Ragged Dick Prompt

Throughout this course, we have read literature that has a young female as the main character. This young girl has usually ecountered a struggle that dealt with being a dainty young lady, or how to become and act like a proper young lady. For example in The Lamplighter we deal witht he character of Gerty whose major struggle involves her inability to be a "good girl". Throughout the text people encourage her and give her the means to become a prim and proper young woman, however she continuously struggles with how to make tea and how to mind her temper. Of course, like all of our 19th century books, in the end she does become the dainty young women she is meant to be and marries the man she wants and lives happily ever after. And this is what we've always seen; A young girl encountering a dilemma but in the end becoming mature and quaint and living happily ever after. However Ragged Dick shows us a different side of 19th century American children's literature. Ragged Dick shows us the expectations of young boys.

Ragged Dick is a young boy whose biggest issue is whose shoe is he going to buff next. This boy is not as good natured as the girls that we have seen and is in fact quite deceptive. For example on 47, Dick and his new companion Frank decide to patronize a widow selling apples by telling her that Dick was, "sent by the mayor to collect your taxes." This mischeviousness is much different from the up front honesty and politeness we are used to from the young girls. Another difference is Dick is extremely independent. From what we know he has had no role model to look up to and has basically relied on himself for food, money, work, and shelter. And yet this boy is a witty, nice, funloving guy. In our literature we have always seen young girls needed a role model or companion. Ellen needed her mom, Gerty needed her kitten and then True, Capitola needed Nancy Grewell and then Old Hurricane. Unlike girls it seems boys don't need a companion or role model; they do quite fine on their own. Another big difference with boys is their lack of religion. The bible and the symbol of God has played such a huge role in the lives of almost all the female characters we've encountered. For example both Gerty and Ellen struggle to find God and understand religion better and Ellen even has to read passages of the bible to her mother each night. This is very different from Ragged Dick who proclaims on page 63 that he's never read the bible but, "heard it's a good look." To hear this is incredible because it again shows that girls were expected to be well rounded, christian young ladies and boys were not.

The character I would like to mainly contrast Ragged Dick to is Gerty. Dick is referred to as "ragged" because of his looks; he is very dirty and wears tattered clothes. Throughout Ragged Dick we hear of no one giving him a second glance for his look, and we hear him engage with several older men (even getting most to laugh) and having an all around great disposition. With Gerty, she too is dirty, however when she is walking down the street people point at her and call her ugly or a "witch." Because of these names she develops a very low self image and constantly views herself as disgusting. This is a huge difference because clearly for a girl to look "ragged" was deemed almost evil and clearly was way out of the ordinary for Gerty to get so much attention. But with boys this was okay. It was okay for a boy not to shower and wear old clothes; he can just joke and say his jacket is Washington's and his pants are Napoleon's.

From the texts that we have read we can conclude thus far that girls were mainly viewed as objects; people that were on the earth to look, act and be dainty and submissive. They needed to be educated and beautiful in order to be accepted and if they went outside this norm and looked ugly such as Gerty or were outspoken, such as Sybil, negative consequences (being put in an insane asylum) were imposed. Although this is our first text with a male main character, so far we can conclude that boys were given little expectations, but still had more opportunites than girls just because they were males. They were also more socially interative which we can see through Dick mentioning several different friends and all our female characters naming no other girl friends. Overall during 19th century children's literature, boys and girls functioned as foils, or opposites.