Affection is expressed in many ways, and not always appreciated or reciprocated. If she fails to relate to third graders, we assume she has no family of her own. As adult readers, however, we can fill in the gaps: Miss Snell is a lonely old woman who has interpersonal issues in her private life. The children know nothing about Miss Snell other than what she shows them in class of her teaching style. In the same way, Miss Snell started teaching when teachers typically removed their personalities from their classroom personae. Still, they could not hate Miss Snell, for children’s villains must be all black, and there was no denying that Miss Snell was sometimes nice in an awkward, groping way of her own.ĭick and Jane became increasingly out-of-touch with the children reading it. Likewise, this is how we are to think of Miss Snell: So the title of this short story has been chosen to evoke Dick and Jane, or rather all the things the Dick and Jane series evokes: innocence, awkwardness, something that’s easy to poke fun at because of its very earnestness. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Dick and Jane became a bit more sophisticated. The stories are ridiculously simplistic, even for the youngest of readers. The Dick and Jane readers were coming under heavy criticism during Richard Yates’ adulthood, mostly for their lack of diverse characters, but also because they are so very easy to parody. The title Fun With A Stranger won’t be lost even on modern audiences, due to the 19 movies called Fun With Dick and Jane, the title of which is taken from an American grade one basal reader, used in American schools from the 1930s through to the 1970s. THEMES Children can be more emotionally adept than the adults who care for them. The rivalry is underscored first by the Taylor twins, who boast that they are going on a field trip, and next by Grace, the girl who interrupts Miss Snell’s class on the final day before Christmas by asking for a paper plate. Since class rivalries naturally occur, this is what gives rise to the protectiveness Miss Snell’s own pupils feel towards her. The young, pretty, exuberant and socially adept Miss Cleary is set up as the clear antithesis to the old, starchy, awkward, black hat and black coat wearing Miss Snell, whose very name sounds brusque. The familiar childhood rivalry that often exists between two classes of the same grade is used to great effect in this story. Also, I suppose, because the author has a male name, and we tend to conflate authors with narrators.) (We assume the narrator is a boy because he writes of girls as if slightly removed from them. The story is told by an unseen narrator, but we know that the narrator writes as an adult from memories of being a pupil of Miss Snell’s third grade class. It’s significant that female teachers were paid no more than a living stipend at this time, because the reader knows that Miss Snell’s purchase of a class set of erasers was no small thing for her, even though the gift was brushed off by the narrator as a disappointment. The children are off on a field trip to see ‘locomotives’, which places this firmly in a certain era, just as my own real-life primary school field trips to the tobacco and hops farms place my childhood in a certain era. We can also tell from the word usage: vacation, raincoats and rubbers. There is mention of Halloween and Thanksgiving, which of course are specifically American. The setting is unambiguously mid-twentieth-century America, and though this town is set somewhere near a place called Harmon, it’s not clear which Harmon this refers to - there are a handful - one is a ghost town. Two particularly memorable events happened that year: The field trip to the locomotives and the Christmas party. Story time - An extract from my short stories #storytelling #booktube #books #easter #readingaloudĪ man retells what it was like being a third grader in Miss Snell’s class.
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