by M. O. Grenby
Rowling’s novels are the great exception to a general migration in recent times of the most popular school stories from books to television. In the UK, Grange Hill lasted thirty years from its first broadcast in 1978; in Australia, the Glenview High series appeared in 1977 and 1978; in Canada, Degrassi Junior High was first produced in 1987, various offshoot series later being developed to capitalise on the success of the original shows; in the USA, since the early 1990s, school-story series have regularly been scheduled on network channels during the prime hours of young people’s television viewing. One of the longest-running of these is Beverly Hills 90210, first broadcast in 1990 and produced for ten years before moving into re-run schedules. In addition, popular series from the past, such as Richards’ Greyfriars series, have been re-made for television. The comfortable fit of the school story into the TV format is the result in part of the formal features of the genre, which include, as Jeffrey Richards has observed, a ‘multiplot structure, a large cast of characters, [and] the intermingling of comedy and drama’, as well as recurrent patterns of action.20
However familiar these features might be to readers of school stories, the series set in schools were innovations in the 1970s in television programming for young people, which was dominated at the time by family comedies and focused on intergenerational conflicts. The school stories, by contrast, emphasised peer dynamics and depicted the school as a relatively autonomous space of teen culture. In the North American series in particular, the conflicts between students and school authorities so much a part of the nineteenth-century British school stories were relegated to the background. In the first season of Degrassi Junior High, for example, the principal of the school is never seen, his presence indicated only by his voice on the public address system. Students solve their problems primarily through interactions with one another, although the relation of the concerns of their ‘little world’ to the larger world is often indicated by signs and posters caught by the camera as it tracks characters’ movements down hallways or streets. In Beverly Hills 90210, the school clearly functions as a ‘world apart’, a fantasy space in which young people can explore and express themselves, with teachers generally ineffective in enforcing desirable behaviour in the school and powerless in the world of wealth and influence that surrounds the students outside of school. The only obvious adult moral authorities are the parents of the twin brother and sister who are the central characters of the series, the highly unusual involvement of parents in their lives attributed to the fact that the Walshes have recently moved to Los Angeles from Minnesota and have not yet learned the rules of the new world.
Both series, nevertheless, have been praised as ‘realistic’ depictions of contemporary adolescence, a reference to the willingness of the producers to include in the storylines such problems as differences in class status, racism, shoplifting, family breakdown, drug use and, most notoriously, gender stereotypes, teen sex, pregnancy and abortion. The critical attribution of realism to school stories has been a recurrent marker of value since at least the publication of Tom Brown’s Schooldays; now, as then, such a descriptor seems principally to indicate that a narrative has made visible the particular tasks the society of the day has assigned to childhood and adolescence. School stories of the late twentieth century make it apparent that the creation of successful gendered and sexual identities has recently been understood to be a primary task for young people. Gene Kemp’s The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977), for example, is a conventional story of the little world of school, but for the startling revelation in the postscript that Tyke is a girl, a fact that sends readers back to re-read the narrative to discover why they assumed she was a boy and how the new information changes their response to Tyke’s story. Adèle Geras uses three of the fairy tales commonly read as stories of young girls’ sexual awakening – Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White – as the basis for the school stories of her Egerton Hall trilogy (beginning with The Tower Room in 1998). A number of writers have explored the possibility of sexual readings of the close, passionate friendships between girls that have been central to the girls’ school story at least since the novels of L. T. Meade. In American Deborah Hautzig’s Hey, Dollface (1979), Australian Jenny Pausacker’s What Are Ya? (1987) and Canadian Catherine Brett’s S. P. Likes A. D. (1989), the central girl characters recognise that their intense feelings for a best friend are sexual as well as emotional, and contemplate the implications of taking up a lesbian identity in the homophobic ‘real world’ outside school. Melvin Burgess’ Doing It (2003) assumes a heteronormative society inside and outside school, but exploits the conventions of the school story to tell the stories of the first sexual experiences of three high-school boys. Not only does Burgess use the common techniques of focalising the stories through the teenagers themselves and allowing them to tell their stories in the vocabulary of schoolyard slang, but also he structures his story around a secret that threatens the solidarity of the little band of friends. The secret in this case is that one of them is in a coerced sexual relationship with a teacher.
There is a dearth of contemporary school stories for young people with positive depictions of gay male relationships. This may be, ironically, a result of the long and perplexed history of the representation of homosexual relations between boys in the school story. Thomas Hughes insisted that a footnote he had written about the ‘little friend’ system at Rugby be allowed to stand in the published version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays despite the protests of some of his early readers, and Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1917) is notorious for its autobiographical description of the sexual relationships of schoolboys. A number of boys’ school stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including H. O. Sturgis’ Tim (1891) and H. A. Vachell’s The Hill (1905), featured physically and emotionally effusive relationships between boys, although these loves were not depicted explicitly as sexual. As Eric Tribunella has demonstrated in his reading of A Separate Peace, however, narrative prohibitions staged to enforce gender conformity can function perversely to eroticise ‘the forbidden object’, so that locating the ‘queer potential’ of a school story might be as much a chosen reading strategy as an element of the text.21
The schools in which most contemporary stories are set are comprehensive, mixed schools, rather than the single-sex, private boarding schools that provided the most common setting until the middle of the twentieth century. Whether comprehensive or private, however, schools continue to provide the ‘enclosed world[s], narrow and intense, close-knit and passionately experienced’ spaces that Isabel Quigly maintains are an ideal framework for any fiction and central to the success of the school story.22 Among the most provocative of the contemporary stories are those that explicitly investigate the closed and narrow boundaries of school, and interrogate the disciplinary structures of these worlds. In Gillian Cross’ The Demon Headmaster (1982), for example, the Headmaster is so successful in using hypnosis and the prefectural system to control the student body that he believes he can use his comprehensive school as the site from which to launch a bid to impose order on the entire nation. It is the task of a small group of resisting students to fight for freedom by creating disorder. Cross’ series of novels was the basis of a successful television series in the UK. Diana Wynne Jones’ Witch Week (1982) is a fantasy about a boarding school set in a ‘world apart’ in which witches are regularly burned in ‘bone-fires’. Attempts by school authorities to ensure that the witch-orphans who have been placed in the school restrain their powers and conform to the expectations of the ‘normal’ world are entirely unsuccessful. It is the world itself that is reconstructed, literally and dramatically, in the final scene. The conclusion of Julian Houston’s autobiographical New Boy (2005) is less spectacular but also optimistic about the possibility of change. The first African-American boy to attend an elite boarding school in Connecticut in the 1960s, Rob Garrett recognises that he will never become fully integrated into the school community. But he chooses to stay at s
chool nevertheless, in the hope that the movement towards inclusion in the ‘little world’ of school will prompt corresponding changes in the wider world of the nation. Bebe Faas Rice in The Place at the Edge of the Earth (2002) and Sylvia Olsen in No Time to Say Goodbye (2001) also look back in history, to write the stories of Native American and Aboriginal Canadian children compelled by governments to attend residential schools, with the expectation that such schooling will work to assimilate them into dominant white cultures. There is no triumphant ending either to Rice’s ‘world apart’ or to Olsen’s ‘little world’ stories. For both writers, the most important achievement is the telling of tales that have been hidden for too long, a telling that rewrites the history of ‘the civilising mission’ in North America.
Criticism of schools as places of injustice, unhappiness and coercion have featured in narratives from the beginning of the genre, but such critiques have been a comparatively thin thread through the tradition. More typical is the story in which the new scholar learns first to understand, then to accept, and finally to excel at, the ways of the strange world he or she is entering. Writing about ideological analysis in literary and cultural studies, James Kavanagh proposes that ideology be understood as ‘designat[ing] a rich “system of representations,” worked up in specific material practices, which helps form individuals into social subjects who “freely” internalize an appropriate “picture” of their social world and their place in it’.23 The system of children’s literature clearly is one such material practice and Kavanagh’s definition seems an apt description of the work of the school story. Giving young readers pictures of complete, self-sufficient and contained systems, the school story seeks to persuade them that they, too, have a place in the world before them.
Notes
1. See Gillian Adams, ‘Ancient and Medieval Children’s Texts’, in International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd edn, ed. Peter Hunt (2 vols., New York: Routledge, 2004), vol. I, pp. 225–38.
2. Sarah Fielding, The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy, ed. Candace Ward (1749; Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005), p. 84.
3. [Ellenor Fenn], School Dialogues for Boys (2 vols., London: John Marshall, 1783), vol. I, p. x.
4. Fielding, Governess, p. 176.
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 201.
6. [Fenn], School Dialogues, vol. II, p. 136.
7. Thomas Arnold, Sermons (3 vols., London: Rivington, 1830), vol. II, p. 44.
8. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857; London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 115.
9. Harriet Martineau, The Crofton Boys (1842; London: Routledge, n.d.), pp. 65 and 70.
10. ‘School and College Life: Its Romance and Reality’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 89 (February 1861), 132.
11. Arnold in a letter written in March 1828, quoted in J. J. Findlay, Arnold of Rugby: His School Life and Contributions to Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 30; Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, p. 61.
12. Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, p. 282.
13. Public School Commission, Report, Parliamentary Papers, vol. XX, session 1864, vol. I, p. 56.
14. Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, pp. 362, 351 and 355.
15. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 39.
16. Frank Richards, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars (1947; London: Hawk Books, 1991), p. 222.
17. ‘Boy, Only Boy’, The Academy, 57 (21 October 1899), 457.
18. Evelyn Sharp, The Making of a Schoolgirl, ed. Beverly Lyon Clark (1897; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 62.
19. Rosemary Auchmuty, ‘The Critical Response’, in The Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories, ed. Sue Sims and Hilary Clare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 19–20.
20. Jeffrey Richards, ‘From Greyfriars to Grange Hill’, in School Stories From Bunter to Buckeridge, ed. Nicholas Tucker (Lichfield: Pied Piper, 2003), pp. 25–39 (p. 37).
21. Eric Tribunella, ‘Refusing the Queer Potential: John Knowles’s A Separate Peace’, Children’s Literature, 30 (2002), 81–95 (p. 93).
22. Isabel Quigly, ‘The School Story as Adult Novel’, in School Stories From Bunter to Buckeridge, ed. Tucker pp. 4–8 (p. 6).
23. James Kavanagh, ‘Ideology’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 310.
14 Fantasy’s alternative geography for children
Andrea Immel, U. C. Knoepflmacher and Julia Briggs*
In The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (1983), Colin Manlove arranged fantasies according to their divided topographies. Whereas some fantastic narratives may describe a journey from our world to a supernatural one, he wrote, others, like William Morris’ romances, Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, immediately plunge us into a wholly fantastic world with little reference to our own reality. Still others, Manlove noted, may try to harmonise orders that are considered to be separate only in the minds of their readers, or, quite to the contrary, hint that magic and miracle are so rare that they can only become manifest to ‘certain types of people’.1 Though helpful, this topography overlooks the persistent presence of the child as a special ‘type’ in fantastic landscapes. Indeed, with their special perspective, where neither innocence and experience nor the real and imaginary have drifted into opposition, children are prime players as characters in, and creators and readers of, fantasy texts.
In its focus on the figure of the child, this chapter will offer a parallel perspective on Manlove’s taxonomy. In ‘Dubious binaries’, we question the pervasive opposition between fantasy and reason, as well as a concomitant tendency to designate fantasy texts as being exclusively for either children or adults. We then examine the roles played by children in three very different kinds of fantastic narratives, none of which strictly follows the conventions based on medieval romance, Welsh legend or Northern European mythology that still operate in works of ‘high’ fantasy, such as C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising or Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. The texts we next consider in ‘Domestic disturbances’ feature young protagonists whose encounters with exotic intruders from different realms or times create awkward conflicts with the everyday routine of parents or guardians. Still, since any disruptions created by a clash between such conflicting realities are short-lived and without lasting consequences, they can ultimately be laughed away or even forgotten. The narratives we take up in ‘Worlds upside down’, however, are more prone to enlisting the child’s own magical thinking to create alternative worlds as an antidote to the convention-bound notions of his or her elders’ reality. Here, too, such conflicts may be temporary, since the maturing child must eventually relinquish the empowering immersion in these early imaginings. But the prospect of retaining some of that potency can also ensure the fantasy’s preservation. Last, in ‘Wayfarers in strange lands’, we highlight texts in which child-men or children are thrust into parallel worlds to overcome treachery or evil. Such texts, which can appeal as much to grown-up as to juvenile readers, are potentially tragic and theologically inflected, and hence fundamentally different from the comic or nostalgic fantasies taken up in the second and third sections of this chapter. Since a soul, a world or an entire universe may now hang in the balance, much depends upon the heroic but inexperienced protagonist’s ability to acquire the self-knowledge and wisdom needed to surmount the challenges she or he must meet.
Dubious binaries
In the preface to her highly influential collection of children’s stories, The Parent’s Assistant (1796), the British novelist and educator Maria Edgeworth boldly challenged the ‘authority’ of Dr Samuel Johnson. It was incorrect, she held, for him to assert that ‘Babies do not like to hear stories of babies like themselves’ and hence prefer ‘to
have their imaginations raised by tales of giants and fairies’. Even if Dr Johnson’s assertion were to be true, something which Edgeworth greatly doubted, why should children be ‘indulged’, she asked, in their preference for escapist narratives? Exposure of young readers to narratives about ‘fairies, giants, and enchanters’ might only delay their needed ability to confront the verities of everyday life: ‘Why should the mind be filled with fantastic visions, instead of useful knowledge? Why should so much valuable time be lost?’2
Edgeworth’s attack on fantastic narratives was derided by post-Romantic critics who questioned her position that such texts taught nothing profound and hence could never serve worthy ends. These critics even went beyond Dr Johnson by endorsing all writings that valued the child’s construction of alternative realities. British Romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth, and Victorians such as the fantasists of the pivotal 1860s (Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll and Jean Ingelow), thus were upheld as foils to the utilitarian and supposedly dry educational ideology espoused by Edgeworth and her followers. Well after Mitzi Myers vindicated the artistic sophistication of Edgeworth and her fellow-Georgian ‘mentorias’ and exposed the over-simplifications of literary historians such as Geoffrey Summerfield, the opposition between fantasy and reason still stands mostly intact, although more in principle than in practice.3