Society · Heidi
Heidi and the Homesickness of the Mountains
Mountain poverty, growing cities and adults deciding for children form the social world of Heidi.
Say the name Heidi and most people picture green pastures, goats and a hut high in the Alps. But Johanna Spyri's novel is more than a postcard. It is also a story about rural poverty in nineteenth-century Switzerland and about the decisions adults make on behalf of children.
Poverty in the high valleys
Heidi was written by the Swiss author Johanna Spyri and published in two parts, in 1880 and 1881. Spyri grew up in a village near Zurich and knew mountain life well.
Orphaned young, Heidi is raised for a time by her aunt Dete. When Dete finds work in a town, she leaves the little girl with her grandfather, a solitary old man the villagers call the Alm-Uncle and tend to avoid. Heidi's new friend Peter is a goatherd who drives the village goats up the mountain every day, and as a result he falls badly behind at school. His family's cottage rattles in the wind, and his blind grandmother dreads the winter. In such valleys, children were expected to help keep the household going.
Sent to the city
Then Dete returns and takes Heidi to Frankfurt, a large German city. A wealthy family needs a companion for their daughter Clara, who is frail and uses a wheelchair. No one asks Heidi what she wants. Dete calls it a wonderful opportunity, but her own interests are part of the bargain too.
The Frankfurt house is grand, yet the strict housekeeper, Fräulein Rottenmeier, corrects Heidi at every turn, and from the windows she sees only walls and rooftops instead of mountains. Across nineteenth-century Europe, cities were growing fast and many people left the countryside to find work. Heidi's sense of being out of place was one that countless people of her time shared.
The Swiss sickness
In the city, Heidi slowly loses her spark. She misses the mountains and her grandfather. Interestingly, intense longing for home was once thought of as a particularly Swiss illness. In the seventeenth century a Swiss doctor is said to have given the condition a name after observing Swiss soldiers serving abroad who fell ill from missing home.
Through Heidi, Spyri suggests that a growing child needs more than good food and a big house. Whether Heidi sees her mountains again is for readers to find out.
A question to think about
Heidi was handed to her grandfather when her aunt found work, and later taken to Frankfurt by that same aunt. Neither time was she asked. Meanwhile Peter was missing school because he had to herd goats. Today children still change homes and schools because of their parents' jobs or money worries, and in some countries children go to work instead of school.
When adults make a big decision that will reshape a child's life, how much should the child's own wishes count? And how can we tell a decision made for the child's sake from one made mostly for the adults' convenience?