The Schools That Never Were

   Did you ever fantasize about being “sent away” to boarding school?  I did, and books about boarding schools—classics such as John Knowles’s A Separate Peace  and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye among them—fueled this fantasy.  Bad things tend to happen in books about boarding schools, yet something about the idea of trading parental authority for institutional authority captured my imagination.

    British literature abounds with books set in boarding schools.  Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, R.F. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, and of course J.K. Rowlings’s Harry Potter series all reinforce the notion that going away to school—even a wizardry school—is a normal thing to do.  We Americans are more likely to think of boarding schools as warehouses of last resort for burdensome children, yet we nonetheless have a certain fascination with them as fictional settings.  This is why a book like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, whose tale of a Midwestern public school girl making her way through an East Coast boarding school feels strikingly familiar, can be so satisfying to read.  Boarding schools are great settings for “coming of age” novels largely because they are insular worlds where adults recede into the background while adolescents define themselves with respect to the “real world” outside the school.

     The Desert Academy, a progressive boarding school in Arizona, is one of several settings for my novel, Blind Girl’s Bluff.  My fifteen year old protagonist Lucy was homeschooled for most of her life by her anarchist father, Will, who died a year earlier when he bombed the post office where he was a mail sorter.  Lucy, who had followed Will to the scene of the bombing, lost her vision in this explosion, and comes to the Desert Academy as a scholarship student.  It is in this boarding school that Lucy discovers a passion for painting and begins to struggle with the problem of being unable to see, and therefore evaluate, her own work.

    While the Desert Academy turns out to be a very temporary home for Lucy, it is a place that changes her life forever.  This is true of all the best fictional boarding schools, whether they are places of refuge, imprisonment, or both.  Thus, it is impossible to think of Jane Eyre’s trajectory without thinking about her years at Lowood, where a den of pestilence ultimately became a nurturing sanctuary that prepared Charlotte Bronte’s heroine for the likes of Rochester. 

    My take on the Desert Academy pedagogy is rather negative, but the place is mostly a figment of my imagination—with some inspiration from boarding school anecdotes I have heard over the years.  Ironically, in these late stages of revising my novel about a flawed progressive boarding school, I have at last found the ideal progressive boarding school—The Delderton School in Eva Ibbotson’s The Dragonfly Pool, which I just finished reading to my eight year old daughter.  The fantasies about being “sent away” may already be germinating in her brain, ready to surface in adolescence.  I will just remind her that reality is overrated, and that sometimes it is best to experience things vicariously.  Isn’t that why we read novels in the first place?

Comments

[Donna]

Great and familiar threads in this post Kelly. The books you mentioned, as well as A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, fueled my imagination as well as my daughters'. While they were all schools that never were, the writer's skill made them as tangible as any school I actually attended.