by M. O. Grenby
But despite such modern complications of masculinity, a feminine boyishness is still not widely countenanced in male characters, as it is still perceived as sissiness. Neither Tom Brown, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Bilbo Baggins, Jerry Renault or Ged are quite the male equivalent of the tomboy, a boy who behaves like a girl. For Blyton to have included in her Famous Five a boy in a dress who demanded to be called ‘Georgina’ would have been unthinkable in the 1940s, and even today such a novel would probably be difficult to place with a mainstream trade publisher. There has been much more freedom in the ways in which girlhood has been constructed in recent children’s literature. Heroines who openly take on the best qualities of a Jack Harkaway (without his colonial prejudices) do not necessarily arouse hostility or provoke controversy, nor are they characterised two-dimensionally as tomboys or as somehow queer. In fact, brave, smart, resourceful girl protagonists are by no means unusual in recent children’s novels – if anything, the portrayal of a traditionally feminine girl may be regarded by some critics as requiring a word of explanation or apology from the author. On the other hand, strong girl characters who may be the superior, in important respects, of a novel’s male protagonist, like Hermione Granger in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels or a woman warrior like Aerin in Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown (1984), are not necessarily allowed to upstage the male hero or the man they love. Likewise Dicey Tillerman, in Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming, who displays a degree of courage, resourcefulness and determination far beyond her age in caring for her siblings after abandonment by a mentally ill mother, may seem to some like an updated version of the self-sacrificing May sisters in The Daisy Chain.
The deliberate disordering of gender identities in modern children’s literature has not, of course, rendered more traditional representations of gender obsolete. C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books, for instance, remain popular at the start of the twenty-first century despite the very conservative gender roles that they endorse. It might in fact be argued that some of their popularity comes precisely from this social conservatism. Nor does the modern disordering of gender necessarily mean that child readers are absorbing and abiding by any new proprieties of gender. It is possible that these books should best be understood as a kind of fairy tale of adolescence, enabling children to satisfy an urge to experiment with gender without the need to destabilise their real-life identities. In other words, young girls may always have enjoyed reading about tomboys, but they don’t want to grow up in that image. If anything, the fantasy of tomboyhood provides not a challenge to but a necessary preparatory stage for their adult roles as wives and mothers. Readers may like it when gender is destabilised because it offers the usual gratifications of the carnivalesque, just as the tradition of blackface minstrelsy plays with colour but actually only enforces old divisions. Here then is an explanation of why George has remained easily the most popular character from Blyton’s Famous Five, and why Alcott’s Jo and Montgomery’s Anne are among the most iconic characters in all children’s literature. It is the depiction of gender dissidence of these characters and the rigidly gendered society in which they operate that readers appreciate. Unambiguous and inflexibly enforced gender boundaries can provide the reassurance and stability which young readers crave, while at the same time offering a delightful opportunity for transgression and socio-cultural adventure.
Notes
1. Enid Blyton, Five on a Treasure Island (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1942; rpt 1997), p. 19.
2. Blyton, Five on a Treasure Island, pp. 21 and 14.
3. Edward Salmon, ‘What Girls Read’, Nineteenth Century, 20 (November 1886), 515–29.
4. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of little Master Tommy, and Pretty Miss Polly, 10th edn (1744; London: J. Newbery, 1760), pp. 13–20.
5. William Darton, A Present for a Little Girl (London: Darton and Harvey, 1798), pp. 45–9.
6. Quoted in E. S. Turner, Boys Will be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton et al. (1948; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 84.
7. Claudia Marquis, ‘Romancing the Home’, in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 53–67 (p. 57).
8. Quoted in Turner, Boys Will be Boys, pp. 68–9.
9. Salmon, ‘What Girls Read’.
10. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Madeline B. Stern (Boston: Little, 1989), pp. 59 and 79.
11. Martha Saxton, Louisa May (Boston: Houghton, 1977), p. 165.
12. Charlotte M. Yonge, The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations, vol. I (1856; Virginia: IndyPublish.com, 2002), ‘Preface’.
13. Charlotte M. Yonge, Womankind, serialised 1874–7; published in book form, 1887 (new edn, New York: Macmillan and Co., 1890), p. 6.
14. Yonge, Daisy Chain, pp. 227 and 221–2.
15. Yonge, Daisy Chain, p. 225.
16. G. A. Henty, The Young Buglers (1881).
17. Anthony Horowitz, Stormbreaker (London: Walker Books, 2006), p. 235.
18. Reported in the Daily Telegraph, Thursday 15 March 2007, p. 4.
19. Charlotte M. Yonge, What Books to Lend and What to Give (1888), quoted in Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only? Gender and Popular Fiction in Britain 1880–1910 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 36–7.
20. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937; London: Collins, 1988), pp. 363 and 365.
21. See Ursula Le Guin, Earthsea Revisioned: A Lecture Delivered Under the Title ‘Children, Women, Men and Dragons’ (Cambridge, MA: Children’s Literature New England in association with Green Bay Publications, 1993).
22. Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War (1974; London: Puffin, 2001), pp. 168 and 201.
23. Yoshida Junko, ‘The Quest for Masculinity in The Chocolate War: Changing Conceptions of Masculinity in the 1970s’, Children’s Literature, 26 (1998), 105–22 (p. 113).
10 Children’s texts and the grown-up reader
U. C. Knoepflmacher
It is a truth still insufficiently acknowledged that our finest children’s books are hybrid constructs that combine a child’s perspective with the guarded perspective of the former child we call ‘adult’. Pliable and elastic, such mixed texts allow both perspectives to coexist. They may rely on a fictional child/adult amalgam, or an animal/human composite, such as a Sendakian Wild Thing, as a mediating agent. Or they may require a transformative space that is both mundane and fantastic, as ordinary as a smelly barn and as magical as the mysterious advertising slogans that a tiny spider called Charlotte has spun on her threshold web.
Since it has become routine for critics to scrutinise adult values embedded in juvenile texts, we may no longer need Jacqueline Rose to remind us that children’s literature is not ‘something self-contained’ or exclusively self-referential.1 Nonetheless, our scrupulous attention to cultural and political frames has hardly moved us beyond Rose’s dialectical emphasis on generational binaries. The overlaps and frictions that make most children’s books such an interactive meeting ground for readers of different ages still require a much closer attention.
In 1997, Mitzi Myers and I edited a collection of essays devoted to what she called ‘Cross-Writing the Child and the Adult’. In our preface, we tried to refine ideas I had posited in a 1983 discussion of Victorian texts ‘balancing’ generational opposites.2 The topic continued to intrigue Professor Myers, as it has other critics such as Sandra Beckett and Marah Gubar, who have fruitfully extended it. Convinced that we had unduly homogenised the generational dynamics of texts substantially different in genre and form, Professor Myers wanted us to take a closer look at the variable layerings involved in ‘cross-writing’. We had also paid scant attention to the historical role of folktales and fairy tales as prime models for the traffic between child and adult. It was their trans-generational and trans-gendered fluidity, after all, that allowed fairy tales to evolve and spread in
to other discursive forms.3 When Charles Perrault and the Grimms infantilised and masculinised texts (which later women writers then re-feminised and eventually reclaimed for adult audiences), they set off trans-generic changes that have continued to flourish in theatre, opera, film and television.
But unasked questions remained even about those texts we had highlighted. What kinds of overlaps exist between a child’s constructions of reality and their later reappropriation by adult authors and adult readers? How do different age gaps affect a text’s multigenerational appeal? Might books targeted for smaller children – Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902), say – possibly offer a richer interplay between younger listeners and older readers than narratives designed for the so-called ‘young adult’, such as Kipling’s own Jungle Books (1894–5)? And, if so, would picture books for pre-literate children perhaps offer a more successful ‘mix’ of adult and child interests than books with few or no illustrations? Might comic narratives that rely on shared jokes or that mock plots familiar to both children and grown-ups offer both constituencies a stronger sense of partnership or joint tenancy than texts dominated by a narrator’s recognisable adult voice? After all, the repetition and variation of narratives familiar to both children and grown-ups may well result in the communal pleasure of those ‘twice-told tales’ that John Stephens so valuably highlights elsewhere in this volume.
If our finest child-texts are adult/child hybrids, greater attention must be paid to the triangulating processes through which such hybrids dissolve, reshape and yet also reinstate the divisions between child and adult. In 1983, I used ‘See-Saw’, a brief tale by the Victorian writer Margaret Scott Gatty, as a crude paradigm for such a process. I aligned Gatty’s creation of a mediating third entity, a hermaphroditic snail, with hybrid figurations of the ‘childlike adult or adult-seeming child’ so frequently found in other Victorian fantasies. Yet my anatomy of these more complex texts was over-simplified, for it depended on an ideal equipoise I represented by drawing a balanced see-saw. Decidedly tilting towards one extreme or the other, mixed texts rarely balance their adult/child components. The Victorian fantasies I considered should thus have been assessed according to the varying proportions of those components. And they should also have been contrasted with the intricate mixtures created by later writers such as Mary Norton or E. B. White, or by artists such as Maurice Sendak and Dr Seuss, the creators of so-called ‘iconotexts’ (graphic texts in which word and picture are so enmeshed that neither can be understood without the other).
Sendak’s case as writer-illustrator is instructive. The rich verbal and pictorial equilibrium of Where the Wild Things Are (1963) certainly makes this masterpiece one of the finest specimens of adult/child (or child/adult) interaction that children’s literature can offer. Yet the uniqueness of the book’s ‘mixy’ nature also becomes apparent when it is set beside its 1957 forerunners, Kenny’s Window (1956) and Very Far Away (1957). Despite their thematic kinship with Wild Things, these first attempts at illustrated narratives which Sendak wrote himself seem flatter and feebler as bi-textual compositions. Why? Without his later confidence in balancing word and image, Sendak had yet to find the means for injecting an adult presence into a child-text and thus may have tilted too much towards the child’s interests. Conversely, later Sendakian texts, still marketed as children’s books, tilt in exactly the opposite direction. The idiosyncratic pictorial inscriptions of brilliant works such as Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life (1967) may delight adult critics; yet, by excluding a major segment of the book’s intended audience, they also threaten to diminish the interaction between younger and older readers.
Facing the title-page of Higglety Pigglety Pop! is a full-page drawing of Jennie, the feisty terrier whom Sendak places against the backdrop of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’. By posing two mortals in parallel pictorial planes that hold them in an ever-frozen moment, Sendak not only aligns his own canine Mona (whom he had renamed ‘Jennie’ in real life) with the human Mona whom Leonardo immortalised as La Gioconda but also identifies himself with the Renaissance artist whose masterpiece Freud and Walter Pater had analysed as an act of self-projection. He, too, is determined to combat mutability by ‘eternising’ a female subject. For Jennie’s comic odyssey can transfigure, through the timelessness of art, the mother-nurtured securities of childhood that both the artist and his subject must cede to a world of change and death. Sendak’s absurdist elegy is rich in witty verbal and visual delights. But its pleasures are far less accessible and less universal than those he had previously produced in the iconotext of Wild Things. The exclusivity of the private meanings we are asked to decode has the effect of barring too many child readers and can even alienate adult readers who may expect – and miss – the richly interactive cohesion of the earlier book.
I shall take a closer look at the cohesive artistry of Where the Wild Things Are in the final section of this chapter. But I first want to consider a very different type of hybrid text, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952). Like Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Norton’s fiction tries to defuse adult anxieties about the threat of death. Her anxieties, like Sendak’s, are rooted in the insecurities and compensatory imaginings of a vividly remembered childhood past. But unlike Sendak’s handling of Jennie’s surrealist march towards Castle Yonder, Norton’s own exodus narrative interrogates her text’s child/adult mixture. The primarily linguistic hybridity of her novel thus needs to be carefully examined before we can return to the visual/verbal hybridity offered in Wild Things.
Mary Norton: the problematics of ‘bilingualism’
A 1966 letter that Mary Norton wrote to a friend who wanted to know how she came to invent her tiny race of Borrowers wonderfully documents the multiple ‘layerings’ that shape a hybrid child/adult text.4 Norton traces her fiction back to ‘an early fantasy in the life of a very short-sighted child, before it was known that she needed glasses’. The little girl she describes in the third person is recalled as ‘an inveterate lingerer’ who lagged behind her older brothers during their country walks: ‘she was a gazer into banks and hedgerows, a rapt investigator of shallow pools, a lier-down by stream-like teeming ditches’ (xv). The child’s acute myopia, Norton suggests, became an asset rather than a handicap. For she soon transformed the minutiae she saw: a ‘small toad’, struggling to survive on a piece of bark, turned into ‘little people’ as ‘vulnerable’ as this amphibian creature or as her own small self (xvi).
Norton credits that child-self with having begun a layering process that she complicated and refined as an adult writer. For, soon, this most vulnerable of three siblings took ‘her small people indoors’ and retained them as secret companions unknown to her brothers and ‘unguessed at by the adult human beings, who were living so close but so dangerously [by]’ (xviii). Yet a new phase began, Norton suggests, after the ‘maturing demands of boarding school’ displaced the sheltered life of her ‘nursery years’ (xviii). The provision of a pair of spectacles and the advent of adolescence had opened other realities: ‘In the midst of such diversions there was little time for the Borrowers who, denied even humble attention, slid quietly back into the past.’ Still, although she had shelved this imaginary band of survivors, what still persisted into adolescence and, eventually, into maturity was her continuing apprehension of the fragility and precariousness that had led to their invention. The fantasies that Mary and her friends traded at their ‘convent school’ were still defensive. For the teenagers needed to escape their acute awareness of ‘the 1914–18 war and the mud and blood across the Channel which engaged our elder brothers’ (xix–xx).
It took another world war, however, and the fully matured awareness of a woman who had become a mother-in-exile, to bring back into consciousness a near-sighted child’s early imaginings. By then, however, these had accrued new meanings:
It was only just before the 1940 war, when a change was creeping over the world as we had known it, that one thought again about the Borrowers. There were
human men and women who were being forced to live (by stark and tragic necessity) the kinds of lives a child had once envisaged for a race of mythical creatures. One could not help but realize (without any thought of conscious symbolism) that the world at any time could produce its Mrs Drivers who in their turn would summon their Rich Williams. And there we would be. (xx)
‘I hope this answers your question’, Norton tells her correspondent before finishing the 1966 letter she copyrighted in 1991, a year before her death. By using this epistle as an ‘adult’ introduction to a children’s book, Norton can be said to have added, towards the end of her long life, still another layer to the text she had published, almost forty years earlier, in its 1952 British and 1953 American versions. She seemed eager to alert her public to the idea that a text that opened a privately cherished mythical core to younger readers could also be read by an older audience as a post-Holocaust parable. The year 1952, it may be well worth remembering, was the one in which two other major narratives about the precariousness of survival, Charlotte’s Web and The Diary of Anne Frank, first appeared in the United States. Like each of these texts, The Borrowers engages fears of extinction shared by the young and the old.