Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (1930)
The real world hadn’t crashed into the Newbery yet, but 1930 would’ve been the year to do it. After the US stock market tanked in 1929, the post-war bliss of the 1920s was swiftly replaced by the dusty Depression of the 1930s. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about how his Indianapolis Public School was able to scrounge enough together during those years to keep a student newspaper running, but a lot of public schools just closed, either because they couldn’t afford teachers or because the local economy blew away with the topsoil. In a year when it suddenly became much harder to get your hands on a book, the Newbery likely lost some of its cultural import.
Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, a story told from the perspective of an inanimate doll, doesn’t nod to the brewing national crises, though that’s likely because it was written before things really took a turn for the worse. (The book ends with the titular doll being sold at auction for $50, something like $750 today and likely not within reach of most families by 1930.) But Hitty does represent the first female author to win a Newbery Award, a feat to be applauded ten years after white women finally gained the right to vote in the US. Though not exactly a timely reflection of its moment in history, Hitty’s award fits somewhere in the political narrative of the decade.
Author Rachel Field had been writing for six years by the time Hitty was published, starting with poetry collections (which seems like a weird thing lots children’s authors did back then), moving up to children’s lit, and eventually onto more adult fare before her early death in 1942. Hitty was where she really took off—her follow-up book, Calico Bush (lol), was another Newbery nominee. The book is competently written, and it’s easy to see how a stereotypical 1930s American Girl® might have liked reading about a doll’s adventures. But I’ll be the first to tell you: Hitty sucks.
The main problem with the book is its central character: Hitty. Art centered on dolls has a spotty track record. On one hand, you’ve got Toy Story. It works because the dolls are characters. When people aren’t around, they move, talk, fight, terrify naughty neighborhood children, etc. Buzz and Woody have a complicated friendship that reflects human relationships. And they also have purpose: they want to be played with. There’s a central reason to their existence with a throbbing emotional core, one that works splendidly across three movies.
On the other hand, you’ve got Annabelle, the horror movie porcelain doll possessed by Satan who kills people. I’ve never seen any of those movies and you can’t make me, but at least there’s still a motive. She’s also not (from what I gather) the main character in the movies, just a prop that our characters hover around before their eventual deaths. Hitty skews closer to Annabelle in that she doesn’t talk or move when people aren’t around. (Does Annabelle move? Oh geez, I hope she doesn’t move.) But unlike Annabelle, the entire book is told from Hitty’s perspective. That means that things are constantly being done to her instead of by her, and it gets pretty boring when all we see is from the perspective of a whittled piece of wood.
What she lacks in motivation, though, Hitty more than makes up for in personality. As soon as she’s…birthed?…she picks up the airs of a snooty Southern belle. She’s hilariously obsessed with her “complexion” and gets offended every time someone says something unkind about her. She’s also remarkably judgmental and stupefyingly racist. Her journeys take her to India at one point, where she can’t get over how this poor little white girl (named, I swear, Little Thankful) has been stuck playing with “dirty-looking” brown dolls all her life. On her final adventure, Hitty compares her anxiety being up for auction at an estate sale to how slaves must have felt when they were being sold in the south. I…just…can’t.
If there’s a saving grace to Hitty, it’s that lots of terrible things happen to her throughout the book. I’m not saying I enjoyed it when she was tossed into the sea from a barrel of exploding whale blubber, nor am I saying that I chuckled when she fell out of a tree and got stuck in the branches with her underwear showing, or when she got stuffed into a couch and left in an attic for decades, or when she inhaled too many mothball fumes and lost “consciousness”, or when she was turned into a pincushion. Buuut…your mileage will vary based upon your stomach for schadenfreude.
There are also a suspicious amount of times when the little girls who end up with Hitty fall ill with fever for weeks at a time, or get caught in lightning storms, or have their ships mysteriously catch on fire and explode. I’m not saying Hitty is evil, but I’m also not saying she isn’t.
Hitty wasn’t written for me, my gender, or my generation. But at the risk of Hitty going all murder-doll and showing up in my room in the middle of the night to slit my throat, I’m gonna call Hitty the worst Newbery book I’ve read so far.
