by Alison Lurie
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Lurie is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature at Cornell University, where she has for many years taught courses in children’s literature, and where her subjects include writing, folklore and literature. She divides her time between Ithaca and Florida in the United States, and Maida Vale in London.
Also by Alison Lurie
Fiction
Love and Friendship
Imaginary Friends
Real People
The War Between the Tates
Only Children
Foreign Affairs
The Truth About Lorin Jones
The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (editor)
Women and Ghosts
The Last Resort
The Nowhere City
Non-Fiction
The Language of Clothes
Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups
For Children
The Heavenly Zoo
Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales
Fabulous Beasts
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Epub ISBN: 9781446434475
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Published by Vintage 2004
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Copyright © Alison Lurie, 2003
Alison Lurie has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
All of the essays in this volume originally appeared in different form in The New York Review of Books with the exception of the following: the foreword and “Poetry by and for Children” were published in different form in issues of The New York Times Book Review; “What Fairy Tales Tell Us” in American Fairy Tales: From Rip Van Winkle to the Rootabaga Stories, edited by Neil Philip, Hyperion Books, and The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, edited by Alison Lurie, Oxford University Press; and “Louder than Words: Children’s Book Illustrations” in The New York Times Book Review and Fairy Tale Illustration from Doré to Disney, The Folio Society, London. “Enchanted Forests and Secret Gardens: Nature in Children’s Literature” is published for the first time in this collection.
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0099453894
For Alexander, Susanna, and Wells Bishop
CONTENTS
Foreword
THE UNDERDUCKLING:
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
LITTLE WOMEN AND BIG GIRLS:
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
THE ODDNESS OF OZ
IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?
WALTER DE LA MARE’S SOLITARY CHILD
JOHN MASEFIELD’S BOXES OF DELIGHT
MOOMINTROLL AND HIS FRIENDS
DR. SEUSS COMES BACK
HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES
THE PERILS OF HARRY POTTER
WHAT FAIRY TALES TELL US
BOYS AND GIRLS COME OUT TO PLAY:
CHILDREN’S GAMES
POETRY BY AND FOR CHILDREN
LOUDER THAN WORDS:
CHILDREN’S BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS
ENCHANTED FORESTS AND SECRET GARDENS:
NATURE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
THE GOOD BAD BOY
Notes
Bibliography
FOREWORD
It often seems that the most gifted authors of books for children are not like other writers: instead, in some essential way, they are children themselves. There may be outward signs of this condition: these people may prefer the company of girls and boys to that of adults; they read children’s books and play children’s games and like to dress up and pretend to be someone else. They are impulsive, dreamy, imaginative, unpredictable.
This is true of many of the writers discussed in this book, and also of other famous children’s authors. E. Nesbit devoted weeks to building a toy town out of blocks and kitchenware, and wrote a story, The Magic City, about it. James Barrie spent his summer holidays playing pirates and Indians with the four Davies boys, and Lewis Carroll was stiff and shy among adults but relaxed and charming with children. Today, Laurent deBrunhoff, who has continued his father’s Babar series for many years and is now over seventy, still climbs trees with youthful skill and delight.
Like some children, the authors of classic children’s books may also prefer the company of animals to that of adults; they identify with animals and sometimes imagine themselves as dogs or cats or horses or wild birds and beasts. Beatrix Potter, the author of Peter Rabbit, refused to dance with eligible young men at the society balls her parents took her to, and spent most of her time with pets of every sort. T. H. White, who wrote The Sword in the Stone, avoided human society almost all his life. He lived alone with his hawks and his hounds, and the death of his Irish setter, Brownie, left him utterly desolate.
It is interesting to note that most of these gifted grown-up children, perhaps the majority, are British or American, just as so many of the best-loved children’s books are British or American. Other nations have produced a single brilliant classic or series: Denmark, for instance, has Andersen’s tales; Italy has Pinocchio, France has Babar, Finland has Moomintroll. A list of famous children’s books in English, however, could easily take up a page in this volume.
Why should this be so? One explanation may be that in Britain and America more people never quite grow up. They may sometimes put on a show of maturity, but secretly they remain children, longing for the pleasures and privileges of childhood that once were theirs. And there are good reasons for them to do so. In most countries there is nothing especially wonderful about being a child of school age. For the first four or five years boys and girls may be petted and indulged, but after that they are usually expected to become little adults as soon as possible: responsible, serious, future-oriented. But in English-speaking nations, ever since the late eighteenth century, poets and philosophers and educators have maintained that there is something wonderful and unique about childhood: that simply to be young is to be naturally good and great. It may be no coincidence that the romantic glorification of youth of the sixties and early seventies was most evident in America and Britain, or that when they want to make an especially touching appeal to voters, American politicians always speak of “our kids.”
Because childhood is seen as a superior condition, many Americans and Britons have been naturally reluctant to give it up. They tend to think of themselves as young much longer, and cling to childhood attitudes and amusements. On vacation, and in the privacy of their homes, they readily revert to an earlier age, and when they write, they often take the side of children against adults. As I suggested in an earlier collection of essays,1 their books are, in the deepest sense, subversive. As writers, they make fun of ad
ults and expose adult pretensions and failings; they suggest, subtly or otherwise, that children are braver, smarter, and more interesting than grown-ups, and that grown-up rules are made to be broken.
Today, what many authorities in the field seem to prefer are stories in which children are helped by and learn from grown-ups. The lesson may be practical or moral; the adult may be a teacher, a relative, a neighbor, a stranger, a witch or wizard, and sometimes even an alien. These kind, wise figures may not appear very often in the story, but the plot turns on their advice or example, and the happy ending wouldn’t be possible without them. From Marmee in Alcott’s Little Women to P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, E. B. White’s Charlotte, and Tolkien’s Gandalf, these admirable characters guide and care for the younger and less experienced protagonists of the tales in which they appear.
When it comes to awards for literary excellence, the books that win tend to contain at least one Wise and Good Grown-up or Grown-up-Equivalent. Back in the 1950s and 1960s the stories were often set in the historical past (especially in pioneer and Revolutionary or Civil War America) and their child protagonists tended to be white. Since cultural diversity was discovered, the settings cover a wider range, and now they often feature Native American, African American, Hispanic American, or Asian American children who, with adult help, face disasters, overcome obstacles, and learn to be brave, kind, and strong: in effect, to be responsible young adults.
Boys and girls, on the other hand, are not always interested in becoming responsible adults. The books they choose for themselves typically feature kids and/or animals who face dangers, have exciting and/or funny adventures, and help and instruct each other. Any adults who are important in the story are apt to be villains. If there are well-meaning parents and teachers around, they have almost no idea about what really goes on in their absence, like the mother in a classic picture-book version of the genre, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.
Children also often like books that anxious adults would consider scary or immoral or both—books in which creepy things happen and there is often no poetic or any other justice. In my favorite local bookstore, the largest space on the shelves of the children’s paperback section is devoted to a series by R. L. Stine known as Goosebumps. The first volume appeared in 1992, and at last count there were sixty-one, plus more than twenty spin-offs with titles like The Goosebumps Monster Blood Pack and The Scare-a-Day Wall Calendar. Essentially, Goosebumps is Edgar Allen Poe updated for contemporary children. The tone alternates between comic and creepy, and in the best tales the horrors are exaggerated versions of everyday juvenile fears and afflictions. In The Haunted School, for instance, a sixth-grader named Tommy finds his way into another part of the school building that has been boarded up since 1947, when an evil photographer, taking a class picture, caused all twenty-seven children to vanish.
As it turns out, the class has survived for half a century in an alternate world, which is entirely black and white, like an old photograph. Since 1947 they have never left the classroom, and by this time most of them have gone mad. A few others remain sane, but in a hopeless, gray condition that will be familiar to anyone who remembers the longest, most colorless days of their own education: days when, as they sat at their desks, they thought desperately, “This is driving me crazy. Am I doomed to sit here forever?”
If you look at the children’s shelves in your local bookstore or library, one of the first things you might notice is that a large proportion of the stories are about animals. This is especially true of books for small children. In a recent count in my local bookstore, I found that well over half of the picture books had animal heroes or heroines. Even though the world the characters lived in was a human one with houses and cars and schools, the protagonists were dogs or mice or bears or rabbits. One of the most popular picture books of the twentieth century, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, is set in a “great green room” that is clearly that of a contemporary middle-class Western child. Yet, according to the illustrations, the inhabitant of the “great green room” is a rabbit, and so is the old lady knitting in the rocking chair.
Several more recent and popular series of picture books also have animal heroes that live in a human environment. Bears are a favorite: those in Elsie Homelund Minark’s Little Bear Series and The Berenstain Bears by Stan and Jan Berenstain are human in all but appearance. They wear clothes and are clearly neighbors of Dick and Jane; they live in the same sort of middle-class suburb and have the same mild adventures: birthday parties, family vacations, the new sibling or pet, the first lost tooth, and so on. Children like these books, librarians tell me, because nothing much happens in them; they are easy to identify with and reassuring.
Even when the characters in a children’s book begin as human, they sometimes turn into animals. For a parent, this may not seem totally unexpected: many parents today sometimes have the feeling that their children are turning into beasts—chattering chimpanzees, maybe, or slovenly, lazy, greedy brown bears. It actually happens in the inventive and wildly popular Animorphs series by Katherine A. Applegate. “All the kids are asking for those books; we can’t keep them on the shelves,” say the clerks in one local store. Some adults, on the other hand, don’t care for the Animorphs: my niece Clarissa, who is a children’s librarian, says her system won’t purchase them.
The Animorphs books follow the preferred series pattern. Their heroes are four junior-high-school students, two male and two female, who are also culturally and socially diverse. Two of them are white, but there is a sensitive, nature-loving black girl who lives on a farm and a wisecracking Hispanic American boy from the wrong side of the tracks. All the kids can become animals, and they can communicate telepathically when transformed. But if they don’t change back in two hours, they are stuck in that morph forever, like their friend Tobias, who in volume 1 spends too much time as a red-tailed hawk.
Though Tobias misses being human, he is of great help to the others in their struggle against evil aliens called the Yeerks. The Yeerks, who look like the small gray slugs that eat my tomatoes, wish to conquer Earth. Their method is to crawl into the ears of other beings and take over their minds. There is no outward sign that the person is possessed by a slug, except for an occasional cold emotional falseness. Readers who remember their own adolescence will not be too surprised to learn that several people in the kids’ world, including the assistant principal at school, are really Yeerks. So is Jake’s brother Tom, who always does the right thing and never gets into trouble. “The Yeerks . . . had already infiltrated human society, . . . cops and teachers and soldiers and mayors and TV newspeople. They were everywhere. They could be anyone.”2 One appeal of these books, obviously, is that they give substance to the sense we have all had at some time—perhaps most often in early adolescence—that some people, especially authority figures, are phony. The things they do and say seem false and artificial; very possibly they are under the control of evil alien forces.
Another great attraction of the Animorphs books is that they provide thrilling, scientifically convincing descriptions of what it might be like to be an animal. (The idea is not new: several famous earlier instances occur in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, where the wizard Merlin turns the future King Arthur into a variety of beasts, including a hawk, a fish, a hedgehog, and a snake.) The four friends have a wonderful time in their morphs; they are happiest as birds, but almost any change is fun. Since they are independent American kids, however, the one “morph” that freaks them out is the change into ants, which turn out to have no individuality but are only cells of a colony. As one of the heroes puts it, that experience was “gross beyond belief.”3
Almost every species of animal has replaced humans in one children’s book or another, though the more unusual species tend to be somewhat altered and anthropomorphized in the illustrations as well as the text. Marc Brown’s Arthur began, in Arthur’s Nose (1976), as a fairly strange-looking character. He was identified as an aardvark; he was coffee-co
lored and had a self-image problem: he hated his long nose. But over time Arthur has gradually undergone what my niece the librarian calls “a Michael Jackson makeover.” He is now pale orange and has no visible nose, and the word aardvark is no longer used. Moreover, he has gone on television: at one point he had his own series on PBS.
Of course Arthur is not the only children’s book hero to move into media and merchandising. What are called “tie-ins” are now the rule for popular series. Readers of Goosebumps, for instance, are solicited to log onto its Web site, join its fan club, and purchase T-shirts, backpacks, lunch boxes, videos, and glow-in-the-dark pens. Animorphs too has a Web site, and its fan club and T-shirts cannot be far behind. Maybe our children are not turning into beasts after all; instead they’re turning into relentless consumers—which may be just as frightening.
This book would not have existed without the help and encouragement of many people. I am especially indebted to Barbara Epstein, the brilliant coeditor of the New York Review of Books, where most of these essays originally appeared in an earlier version, and to my kind and gifted agent, Melanie Jackson. Thanks too to Angelica Carpenter and the other members of the International Wizard of Oz Club who shared their centennial meeting and their expertise with me.
I should also like to thank the students in my Cornell classes on folklore and children’s literature for their intelligent and perceptive comments on many of the books discussed here.
My niece Clarissa Cooke, who is a children’s librarian in Manhattan, and the staffs of my favorite bookstores in Ithaca, New York (The Bookery), and Key West, Florida (Lauriat’s), provided invaluable information on current reading tastes. My grandchildren, Alex, Susanna, and Wells Bishop, to whom this book is dedicated, gave me firsthand experience of what children really want to read or hear read aloud.