The Hardy Boys and the Case of the Arrogant Critic

I mentioned in an earlier post that I used to be a grad student in literature. Part of why I chose to abort my professor goal had to do with the feeling that I was becoming a self-righteous intellectual. Whether I was reading a novel for fun or watching a play at Stratford, I felt that I, the scholar, had to identify everything that was “problematic” and condemn it. Let’s see what that looks like in a sample book by a Canadian author.

The Tower Treasure (1927) is the first novel in the immensely popular Hardy Boys series. Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian, was the first author to ghost write under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. Frank and Joe Hardy are the teenage sons of a middle-class, suburb-dwelling family in Bayport, a modestly sized city of 50,000. Aside from the crimes that drive the plot, the world of the books is basically a wholesome place where things are “swell” and “good night!” is an acceptable exclamation. The boys’ detective work fits around classes, church, baseball practice, and family meals.

An especially problematic feature of the story is the class values that operate in the background. When a package of jewels disappears from the mansion of a reclusive millionaire, the father of the boys’ friend Slim Robinson is the prime suspect. Mr. Robinson loses his job, and Slim, the A-student and aspiring engineer, is forced to drop out of school to get a job. Now here’s the thing: the family also has to move into the poor neighborhood of Bayport. The story describes their fallen state in one scene when Frank goes to visit his pal:

When they came to the street where the Robinsons had moved they found that it was an even poorer thoroughfare than they had expected. There were small houses badly in need of paint and repairs. Shabbily dressed children were playing in the roadway.

The Robinson’s misery is complete. The father is unemployed, their son has lost his future, and they have nameless street urchins for neighbors. To be identified among the poor is the worst possible condition, and the Hardys must solve the mystery to clear Mr. Robinson’s name and restore the family to the middle class.

What else is problematic in this story? Gender. Mrs. Hardy’s role in the story is limited to enabling the boys’ adventure, mainly by packing them lunches as they go off sleuthing. For example, “When [she] heard the boys’ plan, she thought it an excellent one and immediately offered to make some sandwiches for them. By the time they were ready to leave she had two small boxes packed with a hearty picnic lunch” (157). The mother has her own car, but doesn’t seem to need it; she never leaves home. The only exception is the final scene when all the characters gather at the house of Mr. Millionaire to celebrate the solved case (and I’m not sure why, but I pictured her wearing oven mitts).

Leslie McFarlane

 Now what do critics do with all of this? Here’s what I would say: “Aha! I knew it, you backward, middle-class, patriarchal so-and-so! (to borrow an expletive from Joe Hardy) “I see your ideology of class and gender oppression, and I censure it!” This is the spirit of judgment and condemnation that just stinks from a mile away. It’s the petty mindset that claims moral high ground and elevates one’s self above the author. Yes, The Tower Treasure perpetuates a vision of the middle class that alienates the lower class and limits women. But (and I say this to myself) let’s not go the extra step of using a children’s story to inflate our moral ego.

Alistair MacLeod – Bard of Cape Breton

Recently I’ve been considering my decision to write about history and literature on this blog. Is there any relationship between those two? Or did I just throw them together like green eggs and ham? Over the past two months, I’ve been reading an author who has helped me to realize how both history and literature feed into and enrich one another.

Alistair MacLeod was born in 1936 and grew up on Cape Breton Island. I discovered him at the recommendation of a friend, and have thoroughly enjoyed his writing from the start. The great thing is that, unlike Charles Dickens, you can reasonably set out to read all of his published work. All you need are two books: Island (1999), his collected volume of short stories, and No Great Mischief (2002), his novel.

 As I said, MacLeod has helped me to think about the relationship between history and literature. In stories we have, as Northrop Frye said, an “imaginative key to history” (76). For example, No Great Mischief traces the family history of Calum Ruadh, the Abraham-type patriarch who emigrated from Scotland in 1779. In a history textbook, you might read that “nearly 40,000 Scots arrived in Nova Scotia between 1785 and 1849” (Conrad 240). In the novel, however, you get to read about the experience of one man, widowed on the crossing, and his effort to establish a new life in Cape Breton Island with his twelve children. The story brings life and emotion and compassion to compliment the historical facts.

In Island, MacLeod’s short stories centre on the family life of Cape Breton. The fathers are miners, farmers, fishermen, and loggers who take pride in the dignity of physical work. Again, you could read in a textbook that “Cape Breton's economy faces significant challenges with unemployment and out-migration” (Wiki). But what you have in Island is the story of a young man fed up with his futureless life in small town C.B., who leaves home to “kick the dust off his shoes” and yet discovers new-found respect for his father and grandfather even as he travels away (The Vastness of the Dark). In another story, a miner wrestles with his alienation from his wife and children as he prepares to leave Cape Breton to work in the mines of South Africa (The Closing Down of Summer). Again, as Northrop Frye says, stories “tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way” (77).

This Group of Seven painting illustrates the typical setting of a MacLeod story. (1)

I want to know the Canadian experience. I want to understand its regions, and appreciate the character of their inhabitants. I want to see their strength and feel for their trials. If we are to have any hope of progress to that end, we need both history and literature. History tells us what happened, and literature fills it with life.

Sources

Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination.

Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, History of the Canadian Peoples: Beginnings to 1867. 

(1) Painting: Jackknife Village by Franklin Carmichael

The Difference between Canada and the USA

I just got back from a week in Florida with family. Apart from the chance to swim in the ocean in January and eat a full hamburger as an appetizer, the trip gave me the opportunity to think about cultural differences between Canada and the United States.

Sunset at the beach in Naples, FLA

Certainly, Canada has a long history of receiving culture from America with open arms. Most of our songs on the radio, movies in the theatre, and athletes in the CFL are American. It’s easy to take all that for granted. But during my stay, I was struck by one thing that definitely stopped at the border: religious nationalism.

You might first notice it when you exchange currency at the airport. Suddenly all of the bank notes and coins in your hand bear the refrain “In God We Trust.” Later on, as you toast the New Year, the band leader says “This next song is dedicated to our troops in the field – may God bring them home soon,” and they begin to play, not Auld Lang Syne, but God Bless America. A few days later, you are browsing a large bookstore and you find a thick volume titled Southern by the Grace of God, singing praises to sweet home Alabama et al. And as you drive around town, you are struck by the insistent presence of Old Glory, the flag that adorns public buildings and houses everywhere.

In application, religious nationalism can lead people to present their political values in religious language, intensifying debate from matters of justice to matters of good and evil, righteousness and sin. At its most extreme expression, this has produced the “God Hates Fags” movement out of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas.

It is wrong to pray for blessing upon your country? Surely not. Is it wrong to love your flag? Nope. Is it wrong to let religion inform your views of justice? No, we all do this. Is it wrong for interest groups to use language of sin and evil in public debate? Yes, and I’m grateful that the practice is foreign to Canada. It's not easy to maintain a language of shared values, especially given that people from every religion and worldview have made Canada their home. But for the sake of unity and understanding, surely it's worth the effort.

For a brief overview of religious nationalism, see:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March07/Dyson.cover.AP.html