Family Values and Other Meditations on Children's Literature

Recently, I ordered the set of Little House books from the Scholastic Book Club. I decided that having a daughter and finding them at a reasonable price were sufficient reasons to buy the series I read as a young child, then as an older child, and as a teen--the only set I read nearly as often as The Chronicles of Narnia, though the two series are worlds apart (no pun intended) in genre. Looking desperately for something to read yesterday that was relaxing and not too challenging, and rejecting, for the moment, A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I recently bought from the Second Chance Book Adoption (thanks, Chris!), as being too post-apocalyptic, and therefore potentially too thought-provoking, I remembered the Little House books, unwrapped, but still untouched. So last night, I selected These Happy Golden Years, the book in which Laura is courted by and marries Almanzo, and in which she teaches school for the first time.

Predictably, the novel was thought provoking. After all of these years, I had forgotten few events, but some of the descriptions of the events stood out for me anew. After spending her first full week at home after a dismal experience boarding with the head of the school board and his wife during her first teaching job, Laura reflects on the contrast between her own home and the Brewsters':

But best of all were the mornings and the evenings at home. Laura realized that she had never appreciated them until now. There were no sullen silences, no smoldering quarrels, no ugly outbursts of anger.

It was with a shock that I realized that this was precisely the difference between the home my husband and I have made, and the one in which I grew up. These sentences may mean nothing to my children when they read them, or else they will sympathize with Laura without knowing exactly what she has experienced. To me, they summarized a contrast I have felt within my own life, and for which I am grateful. My mother has not yet escaped that past, and I fear that there is little I can do to help her. Similarly, in Little Town on the Prairie, the "ordinary" (stereotypically Irish, perhaps) quarreling of the Clancys, by whom Laura is employed as a seamstress, disturbs her because the behavior is so foreign to her: Laura was so upset that she could not eat, she wanted only to get away.

A meditation followed:

So much of children's literature these days is intended as self-help, of the pop-psychology variety, intended to make children recognize, and perhaps wallow in, the short-comings of the world around them. Rather than displaying personal strength and the ability to meet challenges, they portray children who "need help" in order that the "actual" child reader will know what it means to "need help." I welcome an assessment of this by someone with experience helping troubled children professionally; I venture to assert that having similar experiences in which to wallow would compound rather than alleviate one's own problems, and that stories that show magical solutions to real world problems are still more damaging. I did not need a story to tell me that my family was dysfunctional, and I did not need a story to validate that being dysfunctional was O.K.--it was not O.K., and acknowledging that may have given me the ability to change my own life accordingly. Though I never thought of the stories in this way, the Little House Books, by holding up an ideal, may have allowed me an escape from our family situation, and shown me what could be possible through mutual respect between husband and wife, parent and child.

A further context for this meditation is my son's recent experience of reading the award-winning, but to my mind wholly unsuitable Each Little Bird That Sings, which centers on the life of a family of undertakers, children who are confronted with the death of strangers and who must, in the course of the book, confront the deaths of two elderly relatives and a beloved dog. The baby, probably not much older than my daughter, sings about people being dead to the tune of nursery rhymes. I'm sure this is all very "helpful" to children's psyches. However, my 10-year-old was soberly meditating on the fear of death after reading this wonderful piece of children's literature. At his Catholic school, he should be taught more about the meaning of death in the context of eternity than in the context of worldly fears. In the Little House Books, he would be learning about the challenges of life, and how they contribute to its wonder and joy. I may be naïve in preferring the latter to the former; nevertheless, I feel that it holds more value to the human person.

The Little House Books also offer useful lessons in generosity, albeit towards one's family only. I have a difficult time understanding where taking care of one's own (extended) family fits with Catholic ideals of generosity and charitable giving. Is giving to one's family being charitable? Some would say not. If caring for one's family precludes one's ability to give generously to strangers, does it fulfill one's obligations for charity? I am not well acquainted with Catholic social teaching, so I do not have the answers.

My brother has expressed his resentment--in words and actions--that he has had to share in the financial responsibility of the household. Admittedly, he is 18, the 5th of 6 children, but his venom is great, and does not fit with how we lived when I was part of the household and he was young--he was only 7 when I married. Without elaborating on the situation, my mother's unstable financial state has been further weakened by health concerns. In this college town, my brother has been exposed to a world in which undergraduates drive Lexus and BMW and Mercedes; more moderate incomes drive Mustangs. To not have a car to oneself at 18 is the exception rather than the rule. Talk is cheap, and money is cheaper. He has been well poisoned, who used to be generous.

In the Little House Books, Laura willingly and gratefully takes on jobs that she hates--that intimidate her, expose her to danger and unpleasantness, jobs that keep her in town from dawn until dusk, though only for short periods of weeks at a time--in order to contribute to her family's efforts to send her sister to the college for the blind in Iowa. She feels a deep sense of contentment, upon leaving to be married, at having contributed to her family, and feels able to leave and feel satisfied at having material things of her own because she has been able to give of herself to her family. In contemporary children's (or young adult) literature, would generosity or selfishness prevail? Which do we need more in today's world?

What do we want from children's literature?

Recently, courtesy of my search for suitable and stimulating reading material for my son and a great blog/conversation on Little House on the Prairie by DarwinCatholic, I have been considering and reconsidering the topic of children's literature. I say "reconsidering" because children's lit has long been an interest of mine. It is the one and only subject on which I am published--well, that and ecocriticism, but it's the same article.

It is inevitable that children's literature should try to teach. After all, it is difficult to find work of literature in which the author (who after all, does not exist in poststructuralist literary criticism) does not seem to have something that she or he is communicating to the audience. Even if the work seems to be "just a story" (whatever that means), there is some "exigence" (rhetorical term I taught to my students this past week meaning some reason that the writer wrote that story and not something else).

Having said this, in spite of my lifelong love of the Chronicles of Narnia that began when I was 10 and culminated in my M.A. thesis (and the above-mentioned article), I, like Neil Gaiman, who expressed the sentiment at the Mythcon 35 conference, which I attended in 2004, felt utterly betrayed in high school when I realized the religious subtext. Yes, I am one of the three or so readers who did not catch on to this on the first, second, third or fourth read. I can't say when I caught on, but I think it was the fuzzy white lamb who turns to Aslan at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that did it for me. In my defense, I did not read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the most Christological) as often as the others because I found the story to be less interesting than many of the other books, and did not acquire a copy of The Magician's Nephew, with the Creation story, until after I had read the rest twice, as the (Baptist school!) library where I first encountered the Chronicles had lost their copy. When I did read MN, I was taken by the symmetry of the series--the discovery of who "the Professor" of LWW really was--rather than by the Creationism.

I lost interest in Harry Potter when it became clear that book 3 was, in the first three chapters, more concerned with establishing its anti-capital- and corporal-punishment slant (not to mention the house-elf slavery sub-plot) than its main storyline, at least initially.

Yet, I find myself concerned, while reading The City of Ember, that the author's only mention of religion is mockery--brief mockery, and mockery of a kind of extreme Evangelicalism, but mockery nonetheless. I find myself thinking that there is enough of this kind of mockery to be found in everyday life, and asking whether in need intrude upon the most compelling early adolescent book I have encountered in many a year.

I have not made it a habit of studying new releases in children's literature. I have been busy studying--or avoiding studying--early 20th century Brit Lit (the whole "life's work" thing). But since my son is going to a school with a library this year and a screwy reading program that awards "points" for reading, and since he is in the "tweens" as far as book-level and book-content, I have been paying more attention. I have no interest in the more or less "realistic" pre-teen fiction. I didn't even read it when my friends were busy with The Babysitter's Club series. Since HarryPottermania, the standard formula for children's fantasy goes something like this:

1. Young person has difficult family/school situation.
2. Young person discovers something extroardinary about him or herself, some extroardinary creature, or an otherworldly realm.
3. Young person is faced with a crisis that pertains directly to the ethereal plot device mentioned in #2.
4. Having discovered the fantasy element, young person puts it to good use, growing and learning about him- or herself in the process, resolving the issue satisfactorily, usually heroically.
5. Young person's life returns to normal, and s/he is able to resolve difficult real-life issues due to the intervention of the deus ex machina.

It's amazing how many variations there are on this now. The formula is effective, if done well (though Tolkien thought the fantasy lessened by the entering-the-secondary-world-through-our-world motif). But to do it well in the wake of the acknowledged masters is difficult. And I hate to say it, but dragons are getting old.

School stories are trite. Fantasies are becoming poorly- and overly done. I don't approve of books that preach, unless one knows what is being preached to one. And yet cheap jabs at religion are objectionable, too. The classics are a bit above his reading level, though Treasure Island is on the agenda. I will be working on getting him to read the Little House Books, because they have a rare quality about them--honesty. And perhaps that is what I am seeking, really. Even C. S. Lewis, I came to realize, is not quite genuine in his fiction. He comes close, but he doesn't quite believe in his characters or his world. He does have fun with it, though, and there's something to be said for that! If Little House on the Prairie is teaching anything, it is doing so because the ideas communicated were so well-ingrained in the author as to be second nature--they couldn't not be there. Religion is not self-conscious; it is not intrusive; it is just a way of life. And isn't that how it should be, really?

I haven't yet decided what makes The City of Ember so compelling, but it is. I'm not entirely sure what it's trying to communicate. There is self-reliance, with the realization that one does need help sometimes. The children are mature, but still act like children. The fantasy world is fantastic, but has an air of reality. Society is dark and has dystopic elements, but it is not a dystopia. It's even got that healthy fatalism that is so entirely missing from entertainment media these days. (The same healthy fatalism inherent in Return of the King or the poems of W. H. Auden, though non-Christian existentialist fatalism--a fatalism makes it unsuitable for my son, unfortunately.) It would be perfect (so far) if not for the "Believers."