Moved from another topic.
Following up on Andrew Maunder's interview [
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9320] and overall approach to Enid, I'm now going through his biography - but as said, I find the major insights on how and why she wrote particular books/ series offset by the heavy-handed references to 'racism'' as a major issue yet again. I would have been happier with extending the 'these books were of their time' approach, which is a valid one and explains a lot (eg the charge of showing too many 'lazy' stereotypes of foreign characters), to this issue too.
Certainly this applies in the case of the depiction of Jo-Jo in 'The Island of Adventure' - he should rather be put with Mr Diaz in The Secret of Spiggy Holes and the slightly cartoonish Balkan villagers and policemen in The Circus of Adventure , or for that matter the Central African 'sun-worshipping lost tribe' in The Secret Mountain as the literary product of an era in the 1900s (when Enid was reading as a girl) ,to 1940s when books, adventurous boys' comics, and later on films portrayed such people in these terms as a matter of course. Arguably Enid did not bother to create unusual and more thought-provoking challenges to these stereotypes as writers like Geoffrey Trease did, but that was not her purpose and she was writing a lot more books than they were and had other priorities. And why not read Jo-Jo as a more subtle commentary by Enid on the simplistic cliche stereotype being shown up as lazy and inaccurate and needing to be ignored, as he can use this to exploit and trick his employers and the children? The message here to the readers would be 'look behind the surface assumptions' , which is in a way anti-racist in general terms - though very low-key.
But it is interesting to see the Second World War context of creating the first few Famous Five books as cheering up British readers and introducing the best of the UK countryside to foreign readers, as a wartime propaganda exercise - and using Eileen Soper's illustrations as she had already been called upon to do war work posters of the British countryside in 1940 . (I did not know this.)
Ditto the revelations in the AM book of what Macmillans, the publisher of Island of Adventure in 1943, initially thought about for Enid's first book for them - aiming it at their US audience with 2 British children returning to the UK in c. 1941 from the US and getting mixed up with German spies and helped by a US pilot . A rather different sort of series if Enid had followed this up, and one firmly set in WW2 - but Enid had the sense to prefer something that would not date' so quickly and reassured the publishers' that her own plotline would appeal to US readers too and would be not so specifically placed in a UK setting that it would put American readers off. (She stated in a memo to Macmillans that her setting would not be firmly placed geographically, and the 'copper mine' and the 'search for a rare bird' would be as relevant to US as to UK readers; and elsewhere this sense of creating only vague locations was stated by her as applying to the Five books too, as a way of widening their appeal. ) A useful new line on these 2 series, and on Enid's shrewdness!'
The Secret Mountain in particular can be argued as a children's equivalent of the literary Rider Haggard and the film 'Tarzan' series genre , not just written off as lazy racism - and as a cultural construct of a particular era which its intended audience would recognise. Enid was writing for that audience, and selecting topics that would please them and was portraying these in a manner which they would feel comfortable with; and I think that could have been emphasised in a more 'positive' and generous way rather than trotting out the 'look at all the racism, how terrible' approach again.
The 'cultural construct' argument about reflecting the author's background and how to tie in the produced book to the readers feeling comfortable about a recognisable setting explains a lot - but needed to be taken further. And if Enid was using cliches in her characterization, how about all the cliches of Buchan, 'Sapper' and co about sinister foreign baddies - and the often worse characterization of the 'foreign villains' in children's comics, which is I think a problem that all these literary critics tend to ignore but was still pretty bad when I was reading them in the 1970s and was then still aimed at the wartime Germans !
