Sara Crewe from A Little Princess
For a while now I’ve been thinking about the term Mary Sue, and how irritating it is when it’s adhered to characters who don’t deserve it. Something that used to define an original character who was inserted into a fanfiction in such a way that made them the centre of the universe, is now mostly used to describe female characters that can walk down the street without assistance. A girl who does stuff? What a Mary Sue!
I’m exaggerating a little, but not much. And all that got me thinking about Sara Crewe…
A Little Princess is by no means a perfect book, not in its prose (Burnett does much better in The Secret Garden), not in its structure (too many contrived coincidences) and not in its moralizing (which seems more heavy-handed with each passing decade). Though it never tips entirely into cloying sentimentality…well, it gets pretty close at times. As well as this, some aspects have dated terribly, mostly in regards to the class divide between Sarah and Becky.
But there is an undeniable power to the story, though it’s hard to put your finger on exactly why. Is it Sara’s imaginings? Her Riches-to-Rags-and-Back-to-Riches narrative? The subtle strain of magic that infuses the plot? Whatever it is, there’s a potency to the story of Sara Crewe that’s largely due to the portrayal of Sara herself. Burnett describes her thusly (in a passage that you may remember Wesley reading to Fred in Angel):
She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things, and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.
Admit it, this is a girl you want to read more about. Throughout the story she suffers the death of her father and the loss of her fortune, and her subsequent inner struggle is to maintain her capacity for kindness despite her degradation. So yeah, it can get a little preachy at times, but Burnett manages to infuse Sara with enough personality (and give her the occasional foible) to keep her relatable.
And it amuses me that Sara Crewe ticks nearly every box of the dreaded Mary Sue moniker: she’s wiser than her years, she can speak fluent French, she’s adored by everyone except the villain, she’s lavished with gifts but never becomes spoiled, she remains good and pure despite the terrible conditions she’s put through, she considers herself ugly but nevertheless has “an odd charm of her own” (and is described as beautiful by the narrative anyway), and is given a typical fairy tale ending in which she vows to provide for the waifs and strays of London.
Is she a Mary Sue? I’d say yes – but this next part is important: I don’t necessarily think being a Mary Sue is a bad thing. Some of my favourite characters have been dismissed as Mary Sues by various fandoms: Guinevere from Merlin, Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey, Rey from Star Wars, Nausicaa from The Valley of the Wind, and you only have to look at the vast differences between those three characters to see that the requirements for Suedom are so broad that you could fit practically any female character into the category.
But if we take the term Mary Sue to mean a character that encompasses genuine goodness and popularity, authentic intelligence and friendliness, honest talent and desirability, then I’m at a loss to explain why they’re so hated. I’d argue that there are two types of Mary Sues: the well written ones and the badly written ones, for even though the term Mary Sue was originally coined to indicate bad writing, it has now slipped so far from its initial purpose that the definition needs reconfiguration. In the minds of many it’s no longer a tool, but an archetype.
Sara Crewe is an archetypal Mary Sue, but Burnett walks a fine line, never straying into goody-two shoes territory, never contradicting Sara’s vaunted goodness with scenes of selfishness or pettiness that go unremarked by the narrative, and never turning her into an unattainable angel of perfection. Burnett doesn’t break the “show don’t tell rule”, she doesn’t spent pages gushing over how wonderful Sara is (in fact, she’s rather matter-of-fact about her extraordinariness), and she allows Sara to have moments of weakness.
In short, she’s what I would call a well-written Mary Sue.
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