Malory Towers, by Enid Blyton
May. 9th, 2019 03:51 pmI love boarding school stories. I was actively annoyed when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows largely ditched Hogwarts to focus on saving the world--generally, I am pro-world-saving, but I don't like it when it gets in the way of classes and school projects and petty rivalries. So it will not surprise you that I borrowed all the Malory Towers books from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija and generally adored them. It's not even just the boarding school aspect. It's also the oddly soothing matter-of-fact mid-century Englishness where everyone is practical and unsentimental and, of course, it's also the metric ton of excellent f/f potential.
Briefly, Malory Towers revolves around Darrell Rivers, an all-around good sport who sometimes struggles with a genuinely bad temper. Darrell goes to Malory Towers, a gorgeous boarding school in Cornwall, where she can see the ocean from her "dormy" and where the enormous pool is filled by the sea. There she meets a colorful assortment of characters: future best friend Sally, hardhearted but clever and jovial Alicia, self-centered designated butt monkey Gwendoline, horse-mad Bill, shy little Mary-Lou, and many others. Each book basically follows the same pattern, introducing a new girl or two and charting their character development while also keeping a running tally of lacrosse achievements and tricks played on teachers. Blyton reiterates time and time again that Malory Towers has a profound impact on its girls and tends to shape them for the better, and that's a big focus early on, as we have characters gradually learning to embrace genuine friendships, put aside vanity, and generally assimilate socially.
Gradually, however, the girls get older and the books get strangely meaner. (And weirdly full of fat-shaming.) You can argue about the value of the lessons learned or about the virtues Malory Towers promotes and the vices it punishes (some of which are odd: make sure not to cry when saying goodbye to your parents, thirteen-year-olds!), but early on, there's a kindness to how they're applied and a mercy to how the punishments are dealt out. Later, that's less true. In book five, a character is brutally humiliated for the sin of... talking too much and too favorably about her old school and believing that she can do things. (It turns out that that belief is largely unfounded, but the characters hate her before that's even proven. And unlike in previous books, the humiliation here goes nowhere--the girl is cast down but never lifted back up again.) Other characters are allowed to believe they can do things, but only if they have the proper attitude about it--if they're good sports in other ways, or charmingly eccentric, or athletic. The primary sins appear to be social rather than moral, and if that makes perfect sense for a group of teenage girls, it's an unpleasant thing to encounter from an authorial POV.
All of which basically means that I fully intend to spend a lot of exchanges this year requesting some Gwendoline-centered fic. Gwen is the designated butt monkey of the series, as I said. Only in the first book does she do anything properly villainous--sabotaging a girl in an attempt to frame Darrell for it. She doesn't have mean girl social clout--she can't, because she has no friends. She likes to talk about herself and she's vain and she lies and she hates to swim, and all of these traits are treated as damning and central to her character in a way that they're not with other characters; it's explicit that when she tries to change for the better, no one notices. And when she finally does get her character development and "learns her lesson," it comes at an absurdly high price. Fix-its for Gwen, please. Slow burn character development and Gwen femslash!
Actually, all the femslash. Darrell and her contentious relationship with the charismatic, charming, slightly dangerous Alicia. Darrell and the loyal, quiet, empathetic Sally. Darrell or Alicia and the aforementioned Gwen, enemy-shipping to love. Scatterbrained true love with Irene and Belinda. BILL AND CLARISSA OPENING A STABLE TOGETHER. Darrell having eventual hate-fueled hookups with Alicia's younger cousin June. Shy Mary-Lou made heroic by her love for Daphne, who gets her redemption by loving Mary-Lou back. I need to do some ship manifestos.
The books are an absolute treasure trove for female interaction. I love stories set in all-girl environments for exactly this reason--girls are everywhere and have all kinds of character traits, good, bad, and otherwise. And for all I said about the mean-spirited vibe of some of the later books, the principles here are often sound and grounded in action and character development rather than preachiness. Everything combines to make these irresistibly readable to me, and very memorable.
rachelmanija and generally adored them. It's not even just the boarding school aspect. It's also the oddly soothing matter-of-fact mid-century Englishness where everyone is practical and unsentimental and, of course, it's also the metric ton of excellent f/f potential.Briefly, Malory Towers revolves around Darrell Rivers, an all-around good sport who sometimes struggles with a genuinely bad temper. Darrell goes to Malory Towers, a gorgeous boarding school in Cornwall, where she can see the ocean from her "dormy" and where the enormous pool is filled by the sea. There she meets a colorful assortment of characters: future best friend Sally, hardhearted but clever and jovial Alicia, self-centered designated butt monkey Gwendoline, horse-mad Bill, shy little Mary-Lou, and many others. Each book basically follows the same pattern, introducing a new girl or two and charting their character development while also keeping a running tally of lacrosse achievements and tricks played on teachers. Blyton reiterates time and time again that Malory Towers has a profound impact on its girls and tends to shape them for the better, and that's a big focus early on, as we have characters gradually learning to embrace genuine friendships, put aside vanity, and generally assimilate socially.
Gradually, however, the girls get older and the books get strangely meaner. (And weirdly full of fat-shaming.) You can argue about the value of the lessons learned or about the virtues Malory Towers promotes and the vices it punishes (some of which are odd: make sure not to cry when saying goodbye to your parents, thirteen-year-olds!), but early on, there's a kindness to how they're applied and a mercy to how the punishments are dealt out. Later, that's less true. In book five, a character is brutally humiliated for the sin of... talking too much and too favorably about her old school and believing that she can do things. (It turns out that that belief is largely unfounded, but the characters hate her before that's even proven. And unlike in previous books, the humiliation here goes nowhere--the girl is cast down but never lifted back up again.) Other characters are allowed to believe they can do things, but only if they have the proper attitude about it--if they're good sports in other ways, or charmingly eccentric, or athletic. The primary sins appear to be social rather than moral, and if that makes perfect sense for a group of teenage girls, it's an unpleasant thing to encounter from an authorial POV.
All of which basically means that I fully intend to spend a lot of exchanges this year requesting some Gwendoline-centered fic. Gwen is the designated butt monkey of the series, as I said. Only in the first book does she do anything properly villainous--sabotaging a girl in an attempt to frame Darrell for it. She doesn't have mean girl social clout--she can't, because she has no friends. She likes to talk about herself and she's vain and she lies and she hates to swim, and all of these traits are treated as damning and central to her character in a way that they're not with other characters; it's explicit that when she tries to change for the better, no one notices. And when she finally does get her character development and "learns her lesson," it comes at an absurdly high price. Fix-its for Gwen, please. Slow burn character development and Gwen femslash!
Actually, all the femslash. Darrell and her contentious relationship with the charismatic, charming, slightly dangerous Alicia. Darrell and the loyal, quiet, empathetic Sally. Darrell or Alicia and the aforementioned Gwen, enemy-shipping to love. Scatterbrained true love with Irene and Belinda. BILL AND CLARISSA OPENING A STABLE TOGETHER. Darrell having eventual hate-fueled hookups with Alicia's younger cousin June. Shy Mary-Lou made heroic by her love for Daphne, who gets her redemption by loving Mary-Lou back. I need to do some ship manifestos.
The books are an absolute treasure trove for female interaction. I love stories set in all-girl environments for exactly this reason--girls are everywhere and have all kinds of character traits, good, bad, and otherwise. And for all I said about the mean-spirited vibe of some of the later books, the principles here are often sound and grounded in action and character development rather than preachiness. Everything combines to make these irresistibly readable to me, and very memorable.