Land of Desire by William R. Leach

Author:William R. Leach [Leach, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76114-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1993-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Pollyanna and the Popular Culture of Mind Cure

Mind cure found its way also into popular culture, into films and Broadway musicals, and into children’s stories and fairy tales. Eleanor Porter, author of Pollyanna, and L. Frank Baum, creator of The Wonderful Wizard of OZ, stand out among the writers for children who wrote from a mind-cure perspective.

Porter, born in New Hampshire in 1868 and descendant of Plymouth Colony’s William Bradford, lived much of her life with sickness but wrote books about health and happiness. Her mother was an invalid for many years, she herself was a sickly adolescent, and she married a very rich and successful businessman—John Lyman Porter, president of National Separator and Machine Company—whose mother was chronically ill and required constant care. In the late 1890s, after overcoming her own bad health and ending what appears to have been a dead-end career in music, she simultaneously took up mind cure (probably of the New Thought variety, the ideas of Orison Swett Marden and Ralph Trine) and a new career in story writing. Among her many books was Oh, Money! Money!, a story of three cousins who each unexpectedly inherit $100,000 from an unknown relative and who deal in different ways with the money—an inspiration, perhaps, for a popular television series in the 1950s, The Millionaire. The moral is resoundingly “American”: “It isn’t the money that does things; it’s the individual behind the money” (but isn’t it wonderful to have money).80

Porter’s triumph, Pollyanna, written in 1912, was every inch mind cure. The heroine is an eleven-year-old girl, Pollyanna Whittier, who, in the face of the most daunting misery, never stops smiling, feeling “glad” about life, or bringing “color and light” and health to everyone. “I wish I could prescribe her,” says an admiring physician. After meeting Pollyanna, decrepit old men and women throw off their “greys and drabs” for “red and blue and yellow worsteds.” Dour scrooges, accustomed to scrimping and stashing away their savings, learn to “live and let live” and “enjoy life.” “I love rainbows,” she says, along with “ice-cream” and “carpets in every room.” She inspires worn-out ministers exhausted by preaching about evil and damnation to reject the gloomy biblical texts for the “800 rejoicing ones” in both testaments.81 Her signature is her “glad game” or “just finding something to be glad about—no matter what.” She is always “glad, glad, GLAD.”

In the heart of Pollyanna, Porter presents a mind-cure message that governs her heroine’s destiny and the book:

What men and women need is encouragement. Their natural resisting powers should be strengthened, not weakened. Instead of always harping on a man’s faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut of bad habits. Hold up to him his better self, his real self, that can dare to do and win out!… The influence of a beautiful, hopeful character is contagious, and may revolutionize a whole town.… People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts. If a man feels kindly and obliging, his neighbors will feel the same way, too, before long.

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