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Donna Getzinger’s The Picture Wagon is ostensibly the story
of Joanna, a young girl serving as a Union Spy in the Civil
War. But it soon becomes apparent that it is in fact a minor
morality tale, staged with modern actors in a pasteboard
replica of the American Civil War. Along a passionless
reproduction set, Joanna makes her way in the advertised
picture wagon, picking up symbolic characters and opening
her doors to all manner of simplistic discussion of the
great national trauma.
It’ s painful to read, but the harshest aspect of is the pervasive contempt for anyone and
anything not fitting in with Getzinger’s concept of modern
values. Every single Confederate or rebel sympathizer is
ugly, violent, stupid, and amoral. Slaves are represented by
a pair of big-eyed refugee children, grateful for the
assistance of their sweet white friend and confident in her
“pow’ful magic.”
Saddest and most puzzling is the disdain
offered for women throughout the story. It’s become standard
practice for adventure heroines to chafe against the
traditional roles of women, wanting nothing more than to
throw off their skirts and join in men’s activities. But
that attitude shouldn’t come at the expense of other women.
Every time Joanna interacts with her mother and her older
sister Betsey, we're invited to share in her contempt for
“housework and pretty dresses,” as though the two go
together in any conceivable way. Joanna’s mother, a woman
who has raised two daughters, run a farmhouse, and helped
pack a family across several states, is reduced to fainting
or impotent scolding in the face of danger. Joanna’s sister
Betsey manages to sew together a new dress in three days
while performing enough housework to earn the family a stay
at an inn, and readers are expected to recognize this as a
sign of sloth.
In a society where a load of laundry means
five minutes switching clothes and dinner can be produced
with five minutes and a microwave, it may be easy to forget
that “women’s work” was once cripplingly manual labor,
women’s labors often fatal, and the female head of household
often left to herself to provide education, socialization,
and sanity for her rather isolated family. It may be easy to
forget; but it’s the job of a historical novel to remind us
of these things, to bring the past to life beyond the dry
facts offered by a textbook.
But such dimension is lacking even in Joanna herself. She
takes to spying on the Confederate troops (though she
scrupulously calls them “Rebels” at every opportunity) not
out of deep patriotism or in protest over their political
beliefs, but out of a wish to hurt the people who hurt her
family and a childish craving for adventure. The result is
that she seems about as heroic as a child in line for a
roller coaster, except that she’s risking her family’s
livelihood and her own safety to indulge the urge. That,
combined with her amazing ignorance of the political debates
that inflamed a nation, makes her seem less a character than
a prop, moving through the days of a very civil war indeed.
The honesty that Getzinger keeps from her characters is
absent in the setting, too. There are no razed towns, no,
and the one battle scene that appears receives as much
emotional force as a railroad crossing. Mentioning dead
bodies is unimpressive if no one, even the strangely
enlightened hero, remembers or cares about them by the next
page. Offscene deaths of unseen characters mean little when
the hero and her family escape every danger with little
damage. This is a Civil War without consequences, reason, or
drama.
Perhaps Getzinger feels that the young audience she writes
for can’t handle the weight of real history. But if actual
children lived through the period, then modern kids should
at least be able to know about it. With the real force of
the war stripped away, The Picture Wagon is left to find its
power in such daring moral statements as “all men should be
free”- a daring idea in the '90s, if it were the 1790s.
Morals shouldn’t need to be shoehorned into a tale. Any
story with some meat to it will reveal such themes
organically. Sadly, The Picture Wagon is strict vegetarian
fare and practically homeopathic in its serving of drama.
If you‘re craving a bit of Civil War fiction, pick up one of
the books recommended on the back cover.
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The Picture Wagon: A Children's Historical Novel