Abstract :
To compensate for her feelings of anger and helplessness over her mother’s
abandonment and subsequent displacements, the foster child Gilly Hopkins seeks power
and agency through the primary means at her disposal: through the use of language and
fairy tales. She constructs a Cinderella fantasy of an idealized mother who will rescue
her. She also resonates strongly with the Rumpelstiltskin story, as it is a story about the
power of language, and highlights a dynamic of exploitation that seems familiar to her.
Through relationships with William Ernest, Trotter, Mr. Randolph, and Miss Harris,
Gillie learns, however, to move beyond the habit of exploiting others as objects, and to
experience the beauty of language for its own sake. Her emotional and psychological
development can be charted through her changing relationship to the imaginative and
expressive potentialities of language. Most importantly, literacy becomes not a basis for
illusory control and manipulative power, but for the kind of human relationships that
make possible the building of a self. Language becomes a rich inner resource, not simply
a means for power over others.
