37 pages • 1 hour read
Louise FitzhughHarriet the Spy
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Odd Habits
Three of the main characters in the novel follow fixed routines that amount to obsessions. This recurring motif speaks to the theme of Developing Empathy. Harriet’s habits make perfect sense to her and provide her with a sense of security, but she lacks the empathy to understand the quirks of her two closest friends. Every day for five years, Harriet eats a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich for lunch. When she returns from school, she expects a snack of milk and cake to be ready for her. The cook is exasperated by these unvarying menu choices but provides them anyway.
Harriet follows a regular circuit when she makes her spy rounds. She always visits the same houses, usually in the same order. Of course, her most important recurring habit is that she writes down all her observations in her journal. The journal is a sort of security blanket for her because Harriet finds that she can’t think straight without it when her teachers confiscate it during class hours.
While Harriet’s friends and family find her behavior odd, she is far from the only character who indulges in a comforting and rigid routine. Sport proudly shows Harriet his financial ledgers. When she isn’t impressed, he explains that he can’t manage his family’s finances without them. The ledgers spell the difference between poverty and prosperity, and Sport values them for the sense of security they provide. In the absence of parental responsibility for budgeting and household management, Sport takes on the complex adult role of managing the family finances, and the ledgers offer him the stability and reliability that his father fails to provide.
Janie also has quirks that neither Harriet nor Sport can understand. She sets up a laboratory in her bedroom where she conducts incendiary experiments. Whenever she tries to explain to her friends what she’s doing, they become lost. They are impressed by her threat to blow up the world someday but have no idea how she’ll go about it. Janie gains a sense of power over her environment through her threats to destroy it. All three characters find the security and stability that their family relationships do not provide by taking refuge in their routines and hobbies.
Spying
The most prominent recurring motif in the novel is Harriet’s spying, which relates to the theme of Observation Versus Understanding. The novel even includes an illustration of her neighborhood spying route. She explains her routine to both Sport and Janie, but neither one is interested in accompanying her, so it becomes a solitary pleasure.
Harriet spies on the neighbors as a way of acquiring knowledge. She grandly announces to Ole Golly that she will know everything when she’s a grown-up spy. Harriet’s frequently shares her observations about her targets with the reader, who is privy to the secret ideas in her notebook. Most of them consist of describing activities and speculating about the meaning of what she sees, but Harriet rarely reaches any conclusions about why people act the way they do. Since she can filter their behavior only through her own limited perception of life at age 11, her targets frequently baffle her.
Harriet doesn’t understand why the Robinsons acquire new things for their house simply to have people over to view their prized possessions. She doesn’t understand why Harrison Withers keeps so many cats, and she is surprised by his sadness when the Health Department confiscates them. She wonders why Mrs. Plumber is so happy to be bedridden and then is overjoyed when her doctor tells her she can move about again. Harriet is even more perplexed by the Dei Santi family’s frequent drama and is especially puzzled by their ever-hungry delivery boy and his charity toward neighborhood children.
Harriet faithfully records the activities of all these people, thinking she has captured knowledge by observing them. In reality, she is recording data about which she speculates without ever reaching any conclusions. She has yet to apply or understand Ole Golly’s hint that love inevitably leads to understanding. The first glimmer of understanding finally comes in the last page of the novel when she doesn’t simply spy on her two friends and record their actions; rather, she thinks about who they are independent of her. This shift in her perception represents the beginning of understanding.
Written Media
The written word, in various forms, recurs as a motif in the novel and speaks to the theme of the Power of Words. The most obvious example is Harriet toting around her ubiquitous notebook. However, her current journal is only one in a long line that preceded it. The toy box in Harriet’s room was converted long ago to a storage chest that holds her earlier written efforts, which she keeps under lock and key. When she goes out on her spy rounds, she uses a pouch on the tool belt she created to hold her journal.
Harriet isn’t the only character concerned with writing things down. Sport is nearly as obsessive with his ledgers. He proudly shows Harriet the books where he keeps track of the household finances. For someone as fixated on journals as Harriet is, she remains unimpressed by Sport’s efforts. Numbers don’t interest her as much as words do, and she doesn’t read the stories they tell.
Her classmates decide to give Harriet a taste of her own medicine after they discover her harsh statements about them. They begin passing notes around in class to each other. When Harriet intercepts these, she finds hurtful comments criticizing her appearance and habits, written in the same tone as her notebook entries.
When Harriet visits Dr. Wagner, she sees him writing about her in a notebook of his own. When he notices her interest, he gives her a blank notebook to record her thoughts, but he keeps it after their session ends. Miraculously, the same medium that got Harriet into trouble in the first place will also give her a path forward. Wagner recognizes her intelligence after reading her entries and finds a way to channel it constructively by suggesting a special school project as the class’s newspaper editor.
