37 pages • 1 hour read
Louise FitzhughHarriet the Spy
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Observation Versus Understanding
The life of the mind is a central theme in Harriet the Spy. Both Harriet and Ole Golly perceive the lack of intellectual curiosity as a grievous character flaw. The nanny deliberately points out this fact to Sport and Harriet when they visit Ole Golly’s mother in her tiny house and she points her out as “a woman who never had any interest in anyone else, nor in any book, nor in any school, nor in any way of life, but has lived her whole life in this room, eating and sleeping and waiting to die’” (18-19).
Harriet has no difficulty embracing the message that curiosity is important. The girl is driven by the need to know. She incessantly records facts about the people in her neighborhood as well as her classmates and teachers. She aspires to be a spy when she grows up because she believes that such a career is the best way to acquire more information. As she tells Ole Golly, “I will be a spy and know everything” (24). Just as Ole Golly insists that a life of the intellect matters, she also insists that observation for its own sake is futile. The nanny says, “It won’t do you a bit of good to know everything if you don’t do anything with it” (24).
This principle is demonstrated in Harriet’s obsessive notetaking. She records data and interprets it through her own limited worldview. She judges others based on her personal likes and dislikes but is unable to contextualize or understand experiences and preferences that differ from her own. Ole Golly exhorts her to do more than receive impressions and make snap judgments. The nanny quotes Dostoevsky and says:
Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love (23-24).
Harriet’s observations are clinical and lacking in emotional context. She is ruthless in dissecting the faults of others, giving no thought to why they do what they do. Because her notebook is private, it isn’t subjected to a reality check, and Harriet can persist in the belief that knowing about others constitutes understanding them. It isn’t until her journal falls into the hands of her classmates that she begins to recognize that her perception of things is incomplete and may be flawed. Ole Golly intervenes one final time in the novel through a letter that helps Harriet assimilate this vital message: Observation can exist apart from love, but understanding cannot.
The Power of Words
Harriet has difficulty processing the world unless she can commit her thoughts to paper. This is why she obsessively notes the activities that take place in her neighborhood. She records facts and speculates about their meaning, even though she never reaches any conclusions.
Because Harriet has been writing down her thoughts for years, she has an ingrained habit of thinking through writing. When a teacher confiscates her notebook, not only is she deprived of her familiar and preferred mode of self-expression, but she also loses the power to think at all: “She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her” (237).
The written word drives Harriet’s ability to process her life experiences and her own thoughts. However, she learns, much to her grief, that words can be a two-edged sword: Writing a thought down on paper brings it out of the realm of the solitary mind and converts it into a form of communication that may be shared with others. Despite Harriet’s insistence that her journal is private, the written word becomes a weapon when she loses her notebook and her thoughtless judgments about her friends and classmates become public. Harriet has difficulty understanding why anybody should take offense at what she said. From her limited perspective, she wrote the truth. However, her notebook and its contents impact the lives of others in unintended ways. Ole Golly points out that the function of written communication is to uplift, not to wound. She writes, “Little lies that make people feel better are not bad […] Remember that writing is to put love in the world, not to use against your friends. But to yourself you must always tell the truth” (278).
Just as Harriet’s written words caused unintentional harm, she manages to repair the rift she created by publishing more words. Her printed retraction heals the breach with her friends as she uses language to show them love when she apologizes for her prior notebooks. Having learned the real power and purpose of words, Harriet will use them more responsibly in the future.
Developing Empathy
Human beings are not born emotionally mature. At the age of 11, Harriet still has much to learn about understanding other people’s feelings and perspectives. In her journal, she makes negative comments about the appearance or behavior of others but gives no thought to what makes them that way. Her first attempt at the proverbial “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes” comes from the unlikely school project of inventing an onion dance for the Christmas pageant. Her father tries to help by telling her she must first feel like an onion. He even gets on the floor with Harriet to demonstrate the process, and the two of them roll around, trying to imagine movement from the onion’s perspective.
This early attempt at becoming something else does not carry over into Harriet’s early spy notebooks, which lack feeling and are judgmental. Harriet begins to see the world from the perspective of others only after she loses her notebook and her schoolmates read her negative comments about them. In her notebooks, she criticized other students’ family structures, appearances, ways of dressing, and other personal details, basing her judgments strictly on superficial observations. Shortly before the end of the story, after having become an outcast and struggled to repair her relationships, she writes, “I HAVE THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT BEING THINGS SINCE TRYING TO BE AN ONION. I HAVE TRIED TO BE A BENCH IN THE PARK, AN OLD SWEATER, A CAT, AND MY MUG IN THE BATHROOM” (297-98).
Significantly, the targets Harriet chooses for her attempts at imagining others’ perspectives are either vegetables, inanimate objects, or animals. Even after losing her friends, she never considered projecting herself into the experience of another human being. Fortunately, she has enough affection for Sport and Janie to make her want to try. She takes her first tentative steps toward empathy in the very last pages of the novel when she sees her estranged friends walking toward her after she has published her retraction and apology in the school paper. Harriet studies them as they approach and imagines the details of what it would be like to be each of them: the way they walk, their body types, the feel of their socks and shoes, the way it feels when they scratch an itch. While Harriet’s progress toward empathy is still limited to the physical rather than the emotional in this final scene, she is trying for the first time to imagine what it would be like to walk around in their skins. This is a sign that she has the capacity to develop empathy and indicates incremental progress toward developing empathy and emotional maturity.
