Pollyanna is an immensely popular children’s book by author Eleanor H. Porter. It was published in 1913. The word Pollyanna has been added to the English lexicon to describe an unusually optimistic person. Most people use this term in a pejorative sense, suggesting naivete verging on foolhardiness. What accounts for the popularity of Pollyanna as a literary work, and how has this generated the backlash implied by the name’s pejorization in the English lexicon?
Bow and I wanted to know, so we embarked on a reading of the book in 2023, 110 years after its publication.
The “glad game” introduced by Pollyanna was actually devised by her late father, an ailing and poverty struck minister in a community in the far western settlements of the United States. Whenever anything undesirable happened, Pollyanna was to try to find something about the circumstances to be glad about. Considering that both her parents died when she was a child, Pollyanna cannot have failed to see that bad things happen to good people, and she could also not have been blind to the darker side of life.
In the modern world, there is currently a toxic cult of positivity, where people are discouraged from sharing depressing or demoralizing truths. But is Pollyanna really a book that advocates toxic positivity? Does it encourage burying our heads in the sand when faced with a crisis?
I prefer to think that the book merely allows individuals in difficult circumstances to take a moment or two to enjoy happy and pleasant details in otherwise dreary lives. Viewed in this way, there is nothing wrong with the glad game. Yes, the world may be going to hell in a handbasket, just as it did in 1914 at the outbreak of the first world war, but we can still take time to wonder at the beauty of a rainbow.
