Belittling, and making little To belittle someone is of course to say something that shows disrespect for him or her, that puts the other in a bad light, as a person of no importance or of less stature than one might expect. It's significant, of course, that the word has no bearing on the actual size of the person, but that the word implies that to be little, in height, intelligence, social status or moral behaviour, is a bad thing. Affectionate littleness If you ask someone why she talks about "the little girl who does my hair" when the hairdresser is tall, stout, and middle-aged, the defence will probably be that "little" was just meant as a term of affection. The hairdresser may or may not feel belittled by the reference. I've discussed elsewhere ( ) the connection between littleness and juvenile animals, who are often both little and "cute." Grown women who are called "little" may feel that the affectionate intention is overshadowed by the implication that they are only children. I've been speaking very generally here, so now I'll give a specific example of how the meaning of the word "little" can be created and changed by an author These are some extracts, modified, from an article I wrote called "Gender and Miniaturization." In it I look at the part played by Dickens in creating an ideology of littleness. He wasn't the first to use "little" so frequently, but with his characters Little Nell, Little Em'ly and Little Dorrit, he was certainly influential. In one of his earliest works Dickens shows us Mrs. Chirrup, "a condensation of all the domestic virtues,' "a pocket edition of the young man's best companion,--a little woman at a very high pressure, with an amazing quantity of goodness and usefulness in an exceedingly small space." This description fits exactly the theorists' understanding of miniaturization as a process that condenses something and renders it possessible, and Dickens emphasizes the point by having his narrator ask "whether it is that pleasant qualities, being packed more closely in small bodies than in large, come more readily to hand than when they are diffused over a wider space, and have to be gathered together." Near the end of his career Dickens creates Miss Peecher, a woman who is very like Mrs. Chirrup but who is aware of her "littleness" and uses it to her advantage. She is "a little pincushion, a little housewife [sewing kit], a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one." Miss Peecher has a secret: she is in love with a violent man who turns out to be a murderer. But she has made a habit of writing down her romantic fantasies according to her schoolmistress's rules, filling exactly one slate-length and no more. She arranges her "little workbox of thoughts" so there are no dark recesses, and she is not caught up in the tragedy caused by her beloved. DIckens is only indirectly responsible for the littleness of Little Nell. She is called that only (I think) once in The Old Curiosity Shop, but the reading public firmly attached the label to her. By the time Dickens wrote David Copperfield, he can show how Little Em'ly runs away from the dollhouse-like future arranged for her.But even while rejecting a doll's role, she implicitly recognizes and accepts the ideology of littleness: "You need not call me Little, you need not call me by the name I have disgraced." Later on, in Bleak House, Esther Summerson, also offered a metaphorical dollhouse to live in, shows some ambivalence towards its littleness, and soon arranges to extend the building. On the other hand, the heroine of Little Dorrit encourages people to call her "Little Dorrit" and "Little Mother" because, though bearing the burdens of her father and siblings, she is reluctant to become a grown woman who can love on equal terms. In Our Mutual Friend, the last book that Dickens completed, the self-aware Bella Wilfer takes possession of the labelling process. Always conscious of the dangers of belittlement, n einshe makes a game of neutralizing and degendering the word "little" by using it of her father as frequently as he uses it of her. It becomes a term of affectionate play and loses its literal meaning. All the same, the ideology of littleness is never in danger. Women in Dickens's novels are often made little by the verbal constructions of their associates; but at their most desirable they also remain essentially little. Images of littleness remain in the reader's mind when verbal undercutting has been forgotten, images that are less easily resisted because presented with humour and in the context of a game. Adapted from Frances Armstrong, "Gender and Miniaturization: Games of Littleness in Nineteenth- Century Fiction," English Studies in Canada 16:4 (December 1990). |
Miniaturizing with words For details of works cited, see Reading list , under "Miniaturization" Writing in miniature Belittling, and making little |
Toysi n Miniuture: Frances Armstrong |
Writing in Miniature Theorists have puzzled about whether it is possible to write in miniature. They aren't talking about tiny handwriting or small fonts, but about whether there is a literary equivalent of the painted miniature, for instance. Perhaps the nearest equivalent is the epigram, a short, pithy saying which contains a great deal of meaning. The technique is sometimes called Multum in parvo, the Latin for "Much in little." Carl Zigrosser says that compression is not really possible for the senses of hearing, taste, and smell, but that 'the happy hunting ground for multum in parvo is through the eye and mind, among mathematical formulae and symbols, in the concise and epigrammatic forms of poetry, and in the miniature forms of visual art. Furthermore, from a purist's point of view, neither a fragment of a longer poem nor a detail of a picture can be accepted strictly as multum in parvo." (see Stewart, 53). But "the miniature is against speech," says Susan Stewart (66). "Naturally miniature is easier to tell than to do, and it is not hard to find literary descriptions that put the world in the diminutive. But because these descriptions tell things in tiny detail, they are automatically verbose." (Bachelard 159-60) Stewart comments on Bachelard's remark: "We might add that this verboseness is also a matter of multiplying significance. . . . Minute description reduces the object to its signifying properties, and this reduction of physical dimensions results in a multiplication of ideological properties. The minute depiction of the object in painting, as Levi-Strauss has showed us in his analysis of the lace collar of Francois Clouet's Portrait of Elizabeth of Austria, reduces the tactile and olfactory dimensions of the object and at the same time increases the significance of the object within the system of signs." Philip Stevick goes into detail about literary miniaturization, which he sees as different from a literary miniature. A miniature is small, pithy and compact, like a rhyming couplet. but a miniaturization is "the construction of a model, with the essential features intact, of a larger entity." This can take various forms. A scale mode of a disaster site tends to take away negative feelings and bring delight. A condensation of intellectual thought can look "pretentious and shallow." But it is possible to achieve more through miniaturization. "It is above all their striking success [referring to Gibbons's sentences] in making small, in taking a period of time and a state of mind and reducing these to a sentence, persuading us . . . that it represents, in the smallest possible compass, the essential features of the whole." Notes to be added. |
Belittling, and making little To belittle someone is of course to say something that shows disrespect for him or her, that puts the other in a bad light, as a person of no importance or of less stature than one might expect. It's significant, of course, that the word has no bearing on the actual size of the person, but that the word implies that to be little, in height, intelligence, social status or moral behaviour, is a bad thing. Affectionate littleness If you ask someone why she talks about "the little girl who does my hair" when the hairdresser is tall, stout, and middle-aged, the defence will probably be that "little" was just meant as a term of affection. The hairdresser may or may not feel belittled by the reference. I've discussed elsewhere ( ) the connection between littleness and juvenile animals, who are often both little and "cute." Grown women who are called "little" may feel that the affectionate intention is overshadowed by the implication that they are only children. I've been speaking very generally here, so now I'll give a specific example of how the meaning of the word "little" can be created and changed by an author These are some extracts, modified, from an article I wrote called "Gender and Miniaturization." In it I look at the part played by Dickens in creating an ideology of littleness. He wasn't the first to use "little" so frequently, but with his characters Little Nell, Little Em'ly and Little Dorrit, he was certainly influential. In one of his earliest works Dickens shows us Mrs. Chirrup, "a condensation of all the domestic virtues,' "a pocket edition of the young man's best companion,--a little woman at a very high pressure, with an amazing quantity of goodness and usefulness in an exceedingly small space." This description fits exactly the theorists' understanding of miniaturization as a process that condenses something and renders it possessible, and Dickens emphasizes the point by having his narrator ask "whether it is that pleasant qualities, being packed more closely in small bodies than in large, come more readily to hand than when they are diffused over a wider space, and have to be gathered together." Near the end of his career Dickens creates Miss Peecher, a woman who is very like Mrs. Chirrup but who is aware of her "littleness" and uses it to her advantage. She is "a little pincushion, a little housewife [sewing kit], a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one." Miss Peecher has a secret: she is in love with a violent man who turns out to be a murderer. But she has made a habit of writing down her romantic fantasies according to her schoolmistress's rules, filling exactly one slate-length and no more. She arranges her "little workbox of thoughts" so there are no dark recesses, and she is not caught up in the tragedy caused by her beloved. DIckens is only indirectly responsible for the littleness of Little Nell. She is called that only (I think) once in The Old Curiosity Shop, but the reading public firmly attached the label to her. By the time Dickens wrote David Copperfield, he can show how Little Em'ly runs away from the dollhouse-like future arranged for her.But even while rejecting a doll's role, she implicitly recognizes and accepts the ideology of littleness: "You need not call me Little, you need not call me by the name I have disgraced." Later on, in Bleak House, Esther Summerson, also offered a metaphorical dollhouse to live in, shows some ambivalence towards its littleness, and soon arranges to extend the building. On the other hand, the heroine of Little Dorrit encourages people to call her "Little Dorrit" and "Little Mother" because, though bearing the burdens of her father and siblings, she is reluctant to become a grown woman who can love on equal terms. In Our Mutual Friend, the last book that Dickens completed, the self-aware Bella Wilfer takes possession of the labelling process. Always conscious of the dangers of belittlement, n einshe makes a game of neutralizing and degendering the word "little" by using it of her father as frequently as he uses it of her. It becomes a term of affectionate play and loses its literal meaning. All the same, the ideology of littleness is never in danger. Women in Dickens's novels are often made little by the verbal constructions of their associates; but at their most desirable they also remain essentially little. Images of littleness remain in the reader's mind when verbal undercutting has been forgotten, images that are less easily resisted because presented with humour and in the context of a game. Adapted from Frances Armstrong, "Gender and Miniaturization: Games of Littleness in Nineteenth- Century Fiction," English Studies in Canada 16:4 (December 1990). |
