by characters' names. 

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My mom read me the Borrower books by Mary Norton when I was growing up. Between The Borrowers Aloft and The Borrowers Avenged lie 21 years. 

The Borrowers Avenged is likely one of the last books she read aloud to me since as I got older and better at reading (I struggled when I was younger), I didn't wait for her to finish a book with me. 

What I remember from that time is that my mom didn't care for the book because she thought the author altered Arrietty's fundamental character. 

I recently reread the entire series, and I have to agree. I wonder if the author was trying to answer problems and questions raised by her readers. (Another reason artists should satisfy but ignore their audiences.)

In the early books, Arrietty loves the outdoors. She hates being locked in under the floor. Her desire to be outside is not only to have more scope and not feel confined. She loves the outdoors for its own sake. Despite being smoked out of her first home, despite the cold and wet and danger of the countryside, Arrietty still cries out with relief and pleasure when Pod and Homily, her father and mother, decide to leave the cottage to try their hand again in the outdoors. 

Arrietty does keep a diary, but she mostly writes because she can and it gives her a break from her mother. A true writer would have filled the tiny journal Pod got for Arrietty. Such a writer would go on to use whatever writing surfaces were available to scribble out more. Arrietty doesn't. 

She reads for the same reason, being more interested in factual information than made-up stories. She is active, moving, never entirely still. She would be a hiker, mountaineer, and adventurer if she was human. (I wrote that line as someone who ISN'T a hiker, mountaineer, or adventurer. I'm not disappointed in later Arrietty because I think she should be more like me. I am disappointed because I liked her for herself.) 

From Borrowers Afield

In The Borrowers Avenged, Arrietty and Pod and Homily find themselves in a large, rambling, historically protected vicarage that is inhabited by a single couple. They end up in "rooms" that give them access to the outside; Pod even suggests that he will use the skills he acquired during their time in the "wild" to collect food from the overgrown garden and pond. If she wants to experience nature, Arrietty can travel to the end of the drive and climb a bush (while remaining well-groomed, like a woman riding a horse side-saddle). She can also travel to the nearby church to visit her relatives. Moreover, she meets another young borrower, a partly lame young man who recently moved into the building's birdhouses. He is kind, intelligent, literary, and likes to paint. 

On the one hand, I can understand Norton wanting to give Arrietty more dating options than the exceedingly uncommunicative Spiller. And the new home offers more to the family than the other homes did. And people, especially teens, do change as they mature. 

On the other, in this last book, I feel that Arrietty was literarily confined by her author. Suddenly, not only do other borrowers protest at Arrietty's behavior, the author does as well! Arrietty needs to calm down, settle down, accept her lot in life. 

I've never been one to buy into the cliche of imprisoning suburbia where a good little woman in a pretty dress greets her hardworking husband with a cocktail at the end of the day. I grew up in suburbia in the 1970s. Not only did none of the women I knew act that way, none of their mothers had acted that way. (The woman next door did keep redecorating her house but she also started a business, so...). 

It's a lovely picture. Still--look at

the illustrations above.

Nonetheless, I felt at the end of my recent rereading of the entire Borrower series that "round" and energetic Arrietty had been pressed into a "square" hole: she had been put-in-her-place. She and Spiller even have a kind of fight at the end. She won't be traveling up and down the river with him and their borderline wild kids. Or catching a ride on a visitor's coat (like Stainless did) to explore a nearby town as if it was a new country. 

Instead, Arrietty is going to get married to a guy who corrects her grammar, produce proper little borrower children who behave in traditional ways, live a tidy little life in a reasonably acceptable house that she can't really complain about...

The writer seems to be saying, Haven't I given you what you wanted? There's a grate to the outside! There's a bush! Now, be happy and stop complaining.  

It is very sad. 

Arrietty aside, other parts of the last book are quite good. Peregrine is an interesting addition. Pod and Homily are getting the type of house THEY want. Aunt Lupy is hilariously presented as having "repented" her snobbery because she went to live in a church. Her son IS a wild child. 

And...Arrietty is now a proper grown-up.

*Sigh.*  

So transformation is good--but if it undermines the fundamental personality of a character, it may be considered a failure rather than a triumph.  The solution lies somewhere between Alice and 1982 Arrietty.