Basic Premises
Even when it is designed to entertain, Children’s
and Adolescent Literature includes an element of
didacticism
– after all, it is written by adults, and no matter how sympathetic adults
can be to a young person’s viewpoint, they are still aware that their work
has the power to influence the developing minds of its
intended audience
. Authors of mainstream adult
literature also tend to include elements of didacticism in their works, but
they can afford to be less overt in their didacticism because they believe
that their intended audience’s intellectual and moral development is already
complete.
Like all literary texts, Children’s and Adolescent Literature reflects the
cultural milieu
in which it is written; however, it can also change the culture, especially
when it is written by authors who embrace social change.
For instance, in 1974, Mildred Taylor published Roll of
Thunder, Hear My Cry, one of the first children’s novels to contain detailed,
frank discussions of slavery and its aftermath.
Prior to this time, most authors of children’s literature
avoided controversial issues surrounding slavery, especially because they
assumed that their audience would be comprised mostly of whites who might
not like to acknowledge the country’s involvement in human rights violations.
Ms. Taylor ignored this tradition and wrote about a black
family’s inner life, without concern for sparing anyone’s feelings.
The result was a
Newbery Award
winning novel and a sea change in children’s literature.
After the early 1970’s, authors were more likely to employ
realistic portrayals of historical events and to emphasize psychologically
complex relationships between characters.
Key Questions/Discussion
1.
How did authors of pre-twentieth century U.S. Children’s and Adolescent
Literature balance didacticism with entertainment?
One glance at the title page of the first successful American children's
book reveals the concern that Puritan parents had regarding their children’s
moral lives.
A Token for Children: Being
an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths,
of Several Young Children, written in 1642 by James Janeway, combines
adult concerns about infant damnation and infant mortality with language
and illustrations thought to be appropriate for an audience of children.
Janeway's purpose in writing A Token
for Children was twofold; he wished to secure parents' interest in the
salvation of their children and to instruct his young audience in the intricacies
of religious self-scrutiny.
"Are the Souls of your Children of no value?... Shall the Devil run away
with them without controul?" he asks in his preface to Parents, School-masters,
and School-Mistresses.
"They are not too little to dye," he warns. "They are not too little to go
to Hell..." (3-4). Janeway hoped that parents would use his book to remind
their children that "every Mothers Child of you are by Nature, Children of
Wrath," a message that was echoed in the pulpits of many a Puritan church
(5). John Cotton spoke for his
peers when he observed that children were "'capable of the habits and gifts
of grace from their first Conception...and, as soon capable of sin.'"
To his young readers, Janeway emphasized the importance of entering into
a covenant with God before it was too late.
Infant mortality in seventeenth-century New England was extremely
high; during the 1640s, three out of every ten babies born in Boston would
die before reaching adolescence.
Given that most couples had seven or eight children, the likelihood for bereavement
was great, and many young readers of
A Token for Children would have seen one or more of their siblings buried
in the family plot. With this
thought in mind, Janeway begins his text by asking a series of questions designed
to encourage introspection and fear:
"Did you ever hear of a little Child that died?
And if other Children die, why may not you be sick, and die?
And what will you do then, Child, if you should have no grace
in your heart, and be found like other naughty children?" (12).
Typical of Janeway’s protagonists is Anne Lane, a child who is "sanctified
from the very Womb" (17). Once
assured of her own state of grace -- at the age of four -- Anne is shocked
to find that her father is "little acquainted with the power of Religion."
As Janeway describes it, she "put him upon a thorow [sic]
inquiry into the state of his Soul, and...that a Babe and suckling should
speak so feelingly about the things of God, and be so greatly concerned not
only about her own soul, but about her Father's too, [led to] the occasion
of his conversion" (15). Another
young heroine, Mary A., advocates against the public display of emotion,
even if that emotion were inspired by religious zeal.
She "was greatly afraid...of doing any thing to be seen by
men" and would comport herself modestly in church.
Mary also declines to play games with her siblings and their
friends because she would rather read the
Bible ; hers is an adult sensibility, shared by Janeway's other heroines
(28).
Our received interpretation of colonial history suggests that Puritan parents
were very concerned about the state of their children's souls and thus would
have approved of Janeway's depiction of his pious and diminutive heroines.
Years later, Cotton Mather was so convinced of the book's
efficacy that he published a special edition and appended to it a number
of entries drawn from his own observation.
Significantly, Janeway's fame was not restricted to his lifetime,
or century, or even to the New England region; well into the eighteenth century,
his portrait of idealized American childhood served as a model for the authors
of children's literature.
In Behold the Child, critic Gillian
Avery observes that the majority of children in colonial literature ended
their careers on their death beds, assured of grace, and enfolded in Christ's
arms. However, while this formula
may have worked for the Puritans, it held less value in a post-revolutionary,
post-Lockian America. By the
early nineteenth century, authors of children's books, Jacob Abbott and Charlotte
Yonge among them, discouraged parents from allowing their offspring to worry
excessively about religious matters.
"'We often weary our children with the subject, or alienate their
hearts from it,'" Abbott wrote.
"'If your children express strong interest in religious truth and duty for
a time, be pleased with it, but place little confidence in it.'"
Charlotte Yonge was just as critical of those books that "dealt
in the young child who goes about asking people whether they are Christians,
or else in the equally unnatural one who is always talking about its white
robes. Both alike die young,
and are equally unreal and unpractical."
Yonge and her peers had inherited a very different American culture than
the one experienced by their New England Puritan ancestors.
In a nation consumed with expansion, industrialization, and
urbanization, there was very little time for children to engage in morbid
self-scrutiny. The shapers
of the early republic, influenced by Jean JacquesRousseau's theories of childhood
innocence and John Locke's essays on free will, wanted their children to
focus on learning hard work and self-control, and they expected these values
to feature prominently in the literature that was written for the young.
Deacon Nathaniel Willis, publisher of The
Youth's Companion, the most successful of nineteenth-century children's
periodicals, set the tone for a new generation of children's authors in the
inaugural issue of the magazine, dated April 1827:
This is a day of peculiar care for Youth....
Patriots and philanthropists are making rapid improvements
in every branch of education.
Literature, science, liberty and religion are extending on the earth.
The human mind is becoming emancipated from the bondage of
ignorance and superstition.
Our children are born to higher destinies than their fathers; they will
be actors in a far advanced period of the church and the world.
Let their minds be formed, their hearts prepared, and their
character moulded for the scenes and duties of a brighter day.
It was at this time that the themes of children’s literature became highly
divided, based upon gender.
Boys, who were intended to follow “the higher destinies” referred to by
Willis, were treated to texts in which industrious young men raised themselves
from poverty into affluence.
In the realm of girls’ literature, the American girl became what might be
called "the little educator," or what Sarah Lesley, an antebellum critic
of children's fiction, labeled "'the little prig.'"
Still pious and virtuous, the child heroine was shown
to prepare for her role as a dutiful wife and mother by escorting everyone
within her reach through "the school of virtue."
Unfortunately, this made for a very dull body of work.
Anne Scott MacLeod, an expert in antebellum children's literature,
describes the reasoning behind the serious tone of girls’ and boys’ literature:
No one can make a claim for the literary merit of this fiction:
there was none....
The characteristically sober tone of all the literature [was] a natural
consequence of the authors' view of the purpose of childhood, which was serious
in the extreme. Childhood was
wholly preparation, entirely a moral training ground for adult life.
Frivolity, imaginative play, and uninstructive entertainment
were dismissed, not so much because they were sinful as because they wasted
the brief, precious time in which a child must learn so much that was so important.
In addition to countless tracts in which heroines saved their fathers from
drink -- Female Influence, or
The Temperance Girl being a typical title -- there were the stories of
the enterprising and efficient young girl who helped to provide for her family.
In Catherine Maria Sedgwick's
The Poor Man, and the Rich Poor Man, for instance, a young daughter
"tacks worsted binding together for Venetian blinds whereby she got from
a manufacturer...two shillings a week, and at the same time, she teaches
a sister, something more than two years younger, the multiplication table."
The antebellum heroine was typically home-bound, even
if she worked, and she accepted her role without question.
Entertainment made its way into nineteenth-century Children’s and Adolescent
Literature in two ways: through
the fairytale and through the adventure series.
Fairytales originated from folklore – a
folktale
is a story that circulates orally without having been written down.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, authors such
as Giambattista Basile and Shakespeare began to incorporate folklore into
their stories and plays. By
the nineteenth century, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and other scholars
had recorded volumes of folklore that had been circulating in Europe for
thousands of years. Modern scholars
estimate that there are over 400 versions of “Cinderella,” the first being
a Chinese rendition that is thousands of years old.
A
fairytale
is a story that was once an oral folktale, but has at some point in its
history been written down and printed as a published text.
In modern times, authors such as Hans Christian Andersen have
written fairytales based upon the format of folklore, and producers such as
Walt Disney have adapted fairytales and folklore to the movie format.
Another term for an adaptation or a version of a fairytale
is the word
variant
. Thus, we can say that The
Brothers Grimm’s “The Frog Prince” and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
are variants of Tale Type 425, The Search for the Lost Husband, Sub-type
I, The Monster as Husband.
Characters in fairytales are usually one dimensional in nature – they are
either good or bad. On a very
basic level, fairytales operate on the principle of wish fulfillment.
The conflicts in fairytales usually center on the injustice
that is perpetrated against a good character and the way in which that character
restores his/her power. Typically,
good characters are rewarded, and bad characters are punished.
The fact that fairytales are didactic in nature did
not prevent Puritan and early colonial parents from disapproving of the genre.
The intervention of magical characters, the absence of a Christian
God, and the tendency for children to be represented as powerful agents of
their own destinies were all threatening to the Puritan belief system.
However, by the nineteenth century, standards had lessened,
and the fairytales of Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen
became part of most American children’s libraries.
Another change in children’s literature also heralded a balance between
didacticism and entertainment.
In the mid-1850’s, a number of publishers began to print adventure tales
for boys in series form – thus began the
sub-genre
of children’s
series fiction
.. For as little as 5 cents,
a child could read about the industrious exploits of Ned Nevins, the Newsboy
or Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.
Later in the century, Twain’s TomSawyer seemed to glorify
disobedience. Sometimes, the
action in boys’ adventure series became bizarre and morbid, as is the case
in the popular Peck's Red-headed Boy
, where a gang of youths is shown tying a stick of dynamite to a stray mutt's
tail and shouting with glee as "the sky rained dog.'"
Clearly, didacticism was increasingly a tempered presence
in American children’s fiction.
Children particularly appreciated series fiction because it contained predictable
plots and predictable characters.
John Cawelti, a prominent literary critic, has noted that children enjoy
series texts because they take comfort in knowing what comes next.
This may explain why young readers will spend so much time
reading and re-reading Goosebumps novels, the Harry Potter series,
and Nancy Drew mysteries.
Even though these texts include adventure and suspense, they also end with
order restored and with praise heaped upon the hero or heroine.
Literature for children quite obviously changed over the centuries
so that now most texts are designed to spark a child’s imagination, while
teaching a modest lesson.
2.
What changes in society influenced twentieth-century authors of Children’s
and Adolescent Literature to begin focusing on the young person’s point of
view?
Contemporary ideas of childrearing, which place childhood in a privileged
position, had their beginnings in the Enlightenment era of the 18th
century, when such philosophers as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau
began to put forth theories on how children developed.
Locke argued that children were born with “blank slates” and
that their personalities were formed through experience.
This theory placed more responsibility for a child’s behavior
on the parents; after all, if a child were born with a blank slate and grew
into a selfish, loudmouth, obviously, the environment in which the child was
raised would be to blame. Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s ideas, which were published soon after Locke’s treatises
on childhood, took a different slant:
Rousseau argued that children were born with an innate sense of right
and wrong and an innate plan for healthy, orderly growth.
Although this view contrasted with Locke’s theory of the blank
slate, it did perpetuate the idea that if a child “went bad,” it was because
something was wrong in the environment that meddled with the child’s natural
morality. As these ideas took
root, middle class colonial parents began to question the way that they
were raising their children.
As a result, parents and educators began to advocate the idea that childhood
was a separate, delicate stage of development, and they began to extend the
time of childhood and to alter children’s daily routines.
In the nineteenth century, legislation in this vein increased
the amount of schooling a child was to have by law, and it made child labor
illegal.
By the early twentieth-century, the field of child psychology was pioneered
by such luminaries as Freud, Hall, Piaget, and Erickson.
Although their theories differed slightly, all of these scientists
argued that children grew through a series of developmental stages until they
reached maturity. Their theories
recognized that human development takes place over time and is influenced
by such factors as nutrition, home life, education, and socio-economic status.
Another important development in the twentieth century was the increase
in what people back then called
“peer culture.”
As families began to move to urban areas and as a K-10 education
became mandatory, children spent more time with each other, on average, than
with their families. As a result,
they began to pay attention to their peers’ ideas and opinions.
By the 1920s, some cultural commentators dubbed this concept
“youth culture” or “peer culture,” and to call its participants “teenagers.”
While many adults did not relish the fact that their children
were becoming more free in expressing their desires or making their own decisions,
the manufacturers of clothes, jewelry, cosmetics, sporting gear, and BOOKS
started to take advantage of this new market niche.
Increasingly, the teenage viewpoint was solicited and commented
upon in major newspapers and magazines.
With the introduction of films and TV, teenage culture became the focus
of the entertainment industry, as well.
For the first time in recorded history, the viewpoint of the child
and adolescent was at the center of the culture.
Authors of children’s literature responded to this trend by writing more
“realistic” texts in which young people’s slang, music, fashion, and relationships
took center stage. Especially
with the publication of Judy Blume’s 1970 novel Are You There God?
It’s Me, Margaret, such themes as sexual development and
social rebellion ushered in the “teen
problem novel
,” a sub-genre that focused on a particular adolescent concern.
While these novels were momentarily popular, most of them
faded from the public realm once the particular problem in question – teen
drinking, for instance – was overshadowed by another problem, such as teen
drug use or sexual abuse. Nevertheless,
the idea that young readers should be provided with literature that addressed
their cultural reality marked a departure from the early didactic novels,
in which children and adolescents lived a utopian existence and were never
faced with major social problems.
Another major change in children’s and adolescent literature occurred in
the 1970s and 1980s, when black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American authors
broke through the publishing industry’s “glass ceiling” and began to write
novels intended to portray “minorities” in a realistic light.
Mildred Taylor’s Newbery Award winning 1975 novel Roll
of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a perfect example of this new trend.
Her protagonist, Cassie Logan, a young black girl growing
up in 1930s Mississippi, describes the hurt of receiving second-class school
books, of having to walk to school, while the white children are bussed, and
of having to apologize to a white girl for an offense that she did not commit.
Cassie’s parents help her to understand racism by providing
her (and the reader) with a detailed account of slavery in the U.S. and by
encouraging her to maintain her self-esteem in the face of a racist society.
Such frankness would never have been acceptable to mainstream
publishers in the 1930s, when the novel is set.
However, as the Civil Rights movement took hold, authors were
finally able to write realistically about racism and prejudice.
Most contemporary Children’s and Adolescent Literature is based upon the
following premises:
1.
Children are excellent social observers, whose viewpoints are often more
frank than those of adults.
2.
As readers, children are capable of filtering fantasy from fact; they are
also able to identify with experiences and ideas that are new to them.
3.
Authors have a responsibility to provide realistic life events and moral
dilemmas to their young readers.
Out of these premises has emerged the sub-genre of
Psychological Realism
, a term I use to define current trends in children’s and adolescent literature
in which an emphasis is placed upon the inner life of the protagonist.
Unlike their literary predecessor, the teen problem novel,
texts written using psychological realism tend to focus on the whole life
experience of a character, not just upon a particular problem or social conflict
that the character may be facing.
One of the best ways to interpret these novels is by working from the diagram
below.
Self ---------
Family ------------
Peers -------------- Community
--------------- Larger World
of Ideas
Essentially, a child develops an understanding of the world through an ever-increasing
web of information. First, the
child learns about others by developing relationships with family and with
peers. Then, by attending school
and becoming active in church, club, and sporting events, the child comes
to know his/her community. Finally,
through study and observation, the child learns about the culture’s history
and beliefs, or what I term “the larger world of ideas.”
Under normal circumstances, this development process takes
years; however, when an emotionally traumatic occurrence intrudes into a
child’s life, he/she is often compelled to skip developmental steps and to
confront “the larger world of ideas” before he/she is sufficiently mature.
For example, Ruth White’s novel, Belle Prater’s Boy
, the eleven year-old protagonist Gypsy
has repressed an awful memory – finding her father’s body after he
has shot himself in the face.
Because she was only five years old when she saw this terrible sight, she
is unable to understand the reasons for her father’s actions, and in order
to cope, she creates and comes to believe the idea that her father perished
while working as a volunteer fireman.
Over the years, it becomes harder and harder for Gypsy to suppress
the truth, and in order for her to return to normal functioning, she eventually
accepts her father’s suicide.
Another example can be drawn from Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
, in which ten year-old Cassie Logan witnesses a lynch mob.
In that moment, she is catapulted out of the typical childhood
concerns of friends and school and is forced to face “the larger world of
ideas” – in this case, the racist South in which she lives.
As you read for my class, ask yourself these questions:
At the beginning of the novel, which level of development
has the protagonists reached?
By the end of the novel, how thoroughly has he/she encountered the “larger
world of ideas”? The prominent
conflict in modern children’s and adolescent novels occurs as a protagonist
is lifted out of childhood to face an unpleasant social or cultural reality.
Important Terminology
Bildungsroman:
A narrative that focuses on the intellectual and emotional development of
a character. Typically, the
character goes through various learning experiences before settling on a
vocation and becoming an integrated part of the community.
This genre gained popularity in the eighteenth century, as
novelists began to focus more upon the lives of the common people – especially
upon members of the middle class.
Examples of bildungsromane include:
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, Emma by Jane Austen,
Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man by James Joyce, and Remembrance
of Things Past by Marcel Proust.
Bildungsroman is a German word, combining “bildung,” which means growth
and “roman,” which means novel; a bildungsroman is a novel of growth.
Bildungsromane is the plural form.
In contemporary criticism, the bildungsroman is usually referred
to as the
coming-of-age narrative
.
Caldecott and Newbery Awards:
Named after pioneers in the publication of children’s
literature, the Caldecott Medal for excellence in children’s picture book
illustration (initiated in 1938) and the Newbery Medal for excellence in
children’s literature (initiated in 1922) are awarded annually by the American
Library Association.
A. Questions are raised.
Will Goldilocks find a porridge that is “just right”?
Will the bears be upset that she is eating their food?
B. Partial Answers are given.
Goldilocks finds
that baby bear’s porridge is just right, so she
eats it.
C. Some questions are left
Where are the bears?
Where will Goldilocks take her nap?
Taming Narrative:
A conservative novel sub-genre in which a character is brought in line with
prevailing cultural norms.
Examples include Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Coolidge’s What Katy Did
.