to be someone else—focusing particularly on the adult—child divide. In Vice Versa, the
emphasis is on the father learning how awful it is to be a child attending a public (that
is, in Britain, a private boarding) school; in Freaky Friday, the mother actuates the
transformation so that the daughter can understand how difficult she is making her
mother’s life.
Vice Versa is subtitled ‘a lesson to fathers’. The father, Paul Bultitude, is pompous and
overbearing. He finds his son a trial and can hardly wait for him to return to his school
appropriately called, Grimstone. On their parting interview, Dick, the son requests some
extra pocket-money which the father denies. Then Dick asks if he can keep the Garuda
stone his uncle had given his now dead mother. Again the father refuses. Finally Dick
asks if he could leave school after this term and the father, still holding the stone,
refuses pontificating that ‘I only wish, at this very moment, I could be a boy again, like
you. Going back to school wouldn’t make me unhappy, I can tell you’ (Anstey 1893:22).
He gets the wish. What changes is his body, however, not his mind, and so he thinks of
himself as the father, certain that he can convince adults who he really is. Dick meanwhile
uses the stone to change his mind into his father’s body. Paul (as Dick) is hauled off to
school where he is roundly mistreated by the staff and other boys, and learns what it is
like not to have money. Meanwhile, Dick thoroughly enjoys himself, treats his younger
brother and sister to pantomimes, and plays with them. When the transformation is
reversed after a week, the father has a whole new view on Dick’s education and reflects
that ‘his experiences, unpleasant as they had been, had had their advantages: they had
drawn him and his family closer together’ (366).
While Dick learns that being an adult with money is desirable, the opposite occurs in
Freaky Friday. Annabel Andrews thinks it is hard being 13 but after a day in her
mother’s body, is happy to remain herself. Only at the end of the book, does the reader
learn that the mother was, in some unexplained way, responsible for the change. While
the book focuses on the daughter struggling to cope with her mother’s appointments
and chores, the mother has gone out and had her hair cut and bought new clothes, and
had the braces taken off her teeth. Much of the humour in this book is based on what
Annabel doesn’t know; just as in Vice Versa Paul, the father, has problems with school
friends and school codes and classroom material.
It has probably not escaped the reader’s attention that only one of the books
mentioned was written by an American. In general terms, British fantasy, both domestic
and ‘high’ tends to be rooted in places: literature is often attached to a real or realistic
place. As Peter Hunt has pointed out:
not only do the complex layers of history embedded (as it were) in the landscape
enrich the texture of stories, but the meanings of the landscapes themselves
provide a subtext for the journeys: places mean. The American tradition of fantasy
journey seems to be—at least to an Englishman like myself—one reaching outwards
and westwards; it is a linear matter. Because there is little to dig down into,
American fantasy tends to be set in secondary worlds... The English, in contrast,
are re-treading ancestral ground. Their reference points are more concrete, deep-
rooted cultural symbols which seem to lie, sometimes literally, underfoot.
Hunt 1987:11REAL GARDENS WITH IMAGINARY TOADS: DOMESTIC FANTASY 295