2.1 The key questions

Part 1 – The Key Questions

Many people come to children’s literature as a relief, as a rest from the rigours of ‘adult’ studies, and their image of the texts is often based on nostalgia or wishful thinking. Children’s books are nice; they take us back to a golden world, one which we might also want to share with our children or grandchildren. Books people enjoyed when they were children have a special, and often very personal, value and meaning (which is not surprising, considering the change that a single book may make to an inexperienced reader), and there is a perfectly natural urge to revisit them. But if we look a little more closely, problems arise. It might be that the books read as a child were actually an escape, and that it is the escape, not the childhood, that the reader wishes to relive: far from being a happy, lost state, many (perhaps most) childhoods are difficult, and many adults (and adult writers) have an ambivalent relationship with their own childhood. To reread a children’s book from childhood, perhaps as an escape from the stresses of adulthood, evades both the real now and the real then. Is childhood innocent? Are the books innocent?

As Judy Blume, who wrote some of the most controversial children’s/teenage books of the late twentieth century, including Forever (the first ‘full-frontal’ children’s book (1975)) wrote:

And so it soon becomes clear that the relationship between children’s books and childhood is far from simple; even the bright world of Winnie-the-Pooh carries within it echoes of Milne’s traumatic experiences in the First World War – the need to create a retreatist, idyllic world – and his ambivalence towards real childhood, shown in the oversentimentalised image of Christopher Robin. The filmed versions, of course, are notable (or notorious) for their commodification of childhood.

[…]

Children’s books, adults, and children

Questions such as those raised in the paragraph above are vital because, unlike other forms of literature, children’s literature is at root about power – about a power struggle. Adults write, children read, and this means that, like it or not, adults are exercising power, and children are either being manipulated, or resisting manipulation: there is a tension between the reader implied by the writer, and the real readers. Children’s books are thus inevitably didactic in some way: even the most child-friendly is adopting some implicit attitudes. It is generally assumed that those who write for children will, naturally, be persons of goodwill, wishing to do ‘good’ in some form, for their readers. The difficulty with that, of course, is establishing the nature of ‘good’ – are we here for entertainment or instruction, and just what should those two things mean?

[…]

However, it cannot be denied that 99.9 per cent of children’s books are written by adults, nor that all those writers will, necessarily, have an agenda. Even those writers who claim to be nothing but entertainers have their own ideological stance, their own ideas of what is right and wrong, their own way of seeing the world, and it is impossible that they should not in some way convey this in their writing, manipulatively or not. Equally, however childhood is defined, an adult writer cannot think their way into it: there is inevitably some gap. Some writers, such as Enid Blyton, or Arthur Ransome or J.K. Rowling, seem to have a close empathy with their audience; some books, such as Pat Hutchins’s Rosie’s Walk or Shirley Hughes’s Dogger seem, from all visible signs, to bridge the gap. But however sensitive the mediator – the parent or the teacher – they are working with imperfect instruments. The very nature of the relationship between adulthood and childhood precludes the existence of a ‘true’ children’s book. The surprising difficulty of this area demonstrates how carefully we have to step in what looks at first to be a sunny, carefree world!

Children’s books are not innocent or simple; Ursula Le Guin once observed sardonically: ‘Sure it’s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up’ (Le Guin, 1992, p. 49), and involving ourselves with children’s literature means involving ourselves in a complex, active literary–social system.

[…]

This means that dealing with children’s literature involves responsibility, because what may at first sight seem like trivial or ephemeral texts are in fact immensely powerful. They have been read by millions upon millions of people at the period in their lives when they are most susceptible to new ideas. It is inconceivable that these texts have not shaped society in fundamental and lasting ways. More people, probably, have read the books of Enid Blyton, more often and more repetitively, than those of any other author ever. Is it possible to imagine that her middle-class, middle-England, rather racist and sexist attitudes and values, and her patterns of narrative pass through the minds of her child-readers without, as it were, touching the sides?

The question is: if we, as adult readers, see horror and incest and murder in fairy tales, or male exploitation and female repression in Little Women, or sexism and class distinctions in Thomas the Tank Engine (the carriages are female, the trucks working-class), do we not have a duty to do something about it? What goes into children’s minds is our responsibility, just as much as what goes into their stomachs.

At this point, I suspect that we should confront perhaps the most common objection to this kind of approach: ‘but surely the children won’t see that!’ All this interpretation, this detection of hidden meanings and subtexts is what adults do, not children. I’m afraid that the simplest answer is that the assumption that children somehow, like shellfish, live among unsavoury things, but filter them out, and subsist in a pure, innocent state, is wishful thinking. We can, perhaps, make pragmatic guesses about what a child can understand, or what is irrelevant to the child and might thus be ignored – but these are only guesses. And if one is prepared simply to believe that books do not have the potential to pass on subliminal messages, then why are we as a culture so concerned with the influence of advertising or propaganda on the young? Is it because with children’s literature we are dealing with stories, and that stories are, by definition, fiction, untrue and therefore not influential? Surely not, when we acknowledge that stories are so powerful throughout the culture.

References

• Le Guin, U. K. (1992) The Language of the Night. New York, HarperCollins.
• West, M. (1988) Trust Your Children: Voices Against Censorship in Children’s Literature. New York, Neal-Schuman.