| Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature Baltimore, MA Review by David Rudd, University of Bolton I find that my review of this book needs a preface, as it seems to pull in two, distinct directions. As an aesthetic object, it is delightful to drool over: its antique feel and layout are impeccable, perhaps especially for people of a certain age. Regrettably, I thought that the content also had something of an antique feel to it, which was less delightful. Hence I begin with the good news, but after being as objective as I can in conveying the flavour of the book, the critical voice takes over (as it should) and is overall less enamoured. So, let me begin by saying that this is one of the most beautifully produced books on children’s literature I have ever seen. Griswold’s quotation from Jan Morris (concerning Wales), might appositely be applied to his own book: ‘Its smallness is not petty; on the contrary, it is profound’ (73). It is an aesthetic treasure in its own right, and I’m delightfully envious of Jerry Griswold’s artefact: a little book for little hands, after Beatrix Potter, hardbound with gold-tooled writing on the cover, which also features an illustration from Flora White’s Peter Pan’s A B C, of the children flying through the night, straight on till dawn, inset in a magnified illustration from Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days. After sumptuous endpapers, the frontispiece repeats the latter illustration, but in full, now revealing a small boy, bottom left, seemingly clambering into Griswold’s own book. There’s perhaps an extra poignancy here as, in moving into this text, we come across a dedication to Jerry’s son, Colin Rodgriguez Griswold (1979-2005); his dates thus haunt the book, in the way that those of Eddie Rosen’s do in Michael Rosen’s The Sad Book, or Fabian’s do in some of E. Nesbit’s novels, giving extra resonance to the notion of a lost world of childhood. It would be a crime if some of our area’s more opaque academic-speak found its way into a beautiful receptacle like this. Fortunately, Griswold writes felicitously, with an eye for a memorable, witty phrase; for example, ‘Melodrama is tragedy from which weight has been subtracted’ (88); ‘the role of the pun … is to evade weight … to offer a remedy to what we might call … The Unbearable Heaviness of the Boring’ (95). As for the content, Griswold seeks to delineate and analyse the five themes that he thinks ‘recur in classic and popular works of Children’s Literature’ (1), namely: snugness, scariness, smallness, lightness and aliveness, each being given a chapter, and each profusely illustrated, both in black and white and colour, with artistry from some of our most cherished children’s works (even the font, Adobe Jenson, has been specifically selected). For Snugness, Griswold begins with Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, where Rat and Mole find Badger’s underground home while a storm rages outside. He suggests that ‘[t]here may be no better example of the pleasures of snugness’ (6). Indeed, Grahame’s is Griswold’s favourite exemplary text. He then delineates a number of features of snugness, drawing on other texts; for instance, the snug place is also often hidden, as in The Secret Garden, and safe and simple, as is Heidi’s grandfather’s hut. There are also times when snugness is particularly evocative, such as Christmas (as in Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, where ‘The children were nestled all snug in their beds/ While visions of sugarplums danced in their heads’). Mention of dreaming moves Griswold to consider the significance of this activity, not only at night but in daydreaming – and especially for a child, for whom it is seen to be more important, besides being something that a snug place can facilitate (Maslow’s pyramid comes to mind). Scariness is Griswold’s second theme, and he makes some contentious claims for it: ‘scariness seems to play a larger role in stories for children than in those for adults … so common as almost to be an omnipresent feature’ (35), and he instances such texts as Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and fairy tales (Where the Wild Things Are, Struwwelpeter, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ also receive extensive attention). Why is it so prevalent? Because ‘fear is more acute in kids’ lives than in the lives of grown-ups’ (ibid.), he reasons. I’ll leave these claims for others to ponder, as I have more than enough matters to consider below. The third quality is Smallness, which, as Griswold notes, is notable just from an analysis of titles: ‘“Little Red Riding Hood,” Little Women, The Little Prince, A Little Princess, The Little Engine That Could, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Little House on the Prairie, etc.’ (51). I found this one of the strongest chapters. Griswold makes a number of telling points, especially on Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. He also draws on painting, contrasting Velásquez’s Las Meninas with John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward D. Boit, showing how both work to shift our sense of scale. I was surprised, though, that Susan Stewart’s brilliant examination of ‘The Miniature’ in On Longing managed to escape mention. Another meaty chapter follows: ‘Lightness’, where Griswold claims that, ‘in Children’s Literature …characters are more likely to go airborne than in adult fare’ (75-6). Initially he considers this literally, with characters like Peter Pan and Mary Poppins, but he then explores the metaphorical implications in terms of slippery characters like Tom Sawyer and Toad; and considers the way lightness is opposed to gravity, most overtly in George MacDonald’s The Light Princess, showing a sense of liberation from fixity and habit; hence the plasticity of the world in Mary Poppins and Harry Potter. Finally Griswold discusses Aliveness, the way that animals freely talk in children’s literature, as do more insentient things like lumps of wood (the future Pinocchio) and toy soldiers. Griswold comments: ‘We don’t boggle when animals engage in conversation, as long as that happens in children’s stories…’ (103). But it is at this point that I can no longer contain my critical reaction to this book – for which I must commend Griswold: he is certainly provocative! As I commented at the outset, I commend the book for its appealingly retro appearance, but when this carries over into the content (even to the omission of the accepted scholarly apparatus of identifying quotations by page number), I worry. It is as though much of the criticism of the past thirty years has simply passed Griswold by, and yet I know from some of his other writings that this isn’t so. The notion of childhood being a construction, for instance, is completely absent. Instead, we seem to have a very vague but essentialist notion of childhood referenced here, irrespective of age, culture, gender, or ethnicity. Let me begin by noting that, for Griswold, children’s literature is a ‘genre’ (51), which means that it must possess certain conventions of form and/or content to distinguish it. However, being conventional, genres are also open to change: they are pacts between author and reader about writing in a certain way. Yet elsewhere Griswold seems to contradict this notion of children’s literature being a genre, suggesting that the books children like best are those that ‘speak to them where they are’ (4), presumably in some more developmental sense. No other genre, I’d suggest, is tied to a particular readership in this essential, biological way. Who are these children, though? There is no indication of the age range that Griswold intends to include, though he does move across the piece, from picture books to mention of some films classified as ‘PG’, like Antz. At a rough count, it is also noteworthy that a considerable proportion of the works referred to are pre-twentieth century. And if pre-1950 books are included, the bias towards the past is even more apparent. To what extent, moreover, are books like Treasure Island and The Wind in the Willows exclusively for children? And on what basis can his selection be claimed to comprise the most preferred, or the best, children’s books? Apparently, ‘the young confirm that there are a chosen few who can speak to them where they are’, hence their preference for ‘certain authors and works, while ignoring many others’ (4). I’m no empiricist, but I’d certainly like to know why, say, Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses appeals to ‘where they are’ rather than Michael Rosen’s verse; or why Kenneth Grahame counts rather than Melvin Burgess or Jacqueline Wilson? Would it be unfair to claim that this is a very white, western, middle-class, and dated view of childhood? And this indicates a deeper problem, for Griswold is not merely indicating a number of features that characterise children’s books (as a genre). Rather, he claims that through children’s literature we can come to know the child per se: the suggestion of this book has been that Children’s Literature provides an especially good place for the study of childhood and the ways in which the young see the world. There we can glimpse and come to comprehend (or recall) what it feels like to be a kid… (125) If ever there was a time to draw on Jacqueline Rose’s famous statement, this is it: Children’s fiction rests on the idea that there is a child who is simply there to be addressed and that speaking to it might be simple. …If children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp. (Rose 1984: 1-2) Griswold, in contrast, repeatedly seems to assume that the fictional children he encounters must reflect what is essential about childhood. Thus he writes: ‘Images of flight and lightness in Children’s Literature … appeal to the young because they confirm the worldview of childhood’ (98). This is surely a backwards way of arguing. Because many children’s books feature dragons, or absent parents come to that, does this mean that these are part of a child’s worldview? Or might it be that these things are there (as were religion and death in early children’s literature) because adults think that this is what children need to consider as part of their worldview? Winnie-the-Pooh provides an interesting case, for here we witness the child, Christopher Robin, dragging his bear inconsiderately down the stairs, whereas it is the adult who animates and stories the toy for the child. Bearing this in mind, we might look at some of Griswold’s statements from a different perspective. Thus he claims that: ‘[m]ore than adults, children are fascinated with the issue of size and particularly with smallness. Only in Children’s Literature is littleness so frequent a topic’ (51). But, given that it is actually adults that write children’s literature, who assign the characters these diminutives (Little Red Riding Hood, etc), might it not be that adults like to see children in this way, just as other less privileged groups are similarly diminished (wife as ‘the little woman’, a service operative as ‘little man’, etc)? It is certainly of note that, in his discussion of snug places as shelters for daydreams, Griswold comments that, ‘every snug place is Plato’s cave of ideas’ (25), whereas the cave for Plato was precisely a place of illusion, where prisoners were held captive in chains, unable to see the real world outside till one of them was freed. One could argue that this is precisely what adults have tried to do with children: given them a make-believe world which adults pretend is the real one: where babies are brought by storks, or found under cabbage patches, where presents come via Father Christmas, and the Tooth Fairy searches under pillows for milk-teeth. This more adult-oriented perspective is perhaps most obvious when Griswold, in discussing scariness, makes the simplistic claim that ‘Halloween is great fun’ (45), without noting the historical specificity of his statement, or the fact that it has become great because it is such a huge money-making (i.e. adult) event (there was a 50 percent increase in US ‘Halloween’ business between 2005 and 2006; and, largely thanks to US influence, it has also grown exponentially in Britain). Griswold, however, seeks to ground his critique by arguing that we can trust what we find in children’s literature because its best writers have remained children in some way, or remembered their childhoods particularly well (quoting a similar move made by Alison Lurie); thus ‘the great writers for children know … what it feels like to be a kid’ (4). I have criticised this tautological argument elsewhere. Suffice here to say that, even were it possible to remain (or see through the eyes of) a child, this would never be enough, which is why no child actually wrote any of these books; what is needed is an adult supplement (pace Derrida); that is, an ability to shape this ‘raw’ childhood into particular linguistic, imagistic, and narrative forms. In other words, we are not dealing with actual childhood, but a fictional representation thereof. I would further want to point out that, though it is necessary to have some knowledge of how childhood is represented (and it differs across history, class, gender, ethnicity, etc), it is not thereby necessary for writers actually to ‘have remained in touch with their childhoods’ (3), as Alison Lurie put it, any more than it is necessary for authors of stories about dogs or ponies to have once been such animals! But in the way that Griswold continually makes provisos, I sense that he too is occasionally uncomfortable with the exclusivity of his five themes. Thus, he claims that ‘Children need to daydream’, adding: It’s not that grown-ups don’t have the same need and never daydream or drift away in reverie. They do. But as the behavior of the young suggests, children need to daydream more. (24) When he describes daydreaming though, it is clear that he is also bound by a typical child/adult binary; hence he writes of how ‘[t]he young … move tiny figurines around on the rug …We don’t hear of business executives, for example, whose job descriptions permit them two hours a day to move tiny action figures around on their desktops’ (24). Aside from the clearly gendered nature of this depiction, Griswold omits the sort of daydreaming that adults are more likely to engage in – that is, in Freud’s equally gendered terms, about His Majesty the Ego and ‘his’ ambitious and erotic wishes. Certainly, sexual fantasies are something that preoccupy adults, often translating into more on desktops than mere fantasies – eh, Mr Clinton? Griswold’s conventional categorisation extends even to the way that material is classified; thus in writing about animals, he says that ‘We don’t boggle when animals engage in conversation, as long as that happens in children’s stories’ (103). As a contrast, he then names Mailer and Updike – two predominantly realist novelists – rather than, say, Richard Adams and Franz Kafka. Likewise, he contrasts children’s cartoons using animals with realistic films, like Jaws, rather than with adult cartoons, such as Fritz the Cat or the animations of Gary Larson’s Tales from the Far Side. Griswold even assumes that Black Beauty is a children’s book, despite the fact that it was not initially written or marketed as such; Aesop is similarly appropriated (while Griswold is right to point out that the explicit moralising was added after Aesop’s time – in what was known as the ‘epimythium’, that one sentence statement that stood outside the plotted story – this was still done, until almost a millennium later, for adults). In short, Griswold takes a convention – the association of children with animals – and assumes that almost all texts containing animals are thereby child-oriented, ignoring all the animal myths and fables on which many (adult) societies were based; likewise, the animation of insentient objects is also seen as necessarily childlike, forgetting, say, the vogue for adult ‘It’ narratives in the eighteenth century. At times, Griswold mentions more animistic, non-dualistic conceptions of the universe that adults have held (Parmenides, Heraclitus, theoretical physicists and others are mentioned (99)), but these don’t form part of his general explanatory framework, which sees children as essentially different because of their animism. Setting aside the above sociological reservations, though, I still have problems with Griswold’s five themes from a more straightforward, logical perspective – and this doubt emerges from Griswold’s own comments. Thus, after discussing the appeal of snugness, he notes that ‘some literary children want the opposite and are eager to be out and doing’ (26), instancing Jim Hawkins and Tom Sawyer. However, he doesn’t mention Mole who, at the beginning of The Wind in the Willows, escapes his snug, but claustrophobic, underground home – despite later wanting to return to it (Griswold mentions the return only). Instead, Mole’s escape is mentioned in Griswold’s later chapter as an example of ‘Lightness’ (81-2). Likewise, the snugness of Badger’s home is mentioned, but not the obvious ‘Scariness’ of the Wild Wood episode that precedes it. In other words, not only do Griswold’s categories overlap, but each is obviously part of a binary opposite. Seen in this revised way, snugness could then be the opposite pole of escape/freedom; or, alternatively (if the safety aspect of snugness is emphasised), the opposite of being exposed or scared: the two are inveterately interconnected. However, if we make this move, we seem to be back with Perry Nodelman’s more basic opposition, Home – Away (Nodelman and Reimer, 2003: 198-203), which he finds especially characteristic of children’s books (and several of Griswold’s other qualities would also fit within this model). Using a binary framework would also seem to make more sense of some other qualities; thus rather than see smallness as a key feature, it would seem more logical to have ‘size’ as the overriding issue; then Griswold could mention not only Alice’s shrinking, but her equally memorable growth in the Court scene; similarly both Lilliput and Brobdingnag could be discussed using both smallness and bigness, let alone mentioning other pertinent texts such as Big (mentioned elsewhere, but not here), Bigfoot and the Hendersons, The BFG, ‘Bigger than the Baker’s Boy’ (Nesbit’s Five Children and It)and so on. This recognition of both ends of the binary would make even more sense with ‘Lightness’, where Griswold repeatedly wants to discuss related issues of heaviness, or gravity. So, to go back to my introductory remarks, this is a book you must certainly see and probably want to own (you won’t want to put it down!). It certainly raises a number of provocative issues in a delightful way, even if I do, finally, disagree with an awful lot of what Jerry Griswold has to say. References Nodelman, Perry and Reimer, Mavis (2002) The Pleasures of Children’s Literature 3rd ed. Longman Rose, Jacqueline (1984) The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan David Rudd |