Longing for a doll, Pollyanna was crushed when the do-good ladies gave her crutches instead. Pollyanna’s late father had been an impoverished minister and the family depended on donations for their household. Whatever ill you are dwelling on, the rules say, whatever misfortune befalls, there is always some inverse to celebrate. When faced with the high ratio of dispirited folks and sociophobic eccentrics in town, she sets to work engaging all in the Glad Game, a mental exercise that predated Norman Vincent Peale’s teachings by almost half a century. Just-orphaned Pollyanna Whittier is sent to live with her seminamesake, wealthy spinster Aunt Polly Harrington in Vermont. The premise of Pollyanna is quite simple. There is too much suffering on earth for anyone to incline toward optimism-boilerplate or otherwise-and really, who among us today feels any quantifiable hope? But as Tracy Kidder wrote, “Among a coward’s weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all.” And despair gets downright exhausting. Without knowing so at the time, I inclined toward a less sanguine, Voltairean realism. I was a white girl in an upper-middle-class suburb, with no excuse for ennui, let alone cynicism-except I already grasped that the world was on fire and President Nixon was throwing gas on it.
(I loved the sister she played in the latter, with the same god-awful cropped haircut my mother saddled on me, especially when she takes a pair of scissors to her twin’s blonde curls in order to trick their unwitting parents.)Įven as a sixth grader, I found Pollyanna to be tough medicine. I also saw the movie when the local theater served it up alongside The Parent Trap for the annual Hayley Mills double feature. Porter’s 1913 children’s classic manifesto of delusional idealism. The seal on the title page is proof that I read the 1960 Wonder Books edition of Pollyanna, Eleanor H. Between the ages of six and twelve, each time I finished a book, I stamped my name in blue ink with a personalized gadget I’d pulled out of my Christmas stocking one year.
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