The Lamplighter

In contrast with what we were trying to teach girls 150 years ago, today we encourage young girls to be who they truly are. In the video Anna said that her advice to young girls was, “don’t think about what you have to do for people to like you.” This idea goes against what domestic fiction stories such as The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter were trying to teach young girls. These novels encouraged girls to dedicate themselves to serving others. They taught that making other people happy was the key to being a “good” and well-liked lady. In The Lamplighter Gerty cleans Uncle True’s house in hopes of making him happy. “Which the child felt herself more blessed in being permitted to perform than she would have done at almost any girl or favor that could have been bestowed upon her” (110). This is an example of how The Lamplighter portrays girls serving others as a source of being liked. As times are changing so is society’s view of how girls should be. Just as we did 150 years ago, today we are still following what society thinks a girl should be. At the end of the video everyone choose if they liked a butterfly or a rainbow better. We tend to think of these two things as “girly” and associate them with girls. Though some of the idea about what is “girly” may have changed from 150 years ago we are still associating certain characteristics and things with girls because that is what we have been taught to do by the world around us.

The idea of the show was to encourage girls to “balance” themselves. This idea of balance was to get girls to focus on their inner feelings and try to be themselves. Gerty’s balance was to try to contain her inner feelings of hostility. The text talks about the look that Gerty would get in her eyes when she would talk about Nan Grant. It was described as a look of hatred that could only come from the inner feelings of Gerty. Uncle True and others wanted Gerty to find balance in her life by riding herself of and containing those hostile feelings. If Gerty was to be asked by Amy Pholer what she does to create “balance” in her life, Gerty probably would have said screaming. When Nan Grant kills Gerty’s kitten and when the girls at school make fun of Uncle True Gerty uses screaming as a way of releasing some of her anger. “When Gerty was angry or grieved, she always cried aloud—not sobbing, as many children do, but uttering a succession of piercing shrieks” (91). Gerty would have taken a much different approach than Anna and her yoga.