Over the past year or so, I have enjoyed going on a rabbit hole of revisiting lots of stories I loved in my childhood, many of which came from Enid Blyton. Blyton wrote hundreds of hugely popular children’s books between the 1920s and 1960s. Even though many of the most popular ones, including The Famous Five and Malory Towers series were published in the 1940s and 1950s, they were still widely loved during my childhood and still are loved by readers in the present day. I found Blyton’s presentations of femininity through her female characters to be particularly intriguing to look at from a new perspective. On one hand, her presentations of gender can be seen as highly problematic, and a product of their time for which Blyton has faced scrutiny. However, there are also features of these girls, which would have made them pioneering, empowering role models in mid 20th century Britain, and which still hold up as interesting characters. How can we explain these ‘mixed messages?’
The most interesting and complex female character produced by Blyton in my opinion, is George from The Famous Five series and the contrasts presented between her and her cousin Anne. I will be focusing on these characters, and because the ideas here recur throughout Blyton’s work, we can use them to understand her broader ideas on femininity. The Famous Five series was a wildlypopular bestseller following 4 children – siblings Julian, Dick, Anne, their cousin George and Timothy the dog, throughout various adventures and mysteries.
In some ways, George is a great role model. She is strong, capable and brave, a loyal friend, a talented swimmer, rower and climber (often even more strong and talented than the boys and this was explicitly stated). She is bold, direct and even though she often accepts the words of the group’s leader and oldest boy Julian, she still makes clear decisions for herself throughout the series and is self-sufficient without their guidance and leadership. She impressively has her own dog, boat, and island which offers her a degree of agency. George navigates well under tough circumstances and under pressure. She also challenges the dominance and patronisation from the boys far more than any other of Enid Blyton’s girls, and though it wasn’t always effective, it was refreshing to see. From someone who used to be stubborn and closed off, George develops into someone far more compassionate and patient and becomes a team player. She learns to keep her temper and becomes more appreciative and kinder towards her cousin Anne, who is a very different girl to her. Many girls with limited role models like this at the time loved George, and still well into the 2000s and beyond, she was a character that many including myself, admired.
George consistently and firmly rejects female stereotypes. She goes by George and refuses to answer to her full name ‘Georgina’. She has her hair cut short and wears boys clothes, and is delighted whenever she gets mistaken for a boy. Some readers have also questioned whether George is transgender, because of how deeply she wants to be understood as and perceived as a boy. Whilst I think there is absolutely a case to make for this, I don’t think we can say for certain. A lot of George’s aversion to being associated with anything girlish is due to a hatred of how girls and femininity were perceived as weak at the time, and so it is perhaps reductive to assume this means George is transgender, though it’s certainly a possibility.
Anne in many ways is the opposite to George. She clearly fits into the female stereotypes of the time, as a sweet tempered, meek, passive and kind girl. She is praise for these qualities by all the adults around her. She loves dresses, dolls, and enjoys ‘playing house’ during the group’s many camping excursions, focusing ondomestic tasks like cooking, making food and the beds. She enjoys this and is quite happy to be left behind for the most dangerous parts of adventures. Anne is given some credit for her thoughtfulness and shrewdness which contributes to the group’s successes in adventures. She is intelligent, perceptive and compassionate and her caution sometimes comes in useful as she is able to get help when the others go into things hot-headedly at get captured. There are some occasions where she stands up for herselfand is indignant at things her brothers say, but they are limited and are never a sustained protest. She accepts the lead of her brothers, who clearly have a lot of affection for her and always take care of her, but can be very condescending and dismissive. She is often scared, and babied by the others. Lots of the girls that the group encounter are like Anne. Through this, many readers adopted the idea that being ‘typically feminine’ made you weak and were frustrated at Anne’s meekness. A lot of the way she is treated is justified by the others through her being the youngest, but it is undoubtedly mixed up in sexism as well. Anne is also very admiring of George’s strengths and skills.
George has a lot of internalised misogyny which is evident around other female characters. She could be extremely cruel and mocking of Anne. She hates having to do the washing up with Anne, or share the girls’ bed with her. However, she also feels a degree of guilt when she let Anne do such jobs alone, demonstrating the conscience she has been conditioned to have. She feels extremely threatened and jealous towards characters like Jo and ‘Lesli’, andhated when they demonstrated being braver or more boyish than her. She dismissed very feminine girls as weak and silly, and scorned girls who cried a lot. This presents the question – can George really be seen as a refreshing character that breaks the mould, if she treats others like this with such contempt? Her clear belief that masculinity and boyishness are superior, and the way she seems femininity as equating weak, is not the model of female empowerment that we perhaps hoped for. She is only seen as strong when she exhibits a ‘masculine’ quality. Despite her self-sufficiency, George still craves a level of validation and approval from her father and the boys. The male characters also ‘reward’ George for ‘good’ behaviour like chivalry, by saying she is like boy. George is allowed to reject certain feminine qualities but is not fully freed from the gender expectations of the time.
Despite this behaviour, it is clear why George acts the way she does and impossible not to sympathise with her. She has truly been conditioned by her environment, and constantly has to prove herself and her strength repeatedly, to receive respect and to be treated as an equal, which is given for them as boys. For challenging gender norms and the sexist stereotypes so often put on her and Anne, for advocating for herself when it comes to her name and clothing, and protesting the girls being left behind often for the most exciting/dangerous part of adventures, George is often seen by others as stubborn and uncooperative. She is laughed at and ridiculed for this, when often she is just demanding to be seen and respected. As the series went on, I noticed that George seemed to protest less at things like being left behind with Anne. Though I appreciated her growing kindness and appreciation of Anne, it was also sad to see her losing some of her fight. Maybe it is meant to demonstrate that George is maturing and becoming less quarrelsome, however this makes it seem like her protests about being underestimated were childish, which they were not. As she got older, the futile nature of her protests might have become more apparent to her.
A lot of George’s character and inner struggle is based off Blyton herself. Blyton had a complex relationship with femininity andshared many of George’s frustrations. She was a spirited tomboy who enjoyed physical activities that were deemed ‘unfeminine’ and resented the greater freedoms her brothers enjoyed. She was also a career woman. One must wonder though – if Blyton could tell this story of empowerment, why did she write George being ridiculed, not taken seriously and having to prove herself repeatedly? Why did she so often keep the girls back from the most exciting parts of adventure and constantly perpetuate this idea that they couldn’t handle what the boys could, if she too was frustrated by this concept? Is it because of the editing she was forced to adhere to, and the fact that a fully empowered girl would have been hard to swallow at the time? Or because she was trying to show that someone like George ultimately would not get their way? Or because she internalised some of these ideas herself, despite her protests, seeing femininity as weak and relying on ‘masculine’ behaviour to be taken seriously? Whilst she pushed against gender norms, she was never completely free of them as a product of the world at the time. She was restrained by ideas of ‘proper’ behaviour versus the desire to be free, a tension which we see in George.
Is George a story of rebellion against these stereotypes, or is she an example of how it was ultimately pointless trying to challenge them? I think the books present a message of both to those who read it. George is a great, empowering role model for young readers, but she is only seen as strong and admirable for her qualities that oppose typical femininity for the time. Female characters like George, Anne, and others in Blyton’s works certainly presented a welcome array of different possibilities of what girls could be, but ultimately, they were all subject to the same narrow and repressive ideals of what strength, freedom and agency were defined as at the time. It’s important that modern readers don’t internalise these ideas, and so whilst the stories can definitely stillbe loved and enjoyed, this context should certainly be considered.