The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Weetzie’s parents have divorced, her mother is an alcoholic and her father eventually dies of a drug overdose. While she cares about them, Weetzie lives a life in which her parents are largely incidental, and styles herself as a new-fashioned, unjudgmental, fulfilled matriarch in opposition to their self-obsessed, self-destructive and rootless existences. The replacement family she and Dirk and their lovers set up becomes a haven in a chaotic world. They make mistakes in their relationships, and Dirk and Duck live in the shadow of AIDS, but Block imbues each member of this new-style family with an intuitive emotional literacy which makes it possible for them to deal with the consequences of their mistakes and experiences. Unlike their parents’ generation, this family of friends consciously fashion their lives as they want them to be, free from the complications of oppressive family structures and supported by the new family model they have invented, symbolised by the household baby, Cherokee. Cherokee is a ‘three-dad’ baby, probably the product of a night when Weetzie, Dirk and Duck set out to make a baby because Weetzie’s lover doesn’t want to bring a baby into the world. Eventually he changes his mind and, when Cherokee is born, they agree that she looks like all of them, thus creating a notional blood bond between all the members of this elective family.

  Such a family can, of course, only be imagined in the most affluent circumstances where mundane cares about survival don’t impinge; nevertheless, Block’s new-style family is notable for the way it challenges many forms of social control and the drive towards ideological replication associated with the traditional nuclear family. Weetzie Bat not only caught the mood of a generation (as evidenced by internet fan activity and sales), but reflected a latent radicalism in new activity around the idea of the family in culture.

  How I Live Now is set sometime in the not-too-distant future when Daisy, an anorexic teenager from Manhattan whose father has recently remarried, is sent to stay with cousins in England while the baby he and his new wife are expecting is born. The cousins have become remarkably self-sufficient because their mother, their only parent, is completely absorbed in campaigning for world peace. Shortly after Daisy arrives, her aunt leaves for a peace rally, and terrorists attack England, which has so many troops in other countries ‘keeping the peace’ that there aren’t enough at home to defend the country. For a time the children exist happily on their own in the country; as war breaks out, they are separated; and eventually Daisy is returned to her father, no longer anorexic. There is much here that is familiar and parallels the indictment of late twentieth-century parenting in Weetzie Bat and a myriad of other books, including influential, bestselling books such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels with its damaging Dursleys. A twist in this story is that Daisy’s return to her father, which traditionally would have signalled reconciliation and reward, is forced and unwelcome. She has to wait until she is twenty-one and England has started accepting visitors again before she can be reunited with her cousins.

  This is a text that confronts many areas of anxiety about the world we live in – fears of war, terrorism and invasion; worries about our inability to be self-sufficient in cultures based on supermarkets and service industries; and some young people’s sense that their parents care more about their work and the world outside the family than for the family itself. At its heart is the sense that families at all levels in society are under strain, with many failing to work, and that this is both a symptom and a cause of the greater national and international cultural failures to which Rossoff gestures. The response in How I Live Now is not a return to basics and a call for conventional families to be reasserted and strengthened (this is what Daisy’s father does when he carries her off to his home with its mother, father and sibling set-up). Instead, it suggests that strength will come from groups bound together by mutual empathy, identification, interests and accumulated experience: in other words, self-selected.

  It seems then, that, from Goody Two-Shoes to How I Live Now, children’s literature has contained a strand that not only explores the extent to which children benefit from living outside traditional family structures and celebrates their strength, resilience and creative energy, but, more importantly, participates in reshaping the idea of the family to suit the social, economic and emotional needs of the times. This does not mean that the traditional family will disappear from either society or writing for children, or that the alternative/elective family is being presented as the only legitimate social unit for today’s world. Indeed, it could be argued that, precisely by questioning the traditional family and showing it as under threat, books such as these are working to preserve it by reminding readers why they think it is important. Nevertheless, with new world orders taking shape and a new series of threats to the future, from global warming through terrorist activities to a revival of the nuclear arms race, the times are changing again, and children’s literature is playing its part in opening up thinking and offering young people opportunities to revision relationships, culture and power structures.

  Notes

  1. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children, Part I, 2nd edn (3 vols., London: J. Johnson, 1796), p. iv.

  2. See Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003).

  3. Brenda, Froggy’s Little Brother (1875; London: John F. Shaw, n.d.), p. 199.

  4. Johann Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson, ed. William H. G. Kingston (1814; London: MacDonald, 1949), p. 320.

  5. Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson, p. 321.

  6. Biographical studies of the real-life Ingalls family can present a rather different picture: see, for instance, Anita Clair Fellman, ‘Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother–Daughter Relationship’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15 (1990), 535–61.

  7. Michael Peplar, Family Matters: A History of Ideas About the Family Since 1945 (London: Pearson, 2002), p. 3.

  8. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).

  13 Traditions of the school story

  Mavis Reimer

  Since the very definition of childhood is often entwined with social norms for schooling, it is unsurprising to find the beginnings of a body of literature that might be identified as specially for children in the ancient and medieval schoolbooks designed to teach young people the manners and the linguistic skills they needed to be successful in their societies, schoolbooks that often took the form of lively dialogues and included diverting accounts of extracurricular episodes of schoolboy life.1 The traditions of modern English-language children’s literature, with which this volume is principally concerned, are also rooted in the school story, with Sarah Fielding’s story of the nine pupils of Mrs Teachum’s ‘little female academy’, The Governess (1749), frequently identified as the first continuous narrative for children in English. Fielding’s narrative stages the binary organising principle of children’s literature: the attempt to fuse instruction and delight. Taking as its setting the school, the scene of instruction itself, the story also works to engage readers’ interests, by recounting the girls’ confessions of the moral struggles they faced in their lives before they entered school, detailing their meetings with the people of Mrs Teachum’s neighbourhood during their rambles, tracing the growth of their friendships and sense of common purpose, and, not least, by interpolating the tales the girls read to one another into the narrative of their school life together. These tales are interpreted by the girls in terms of their application to their own lives, in accordance with their governess’ wish that they ‘make the best Use of even the most trifling Things’, and so, in turn, become part of the teaching Fielding’s text directs to its readers.2

  In linking reading and interpretation to moral development, Fielding not only inaugurates a recurrent theme in the genre of the school story, but also points to the older tradition of allegory that stands behind
the school story. Allegories such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) were understood to show the way to a heavenly home beyond the vicissitudes of the earthly world; the school story redirects the allegory into a narrative of the progress of the child through the ‘little world’ of the school towards the achievement of successful adulthood in the ‘wide world’ of modern life. Although the school story substitutes a secular destination for a spiritual one, many of the best examples of the genre retain some of the resonance of allegory, an ‘other speaking’ that invites interpretation and holds out the promise of meaning. Fielding’s narrative, for example, begins with the girls fighting over who should have the biggest apple from a basket left in the garden for distribution by Jenny Peace, the oldest of the students. Surprised by the return of their governess, they face Mrs Teachum with dismay, each with evidence of the fray – locks of hair, bits of torn clothing – clenched in their hands. This opening scene can be read through conventional allegorical tropes as a version of the biblical story of the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, the guilty girls, like the disobedient Adam and Eve, ashamed before the eyes of judgment. While the rest of Fielding’s narrative does not correspond in any particular details to the biblical story that has been evoked, the recreation of a harmonious society in Mrs Teachum’s garden nevertheless reverberates with significance, as the girls repent their folly and remake themselves over the course of nine days, through their confessions and conversations teaching one another the self-control, benevolence and ability to interpret others expected of young ladies in their society.

  Like Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft’s story of girls’ schooling, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), presents disciplined reading not only as an important way to gain self-knowledge, but also as a model for approaching ‘real life’ itself. In this high valuation of reading, Fielding and Wollstonecraft are at odds with the influential programme of education set out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile (1762), for he had restricted Émile’s reading to one book, Robinson Crusoe. Early English school stories for the most part follow Fielding’s lead in representing their fictions as intended for the high purpose of shaping the minds of child-readers as they prepare to enter the world of school, a world understood to be a place of struggle. Lady Ellenor Fenn in School Dialogues for Boys (1783), for example, hopes that her book will ‘fortify’ the young boy for whom she writes ‘against the contagion of bad example’ and ‘the poison of pernicious counsel’, and will put him on his guard by showing him ‘what characters he may expect to meet with’.3

  The end of education is self-discipline in the view of these early school-story writers and, in their narratives, the achievement of this objective is asserted as a happy ending. Fielding’s story, for example, concludes with the notice that Mrs Teachum’s school becomes an example throughout the country of what young people, ‘properly employed on their own Improvement’, can attain: every young lady leaving the school has learned ‘always to pay to her Governors the most exact Obedience, and to exert towards her Companions all the good Effects of a Mind filled with Benevolence and Love’.4 The yoking of exact obedience and a mind filled with love suggests that these school stories might usefully be read in the context of the disciplinary society which Michel Foucault argues is forming in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a society is one in which capitalism can thrive, since the extension of disciplinary power is ‘economically’ effective, not only in terms of involving little expenditure, but also in being politically discreet and so attracting little resistance. A primary product of the disciplinary society is the subject who takes responsibility for constraining himself, who participates in his own subjection. For Foucault, this subject is produced through panoptic surveillance, which he understands not as a state in which one is constantly observed, but rather as a state of ‘conscious and permanent visibility’ in which one is sure one might be seen at any time.5 The school, among other social institutions, is an important site for the exercise of such surveillance. Indeed, many school stories, from Fielding’s narrative to contemporary television series set in schools, include scenes in which students recognise that they could be, or are being, watched by school authorities, often by a distant head or principal who generally remains absent or unseen. In Fenn’s School Dialogues for Boys, a teacher, Mr Sage, explains to visitors how the school implements its principle of visible but unverifiable surveillance:

  VISITOR. Does Mr. Aweful keep much in the school?

  SAGE. His breakfast-room . . . communicates with the school; when he enters, and seats himself behind a screen, no one knows of his entrance; so that he should never be supposed to be absent. Yet he is not known to be present, but when he pleases.

  LADY. A proper restraint.

  SAGE. To the good. – but the greater part never think of him, any more than we do of a superior witness.6

  In having Sage draw a parallel between the eye of the headmaster and the eye of God, Fenn claims a divine model for the practice of surveillance in the quotidian world of school.

  The metaphor of the world of school, which Fenn references in the address to the reader that prefaces her dialogues, is also a rhetorical figure borrowed from allegory. While the repeated use of the metaphor sometimes makes it appear to be little more than a commonplace, there is a residual power in the figure. It is a figure that asserts that a school is a complete and circumscribed system, but at the same time a figure that implies the correspondence of the school system to ‘world’ systems on other scales and levels. The metaphor is not only used in school stories, but also embedded in the traditions of actual schools, particularly British public schools (that is to say, old-established, fee-paying boarding schools), and the discourses about them. For example, in a sermon preached in the school chapel on Ash Wednesday in 1844, Rugby’s most famous headmaster, Thomas Arnold, took as his theme the complexities of the idea of the ‘world’: the boys, he assumed, had already learned in their lives before coming to school ‘how apt the world is to tempt you’ and they needed to remember during the years of their education that to them, for the present, ‘school is the world’.7 Arnold’s peroration invokes the idea of the ‘world’ as the realm of the material as opposed to the spiritual, and simultaneously warns the boys – in language reminiscent of such writers as Fenn – that school life will have its temptations and reassures them that, in the restricted sphere of school, they can win such a challenge. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), the novel Thomas Hughes wrote about school life at Rugby under Arnold, Tom registers the lesson being taught by the doctor, ‘a man whom we felt to be, with all his heart and soul and strength, striving against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little world’.8 It is this form of the metaphor, the school as a ‘little world’ preparing its students for other, larger spheres of action, that is most common in the school stories. Such analogies between microcosm and macrocosm are often motivated by a need for order and comprehension, an expression of the desire to master the environment by placing what is outside inside, where it can be contained or managed.

  ‘An expression of the desire for mastery’ is a useful gloss on the boys’ school stories that proliferated in Britain from the mid nineteenth century. In fact, one of the important early books in the field, F. W. Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little (1858), has been widely scorned by critics of school stories from the time of its first publication exactly because its schoolboy hero fails to master the rules of the little world of school. Eric triumphs only when he has left school, repenting of his errors after going to sea. Farrar’s fault might be said to be his failure to conform to generic expectations. Not only is the school story a secular allegory, but also, in the mainstream of the boys’ school-story tradition exemplified by such popularisers as Talbot Baines Reed and Harold Avery, the world of the school is enclosed and self-sufficient, with conflicts resolved within the terms of that world. In this, the school story is characteristic of children’s narratives in general: they build picture
s of concentrated worlds by explicitly mapping their geographies and boundaries; they demonstrate the principles by which power is exercised and distributed; they enact rules that assign morality and immorality to conduct; they institute the marks of belonging and exclusion. In Hugh’s first day at Crofton in Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys (1841), for example, he learns that ‘there were such things as bounds’ and that the way to be left in peace is to ‘show that you are up to play’.9 The early experiences of Louis in E. J. May’s Louis’s Schooldays (1850) and Tom in Tom Brown’s Schooldays teach them that a haircut or a hat can signal their status and their aspirations to their schoolfellows. In all of these novels, the boys also learn more consequential rules: to understand the conditions under which cribbing to prepare your lessons is and is not thought to be cheating by boys; to naturalise the narrow line between the ‘low’ sin of bearing tales to adults and the courageous act of telling the whole truth when confronted by a rightful authority; and to navigate the complicated distributions of power among prefects, captains, monitors and older boys.

  The basic plot of a school story, focusing as it does on the initiation, conflicts and eventual successes of a new student, supports the narrative presentation of the school as a world just discovered and open to exploration. Indeed, an early review of Hughes’ novel observes that the ‘great success’ of the novel is in its telling a familiar story as if it were a tale of colonial adventure: ‘It is no mean triumph to have been the Columbus of the world of schoolboy romance. It lay within easy reach, indeed, but was practically undiscovered.’10 The transference of the newness of the child subject to the world which that subject meets is a common technique in children’s literature, and, as the reviewer suggests, an effective strategy for defamiliarising and dramatising the ordinary. In the case of the boys’ school story, however, it also points to the specific historical circumstances of British colonial expansion in which these books were produced.