The Ones School Couldn't Help

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Hello, all. First post, having discovered the community very recently and thrilled to encounter other AF nit-pickers, as curiously few people in my life are capable of worrying about what Daks did all day in Noah's Ark, or who think in times of peril or indecision 'What would Nicola Marlow do?'

Was amused by other people's various comparisons with the Chalet School series, and a thought occurred, in the context of the discussions of how much AF expects the reader to adopt Nicola's POV. What about the conspicuous school 'failures' in either case? How much are we supposed to despise the Kingscote failures?

The Chalet reforms virtually everybody who steps between its fragrant floral cubicle curtains, bar the proto-Nazi Thekla von Stift (who, however, as far as I can remember, did do a Gwendolen Mary Lacey by later writing a half-ashamed letter to Mademoiselle Lepattre to apologise for her bad behaviour...?) and Joan Baker, who combined, from the Chalet's point of view, the twin scourges of being working-class and distinctly sexually savvy. All others are butted in upon by Joey or Mary Lou until they desist from being anything other than good Chalet girls.

The obvious Kingscote 'failure' (cue inevtable Tim Keith joke) is Marie Dobson, whose death has always chilled me rather. (AF deciding to get rid of a character who is so utterly useless she is effortlessly trumped by the 'pale idiot rabbit' Elaine Rees in The Prince and the Pauper and thereafter goes downhill? There seems to me both realism and contempt in the manner of her death. Heart failure from getting up to turn on Top of the Pops, really, when Nick is continually risking her neck jumping the Cut on Buster, outwitting spies and child abductors etc. What's Marie's function in the novels, though?

I've always found her characterisation as chilling as her death. Lest we imagine that all humanity is as upright, vivid and vaguely heroic as the Marlows, who, whatever their individual defaulting, do have a collective blonde glamour at Kingscote, AF gives us Marie, repellently plain, cowardly, unpopular, untalented, untruthful and clammy-handedly desperate for approval. Does AF give her a single redeeming feature, or so much as a moment of sympathy? Is she only there to make the Marlows extra vivid? Or to show us moments of moral compunction in Nicola as distinct from other characters? I suppose one other thought is that AF uses Marie to buck the trend of schools reforming the substandard, a la the Chalet - she never 'improves', but the depiction of her awfulness from Nick's POV is more detailed and more disgusted than the other 'flat' character failures, like the 'steaming nit' Gina French.

I don't have my AF books to hand, and can't produce the brief section of Autumn Term (the rickyard scene) which is from Marie's POV, which talks about her fear of farm animals and lack of athleticism, or her excruciating attempt after the play to help Nick clear up, and am not remembering clearly their tenor. Or in End of Term when she is left out of the twins' swap-over for the match.

Thoughts?

Comments

[owl]

Well, personally, I tend to make it 'what would Rowan do?' :)

The Miss Keith method of inspiring confidence seems to me likely to do the opposite. Marie is obviously doing no good to the team or to herself.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

But who is there for Rowan to sleep with???

In the world of plausibility, there's the amiable local youth (Ronnie?) she encounters without much interest in one of the holiday novels. In my head, her obvious sexual partner is the Garbo-esque Jan Scott...

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar with yuletide? Probably the only place to get your mitts on anything that unusual. I was actually planning to post on this community in the next couple of days and suggest it to anyone who fancied some AF fic... personally I am absolutely yearning for Harry Southampton/Lord Essex...

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

Oh, which pairing?! (If only I could ask for one slash and one femmeslash in the same fandom!)

Maybe you should moan to your flist about yuletide too, just to make sure that every single one of them participates! /evangelising

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Hope that you are now, more than a year later, keeping up with Forester48's quite marvelous fanfic on Jan's fraught, angst-ridden future life. Just thought I should alert you in case you weren't.

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

"who would Rowan sleep with?"

Jan Scott, I imagine. Or she might have been having a vituperative, bile-filled but passionate affair with Lois Sanger...

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

God, so would I. I don't think I'm the person to write it, though.

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

I was going to say Jan Scott and you beat me to it!

[owl]

It would certainly be my nightmare...and then they kick out Nicola without bothering to verify the evidence. Bonkers.

Well, Rowan's choice would seem to be a little limited...

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

I quite agree about having uncomfortable sensations of 'Marie-ness' as a reader. There are moments when one can positively feel limp strands of hair parting on one's bony forehead.

I suppose one of the things I'm trying to think about is how the School Failure in any school series points up the basic tenets of schoolgirl good behaviour, and the underlying not-quite-ethics of the author - Blyton's Gwen gets nastily punished for not being Darrell Rivers (or Solid Little Sally), hence for not living up to Miss Grayling's idea of 'sound women the world can lean on' etc. Ditto the Chalet's Joan Baker for daring to voice the opinion that dancing is more fun with boys, thereby contravening the code that sex is taboo. So much so that over and over again, people politely fail to notice Joey is pregnant with multiple offspring.

But at Kingscote we don't have to take on the Weltanschauung of any gimlet-eyed, cello-voiced headmistress, as Me Auntie isn't any kind of moral standard, more a sort of arbitrary authority useful for the occasional plot point, but it's assumed (or is it?) that Nicola's moral code is the most valid, certainly most attractive one. But is there any kind of consensus on What Matters?

[wonderlanded.livejournal.com]

I think your last sentence hits on it exactly -- there isn't.

I've always thought the Chalet as Reformer / Kingscote as Non-reformer played to what the two schools aimed to be to their students -- Kingscote as, rather understandably, an educational institution; Chalet as a way of life. Thus Kingscote has no unwritten set of moral and ethical rules the girls are not only supposed to mirror but to promote; while the Chalet has entrenched standards passed from generation to generation and a collective sense of what's done, and what's not.

For the very reason that Kingscote doesn't have such a strictly defined code, I think the school's less reformist in nature. Because Chalet girls have a very certain sense of What's Right and What's Not, the girls themselves put a lot more effort into ensuring that everyone else is thinking the same, virtuous way and will as a result share in the happy joyfulness of being A Real Chalet Girl. Almost as if the Chalet's a religion, and the girls are evangelists -- while Kingscote's a school, and the girls ordinary schoolgirls.

Or something.

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree completely. The character of Marie is chilling because she's so accurate, at least in my experience - I went to a number of schools, and each school had its own Marie Dobson (or male equivalent), who inspired contempt or loathing in everyone they encountered, even the teachers, often for no clearly definable reason. I always got the impression that Antonia Forest went out of her way to try and portray a realistic school situation, with a distinct lack of moralising, and characters like Marie are an important part of that.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

I speak in genuine ignorance, as one to whom the Kingscote version of reality is nearly as unlikely as the Chalet version - my secondary school was what would be called in the UK a 'failing school' and if you could read, you were more or less ignored while teachers tried to stop people throwing tables, and Hellibonk-equivalents went home with stitches. So I read about things like the Tidiness Picture with total fascination...

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

Oh good lord, we certainly never had anything like the Tidiness Picture in any of the schools I went to - on second thoughts it's not so much that Kingscote is a realistic school (though it's not too far off the school I went to for the last four years of high school), but the characters are realistic; compared to, say, the Chalet School, AF's characters behave and interact like real people, rather than according to some reified School Code. Does that make sense?

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely it makes sense.

Though I do think there is a code of behaviour in AF, just not as reified or evangelistic as the CS, as someone said earlier.

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

I think there's a code of behaviour in AF, but not in Kingscote.

[coughingbear]

I think Kingscote has a definite code of conduct, but not necessarily of morality. For example it's not (normally) done to treat student teachers as the Hellibonk is treated, and when Miss Cromwell goes to deal with that, she can trust the class she is teaching to work quietly by themselves. But someone like Lois, whose failings are moral, is never spotted by the staff, and gets punished for untidiness instead.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's right, isn't it - not being the saintly Chalet, where School Rules = Being a Good Christian, Kingscote has rather more secular modes of conduct which have little to do with its restrained Anglicanism. Also, the official school position, the general code of behaviour for the girls, and private morality are all completely different. I'm always interested by moments when they clash, like the fact that Ginty privately thinks her own worst failing was pretending she dived (dove?) badly so Monica could win the Diving Cup, despite landing both Nicola and Patrick in trouble over the phonecalls, or that Miranda, not someone given to apologies, is ashamed of telling Miss Keith about the Suspicious Changear Parcel in Attic Term - prsumably because it smacks of tale-telling, or teacher's pet-type attendance at Visiting Day?

Or other moments when we might expect a clash but don't get one, like when Wendy Treadgold, who is apparently generally anti-Semitic, makes unpleasant remarks about Miranda's wealth in front of Miranda and Nicola, without either of them responding apart from exchanging glances. (It's always struck me as slightly odd that neither of these two notably self-confident girls hits back.)

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

IMO, I think their lack of retaliation has got a lot to do with the fact Nicola and Miranda regard Wendy Tredgold as common. To reply would be to lower themselves to her level. Plus I think that in their times, overt verbal aggression would have been rather less frequent than it is today - they are observing the mode of conduct of their world. Which isn't in the least to say that no aggression is ever displayed at Kingscote...

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure it's that they think Wendy is "common" in a snobbish sense, just that she's pretty much worthless and her opinions don't matter; and furthermore, as far as they are concerned, everyone else who does matter will see that Wendy doesn't matter. Fairly patronising, but then, they're only 13.

A bit like the end of Autumn Term, where Nicola isn't bothered by Marie because Marie is a gabby wet drip who can't help it, whereas Lois isn't gabby or wet and certainly could help it.

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, in canon they don't actually say Wendy is common but I think there are grounds for inferring that. Re snobbery, in End of Term Miranda does expressly refer to "that common little soul with the perm and the Jaguar".

"Fairly patronising, but then, they're only 13."

Have to admit, I always see that pair as being blessed with a healthy sense of their self-worth. :)

[owl]

Well, it's the Traditions of the Service, really, isn't it? Or at any rate, the Traditions of the Marlows. :)

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

I'm currenty looking out the window at approximately a quarter of the Irish navy, and wondering where all the morally-upright Gileses are.

[owl]

Lol, that would be the crew of one ship, then? :-P

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's either the Eimear or the Eithne. Still no Gileses.

[owl]

Aw, shame. Perhaps we could clone one?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

There was also Betty Wynne-Davies, who I can see being a howling success at Kingscote and starting a fashion in scarves that Ginty's friends would take up like a shot.

Though it would lead to parodic scenes with the Staff sitting around smoking and saying

"Well... considering she did give vital information to the Nazis... does anyone else think...?"

"Miss Keith says she has good stuff in her."

"Oh."

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Yes, though not in a while, due to various other stuff that's been taking up my time and energy - rose_and_lizard (summaries on the info page, chapters indexed in the memories). Also Pomona Todd, Vampire Slayer (http://www.livejournal.com/users/rose_and_lizard/13701.html?thread=100229#t100229), which happened in the comments. :)

[jen-c-w.livejournal.com]

Oh! You are rose and lizard! Oh, I read through your stuff and it's fantastic. I don't even like Harry Potter, but it works so brilliantly that I devoured it in about two (allegedly work) afternoons.
Thank you loads. x

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked. :)

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Pomona the Vampire Slayer is a thing of joy. I now want the t-shirt.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

It really needs someone with Tim-like talents to draw her, with axe and jibbah.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Ok, forget the t-shirt, a 'Pomona Todd, Vampire Slayer' jibbah. I envision the Bournemouth AF conference delegates all clad in them.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I dredged up this elderly essay of mine which seemed to be relevant to the point:

here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/ajhalluk/2004/08/21/)

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed, particularly the conversation between you and oursin in the comments, about Nicola's parallel between Marie and Caliban, which I'd forgotten, and the unmistakable Dobson anti-charisma, but particularly in relation to competence in AF.

I know I began the original post on this topic by being happy I'd found other people who worried about Living Up to Nicola Marlow's Standards, and I was laughed at today by a friend for a similar reason - I'm reading Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy for the first time, and my utter, utter enjoyment is tempered by intermittent worries about how good a teenage Macedonian general/celebrated eunuch/Theban Band member I'd have been. (I should point out that I'm not, I think, unduly neurotic, or a chronic under-achiever!) But Renault seems extremely close to AF in her interest in the charisma of extreme accomplishment, whether that's singing 'Once in Royal David's City', doing backward somersaults for King Darius or reading aloud terribly well. Elaine Reese gets her moment out of rabbit-dom by saving The Prince and the Pauper , and Pomona redeems herself by being an excellent Henry , and part of Lois's complexity is that she's talented. (And one can very easily imagine a male Nicola in the world of the Alexander trilogy, drilling his troops with grim enjoyment and being enormously concerned with honour, both his own and others'.)

AF's novels are full of things terribly well done - it puts, for me, a slightly new slant on the twins' desparate desire for success in Autumn Term, if this is a fictional universe in which character is largely (completely?) judged by attainment. 'Character in the AF world is action. Discuss.'

Is it important, I wonder, that Esther can sing and can garden, to back up her beauty?

the ones Kingscote couldn't help

[forester48.livejournal.com]

Have managed at the 2nd attempt to get into this so hope this time I might be lucky. I've only just found this site but have been an admirer of AF's books since childhood and often wondered why they were left out of 'best children's literature' lists.
But what I meant to say was how about Jan Scott as one the school couldn't help. She is in a different league to poor Marie, happy to be a social isolate and admirable in her total indifference.
My other question is why so few postings? The last one was weeks ago. Don't tell me trennels is packing up just as I've found it.

Re: the ones Kingscote couldn't help

[owl]

We're just a rather sporadic lot. But when there is a post, there's usually a lot of discussion comes out.

Re: the ones Kingscote couldn't help

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Jan Scott fascinates me - she's the flipside of the Marlow desire to do things, be involved etc. But does she need help? She never appears to require anything at all. Contemporary pop psychology might say she's alarmingly withdrawn, but that isn't how AF sees her. She is, after all, a capable prefect, and acts well towards a distraught Nicola over the Prosser affair, so it's hardly a psychotic form of isolation.

Re the lack of posts - I have only just got here, too, so I don't know! Post something and see what emerges...

Re: the ones Kingscote couldn't help

[sophie-saurus.livejournal.com]

I read recently in "Celebrating Antonia Forest" that AF revised her books often (it was fascinating to read the bits from "Run Away Home" that got left on the cutting floor). Anyway, it seemed to me as though AF could originally have had Marie commit suicide, which would sort of make sense given the treatment that she received, and then later have toned this down to sudden death. What do you think?

Re: the ones Kingscote couldn't help

[(Anonymous)]

No way - not in the context of what's 'allowable' in children's fiction, nor do I think AF could have borne to do that, as a Catholic. Anyway, isn't Marie just 'not enough of a person' to do that?