Escape from Modernity: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Italian Children

This article examines the ways in which British-born American author Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924)—best known today as the author of such children’s classics as Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911)—portrayed Italian children in her books Giovanni and the Other (1892) and Piccino and Other Child Stories (1894). It argues, in particular, that Burnett found in young Italians the ultimate embodiment of an appealingly pre-modern world, a poignant reminder of a primitive simplicity that in more industrialized and technologically advanced countries such as the United States and England appeared to have nearly vanished. Accordingly, in her stories about Italian children Burnett looked at poverty and backwardness through a romantic, aestheticizing lens, treating these conditions as markers of a more natural, uncomplicated way of life. However, as we shall see, Burnett was also capable, on occasion, of moving beyond the safety and predictability of the touristic gaze, thus touching on the power the observer has over the observed. In particular, in the stories “Giovanni and the Other” and “Piccino,” she focuses on the implications and repercussions of a wealthy foreigner’s intervention in the life of a poor Italian child. She shows what happens when the tourist, no matter how enraptured with the beauty and naturalness of the child, cannot resist the impulse to alter or “improve” his lot. Considering the historical phase in which Burnett devised this scenario and the provenance of the wealthy outsiders in question (respectively American and British), the two stories could be read as parables on the exercise of imperialistic power. In addition, dealing as they do with attempts to make the children conform to unfamiliar values and standards, these stories suggest the process of enforced assimilation to which hundreds of thousands of immigrants were subjected in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century.