{"id":79519,"date":"2014-11-13T11:57:34","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T16:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=79519"},"modified":"2014-11-13T12:52:08","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T17:52:08","slug":"the-glad-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/13\/the-glad-game\/","title":{"rendered":"The Glad Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"polly-anna-club-front\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the immortal words of Winston Churchill,\u00a0\u201cA pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pollyanna Whittier would agree. The once popular novelist Eleanor H. Porter\u00a0wrote the original children\u2019s book\u00a0Pollyanna<\/em> in war-ravaged 1913. It concerns a destitute, orphaned young girl who\u2019s taken in by her grim Aunt Polly. The girl wins Polly over with a good attitude\u2014the Glad Game\u2014all the while touching the lives of those around her. It was a best seller, and over the following decades, various authors went on to write thirteen sequels chronicling Pollyanna\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Pollyanna grows up, has a family, moves around the world, but is always encountering lost souls and helping them develop a sunnier outlook. The books, while lurid\u2014you may have heard about Pollyanna\u2019s miraculous recovery from paralysis\u2014are less treacly than the 1960 Disney adaptation<\/a>, and considerably stranger. (Did World War I\u2013era children enjoy seeing characters miraculously rise from their wheelchairs? Hard to know; Downton Abbey<\/em> fans certainly do.) The books are certainly no more sentimental than most of the escapist titles on current fiction best-seller list, let alone YA.<\/p>\n

To the extent modern kids know Pollyanna, it\u2019s probably via Hayley Mills in that Disney adaptation, and possibly through the eponymous pejorative. But if by some chance you\u2019re a die-hard fan, you should make your way to Littleton, New Hampshire\u2014Porter\u2019s birthplace\u2014where there\u2019s a bronze Pollyanna statue, erected in 2002, and even an official Glad Day. (Glad Clubs enjoyed a brief popularity all over America.)<\/p>\n

The Pollyanna mentality kind of works, too. The other day, having just reread Pollyanna<\/em> in the stacks of the library, I set myself the experimental challenge of casting a rosy light on everything I saw in a five-block New York City street. No mean feat. People rushed past panhandlers, an elderly woman with dementia punched her nurse (feebly, at least), the front page of the paper\u2019s international section recorded nothing but suffering.<\/p>\n

But then a motorist leaned on his horn, and a bunch of others followed suit, and it became a cacophony. And suddenly, this thought intruded: How inspiring that, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, these drivers still have the idealism to believe their honking will make a difference! When you thought about it that way, it was sort of a triumph of the human spirit. Sort of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wonder if Churchill\u2014nearly killed by New York City traffic in 1931\u2014would agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the immortal words of Winston Churchill,\u00a0\u201cA pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.\u201d\u00a0 Pollyanna Whittier would agree. The once popular novelist Eleanor H. Porter\u00a0wrote the original children\u2019s book\u00a0Pollyanna in war-ravaged 1913. It concerns a destitute, orphaned young girl who\u2019s taken in by her grim Aunt Polly. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[3618,16022,16023,16021,16020,7137,14923],"class_list":["post-79519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-childrens-books","tag-eleanor-porter","tag-hayley-mills","tag-optimism","tag-pollyanna","tag-winston-churchill","tag-world-war-one"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Real Pollyanna Whittier<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on Eleanor H. 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