I’ll admit it, I loved reading the Famous Five books and didn’t really have strong issues with them. I enjoyed the adventures, wished I could see a painted wooden caravan or run away to a private island, or find myself trapped in tidal caves. I had no idea how miserable the English weather really is. I definitely noticed, and was aware of, the sexism, but everyone in the book was such a type – whether male or female, child or adult or dog – there was no risk of believing that this is how the world operates.
As a girl in Pakistan I wasn’t likely to see any of the people who populated those books, so they all remained types. The gypsies in the books were as two dimensional as the circus ringmasters or the stock characters of a fairytale. Yes they were problematic and I didn’t have much trouble in understanding that so-called ‘gypsies’ were not all thieving dishonest types, any more than boys were divided into virtuous older brothers and mischievous younger brothers, or girls into good girls in ruffles and tomboys.
This is what the Famous Five, and other Enid Blyton books did give me:
– They showed an interest in exploring their world. It was a limited world of course, but there was always movement within it. They also showed that parents could trust their children to make the right decisions and to take care of themselves. I was fortunate that my own parents held a similar belief.
– Some old-fashioned virtues that appealed to me as a child and that, I think, remain important once considered with more nuance and subtlety that Blyton was capable of, or interested in. These include owning up when you do wrong, not cheating, loyalty to friends, putting others before self, etc.
– An interest in the natural world. It was the natural world of England, and I came out of it knowing more about willow catkins, say, than mangroves of Karachi, but the books opened my mind to paying attention to life even in a concrete megacity with limited outdoor spaces. And I will never forget the excitement I felt when I first saw gorse and confirmed how prickly it can be. Did I regret not knowing about mangroves? Not at the time. I mostly regretted not having seen a willow catkin, though now I do wish I had known more about what was around me – but not at the exclusion of feeling another’s delight in what was around them.
Mine may have been a representative colonial experience, not just with Enid Blyton and her perfect English countryside, but with every other bit of British fiction which was also, let’s not forget, from an alien world yet one which I knew more intimately than my own.
The generation now has something similar with American fiction, television, film and internet conversation. Here representation is tokenistic rather than merely non-existent, with perhaps a variety of people (genders, races, sexualities, sometimes even abilities and cultures) but a flattened world view that reflects a hegemonic understanding of what is and how it should be.
It’s just the nature of growing up in an unequal world. This is why it’s important not just to have representation in characters and the individuals one sees onscreen, but diversity in writers and directors and, yes, users on websites.