As most of you know I went through the voluntary ordeal of graduate school in English. Why? Because I love books. No kidding. I thought that would be enough. This would be sort of like signing up for the military because you are good at pushups.
Books aren't really the thing anymore in the world of English. Books about books? Yes, sir. Queer re-readings of classic works? Bring it! Critical explorations of television shows about vampires? Oh, hellz yeah! I count it one of the great accomplishments of my life to have escaped loving books, real ones (and, no, I don't mean only dead white guy books).
In the spirit of the buffoonery we were required to write every semester, I thought it would be fun to look at kids' books and give them the Earnest English Graduate Student Treatment (EEGST). I probably spend an hour of every working day reading books to my son in the evening and sometimes three or so hours on the weekends. As such a whole new library has been opened to me and I feel it my duty as a person who has read Critical Theory to apply some of the principles to these books. First up, Tootle, a seemingly benign tale of a young train coming to terms with limitations and making the right choice, but under the surface graduate-studenty things lurk. Read on. If it must be noted, all works quoted and scholars cited are fictitious.
"Conformity and Queer Fear in Gertrude Crampton's Tootle"
Marissa Walsh-Rodriguez notes in her seminal work on the topic of conformity and children's literature, To Mine Own Self Be True: Power and Politicking in Pre-Teen Literature, that " [children's literature] exists merely as a vehicle for enforcing the dominant bourgeois cultural structures of the day. . . without which the system would ineluctably collapse" (5). This is so manifestly true that is hardly bears mentioning. We tell our children stories to enforce our own morality with little forethought to the ways in which that morality will change as new social movements come to life. In this, we often hamstring the future of our children, making them moral automatons rather than the freethinkers needed to navigate a complex, gray-shaded world.
Nowhere in the whole corpus of socially-approved children's literature is the conforming element of children's stories more evident than in the Golden Classics work Tootle by Gertrude Crampton. Crampton is an artist for whom conformity was something of an oeuvre. Her other works include the appalling Scuffy the Tugboat and the laughless and lifeless The Large and Growly Bear. First published in the halcyon postwar days of conservative romance, Tootle effectively undercuts any chance of raising children that might buck the system, explore their divergent desires, or experiment with new identities. The conformity expected by young readers of Tootle is well-documented by Honeycutt-Baker, Przybyszewski-Smith, and Palomares-Levin amongst others, but the specific issue of gender conformity and the fear of homosexuality has never been treated by a scholar before, especially one with my pedigree and aptness with polysyllabic words. In this paper I will show the degree to which the conformity expected of young Tootle is gendered in nature, explore the work's own use of the word "queer" as a pejorative to describe Tootle and its implications for a queer reading of the character, and suggest ways in which the book might best be modified for a contemporary reader.
The character Tootle is introduced to us in the opening pages of Tootle as a young engine who has come to the Lower Trainswitch School for Locomotives to receive his formal education in pulling a train across an idyllic America. If you will pardon the expression, Tootle is under the tutelage of Old Bill, a grizzled veteran of the school and presumably the tracks who instructs the young locomotives in a curriculum of proper training technique as well as the principles of conformity that undergird the program. Tootle is introduced to us from the beginning as a brash young engine, confident in his own abilities and desirous of future acclaim as a fast engine on the most prestigious route to which a young engine may aspire: that of the flyer between New York and Chicago. Even Bill accedes to Tootle's exceptional abilities, but from the beginning the need for conformity becomes manifest when Bill enjoins Tootle to work on the one lesson most tied to conformity: Stay on the Rails No Matter What. This course also represents a type of mantra for the young engines. Bill cloaks his desire to suppress Tootle under the auspices of helping him to achieve his dreams but it is impossible not to read resentment in Bill's words to the young engine who he fears might make his cushy job just a bit more difficult. Bill, a lonely bachelor, is confronted by a virile and flamboyant young engine and he is appalled at the contrast to his own decrepitude.
Tootle is diligent in his lessons until one day he is tempted off the track while racing a horse across an open meadow. There is a curve in the track that if he follows will allow the horse to win and Tootle therefore makes the rash decision to leave the track. He ties the horse in the race and returns to the roundhouse in shame. Though the amount of time he has thus far spent at Lower Trainswitch is indeterminate in the text, the degree of indoctrination in the articles of submission propagated by the school is manifest in young Tootle's fragile consciousness. Fearing repercussions for his actions and desirous to remain in line to achieve his career ambitions Tootle hides his dalliance in the field from Bill and the other authorities that impose upon him.
The next day out practicing his lessons, the siren song of the open field rings again. With ostentatious abandonment Tootle breaks loose of the shackles of the track and frolics in the meadow happily. He smells buttercups and makes himself a daisy chain and dances through the meadow. From these descriptors it is quite clear that Tootle has homoerotic tendencies, tendencies highlighted by an evening conversation between Bill and two of the other railmen, the Day Watchman and the First Assistant Oiler. At their nightly card game, the three bachelors sit in their work garb playing checkers. The bathos of the scenario is palpable. These three pillars of conformity, representing efficiency and cleanliness, the surveillance state, and institutional control sit in their free time and discuss the actions of young trains who refuse to comply to their mold.
"It's queer," says the First Assistant Oiler to Bill. Now while some would argue that the usage of the word "queer" in the mid-1940s differed from the pejorative usage common today, as preeminent queer theorist Alain Fournier argues in his seminal work The Arc of Justice Bends Slowly: The Ubiquity of Unwitting GLBTQILMNOP Prejudice in Literature, even anachronistic readings of texts using today's linguistic tropes and attitudes towards homosexuality are accurate given "the vicious and unrestrained homophobia latent in all of our forebears." In other words, though Crampton might not have explicitly intended a homophobic utterance on the part of the oiler, the effect was latent both in the language she used and in the undoubtedly homophobic attitude she harbored herself. It is important that we remember and judge people from earlier epochs for their unmitigated homophobia, even without explicit evidence to do so. The fear of homosexuality ran so deep and was so acute that it undoubtedly colored an otherwise innocuous remark in a children's story.
What is more, Gertrude effectively queers Tootle, by having him dancing in a field with a daisy chain around his anthropomorphic neck. The drawings by the ghastly Tibor Gergely--his first principle in art appears to be as little imaginative as possible, his second to whitewash the world with nondescript European faces--highlight the flamboyance of Tootle's actions. Tootle represents the worst fear of mid-twentieth century culture--an out and proud young person, escaping the false constraints of Neo-Victorian culture. As such, both his individuality and his sexuality must be crushed with all of the weight of the prevailing culture.
We see this in full display in the denouement of the story. Tootle has been spotted in the field by the mayor or Lower Trainswitch who brings the vast bureaucracy of the town to bear on the young engine. Working with Bill and the townspeople, Tootle's jackbooted conformity police work through the night making a number of red flags for each member of the all-white town to hold. It should be noted here that another of Tootle's cringe-inducing courses was Stopping for a Red Flag Waving, something every engine knows he must do.
The next morning when he leaves the track to enjoy his small moments of freedom he is accosted by a red flag behind every bush and tree. He stops for each one and looks for a way around. Alas, in their cold efficiency the townspeople assure there is no other option but to return to the track where a triumphant Bill awaits, green flag in his steely grip. Tootle returns to the track and offers the following heartrending line: "There are nothing but red flags for trains who leave the track."
His will broken, Tootle grows up to achieve his ambitions to run the route between New York and Chicago. Moreover, he becomes a mentor to the next generation of young engines, imparting his wisdom about the importance of staying on the rails no matter what. Fully repressed, Tootle can never be fully happy.
Perhaps the most appalling fact about Tootle is not that such a work was produced in a time of high conformity but that it continues in print and influencing the minds of what ought to be a generation freed from such concerns. Part of my effort in this paper is directed toward addressing this error, not merely in highlighting how backwards older generations were in what they expected from youth. It is not difficult to conceive of a revision of Tootle more in the spirit of the times. In this version, the young engine would be nurtured in his non-traditional pursuits by a progressive headmaster and his lover the Day Watchman. They would tailor a curriculum toward Tootle's desires and perhaps even encourage him in a transition from a track-bound locomotive implement to something freer to roam the meadows outside of town, for example an ATV or a Jeep. Some simple cosmetic work ought to allow for that transition. The opposition would come from a greedy corporate railman in the model of a Vanderbilt who wants to harness Tootle's raw speed and virility for his proposed route that would carry baby seal carcasses and oil fracking equipment with greater speed. Bill and his lover and the townspeople would help Tootle break free of the railman and become who he feels he is at the time.
Isn't that more of the type of book we want to be reading our children?
Next up: The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of the Third Little Pig: Industriousness, Capitalism, and Anti-Semitism in The Three Little Pigs.
I always suspected that 'blowing the house down' was a metaphor for the Diaspora.
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