by M. O. Grenby
Another influential family in children’s literature whose adventures map the expansion of a nation is found in the Little House books (1932–43) of Laura Ingalls Wilder. As in Wyss’ novel, these stories of pioneer life oscillate between dramatic – often life-threatening – events and mundane domestic details, given a charm for the reader through the way Wilder highlights both the family’s ingenuity and the absence of the sense of alienation relating to work, material possessions and the necessaries of life characteristic of modernity. Though the Ingalls family regularly changes location and has to reposition itself in response to new and unsettled frontiers, new economic challenges, new neighbours and new opportunities, the family itself is presented as indivisible: it can be augmented through marriage but the notion of family is sacrosanct.6
Family sagas for children, such as Wilder’s, have their roots in the nineteenth century in famous series such as Alcott’s books about the March family, which chronicle the lives of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, growing up at home with their mother, Marmee, while their father is serving as a chaplain to the troops fighting in the American Civil War. The success of Little Women led Alcott to write three sequels, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Ever since Alcott shifted the focus of her novels to the March sisters, family-based series have tended to focus more on sibling relationships than on interactions between parents and children. For instance, E. Nesbit’s fantasy stories featuring the adventures of Robert, Anthea, Jane, Cyril and ‘the Lamb’ (Five Children and It, 1902; The Phoenix and the Carpet, 1904; The Story of the Amulet, 1906) revolve around the children’s games and needs while the parents are absent for a variety of reasons. Similarly, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books about the Walker, Blackett and Callum children (1930–47) keep the parents very much at a distance, for the most part supplying provisions and monitoring the children’s adventures from the shore. In Noel Streatfeild’s family books, such as Apple Bough (1962), the adults are often artists preoccupied by financial worries and servicing the demands of their professions, while in Madeline L’Engle’s stories about the Murrays, O’Keefes and Austins it is always the children who undertake quests and solve problems while their parents are left as spectators, and sometimes need to be rescued themselves as in the case of Mr Murray in A Wrinkle in Time (1962).
During the 1980s and 1990s few new series about families appeared for reasons that are explained below; however, since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a revival of the family saga typified by Hilary McKay’s books about the Casson family, beginning with Saffy’s Angel (2002). In some ways, McKay looks back to the eccentric, artistic families of Noel Streatfeild – both parents in Saffy’s Angel are painters and they name their children after paint colours – but in others these are books that are new in the way they present family dynamics and their focus on the emotional needs of the children in the family rather than the events that befall them. This child-centred, psychological approach to writing about families needs to be understood as the product of a major shift in attitudes to the family that occurred in the middle years of the twentieth century. These will be discussed in the next section, but before considering the way hostile views of the family affected writing for children, it is important to look at an area of family fiction which retains its interest in whole families who, like the Robinsons and Ingalls, undertake difficult journeys.
The family adventure story survives in books that feature refugee families. What is significant about the many children’s books in which families risk their lives, spend their fortunes and endure considerable hardships to leave countries where they have no future – usually because of war and its consequences – is that many do not focus on the strength of the biological family unit but look instead at the strains on families relocated to places with an unfamiliar language and complex and deep-rooted cultural differences.
Ian Strachan’s Journey of 1,000 Miles (1984) details the hardships – as distinct from adventures – of refugees’ journeys as Lee and his family become ‘boat people’ when they leave Vietnam for what they hope will be a safer and more secure future. Picture books too recount the experiences undergone by boat people, among them Michele Maria Surat and Vo-Dinh Mai’s Angel Child, Dragon Child (1983), Sherry Garland’s The Lotus Seed (1993) and Rosemary Breckler’s Sweet Dried Apples (1996), though each of these books is primarily concerned with responses to separation from the home country and family members.
Linda Crew’s Children of the River (1989) looks at the pressures on Sundara, a teenage girl living in Oregon with relatives with whom she fled from the Khmer Rouge. The novel begins with their hazardous journey, during which the baby cousin left in Sundara’s care dies, before concentrating on Sundara’s struggle to please her aunt and uncle by conforming to their expectations of how a good Cambodian girl should behave, while also trying to succeed academically and socially in the USA. Until the concluding pages of the book, the family is shown as divided and dysfunctional, with Sundara feeling that she belongs nowhere and her relatives resenting – but depending on – her superior ability to negotiate the language and customs of their new country. Resolution is achieved with the arrival of her grandmother from Cambodia. She helps fill in the gaps in the family’s past, heal their wounds, and allow them to find an acceptable accommodation between assimilating and retaining key elements of their original culture.
A variation on the refugee family-under-stress narrative is provided by Beverley Naidoo in The Other Side of Truth (2000). When their mother is killed outside the family home, Sade and Femi are put in the care of a stranger who is paid to take them from Nigeria to London, where she abandons them. The book tracks their efforts both to survive and to make a new life in London and, in the absence of relatives and others from their former lives, to remember their culture and their parents. The Other Side of Truth is unusual in showing a refugee family in which it is the mother who is absent; more common is the story of the family in which the father has been killed, incarcerated or ‘disappeared’ during war or under harsh regimes, as in Sweet Dried Apples and The Lotus Seed.
Most stories that blend the family and adventure genres – including many refugee stories – tend to focus on children who have been separated from their families and who are either seeking to be reunited with parents and siblings or contriving to survive until they are rescued and restored to family life. Either way, these stories’ roots in the tradition of Goody Two-Shoes are evident in the way they highlight the capacity of children who have no families to triumph over adversity. More common than tales about uprooted families are stories about families in more everyday situations; however, in the middle of the twentieth century, the nature of family-centred fiction underwent significant changes, the most important of which was that threats to child characters’ well-being were portrayed as coming from within the family rather than from sources beyond it. The suspicions surrounding the family had their roots in fundamental social changes, leading to a new phase in the way childhood and families were viewed and believed to function.
Families under fire
For the first half of the twentieth century, families were seen as central to the smooth running of society. Increased prosperity meant that childhood was expected to last longer than it had for previous generations; the school leaving age was raised and children remained economically dependent on their parents well into, and even through, their teenage years. Images of stable nuclear families with white, straightforwardly heterosexual parents who conformed to traditional gender roles abounded in books for children well into the 1950s (many contemporary books also feature the same kind of families, though white, heterosexual couples are no longer held up as the norm). For the young, these often took the form of highly domestic tales which focused on daily routines and family relationships, typified by Dorothy Edwards’ Naughty Little Sister stories (from 1952) in the UK, and those about the Quimby family in the USA (beginning with Beezus and Ramona, 1955). Howe
ver, just as the eighteenth century saw the emergence of conflicting discourses about childhood and the family, so the middle years of the last century saw children’s books simultaneously setting up the traditional nuclear family as an ideal and encouraging readers to see it as inadequate or even pernicious.
Hostility to and mistrust of the family were driven by figures such as the anthropologist Edmund Leach, and the psychiatrist R. D. Laing. From their different perspectives, both were highly critical of the nuclear family, seeing it as inward-looking, emotionally stressful, alienated from community, and hence damaging to its members. Leach blamed the family for many of the ills of society, including increases in violent behaviour, while Laing suggested that families prevented individuals from using their talents and being fulfilled, sometimes leading to mental illness. By the 1960s these new ways of thinking about the family were beginning to take shape in children’s literature. For instance, S. E. Hinton’s novels about teenage gangs, The Outsiders (1967) and Rumblefish (1975), feature protagonists who come from dysfunctional families, with parents who are living apart, drink too much, and who are apparently indifferent to the fate of their offspring. The novels of Robert Cormier are littered with families in which parents and children fail to communicate or to trust each other, leading to precisely the kinds of problems at home and in society highlighted by Laing and Leach. Katherine Paterson’s highly praised Bridge to Terabithia (1977) uses the model familiar from eighteenth-century children’s books of contrasting one ideal family with one that is struggling, and showing how the young respond to caring interventions. In The Friends (1973) and following novels, Rosa Guy shows black families sinking under the pressures to succeed in urban America, while two decades later, Melvin Burgess’ Junk (1996) traces the way two British runaways (one from a neglectful and abusive family) are caught up in cycles of addiction, criminality and degradation.
During the final years of the last century, much Young Adult fiction centred on intergenerational conflict and emotional struggles within families: all too often the problems of these ‘problem novels’ begin with the family. In keeping with the development of a youth culture that rejected the bourgeois, materialistic and damaging nature of middle-class life, fiction for young people increasingly focused on protagonists who ultimately reject their families and the lifestyles in which they have been raised. Far from preparing their children to take up the kinds of values and careers that would reproduce the existing Anglo-American culture, families in juvenile fiction were often shown to be turning out misfits and rebels. As Jameson’s economic wheel turned to the most recent phase of capitalism, then, substantial areas of children’s literature were radiating discontent with traditional family life. In the current late phase of capitalism, literary visions for the future frequently try to by-pass the family in favour of other social organisations, from group marriage through single-sex or even optional kinship systems. As has been true throughout history, children’s literature today is engaging in interrogations of the family to suit new conditions, though arguably the alternatives it is proposing are more radical than any that have gone before.
Post-family futures?
Young people today are growing up in an era of ‘consumer capitalism’, which Jameson sees as determined by information technologies, service industries, multinationalism and marketing, and characterised by postmodernity. There is a variety of evidence that this economic climate has put the nuclear family under considerable strain. For instance, in 1995, controversial British writer and broadcaster Melanie Phillips argued that ‘the disintegration of the nuclear family is the most serious problem facing British society’ resulting in a ‘generation of dysfunctional and underachieving children’.7 Since then there has been a spate of television programmes in both the UK and the USA about families who need to call on the services of ‘supernannies’ or send their children to ‘brat camps’. Sociologist Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy (2004) claims we are living through an epoch in which children are contemptuous of adults and families, identifying primarily with their roles as consumers. The current generation of children, she suggests, has little desire to become adult.
Critics associated with children’s literature are voicing similar concerns. In Sticks and Stones (2001), Jack Zipes argues that, as a direct consequence of the incessant urge to consume and to develop brand loyalties, many young people feel a stronger sense of belonging to corporate culture – say, to groups of consumers of Nike products, or Coca-Cola – than to their families. It is this epoch that is experimenting with dismantling the family story altogether and replacing the nuclear family with the ‘family of choice’, comprised of young people of roughly the same age and perhaps most familiar through popular television programmes such as Friends (1994–2004) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). In these serial narratives, biological families are incidental: what counts are your friends, and the lifestyle you can create together.
In fact, the phenomenon of groups of children functioning as families in children’s literature is not itself new, but the way they function has changed in significant ways. It is a commonplace of children’s literature criticism that adventure fiction tends to begin by removing any parents or other responsible adults, and when this happens in early twentieth-century books for children – for instance, those by Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton – the older children generally take on the traditional, gendered, roles of parents, providing food, establishing routines and taking responsibility in difficult situations. They do this consciously and often willingly, in the knowledge that the circumstances are temporary; their relatively unsupervised interludes act as rehearsals for adult life.
Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword (1956) is typical of this subgenre – which often takes war-time settings. It tells the story of the three Balicki children, who are separated by force from their parents towards the end of the Second World War, during the Nazi occupation of Poland. They cope well, with the older two children (a boy and a girl) parenting the youngest and Jan, an orphan they gather into their ‘family’ as they travel towards Switzerland where they are eventually reunited with their parents. Eleanor Graham’s The Children Who Lived in a Barn (1938) rings the changes on the sibling-family convention in that the five Dunnett children (ranging in age from seven to thirteen) believe their parents have been killed in a plane crash, so when they set up home in a local barn in an attempt to stay together rather than be taken into care, they do not expect their parents to return and their previous family life to be resumed. When it transpires that their parents have not been killed, and despite the fact that the children have succeeded remarkably well in looking after themselves, they are more than ready to become children in a family again. In fact, they never revel in their success and independence, and relinquish autonomy readily. Both novels are typical of earlier examples of children’s texts in which children end up living as a family unit without parents: the children do not choose to live without adults; the new families consist of siblings rather than friends; and the return of the parents and traditional family life is idealised, longed for and finally attained.
While the phenomenon of same-generation ‘family’ groups may not be new, its current iteration is. For more than a decade, the challenges to the family associated with living in an epoch of consumer capitalism have been addressed in writing for the young through narratives that experiment with, and pilot, new definitions of what is meant by the term ‘family’, and with the family story itself. One way they do this is by reflecting the alternative family structures typical of what the influential British sociologist Anthony Giddens terms our post-traditional society.8 Works by Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, Margaret Mahy, and a large number of picture books, feature single-parent families; blended, adoptive and step-families; families parented by gay and lesbian couples; and the many cross-household families that are the products of remarriage. Another way in which children’s books are offering new ways of thinking about the family takes the form of narratives based on f
amilies created through choice rather than biology. Such narratives differ from the earlier stories of children living together in the way they seek to develop an ethos of interdependence based on equality, rather than deriving from the power dynamics based on sex and age associated with traditional nuclear families.
Two novels that reflect this change in the role and nature of the family and offer alternative families composed of peers are Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, published in America in 1989, and Meg Rossof’s first novel, How I Live Now, published in the UK in 2004. Both show young people coming together to create unconventional ‘family’ groups in response to inadequate biological families. Both also critique the cultures that gave rise to the original families, using the elective families metaphorically to call into question long-standing ideas about intimacy and belonging. In their diversity and lack of concern with blood-ties, the new peer families in these books reflect changes in the idea of the family; they also challenge some of the age and gender power dynamics of conventional families – perhaps especially the residual influences of patriarchal autocracy associated with the days when father was always credited with knowing best – and so have the potential to break some entrenched patterns of behaviour and ways of relating.
Block’s novel places value on relationships that are emotionally satisfying rather than bolted together through external forces such as religion or the law. It revolves around Weetzie Bat and her friend Dirk, who live in Los Angeles, hate school and have a highly developed aesthetic life: everything they do, from the food they eat to the people they love and the performances they give on the street and screen, seems to be experienced and evaluated by a shared aesthetic code, though one based entirely on consumer capitalism since most of what they do also involves shopping or eating in fast-food restaurants. In a series of magical realist twists they acquire a house, financial independence and a pair of perfect lovers (Dirk is gay so Weetzie lives with three men).