The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Similarly, Tommy’s feeling of superiority over the black servants in his household is directly interrogated in the text, as is the very notion of a hierarchy of skin colour. In the aftermath of a near tragedy in which Tommy is saved from a rampaging bull by the combined brave efforts of Harry and a poor African man, the African muses, ‘Is a black horse thought to be inferior to a white one, in speed, or strength, or courage? Is a white cow thought to give more milk or a white dog to have an acuter scent in pursuing the game? . . . Why then should a certain race of men imagine themselves superior to the rest. . .?’11 However, although Day’s didactic story promotes tolerance and acceptance between races and classes, deep divisions are maintained in the text. In the case of the deserving African man, who refers to the white characters as ‘master’, the place in the Sandford household that is found for him as a reward for his thankfulness and industry – the stable – suggests that demarcations of differences between race and class have not been entirely overcome or successfully negotiated away from notions of hierarchy.

  Within children’s literature, the impulse to confront notions of difference cannot be separated from questions of identity – figuring out who the protagonist (and child-reader) might become both in relation to others and in the surrounding world. Early children’s fiction tends to use difference in others to highlight the ‘normative’ (or white, middle-class) character’s identity; more recent children’s books offer multiple perspectives. In early children’s fiction, difference is often used to demonstrate positive qualities in the ‘other’ child (the ‘industrious lower-class child’, the ‘grateful Negro’), or intolerable distinctions that must be transcended or erased (the black child who ‘acts white’, the disabled child who overcomes an injury). An ‘ethics of resistance’ argues that difference should neither be effaced nor explained away, but celebrated, rejecting and resisting the narrative of conversion that holds that the girlish boy or tomboy must become conventionally gender-normed, or that black characters will be successful only in rejecting or ignoring their racial and cultural heritage, or that disabled characters can be miraculously cured of their disability. Many contemporary children’s books – this is especially true in terms of gender and race – no longer feel the need to take up the challenge of educating the reader (who is not always assumed to be white or male) about race and gender relations in every narrative. Not every book that includes a protagonist of colour has to be about race relations with a white majority. Some recent children’s books resist the essentialising impulse that turns every children’s story that includes non-whites into narratives of ‘black and white’ (for instance, Norton Juster’s joyous picture book The Hello Goodbye Window (2005), illustrated by Chris Raschka, tells the story of a little girl’s relationship with her grandparents, one of whom is black and the other white). In order briefly to touch upon some of the shifts in the politics and discourse of difference in gender, social class, ability and sexuality, and to show some of the ways in which these differences have come to be celebrated and sustained in children’s literature, I will pair texts from early and late periods.

  Many classic works of Victorian and Edwardian Anglo-American children’s literature featured androgynous boys or tomboy girls. From George Arthur in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and Colin Craven in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) to Louisa May Alcott’s famous Jo March in Little Women (1868–9) or Katy Carr in Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), the feminine boy and the boyish girl are ‘converted’ from gender confusion to conventional gender norms. Fifteen-year-old Jo March, for example, proclaims that she ‘can’t get over [her] disappointment in not being a boy, and it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with papa, and I can only stay at home and knit like a poky old woman’; ten years later, a chastened Jo gives up her boyish dreams to see the world and remain independent when she admits her loneliness and accepts a husband.12 Jo’s happy ending requires that she modify her desires to reflect more selfless and attainable feminine goals, assisting needy children rather than indulging fantasies of adventure and fame. In late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, not surprisingly, female characters, especially in teen fiction, are more likely to be given polymorphous gender identities while male characters develop nurturing qualities. In Anne Fine’s comic Flour Babies (1992), for example, tough underachiever Simon Martin falls in love with his science experiment, a burlap bag ‘infant’, and learns not only the effort it takes to care for the helpless, but also how to begin to understand and forgive his own father’s abandonment of him when he was a baby. Simon’s masculine identity ‘improves’ through greater flexibility in conventional gender roles. Francesca Lia Block’s fiction for teens in the Weetzie Bat series and other works blends gender-bending, punk sensibilities and appealing heterosexual, homosexual and transgendered characters in a utopic, highly mannered vision of a magical Los Angeles in which the evils of intolerance, oppression and disease can be mitigated by sexual expression and loving friendships.

  The friendships between lower-class characters and those of more privileged status, in beloved books such as The Secret Garden and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), are key ingredients in the ‘conversions’ of others from illness to health, or from loneliness to sociability. The peasant boy Dickon Sowerby in The Secret Garden and penniless Anne Shirley in Montgomery’s novel both function as agents healing others. Inextricably linked with their low social status to which ‘magical’ healing properties accrue, these characters’ natural childish goodness – Dickon’s special qualities derive directly from his close relationship with the soil and all living things, while Anne’s charming sense of self is similarly ‘simple’ and unaffected – transforms the sickly and lonely around them to health and happiness. The abuses and difficulties faced by the Mexican farm-worker population in Depression-era California, as well as the resilience of their close-knit community, explored in Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising (2000), by contrast, offers a view of a socio-economic underclass untouched by nostalgia for an agrarian past that relied upon an exploitative labour system. Young Esperanza Ortega’s story of growth and maturation, while inspiring, illustrates the shift in children’s literature I have been describing. Esperanza’s ‘difference’ (she was born to a wealthy Mexican family, but her father’s murder, a devastating fire and political corruption in her town force her to flee with her remaining family members to America) functions solely within her segregated community without ‘converting’ white characters to a greater social awareness, or without converting her into a white character. ‘Outside’ of the text, however, a clear message of tolerance and appreciation for the differences of others is promoted.

  When differences between children are identified as problems to be solved, rather than something to be tolerated or celebrated, the constructions of childhood that undergird them are exposed. For example, the belief that children are best raised within a family took hold in the nineteenth century (and remains powerful today). In texts from this period, the solitariness of a child without a family often requires a solution. In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837–8), Oliver is a singular orphan. His feminine appearance and desire to be good mark him as special, but his orphan status itself also readjusts once his family history and remaining family are discovered. Oliver represents the orphan who is not really orphaned, or who is without relatives only temporarily. Similarly, in another popular orphan tale, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881), a change in atmosphere cures a seemingly intractable form of difference: physical disability. The crippled, wealthy Clara Sesemann turns out to be healthy and ‘normal’ after all. Clara’s new-found sociability, her stint in the restorative Alpine air, her diet of delicious goat’s milk and the beauty of the mountain views all contribute to her ability to walk. These faux-orphan/faux-‘cripple’ stories stress a shifting politics of conversion that transforms the incomplete child – without a family, without mobility – into the happy child: ‘w
hole’ and social. Again, these categories do not remain entirely fixed over time as the number of children’s books that include differently configured families (step-families, single-parent families, bi-racial families, same-sex-parented families) makes clear.

  Children’s literature has never been free of images of the body. ‘Healthiness’ and disability have been long-standing concerns, as we have seen. Physical desires have also been a constant presence – appetite, for instance, as appealed to in marvellous long passages about food in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and even passionate, though usually platonic, same-sex friendships such as those described in innumerable school stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Erotic aspects of the child’s body or desires have tended to be sublimated into heated descriptions of religious ecstasy.) In modern children’s books, however, sex acts, sexual feelings (hetero- and homo-), sexual abuse and sexual identity are no longer entirely taboo subjects. In the 1960s, heterosexual sex entered the Young Adult canon by way of cautionary tales about premarital intercourse leading to unwanted pregnancy (in Paul Zindel’s 1969 My Darling, My Hamburger, for example). Yet just a few years later, female sexual desire was celebrated in the still notorious Forever (1975) by Judy Blume, and artificial insemination (for a lesbian couple desiring a child) in Lesléa Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies (1989). Neither Heather, nor her mommies, demonstrate any difference from their neighbours or co-workers: they work inside and outside of the home, care for each other, own a dog; only Heather’s birth-story is unusual (and a bit beyond the understanding of the picture book’s target audience). In the first brave books for teenagers that tackled issues of homosexual desire and homophobia, such as Sandra Scoppetone’s Trying Hard to Hear You (1974), the gay characters tended to be a doomed group: first, the very presence of gay characters educated the non-gay characters and readers in the spirit of ‘we’re all the same, underneath, after all’ – but ultimately these characters are generally sacrificed to some kind of accident or trauma that facilitated the non-gay characters learning a lesson. This trend has been slowed with the advent of books by authors such as Nancy Garden and Francesca Lia Block. Although sometimes marred by stereotypes and comic excess, gay characters typically appear more often in television programmes and feature films than in fiction for the young. When the issue of difference is sexual preference or sexuality, the celebration of difference and gay identity has not entirely entered the arena of literature for children.

  I began this chapter by historicising the ways ideologies of differences between adult and child were reflected in early children’s literature and educational works and then discussed some examples of children’s texts that negotiate difference between children via conversion, or suggested some examples in which conversion is resisted. These categories are meant to offer broad strokes only and they can and should be interrogated further. One important way to interrogate the history of difference in children’s literature is by an examination of size difference in children’s books. The history of size-difference narratives exists alongside the politics of conversion so prevalent in early children’s literature and articulates a complementary view of the complex relationships between adult and child or between different children. Often, the extreme difference represented by figures out of scale – giants or thumblings, for example – emphasises similarities rather than antipathies between characters. For example, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952) explores the sympathies between lonely and imaginative children of wildly different sizes (the large Boy and tiny Borrower, Arrietty). Indeed, when viewed together, conversion, resistance and size offer a more nuanced history of difference in children’s literature. Size difference, an essential element in children’s literature from folk narratives to various forms of fantasy literature, throws the complicated relationship between adult and child into high relief. The delightful big child / small adult dynamic explored in many children’s books, for example, not only indulges a powerful and comic fantasy of power inversion, but also guides the child reader towards serious considerations of the position of the Other, whether adult or another child.

  Big and small often function metaphorically as representations of adult and child, or the experienced and innocent, or the powerful and powerless. But, just as often, negotiations between the power imbalance between big and small weighs in favour of the wily small; and sometimes big and small co-operate and form a super-being of superlative size and extraordinary intelligence or empathy in books such as Rodman Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty (1993), Melvin Burgess’ The Earth Giant (1995) or the 1999 animated film version of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Giant. I mention here just a few examples of recent children’s literature that use the relationship between big and small to explore questions of ethical conduct and illuminate an ethics of resistance. In particular, a subset of the discourse on size, stories that explore the inverted relationship between miniature adults and ‘large’ (conventionally sized) children, highlights power relations so that the child figure functions as both the cultural and physical norm. The crisis that ensues as a result of the comic wish-fulfilment fantasy – the child as ‘master’ and the adult as toy – focuses attention on an exaggerated Otherness the child confronts.

  In children’s books in which miniature adult characters are typed as vulnerable, their caretakers are often children, thereby inverting the conventional paradigm in which adults protect children. These children’s books are written from the perspective of the (large) child, the holders of the normative scale in the books. This combination of big and small combined in the child character helps to highlight lessons about recognising subjectivity in others. These books are particularly well suited to promote an ethics of big and small that emphasise the identities and personhood of the small, and the child’s responsibility in understanding and respecting difference. A number of twentieth-century children’s books rise to this challenge, among them T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (1947), Pauline Clarke’s The Twelve and the Genii (The Return of the Twelves in the US, 1962) and Raymond Briggs’ picture book The Man (1992).

  All three books speak directly to the potential for violent conflict when size difference erases the more important affinities that humans share. They centre on the relationship between a big child and small adults. In The Man, the child holds power over a tiny, hairy, naked man, but in this picture book, the Man, unlike the Lilliputians or the Twelve, plays up his helplessness to John, the boy who accepts, somewhat reluctantly, a parenting and nurturing relationship. Their relationship is fraught not only because Man’s endless demands require John to lie and dissemble to his parents, to spend his pocket money, and to entertain Man, but also because Man’s adult maleness throws into relief John’s youth and ‘feminine’ sensibilities (he likes art and hates sport, to Man’s disgust). Man takes advantage of his size, and inability to feed and clothe himself, in order to manipulate John into providing his favourite foods, drink and needs (conversation and cuddles on demand), yet he also shrewdly confronts John by exposing the fascination John feels at Man’s strangeness, his otherness. When John attempts to guess Man’s origin, he hits upon a likely identity for Man: he must be a Borrower. Not aware of Borrowers, Man reacts badly to the comparison with creatures who live under floorboards and calls John ‘prejudiced’.13 Man and John, by honestly revealing their distrust and resentments, begin to breach the wide divide that separates big and small, adult and child, and even different children. Man wants to be understood for who he is. ‘I am ME’, he repeats over and over. This is the cry that both adults and children make. Man refutes a discourse of conversion: to be loved, respected, valued, you must act, look and believe more like me.

  We continue to believe that children are different from adults – and they are biologically, physically and psychologically ‘other’. And the pleasure and pain of human existence contains the impossibility of bridging that difference between self and other. We are always individuals, alone together. The child functio
ns as a unique Other to the adult – each adult carries the memory of childhood within. But these ‘children of air’, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s phrase, haunt and tease with their elusive nearness, their traces of the past.14 On the one hand, narratives of conversion ask children to leave childhood behind, or to become ‘better’ children – either more like adults or more like a nostalgic view of childhood that never was. Resistant texts, on the other hand, predicated on more fluid constructions of childhoods that tend to celebrate difference, offer additional identity positions for the child within and without the text. To return to Aikin and Barbauld’s ‘Traveller’s Wonders’, the child characters’ amazement that the customs of their own people could seem so foreign enlarges their ability, through narrative, to imagine other cultural perspectives. This late eighteenth-century ‘voyage’ of ethical discovery contains valuable implications for the modern world and for the place of children’s literature within it.

  Notes

  1. John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Travellers’ Wonders’, in Evenings at Home; or The Juvenile Budget Opened (6 vols., London: J. Johnson, 1792–6), vol. I, p. 31.

  2. James Janeway, A Token for Children Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671–2; London: Dorman Newman, 1676), p. [xviii].

  3. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed.Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (1693; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. 58. Emphasis added.

  4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: or On Education, trans.Allan Bloom (1762; London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 90.