Editor’s note: This commentary is by Melanie Stultz-Backus, a retired high school teacher who was born in Burlington and lives in Bristol.
[A]mong Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s many accomplishments was her fluency in five languages, yet she might have heeded the reflections of her reputed namesake from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Dorothea Brooke: “I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don’t know.” Canfield Fisher’s ostensible linguistic aptitude masks a flaw: her well-intentioned efforts to reform society were marred by a conviction that her conception of Yankee culture should be pre-eminent.
Born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1879 and brought up in the then-hinterlands of Midwestern academia, she followed an ambitious road towards sophisticated scholarship in the East and in Europe. When she and her husband chose to settle in Vermont, her romantic reclamation of her forebears’ ancestral home shows her susceptibility to sentimentality in equal measure with her adoption of progressive values. She memorialized the spare, taciturn, thrifty, hard-working and emotionally reticent Vermont character. She sought out a virtuous archetype, but the effect in her writing, as in her impetus for social reform, is to delimit a stereotype that is neither universal nor nuanced.
In a recent broadcast on Burlington’s Channel 17, Kim Chase, an educator and researcher of Canfield Fisher’s works, remarked that Canfield Fisher was “what we would call tone deaf” when it came to a discerning perception of cultural subtleties. When Canfield Fisher and others took up the cause of eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, they embraced what they believed was a noble ideal that would better the human condition. There was a tacit agreement that those who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants had lesser morals and mores than those who were of “pure Yankee stock.” Proponents of the Vermont Commission on Country Life were blinkered by their self-righteous impulses for doing good.
Canfield Fisher first published “Understood Betsy,” her most well known children’s book, in 1917; the copy in our bookshelves had belonged to my mother, who was born in 1916. When I was a child, its faded orange cover, embellished with stylized kittens, butterflies and cattails, caught my attention. I knew it was set in Vermont and that its eponymous hero was a girl about my age. I read it greedily. I vividly recall the inhibiting sensation of its forcefully didactic style, even as I remember the engaging and authentic elements of its narrative line. I felt the writer wanted to make her readers conform to a dutiful acceptance of her notions of self-reliance and right behavior. Near the book’s ending, at a crucial moment of development for Betsy, the author’s voice enters in direct first person discourse with the comment “I’m very proud of her for what she said.” Why must an author intrude, telling her readers how to interpret? Canfield Fisher’s insistent tone left its mark on my impressions of her.
Canfield Fisher’s short introductory note for the Book of the Month Club’s edition of “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, published in 1945, echoes the line in “Understood Betsy”: I am proud of the chance to bring to the thoughtful attention of intelligent, morally responsible Americans the dreadful heart-breaking story of a Negro childhood and youth, as set down by that rarely gifted American author, Richard Wright.
Are her praises of this text (expurgated under her close editorial supervision to be more palatable to Northern readers) driven by her pride? What is that pride but an expression of her unquestioned privilege to prescribe morality and mores? The eminently well-educated, prodigiously industrious “Lady from Vermont” reveals the unexpected insularity of her worldview. Her recognition of Richard Wright’s import is reminiscent of Charlotte Osgood Mason’s patronage of the great artists of the Harlem Renaissance: an acknowledgment of genius tainted by a presumption of guardianship, ownership. Such an arrogation robs the artist of independence and of power.
In her essay “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” Leslie Marmon Silko writes, “Where I come from, the words most highly valued are those spoken from the heart, unpremeditated and unrehearsed.” When we award iconic standing to one individual in the name of enlightened ideas, we create an opening for exposing that person’s damning foibles. We would do better to widen our perspective. If we follow the spirit of Vermont’s award for excellence in children’s literature, we must consider the dimensions of storytelling as an inclusive act. A child’s unerring intuition guides her to understand a genuine tone, a tone unfettered by didactic impositions. As Silko further says, “… storytelling brings us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time.” We cannot remain deaf to such an insight.
