Monday, October 27, 2014
Harriet the Spy
Going into this story, I thought it was going to be more of Harriet solving mysteries using her spy skills. I didn't expect it to be so much about Harriet's daily life and relationships, but I am thoroughly enjoying seeing how she interacts with the people around her, as well as how she thinks about them and what she says about them in her notebook. She seems to love to learn about as much as she can, and she seems very intelligent for her age in a lot of ways.
She loves to learn; we see her skipping into school singing about how she wants to learn everything in the world, and the book says at one point while talking to Sport that "she never minded admitting she didn't know something. So what, she thought, I could always learn." The very nature of her self-proclaimed spy career forces her to pay close attention to everything and learn about the people around her.
Harriet seems to be very perceptive of what is going on around her, as you would expect from someone who make it her business to learn and take notes on everything she sees, but it's interesting that, despite how much she notices, she doesn't understand much of it.
She notes while watching Ole Golly and Mr. Waldenstein interact that "Life is a great mystery. Is everybody a different person when they are with somebody else?" It is very clear to her that Ole Golly is acting unusual, but she doesn't understand why. She knows that it has to do with Ole Golly's boyfriend, but it doesn't make sense to her that someone would act a different way around a boy than they do normally. When she suddenly asks her mom a bunch of questions about marriage, she doesn't understand why her mom would would ask Harriet if that was something she was thinking about, and says that "adults are getting sillier every year-" when, as adults, we know that Harriet's mother was just trying to humor her, and that it isn't necessarily unusual for a child to want grown-up things (like marriage) even if they don't understand them. It's just so fun to watch Harriet react to things as if adults are the ridiculous ones and she is the only rational person trying to deal with their antics.
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Hello, Nikki!
ReplyDeleteOne of the characteristics of Harriet that I absolutely adored was her inquisitiveness. Within the course of the whole novel, she attempts to get into the heads of other people. She wants to know what it's like to have a boyfriend, to be married, to earn money for writing something, as if she's trying to develop an understanding of the world and the people around her. Even when she creates towns through her game, she's placing people in situations and in relation to one another, to see what sort of outcomes occur. She's learning through observation, which poses its own problems, because there really isn't a way to understand someone else through just watching them. One of my favorite scenes occurs at the soda shop, where she simply listens to what people say around her, and tries to guess what they look like based on their conversations. She mentions that sometimes she misses, sometimes she scores, but it's a way of honing her observational skills that is really interesting.
Thanks!
- Shelby.
Yes! I loved her soda shop game! I do the same thing when I listen to podcasts, haha. But I loved her curiosity too and her desire to learn. Plus she's so spunky! Such a fun character.
DeleteI think you really captured the tone of the novel very well in your last statement. With the exception of some well-executed temper tantrums, Harriet does come across as very rational throughout. Her observations are reminiscent of the kind of thing you'd read in early anthropological studies, pseudoscience filtered heavily through her own worldview. The "antics" of the adults and other children in the novel and her bemusement with them are the best part of the novel in my opinion. Harriet is astute but limited in her understanding of what she observes due to her experience and point of view. My favorite was her commentary on Ole Golly's flirtation with her boyfriend and her shock that she would go to the movies with HIM but wouldn't take her.
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