2.2 Defining children’s literature

Part 2 – Defining children’s literature

In discussing literature, there are, fundamentally, two views. The first is that there are absolute standards of quality or goodness; these are generally undefined (and undefinable), but may be perceived by the cultured, the elite, or the gifted: whether you regard the priesthood who elect themselves to make these decisions as part of the divine order, or as the preservers of cultural continuity, or as oppressive egomaniacs (canonising the dead white males) is, of course, up to you. The alternative view (oddly called ‘relativist’ by the first group – to whom everything is relative to their own standards), is to value everything as fit for purpose; thus you can’t compare, say, apples and oranges, because although they are both fruits, what is good about either is intrinsic to the species. Mozart wrote good music of its kind, the Beatles wrote good music of its kind; War and Peace is good of its kind, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is good of its kind.

Therefore, to say that one form (children’s books) is, by definition, inferior to another (adults’ books) may be an interesting philosophical discussion, but it is a dangerous one in the context of children and their books. The ‘inferior’ form will not be taught or taken or analysed seriously (as was the case not so long ago with ‘women’s writing’), and that can cause serious multiple confusions in the education system. Shakespeare at school and Jackie Wilson at home should be seen as doing different things, rather than one being ‘superior’ to the other. Both are leading their readers into different aspects of the culture, and to compare them directly is not a useful exercise.

When Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban came up against Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Old English poem Beowulf for the 2000 Whitbread literary award, the critic Antony Holden wrote that it would be a ‘national disgrace’ if Harry won. (Beowulf won.) Much of the hot air generated in that discussion came from a confusion of what is meant by good in the abstract (undefinable except by assertion) as opposed to good for (demonstrable empirically), and from not comparing like with like. Children’s books are most usefully seen as part of their own separate literary system, which has its own special qualities and values and techniques, and which relates primarily to children. As the New York Times commented:

The problem is that – with a few exceptions – children’s books are equated with ‘popular’ texts in the adult system, and are therefore, by definition, inferior. Any teachers or parents who have at the back of their mind the idea that the majority of what they are giving their children – and what they and their children enjoy – is inescapably inferior, has an unnecessary problem. Thus the Harry Potter books are most usefully seen from the point of view of children.

Defining children’s literature: some case studies

Having said that, how do we define this body of texts that we are going to look at? At this point, the pragmatist will say: surely, it is obvious what a book is, from its cover and layout (the peritext). There might be some marginal cases, books that cross over between children and adults, such as the work of Philip Pullman, or J.R.R. Tolkien, or Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. And there seems to be some sliding around over time – so that fairy tales and Sherlock Holmes, both originally for adults, are now commonly marketed for children, while The Water-Babies finds itself in the annotated Oxford ‘World’s Classics’. But most children’s books are obviously children’s books, for example, Roger Hargreaves’s ‘Mr Men’ and ‘Little Miss’ books, Jill Murphy’s Five Minutes’ Peace¸ A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, or anything by J.K. Rowling or Enid Blyton. What else can they be?

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And many children’s books might not actually be for children. Jill Murphy’s Five Minutes’ Peace is one of a very successful series featuring anthropomorphised elephants, the Large family. It begins with Mrs Large regarding her family (off-page) with the verbal text: ‘The children were having breakfast. This was not a pleasant sight.’ The question is – whose point of view is this? The rest of the book, for all the ‘obvious’ trappings of the children’s book, deals with adult preoccupations entirely from an adult viewpoint: the implied reader is not the child. What, then, does the child-reader, or the child-read-to make of this? Is he/she learning a lesson in empathy? Perhaps, but this may not be what one naturally assumes to be a children’s book.

Other books, like Winnie-the-Pooh, which has been a children’s classic for generations, are in fact books aimed at two audiences. Barbara Wall, in her analysis of how authors address their narratee (the reader), The Narrator’s Voice (1991, p. 35), suggests that there are many books marketed for children where writers actually write for adults and children separately:

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C.S. Lewis, in a statement very often quoted with approval, when it is in fact denigrating children’s literature, wrote: ‘I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story’ (Lewis, 1966, p. 24). We might well argue the exact opposite: the real children’s books are the ones read only by children – ones that do not have anything to say to adults, and which are not, therefore, subject to adult judgements. This is a radical thought, that places, say, Enid Blyton in the forefront of children’s literature (rather than more respectable, adult-like writers such as Kenneth Grahame or Philip Pullman). For Barbara Wall (1991, p. 35), these genuine children’s books are marked by writers who talk directly to the child reader, ‘showing no consciousness that adults too might read the work’.

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The fact that J.K. Rowling’s books are widely read by adults says more about adult attitudes to fantasy than it does about J.K. Rowling, whose focus, like that of Blyton, is her developing audience, not other adults. To criticise her books as if they were written for adults is to miss the point, and to misdirect the criticism.

A working definition of ‘children’s literature’, or, perhaps better, ‘literature for children’, then, might be arrived at by choosing your own interpretation of the three elements, the literature, the children and the ‘for-ness.’

The word ‘literature’ is a spectrum: at one end is the small handful of ‘canonical’ texts ‘generally’ agreed to have some kind of eternal value; at the other is the vast range of ‘texts’ routinely and traditionally absorbed by the category: myth, legend and folk tale, verse, picture books, ‘chapter books’, novels, cartoons, films, video games, websites, merchandise, and so on. You may feel that the oral tale or seventeenth-century chapbooks are no longer for children, and therefore do not fit into your idea of children’s literature, or you may feel that the study of electronic media is different from the study of printed texts, or you may feel that the printed book is really of little relevance to the modern child and that what we should be looking at is the mediation of story through electronic and multimedia channels. Or, perhaps, that there are many kinds of children’s literature, and that only certain ones are within your field of interest.

When we describe literature as being ‘for’ children, do we exclude those texts which, as we have seen, address adults over the heads of children? If so, do we exclude the huge industry of ‘children’s’ films, such as Shrek, or Toy Story, which are clearly for a mixed audience, or, indeed, any of the classic Walt Disney feature-cartoons, almost all of which are concerned with courtship and marriage? Or do we include or exclude books according to whether they are designed to instruct or to amuse their audience? Most histories of children’s literature suggest that children’s books were initially entirely designed for educational purposes, with ‘delight’, if any, an incidental sugar-ing of the pill. In the course of the nineteenth century, instruction gave way to entertainment, religion to fantasy – with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland seen as a kind of anarchic, liberating turning-point. One problem here is that childhood was very different 200 years ago, especially in terms of what we would now call media input; children had fewer things to entertain them, and different mindsets.

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Which leaves us with deciding what we mean by ‘children’. Childhood is generally defined either by physical and mental characteristics – size, development or immaturity, and so on – which are common to all children, or by local, cultural decisions. This second idea of childhood changes with time, place, commercialism, politics, and even with individuals; in the West, it has been commonly associated with lack of responsibility. Consequently, how do we categorise children’s books – as suitable for children of certain ages, or certain developmental levels, or for children in certain social or geographical areas? Are we happy to accept such generalisations, or would we prefer to think about individual children? And even if we are happy to accept such generalisations, is it practical to do so?

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Equally, it is important to realise that it is the concepts of childhood held by writers and publishers, rather than ‘real’ childhoods, which determine what appears in texts. What is important for children’s literature is that the inevitable variety of childhood and childhoods is acknowledged in its real readers, and its variability as a social and commercial construction is acknowledged in the texts.

References

• Lewis, C. S. (1966) ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, in Of Other Worlds. London, Geoffrey Bles.
• Wall, B. (1991) The Narrator’s Voice. Basingstoke, Macmillan.
• Zipes, J. (2001) Sticks and Stones. The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York and London, Routledge.