by M. O. Grenby
Is this sombre retrospective narrative at odds with the child-reader’s empathy with a forward-looking Arriety? I do not think so. Norton’s book is open-ended and self-renewing. As her invocation of a multicultural India as a land of ‘mystery and magic and legend’ suggests, she is determined to create her own repository for the generational, sexual and cultural binaries that she juggles. Mrs May (whose name is vernal as well as a reminder of the wishfulness that binds young and old alike) shrewdly avails herself of a bilingualism that can traduce the Imaginary into the Symbolic. She resurrects the allure of a myopic child’s fantasy-world by translating it into a memorable, self-knowing, printed text.
Maurice Sendak: the bitextuality of word and image
It may seem incongruous to jump from the verbal self-consciousness of Norton’s sparsely illustrated text to a colourful picture book composed of ten sentences and 339 words. But Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is a hybrid that blends some of the same polarities that Norton juggles in The Borrowers. Norton was a skilled artist who could well have illustrated her own text. She provided a model for both Diana Stanley and the Krutches in a 1951 drawing reproduced as the frontispiece for her novel’s 2003 reprint. The drawing contrasts a squatting, book-engrossed, Arrietty, whom Norton prominently places in the foreground, with a thin and distant Homily, the mother, who stands, bent over her dishes, in the background. Norton here presents a conflict that Sendak dramatises in his representations of Max in the first three drawings of his picture book.
Arrietty’s egress from a domestic space into the lush outdoors where she will tame a potentially scary giant is quite similar to Max’s escape from confinement into a realm of roaring Wild Things. Neither child is intimidated by huge creatures that might so easily have terrified it. But if Arrietty relies on her literacy to assert herself over the younger boy she calls a ‘monster’, Max subdues monstrosities produced by his own aggressive imagination. The tiny Borrowers were originally invented by a small vulnerable girl; the outsized Wild Things are pseudo-adults created by a little boy who covets greater powers. Max’s wolf-suit frees him from his mother’s definition of a child and enables him to rule over creatures much taller than himself. Like Arrietty or like that other wolf-boy, Kipling’s Mowgli, this fearless child moves between contrary states of being. Yet, as his own drawing of a rudimentary hybrid attests, what has given Max a taste of mastery is wordless art rather than an older child’s reading skills. The nesting place that he and Sendak jointly construct in the narrative’s first picture-frame distinctly upholds the visual over the verbal.
Conversely, by representing Arrietty as a reader, Norton’s drawing calls attention to the power of literacy. Sheets of hand-written letters are plastered on the walls behind the girl. The vertical lines of script complement the printed books piled to the left of the child who is shown totally engrossed by the huge tome she is reading. The postage stamps (indistinct enough to suggest the effigies of either Victoria or George V) glued on the wall-paper also validate the importance of written communication. Bent over her stove, the figure in the back suggests a diminished future for non-readers like Homily. Here, the rapt child reader is mother of the illiterate woman. Arrietty’s wider knowledge will persuade Homily to emigrate.
Sendak, on the other hand, celebrates the creativity of the little boy who vows to ‘eat up’ his mother.8 Max is not a reader. He steps on two tomes as thick as those which Norton placed near Arrietty in order to reach the nail that will complete his creation of a private fantasy space. The contents of those books matter little to him. Sendak here celebrates a creativity that adults might easily misread as destructive. The adult reader who looks at the incomplete first sentence on the left-hand page of this iconotext will pause on ‘mischief’, the only two-syllable word among those gliding monosyllables: ‘The night that Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind. . .’ Whereas a parent may be horrified by the damage Max’s hammer has done, the child viewer who lingers on this picture is attracted to the activity it depicts. The scar on the wall matters less than Max’s successful demarcation of a child-space.
Yet even before the first and second drawings establish Max’s creative powers, the child viewer who has already seen the book’s double title-page will have noticed a size-reversal that is more startling than Norton’s drawing of a mother dwarfed by her reading child. The huge Wild Things depicted there cower before the little boy they will later hail as ‘the most wild thing of all’. Sendak’s child viewer thus meets none of the obstacles that Norton strewed at the outset of a narrative designed for her child readers. The story’s plot can be anticipated from the title-page. Already wearing his crown, Max is shown taming oversized monsters with his Mowgli-like ‘trick of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once’. The horned male is scared rather than scary, as is the long-haired, female-looking creature, a grotesque translation of a Jewish mother who called her child a vilde chayeh or ‘wild thing’.
The juxtaposition presented in these double pages equally alerts the pre-literate child and the adult reader to the reversals that lie ahead. The next double-page spread opposes the minimalist verbal text to the left with the graphic text to the right. Yet this opposition will soon give way to a visual equivalent of the verbal criss-crossings I have discussed in The Borrowers. By juggling word and image, by erasing all words from the four double pages that show Max regressively cavorting with his subjects, and by reinstating the verbal text at the end, Sendak toys with the contraries of child and adult. And, like Norton, he challenges our notions of authorial control. The book’s last illustration returns Max from a bedroom he may never have left. The older reader of Wild Things may well assume that Max’s voyage has been a mere day-dream, a reverie cut by the provision of a tangible supper. There are no traces left of the forest that grew and grew before Max’s flight into a fantasyland. And yet some changes are apparent. The crescent moon that blossomed at the time of the silent Rumpus is still full. Max’s lowered hood reveals a head that is as round; a grin has replaced all his earlier scowls.
If an invisible mother has intervened to nourish her child, so has an invisible artist left his mark on this final picture. The full moon not only matches a domesticated boy’s exposed head but also restores the orb greeted by a howling wolf-boy. Did Max’s fantasy voyage truly take up a year or weeks or a day? In a text in which wordless drawings gradually displace the verbal narrative, temporality might seem unimportant. And yet time has passed here as much as in The Borrowers or in that famous adult novel that converts an aborted child-voyage into a voyage for grown-ups, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). The sentence facing Sendak’s last drawing must still be completed. Only after turning one more page will the adult reader stumble onto the five words that conclude a navigation that has already ended for Max and the child viewer: ‘and it was still hot’.
Where the Wild Things Are has remained ‘hot’ as a child-classic because generations of ex-children, Mrs Mays and Mr Mays, can recall their own involvement in a story they pass on to their young. Yet Sendak’s ‘twice-told’ text remains as slippery as The Borrowers. Although devoid of a self-conscious closure such as Norton’s, the book relies on similar co-ordinates and is similarly open-ended. In his story of a wolf-boy who stares down wild things, Sendak invokes Kipling even more directly than Norton did through her creation of an Anglo-Indian boy. But as a writer-illustrator, he also is indebted to the precedent of the Just So Stories, that richly interactive text, for his own balancing of image and text, child and adult, the feminine and the masculine. The two hefty books on which little Max stands when he constructs a child-space may well represent Sendak’s own earlier child-texts, Kenny’s Window and Very Far Away. Yet they could just as easily stand for the two Jungle Books that he learned to read from Randall Jarrell, or even the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book.
Be that as it may, Wild Things is as much preoccupied with overcoming anxieties about the child’s vulnerability as are Norton’s
and Kipling’s fables about death and survival. The first-graders of Princeton’s Riverside School who wrote to Maurice Sendak in 1997 with suggestions about alternative endings for his book had not quite exorcised their discomfort about the conflict between childish Wild Things and Momma’s adult authority. How could this conflict be resolved? Some of the letter-writers wanted Max to retain his island freedom, but they worried that he might either be eaten up by Wild Things or be forced to cut off their heads before returning home.9 And there was the dilemma posed by his broken symbiosis with the mother who wants him back. Here, in the children’s own words, are three alternative possibilities for a happy ending:
(1) Momma got worried about Max and came to pick him up. When she arrived, the wild things ate her up and Max and the wild things lived forever.
(2) When Momma came, she tried to bring Max home, but the wild things said, ‘Please don’t take our king away!’ But Momma ate up the wild things and brought Max home.
(3) Max and the wild things went on a trip around the world. Momma was sad . . . On his trip, Max smelled good things and followed the smell home. And the wild things ate with him. And they were a happy family ever after.
The most complicated closure, however, was devised by another anonymous first-grader. Whether a girl like the little Mary Norton or a boy like Sendak’s Max, this reconciler of opposites may well produce a future masterpiece of hybridity:
(4) Max decided to remain king of the wild things until someone could come to take his place. Momma wanted Max back so she got into her own boat. The wild things tried to eat her, but Max said, ‘No! Eat yourselves, but don’t eat my Momma!’ Momma and Max got back in Momma’s boat and sailed home. And into the night of his very own room where their supper was waiting for them . . . But it was cold.
Notes
1. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 143.
2. Mitzi Myers and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds., ‘Cross-Writing the Child and the Adult’, special issue, Children’s Literature, 25 (1997); Knoepflmacher, ‘The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1983), 497–530.
3. Knoepflmacher, ‘Introduction: Fairy Tales and the Value of Impurity’, in Marvels and Tales, special issue, ed. Andrea Immel and Jan Susina, 17 (2003), 15–36.
4. The letter is printed in Mary Norton, The Borrowers, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, foreword by Leonard S. Marcus (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003). References to the pages of this letter will appear in parentheses in the main text.
5. Norton, The Borrowers (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 9. Unless otherwise noted, further references to the novel will be to this edition and will appear in parentheses in the main text.
6. Norton, The Borrowers (London: Puffin, 1958), p. 7.
7. These responses are from an international website, Reading Matters: www.readingmatters.co.uk/book2.php?id=108 (accessed 13 March 2008).
8. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), unpaginated.
9. The children had seen a video of the Sendak/Knussen Glyndebourne Festival Opera in which Max (the soprano Karen Beardsley) swings a sword that accidentally decapitates one of the huge Wild Things created by Jim Hensen. I am grateful to Mr Paul Chapin for sharing these student responses with me.
11 Ideas of difference in children’s literature
Lynne Vallone
The rather obvious observation that children are ‘different’ – from adults, from each other – stands as the point of departure for this chapter on the foundational nature of discourses of difference in the development of 300 years of Anglo-American children’s literature. Simply put, without a powerful guiding belief in essential differences between adult and child, there would be no ‘children’s literature’. Awareness of ‘differences’, or acknowledgement of the presence of ‘others’, has been noted and explored in children’s literature from its earliest inception: consider one of the tales from John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s widely read Evenings At Home (1792–6), ‘Travellers’ Wonders’. In this tale about cultural perspectives, Captain Compass’ children – whose imaginations have been stirred by the marvellous sights and people described in Gulliver’s Travels and stories about Sinbad the sailor – implore him to recount adventures from his own voyages. The fond father replies with a long description of a remarkable people whose habitations, clothes, diet and customs all appear to be perfectly strange to the children – for example the inhabitants fill their mouths with noxious smoke, uncover their heads as a salutation, and spread a delicious grease upon virtually all of their food – until one of them realises with a start that their father has been describing Britain all along. Responding to their surprise, the Captain states, ‘But I meant to shew you, that a foreigner might easily represent every thing as equally strange and wonderful among us, as we could do with respect to his country.’1 The guessing game provides the amusement for the reader, and the recognition and tolerance of different cultural perspectives provides the moral instruction in the tale, twin goals of most eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature for children.
This chapter will begin by discussing the ‘natural’ differences between adults and children that undergird the creation of a literature meant to bridge or mark that difference, and then turns to a consideration of changing categories of difference expressed within children’s literature over time – including gender, race, disability and sexuality – and concludes with a brief consideration of size, given that size represents a significant distinction informing the interactions between adult and child in lived, as well as in literary, child experience. I trace two general responses to difference – what might be called ‘conversion’ and ‘resistance’, the one dedicated to the erasure of difference between adult and child, the other predicated upon an acceptance and celebration of the differences between children. Didactic ‘conversion’ narratives lead the child character (and encourage the child reader) out of the vulnerable, incomplete state of childhood and into maturity or proto-adulthood. ‘Resistant’ narratives, by contrast, reject the politics of conversion that universalise children as well as reify the hierarchical relationship of adult over child, in order to embrace the particular child, the ‘differentiated’ child. I intend these broad categories to be suggestive and illustrative of general trends, while at the same time I will suggest ways to problematise and historicise each shift. In general, the first of these is dominant in early children’s literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which the difference between adulthood and childhood was typically viewed as both natural (arising from biological and physiological causes) and troubling, while the second, more child-centred view of difference essentially reflects an acceptance of the special nature of childhood as distinct from adulthood and focuses on the differences within children and between different childhoods.
For the last 300 years or so, children have been considered a distinct social category (though what this meant in the seventeenth century is quite different from what it means today, of course), and a clear separation has existed between the child and the adult. The child’s perceived difference from adults requires unique responses within legal, economic, educational and family systems. Within the marketplace, too, the child functions both as a separate audience for sellers and as a significant consumer of goods. Clearly, children are also markedly different from adults in both physiological and psychological ways. Children look, sound and act in ways that are distinctly ‘childlike’ even when they are engaging in the same activities that adults enjoy – playing sport, for example, watching television or even sleeping.
Although children are easily recognisable when we see them, asleep or awake, determining the definition of ‘children’ and drawing the boundaries of ‘childhood’ are less obvious. The fuzzy liminality of adolescence intrudes, as do the sober realities of many children
’s lives. Can child soldiers forced to kill be said to inhabit childhood, for example? Literary characters can reflect this confusion. Characters as varied as Kipling’s Kim, Collodi’s Pinocchio, Ursula Le Guin’s Ged and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy are all ‘children’ of one kind or another in the act of ‘becoming’, of maturing. Yet they all remain very different both from adult characters and from each other. But even if ‘the Child’ does not actually exist, this fantasy creature is often invoked, exhibited or manipulated in the intersecting realms of politics, education and social policy.
Literature written specifically for children provides a particularly clear window through which theories of the child can be viewed, and theories of difference explored. In early children’s literature, works for children attempted to supply the needs of incomplete, impressionable and ignorant children by offering them religious guidance, moral lessons and/or reading instruction, ‘converting’ them from childish ways and guiding them away from childhood. In seventeenth-century Protestant religious beliefs (particularly the Puritan strains), the child’s soul was considered to be the equal of the adult’s soul, and so even the youngest babe was at risk of eternal damnation. Yet, although the same assumptions about the sinful nature of all humans, adult and child, informed the creation of children’s books, early religious children’s literature adopted a particular learning model suited to young readers, featuring child characters as positive or negative examples for child readers to emulate or to reject. James Janeway’s A Token For Children (1671–2) functions in just this way. Janeway’s conversational preface, ‘containing directions to children’, identifies and describes sensitive child readers ideally suited to receive his exhortations and directly addresses his audience in mock ‘dialogue’ in which only the adult actually speaks: