It Takes a Village to
Raise a Child: Johanna Spyri’s
Female Bildungsroman, Heidi’s Lehr und
Wanderjahre
By
Lisa Ohm
Although Heidi is one of the most widely read books in the history of world literature, the name of its Swiss author, Johanna Spyri, is all but forgotten. Spyri’s ability to touch a universal chord in the human heart with her beloved heroine is reason enough to re-establish recognition of her name as Heidi’s creator; she deserves further acclaim for her unique contributions to nineteenth -century educational and social thought. Spyri's Swiss biographer, Jürg Winkler, wrote: …durch erzählen wollte sie erziehen (through stories she wanted to teach), and he praises Spyri's psychological and pedagogical knowledge.
Spyri’s social and political views, expressed abundantly in her works, have likewise been overlooked, if not severely distorted, especially in the U.S. book market by later writers promoting the "Cinderellization" of Heidi and cannibalizing her fifteen other books. Moreover, the undisputed origin of Heidi as a Bildungsroman has been ignored as well, masking the tragic dilemmas generally in the education and development of other heroines like Heidi.
Johanna Heusser Spyri wrote Heidi in 1880, creating one of the most internationally famous heroines in the history of world literature. Today, there are an estimated 50 million copies of the book around the world, establishing Heidi, but not Spyri, as a household name.
We know little about Spyri’s personal and literary life, first, because she refused to write the standard autobiography routinely requested of successful writers by their publishers. She explained her refusal in a letter to fellow Swiss writer and personal friend, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer: “…my life and my being are contained in all of my books.”
Second, Spyri requested the return of all of her letters from her personal correspondents and destroyed them, saying they were meant only for the recipient and not for the public. The only correspondence to survive are letters sent to Conrad Meyer, Meyer's sister Betsy, and their mother, Elisabeth. The Meyers simply did not comply with Spyri’s request, and those letters were published in 1977.
Because of this lack of documented information--and perhaps misled by her comment to Meyer that her life was in her books--biographical sketches of Spyri tend to sound like descriptions of Heidi. The same adjectives used to describe the child Heidi--sunny-tempered, happy, simple, pure, winsome, fresh--are used to describe the actually very private and retiring author.
More recent research, however, is gradually producing a truer picture of Johanna Spyri. She is revealed today as reclusive, serious-minded, socially reserved, intelligent, and acutely observant. She was particularly tormented by the misfortunes of children and families caught in the ever-widening zone of conflict between growing urbanization and rural isolation, which was prominent in late nineteenth-century Switzerland.
Born in 1827 in the rural village of Hirzel and later a resident of the country’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, Zürich, Spyri readily recognized the gap between the poverty and ignorance of the isolated, rural peasant and lower classes and the growing wealth and sophistication of the urban middle and upper classes.
Spyri herself was fairly typical for a middle to upper-middle class female of the time. The fourth child of six, she was named Johanna after her father, Johann Heusser, and called Hanneli as a child. Her mother, Meta, a pietist and poet, wrote religious poems, which, although published anonymously at first, became known to some extent throughout Switzerland.
Spyri gained an intimate knowledge of the occupations, beliefs, joys, pains, superstitions, and innumerable conflicts both inside and outside the village in the home of her grandfather, who was a Protestant pastor, and in her own childhood home. Her father conducted his medical practice at home, treating a vast variety of cases, including mental illness. His patients were often housed for long periods of time in the Spyri home or nearby and frequently shared meals with the family.
Johanna attended public elementary school and thereafter was privately tutored by the village priest, since further schooling was not open to women. Then, as was customary, she was sent to relatives in Zurich, and from there to board with families in French-speaking Switzerland to continue her education, again under tutors. Her studies concentrated on history, languages, music and art. In addition to her native German, she learned fluent French, Italian, and English. After two years, Spyri returned home and began to tutor her two younger sisters.
At the “late” age of 27, she married Bernard Spyri, a lawyer and later city clerk and they had one child, a son, who died at age 29 of poor health, probably caused by polio and tuberculosis.
Like most women, Spyri began her writing career later in life. Although a few of her early poems were printed anonymously in a newspaper edited by her husband, her first novel did not appear until 1871. She donated the proceeds from that book to a fund to aid veterans after observing the sufferings of soldiers returning from war. Two other novels and four collections of short stories appeared before Heidi was published in 1880.
Heidi's immediate success led Spyri’s publisher to request a sequel, and the second volume appeared the following year. Both volumes became immediate best sellers and continue to be today. During the next twenty years Spyri produced 44 more stories and left two unfinished manuscripts when she died in 1901.
Just as the original two-volume work was combined into a single book, the original title, Heidi's Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi's Apprenticeship and Years of Wandering), was promptly reduced to the heroine’s name, Heidi. The original title makes it indisputable, however, that Spyri, who greatly admired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's most famous writer, was very consciously attempting to write in the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman, a novel exploring education, development, or apprenticeship, introduced into Germany by Goethe. Goethe 's contribution to the tradition is Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) and its sequel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829).
Like most writings of nineteenth-century women, Spyri’s first works, even the first volume of Heidi, were published anonymously. Her name soon became widely known, however, and even her friend, Conrad Meyer, expressed envy of her financial success. While that success guaranteed the novel’s survival, it led ironically to the erosion of Spyri’s personal recognition in favor of the rising popularity of the book’s little heroine, Heidi. Spyri herself became lost to scholarship--and her literary oeuvre lost to serious study. Today, her books are generally shelved in the juvenile section of public libraries, and she is known, if at all, as a writer of children’s literature. Only the Japanese have pursued Spyri research intently, publishing her collected works in Japan in 1962; a collected edition of her works has not yet appeared in Switzerland.
The stories Spyri created survived the fate of their author, however, frequently stimulating a commercial appropriation of her ideas and style. Various “Heidi” adaptations have resorted to gross simplification, distorted abridgement, and cannibalization of her lesser know works to satisfy a market demand for more Heidi stories. One well-known Spyri cannibalizer was Charles Tritten, a writer and translator from French-speaking Switzerland who wrote the following popular albeit distorted sequels: Heidi Grows Up (1938) and Heidi's Children (1939). Other writers appropriated Heidi’s name and Swiss origin for their stories. A few titles of Heidi stories published in the last 40 years suffice to demonstrate publishers’ desire to tap into the Heidi-Wunder, the Heidi phenomenon, as Roswitha Fröhlich calls it: Defend yourself, Heidi; Heidi and the Little Orphan Boy; Heidi's Niece; Heidi the Detective; Heidi Goes to Camp; Heidi and the Bear; Heidi and the Injured Bird; Heidi and the Phantom of the Alps; Heidi and the Honey Thief; and Heidi and Her Friend Arrive From the Sky.
The sensational success of Spyri’s original Heidi conveys the significance of the messages embedded in the text, revealing a plethora of themes analyzed by feminist scholars during recent decades: women as angels; awakenings; the role of food in women's writing; the association of the heroine with the other-worldly, either spirituality or the supernatural; illnesses such as anorexia and sleepwalking; kidnaping; child abuse; the double bind of women reading; and communities of women. The key element, however, is Spyri’s creation of a new type of nineteenth-century heroine.
With Heidi, Spyri introduced a new type of female figure into nineteenth-century literature: a progressive heroine who survives, replacing the popularity of a dying child, as Franzuska Gerster suggests in her study of Heidi. Spyri rescues Clara Sesemann, the false cripple, from her wheelchair, forcing her to risk doing and not just being. In the process, Spyri deconstructs the “woman as angel” myth and ridicules characters who slavishly follow social conventions, such as Fraulein Rottenmeier.
In the end, Spyri offers a rational social solution to the country-versus-city conflict: the medium-sized village of Dörfli, halfway up the mountain between the extremes of the Bergwelt (mountain world) and the Stadtwelt (city world). Criticizing both the cultural backwardness of an isolated alpine hut as well as the unhealthy surfeit of a congested urban environment, she paints Dörfli as an ideal place to accommodate the alpine hermit and the urban sophisticate alongside the steady villagers. In Dörfli, children, like Heidi, will have the best of both worlds: the advantages of community and regular schooling and the healthy air and beauty of the Alps. It is no surprise that a book containing so much is universally prized.
Inspired by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and in particular by Mignon, the orphaned child of Italian parentage in that novel, Spyri chose to embed her messages in a female Bildungsroman. Mignon is representative of the popular nineteenth-century frail, anemic, and failing--albeit angelic--child who ultimately dies. Mignon is surrounded by adults, none of whom are able to understand her need and her pain, and she dies before fulfilling her wish to return home to Italy where the lemon trees bloom. Spyri may have been haunted by the vision of such a suffering child when she wrote of Heidi longing to return to her grandfather on the Alm, the alpine meadow where his hut stands. Heidi becomes ill, weak and anorexic, her steps drag and she begins to sleepwalk. Proposing that it takes a village to save a child, Spyri directs well-meaning members of the community to plan together to rescue her.
Heidi resembles Mignon physically. She has short, curly, black hair and black eyes, and her skin is brown. Since Heidi’s grandfather marries when he is in military service in Naples, it is implied that her grandmother is Italian. Her grandmother dies before her grandfather returns home to Switzerland with their son, Tobias, who later marries a woman from the village; Heidi is their Italian-Swiss child.
These similarities between the titles and the characters of Goethe’s and Spyri’s works underscore Spyri’s conscious attempts to write in the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman. Women writers of the time, however, were forced to deconstruct the whole notion of Bildung and acculturation as it was known in the male world and reconstruct it for a female world when they attempted a female Bildungsroman, i.e., a Bildungsroman with a heroine. No young woman in the nineteenth -century had the same opportunities as a young man to educate and develop herself through university education (Bildung), travel, and/or apprenticeship.
The author of a female Bildungsroman must also prevent interest in the principal male character from usurping the central development process of the heroine in the novel. This almost happens in Heidi, wherein the education and development of Heidi’s grandfather, called Alm Uncle in the book, his Lehr- und Wanderjahre, are a pretext to the novel. Alm Uncle’s self-imposed seclusion on the Alm is reminiscent of a shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe on an island.
We are grateful for Heidi’s sake to learn that her grandfather is strong, capable, independent, and caring, but there is much more to this singular old man of 70. He takes better care of his goats than anyone in the village, makes and sells cheese, carves spoons out of wood, manufactures furniture, cooks, and keeps his wooden hut as neat as a pin inside and in good repair on the outside. He judges snow conditions expertly, sleds Heidi down the mountainside, and even carries her back up again.
Indeed, Alm Uncle is a man of heroic proportions. He doesn't walk on the Alm, he strides, and his mind keeps pace with his legs. He holds his own in a conversation with distinguished guests from the city of Frankfurt and surpasses Dr. Classen in plant knowledge. He serves the doctor as a guide, identifying the alpine plants and explaining their uses, particularly medicinal, and his knowledge of herbs hastens Clara's cure. He is industrious, capable, and practical. His Tätigkeit, activity combined with competence, make him a hero of Goethean dimensions. As to Heidi, he treats her as neither an object nor a burden; he doesn’t try to elicit either service or sacrifice from her.
Despite his skill and intelligence, however, Alm Uncle lives a poor and marginal existence at the edge of society and, like a child, has no social power. Consequently, he is unable to protect Heidi when Aunt Dete kidnaps her. Not until he leaves his remote Alm and settles in Dörfli, the village below, does he gain the support of the community and recoup sufficient social prestige to function as Heidi’s guardian.
Such personal growth, characteristic of the male Bildungsroman, should apply to the female Bildungsroman as well. Margo Kasdan writes: "…the novel of apprenticeship is admirably suited to express the emergence of women from cultural conditioning into struggle with institutional forces, their progress toward the goal of full personhood, and the effort to restructure their lives and society according to their own vision of meaning and right living” (Able, Hirsch 267). Carol Gilligan, in her book, In a Different Voice, adds: "Among the most pressing items on the agenda for research on adult development is the need to delineate in women's own terms the experience of their adult life” (173). Translated into literary terms, she is calling for a Bildungsroman.
Gilligan also notes that it is often women in mid-life who “return to the unfinished business of adolescence” (170). Certainly, Spyri, who was 53 years old when Heidi was published, reflected on the role of women and female children as she embarked on her own journey to write a Bildungsroman.
In such a journey, the lack of female mobility causes the first of many impasses for the heroine in a female Bildungsroman: the departure from home. For young women, unlike young men, the initial break with home is usually an involuntary or violent one. Wilhelm Meister, for example, received a horse, a bag of gold, letters of recommendation to male friends, and his father's blessing, while Heidi, orphaned by the death of her mother and an unwanted burden on her Aunt Dete, is wretched out of her living situation by her aunt and literally dumped on her grandfather as an unwanted charge. Later, Dete kidnaps Heidi for selfish reasons, taking her to Frankfurt to live in the Sesemann household as a companion to Clara.
In the female Bildungsroman, deference to social convention threatens to pull the heroine off the spiral path of upward development, as recognized by Virginia Woolf who wrote that nineteenth -century novels are "pulled from the straight…in deference to external authority." The heroine is in constant danger of being imprisoned, having her development blocked, or of spiraling downward to her figurative or literal death. Spyri rejects the literary or social expectations voiced by Fraulein Rottenmeier, the Sesemann housekeeper, who describes her requirements of Heidi:
“...I thought a young Swiss girl from the mountains would be suitable. I've often read of these girls, who float through the world like a breath of pure Alpine air; almost, as if it were, without touching the ground.” (Heidi 94)
Although innocent and charming, Heidi does not display other traits typical of the woman-as-angel figure: modesty, grace, delicacy, civility, compliance, reticence, affability, politeness, or serenity, and Herr Sesemann is quick to support Heidi’s refreshing openness and humanity--as well as Spyri’s philosophy:
“I think even Swiss children must put their feet on the ground if they want to get anywhere," remarked Mr. Sesemann dryly, “otherwise they'd have been given wings.” (94)
There is more evidence as well of Spyri's impatient rejection of the notion of woman as angel. In her book, Mäzli: A Story of the Swiss Alps, for example, a young girl expresses the hope that “...Leonore is not like an angel, for she might not be my friend then” (221). In the same novel, when a woman caretaker remarks to the doctor, “Isn't she just like an angel?” he responds curtly, “That is hard for me to say, as I do not know any angels” (232).
For Spyri, angelic children are generally ill and weak, and therefore not typical children. Clara Sesemann in Heidi, for example, is the angel whom Rottenmeier wishes for and who gets about "...without touching the ground [my emphasis]" (Heidi 94). The only possible way for Clara to remain so angelic is to be immobile, a cripple in a wheelchair, weak, pale and sickly. Rottenmeier threatens Heidi with a similar punishment, telling her, "You must sit still during lessons and pay attention. If you don't, I shall have to tie you to your chair. Is that understood?” (74).
Rottenmeier delivers a second threat of dreadful confinement when Heidi brings a basket of lively kittens into the house: "I can think of only one punishment for such a little savage as you. Perhaps a spell in the dark cellar among the bats and rats will tame you, and stop you having any more such ideas” (86). The punishment of children by locking them up appears frequently in Spyri's works, and she deals, by extension, with the adult phenomenon of internalizing social isolation as appropriate self-punishment. Alm Uncle in Heidi and Bruno in Mäzli, for example, separate themselves from social contact for long periods of time.
Rottenmeier’s threat to imprison Heidi in the cellar brings an awakening, an epiphany, for Clara, who speaks up for Heidi against Fraulein Rottenmeier (86). As Clara becomes stronger, however, Heidi's step weakens and she becomes ill.
The second stage of Clara's awakening comes in the second volume of Heidi when she visits Heidi on the Alm. After Peter has sent her wheelchair crashing down the mountainside, Clara is sitting by herself on the grass. She feeds grass to the little goat, Snowflake, blade by blade, awakening in her the need to satisfy a newly discovered inner desire to be useful to another being. The novel experience of being out-of-doors and having a goat eat so trustfully out of her hand gives her “a new idea of what it must mean to be like other girls, well and free, to run about and to help people, instead of always having to be the one who sat still and was waited on” (216).
Through Clara’s new perception--and through Heidi as well--Spyri addresses the issue of the influence on later life of childhood fear of adulthood and sexuality as raised by Marianna Hirsch in her article, "Spiritual Bildung: The Beautiful Soul as a Paradigm." Through both Heidi and Clara, Spyri reaffirms an active role for women in community with others, and in service to others, in a network of care and relationships, rejecting the traditions of the pitiful, dying child. In Spyri’s stories, an ill child usually recovers, fostering renewal for the entire family as well as the community that embraces the child, and the story has a happy end.
That ending evokes clear evidence of the influence of the fairy tale on the female Bildungsroman as suggested by Karen Rowe: “Folktale patterns exert a subtle yet pervasive influence on the structure of female Bildungsroman and on our expectations as a reader, as literary critics” (Abel, Hirsch 69). In Heidi, Fraulein Rottenmeier can be seen as an evil stepmother, and Heidi is immured in the Sesemann household like a princess in a tower. Heidi also ends happily, although not in marriage but in a social integration that brings everything back into balance and renews readers’ hopes.
Indeed, over time, the fairy tale veneer of Heidi--as well as other female Bildungsroman stories--has subverted the very centrality of the Bildungsroman motif, fostered in good measure by the rise of the film industry and the children’s book market of the twentieth century. The famous child star Shirley Temple, who played in the still-popular 1937 film Heidi, put her own indelible stamp on the Heidi character, and fans may see the film a half dozen times yet never read the original novel. The then eight-year-old Temple is a good match in age for Heidi, who is five when she first arrives at her grandfather’s hut on the Alm and nine or ten at the novel’s conclusion. Temple’s honey-colored curls in the black and white film likewise match Heidi’s looks acceptably well.
Heidi is gradually “Cinderellicized,” however, particularly in the United States where the five-year-old with short, dark, curly hair is turned into a taller, slimmer, older, blue-eyed “Swiss Miss” with long blond braids. The transformation began with the expiration of the copyright on the novel in 1931, followed by the appearance in the children’s book market of several illustrated and shortened versions of Heidi’s story. In extreme cases, these abridgments condensed the original two-volume, 388-page novel into a dozen pages, permitting illustrators to ignore Spyri’s black-haired Heidi. After the Temple film in 1937, and especially after Disney’s “Cinderella” film in 1950, more blond Heidis began to show up. Later reprintings of the ever-popular novel resulted in some anomalies as well, including one edition featuring a blond Heidi in some pictures and a dark-haired one in others.
Heidi was not the only figure in Spyri’s novel to be Cinderellicized. The fair-haired Clara began to look older, darker, even motherly, becoming a kind of fairy godmother to Heidi instead of a companion, and Heidi’s Aunt Dete and the Frankfurt household gradually assumed the ugliness and pompousness given to Cinderella’s step-sisters in the Disney film. Even the rough little goatherd Peter became older, taller, more handsome, and more princely, joining all the characters in a giant step away from Spyri’s original creations. Indeed, a romance between Peter and Heidi--and between the governess and the widowed Mr. Sesemann in subsequent films--or the artistic development of Alm Uncle have usurped Spyri’s thematic development of Heidi, Clara’s awakening, and the re-integration of Grandfather and Heidi into the village of Dörfli.
Buried as well in this fairy tale simplicity of hope and happy ending is the socio-political dimension of Spyri’s novel wherein she offers a solution to the city versus the country controversy in the form of the enlightened highland village of Dörfli. In the original first volume, Heidi returns home in chapter 14 to a joyous reunion with her grandfather on the Alm. In crucial chapter 15, however, she and her grandfather move down from the Alm to Dörfli, the medium-sized village halfway up the mountain that becomes Spyri's solution to the urban-rural conflict. Alm Uncle and the Frankfurt doctor, recognizing the detrimental effects of both the isolated Alm and the crowded city, especially on the physical and emotional well-being of children, decide to settle in Dörfli, where they can communicate in a relatively democratic social environment, free from class prejudice and exaggerated social restraint, for the mutual development of their talents.
Several studies refer to the prevalence of nature versus culture, or the city versus the country, in Heidi. If we see nature as the female realm of the Bildungsroman, and culture as the male realm, Spyri’s Dörfli becomes the center of mediation between the two. Sherry Ortner calls this mediation the crucial female function (Gilber,Gubar 300).
For Spyri, that function includes a thread of biography as found in her works, although her story is less personal than communal. She describes the social interactions between her heroines and heroes and their families, friends, neighbors, relatives, and representatives of the institutions of the village (church, school) and members of the business and professional community (church leaders, teachers, doctors, and owners of businesses and industry). Spyri writes less about her own childhood than about the cultural representatives of a Swiss village confronting industrialization, urbanization, and the breakdown of rigid class structures. In order to write about all social levels, both genders, and across generations, she creates matching or parallel characters, including animals. Heidi, for example, is clearly equated with the crippled Clara Sesemann, and, despite their class differences, both are caught between limited social roles and individual potential for personal development. The goats double, as well, for children, and readers tend to remember them even if they have forgotten everything else about Heidi’s story.
Clearly, then, Spyri’s works address both adults and children, as she herself stressed in the subtitle of her later works: “Für Kinder und für solche, die Kinder lieb haben” (For Children and Those who Love Children). Her resolve to enlighten parents, caretakers, older siblings, relatives, educators, doctors, ministers, employers, and household employees about the nature of children and the shape of their lives was equal to her desire to educate and entertain the children themselves. She exposed the plight of impoverished, orphaned, neglected and misunderstood children, and she proposed solutions to social conflicts. She awakened the adults’ social conscience, encouraging them to reenter the social network of the community through acknowledgment of their responsibility toward children.
Like the works of Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, Spyri’s fiction criticized society by describing how its youngest members, children, were treated. Her name deserves to be as well-remembered as theirs.
This article appeared in Symposium: A CSB/SJU Faculty Journal, 2000 (101-11).
I thank the College of Saint Benedict for grants from the President's Fund and Faculty Development Funds to pursue my scholarly research at the Johanna Spyri Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, which was founded in 1968. CSB is thereby the first U.S. educational institute to recognize Spyri’s importance. While in Switzerland, I visited Spyri's birthplace in Hirzel, today a 45-minute commute by bus and train from the center of Zurich. In 1981 a museum in her honor was established in the old schoolhouse.
For the year 2000-2001 I received a "Works in Progress" Grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission (MHC), in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Minnesota State Legislature, for which I am grateful. MHC supports and promotes excellence in humanities education through its programs in family reading, K-12 education, civics, older adult learning, and grants for humanities projects.
Works Cited
Fröhlich, Roswitha and Jürg Winkler. Johanna Spyri: Momente einer Biographie: Ein Dialog. Zürich: Arche Verlag, 1986.
Gerster, Franzuska. “Johanna Spyris Heidi: Thesen zum Erfolg.” Unpublished thesis. University of Zürich, 1978.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.
Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. The Voyage in: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983.
Spyri, Johanna. Heidi. Tr. Eileen Hall. New York: Puffin Books, 1986, rpt. 1956.
----. Mäzli: A Story of the Swiss Valleys. Tr. Elisabeth P. Stork. Illus. Maria L. Kirk. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1921.
Winkler, Jürg. Johanna Spyri: Aus dem Leben der “Heidi”-Autorin. Zürich: Albert Müller Verlag, 1986.
Zeller, Rosmarie and Hans. Eds. Johanna Spyri/Conrad Ferdinand Meyer: Briefwechsel 1877-1897. Kilchberg: Verlag Mirio Romano, 1977.