The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson

First published: 1978

Subjects: Coming-of-age, family, religion, and social issues

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism, psychological realism, and social realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Recommended Ages: 10-15

Locale: A fictional community based on Takoma Park, Maryland

Principal Characters:

• Gilly (Galadriel) Hopkins, a twelve-year-old foster child who is starving for her mother’s love
• Maime Trotter, a poor and uneducated woman who is filled with traditional values of love and self-responsibility
• William Ernest, a seven-year-old foster child who is considered intellectually slow
• Mr. Randolph, an old, blind black man, a neighbor of Trotter
• Courtney, Gilly’s mother, a hippie

Form and Content

Some young adult literature, especially that written for younger audiences, presents an adolescent protagonist who has been given an unfair life, only to resolve all the problems at the end of the book in an unrealistic, unforeshadowed way. The Great Gilly Hopkins threatens to fall into this category but avoids doing so by maintaining an honest, realistic approach and thus offering a hard, but positive ethical perspective.

The story quickly establishes the main characters. Gilly is an intelligent girl who has developed a hard shell as the result of being rejected by her family and forced to grow up while being shifted from one foster home to another. Gilly arrives at her new foster home ready to set up her emotional barriers that she has developed from past experiences. Foster mother Maime Trotter welcomes Gilly and introduces her to William Ernest, a foster child considered to be mentally slow, and her neighbor Mr. Randolph, a poor, blind, black man who shares their evening meals. Author Katherine Paterson strips Maime Trotter of the less important qualities—an education, a clean house, money—so that her more important wisdom about human relationships and self-responsibility is both obvious and acceptable to the reader.

Gilly starts school and begins her standard routine: first demonstrating how intelligent she is, then purposely failing at her work. At the same time, she continues to write to her mother, believing that someday she will return, and complains about her new foster home, prompting a visit from the welfare department. Gilly also steals money from Mr. Randolph and heads for the bus station. In the final chapter, Gilly stands in the airport with her maternal grandmother, waiting for her much anticipated meeting with her idolized mother. Since self-responsibility is at the center of the novel, it is important to note that Gilly is responsible for initiating the change in her situation, for putting herself in this position. By this time, Gilly’s qualities, both good and bad, have come out, and the reader has become sympathetic and anxious for the novel’s resolution. It is a standard progressive plot, leading to this climax—a climax that must be not only happy but also satisfying, which it is.

Critical Context

Katherine Paterson has written several novels for young adults with similar heroines that offer various perspectives on the same ethical concerns about self-responsibility. Perhaps her best-known work is the Newbery Medal-winning Bridge to Terabethia (1977), in which Leslie Burke, a young girl much like Gilly without the rough edges, teaches Jesse Aarons what life is all about. She tells him that the world is frightening, terrible, and fragile, that it is up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what she has loaned him in vision and strength. In Lyddie (1991), an adolescent girl filled with determination and intelligence must discover, just as Gilly did, that there is “nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job.” After Lyddie has faced many external, unfair, and difficult situations in life—such as class, race, and gender inequities—she comes to Paterson’s central theme: “‘I’m off . . . ,’ she said, and knew as she spoke what it was she was off to. To stare down the bear! The bear that she had thought all these years was outside herself, but now, truly, knew was in her own narrow spirit.” In the Newbery Medal-winning book Jacob Have I Loved (1980), the main character and narrator is yet another adolescent girl, Louise, who believes that she has received unfair treatment in comparison to her twin sister (much the same as in the biblical reference to Jacob and Esau on which the title is based). Once again, she learns that it is up to her to make what she will of her life. In the end, Louise becomes a nurse and delivers twins, discovering that it is necessary to leave the healthy twin aside while she helps the weak twin, an obvious reference to her own situation at birth.

This basic ethos fits into what is perhaps the greatest concern of human existence, that of free will verses fate. In contemporary literature, this theme is dealt with in another manner in the works of Robert Cormier, where the characters are deprived of their free will by an uncaring, brutal society. The ethos differs in that Cormier’s characters either succumb or are forced to abuse power to gain even a small amount of self-responsibility. The perfect example of this struggle occurs in The Chocolate War (1974) and Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), in which Jerry Renault attempts to “disturb the universe” by standing up against the establishment. Readers are left to wonder whether he has won or lost. It is obvious in Katherine Paterson’s novels that her characters have won, even if, such as in The Great Gilly Hopkins, it is a victory in defeat.