Mischief and Punishment: The Rhetoric of Girlhood in Sophie May’s Little Prudy Series, 1864-1868

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session III
  In Interactive Paper Session: Children, Adolescents, and the Media Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

In this paper, I am concerned with the ways in which girls and girlhood were figured in mid-nineteenth-century children’s literature as a means for developing, teaching, and cementing the dominant values and rhetoric of the period. Through an analysis of Rebecca Sophia Clarke’s children’s series Little Prudy, which was published between 1864 and 1868 under the pen name Sophie May, this paper considers the rhetorical role that mischief and punishment played in the constitution of the dominant conception of girlhood and the trope of the ideal girl at the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the post-bellum period.

Author

• Lauren DeLaCruz, Northwestern