Children's Books
Feb. 13th, 2011 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archer“Careful parents and guardians will want to go through it first to scratch out the epithets “nasty dirty,” “nasty wicked,” “nasty filthy,” where they frequently occur” - from a book review in The Nation, December 1873.
I read it this morning while searching for reviews of Hans Brinker, which I didn't find, but I found this article which was even better because it basically lays out a programmatic statement for children's literature from 1870 on - though I don't think modern people would put it quite like this, it has strong vestiges in the way children's literature is discussed today:
"Children do not desire, and ought not to be furnished, merely realistic pictures of themselves...A boy’s heart craves a hero; and he believes in his hero with all the beautiful literalness and seriousness of early childhood. We mature so soon here, we so soon become self-analytical, sharp, critical, skeptical, that we not only cannot enjoy anything but realism ourselves, but we become incapable of comprehending that the young are imaginative and full of faith, and that for them a moral romance – we use the word “moral” broadly – may be made by a skilful writer of more weight and wider influence than many sermons.”
I danced around the library when I found that quote, because it so exactly sets out the dominant model of children's literature in the second half of the nineteenth century which is integral to my thesis about Heroines in Girls' Literature, 1890-1910.
There seem to be three competing models of children's literature, two of which were born in the nineteenth century and one from rather later on:
1. Children's books should be Sunday School tracts. They should inculcate children with good moral values by stringently excluding all immoral things (drinking, swearing, sexuality - more recently sexism and racism) and featuring, if you will allow me another quote from The Nation's December 1873 issue, "painfully and impossibly good and bad children" who act as models for children.
This model fell out of fashion, oh, 150 years ago, but when people rail against didacticism in children's literature they tend to hammer on it anyway. I guess it's just too good a punching bag to let go. (And, to be fair, there's a subset of Evangelicals who still eat this stuff up like candy. They're the ones who complain that Harry Potter is a bad role model because he sometimes breaks rules; they are responsible for the reissue of the Elsie Dinsmore books a few years ago. This latter concerns me for their children.)
2. Children's books should be a pleasure garden, a fun place where children can have a good time. They should be clear of snakes, or at least only contain small and unpoisonous snakes, and they should inculcate good values by gentle hints and lovable but fallible heroes rather than sermons and impossibly good children.
This is the model that came to prominence around 1870 - I'm actually borrowing the pleasure garden metaphor from Mary Mapes Dodge, who edited St. Nicholas, which was the premier children's magazine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It remains, with minor changes (the specific snakes have changed), the main model for children's books and fairly common for YA.
3. This third model is mainly YA, althought some children's books fit the bill: the public service announcement, which are books where the snakes have taken over. Children's versions deal with divorce a lot; YA versions deal with, like, everything, although books about mental illness and suicide seem to be popular right now. (Seriously. Why all the suicide books?)
This is probably the most controversial model. ("Only probably?" you say. Yes. The Sunday School tracts take enormous vitriol for not merely boring but actively harming children.)
Which brings me, finally, to the recent dust-up about Bitch's list of recommended YA books for the feminist reader. (Abigail Nussbaum offers a comprehensive analysis of the whole thing.) My question is this: why on earth did someone read Living Dead Girl and say, "A book about a sex slave who is grooming her successor for her master the serial killer! Clearly we must publish this in a manner that specifically recommends it to the twelve to fifteen crowd!"
Because to me, Living Dead Girl seems obviously an adult book. The only thing that suggests it might be YA is the age of the heroine, which is the worst criteria ever. Are the Kushiel books YA now, too? Phedre's a teenager all through the first one.
And I read Kushiel when I was 15/16. (The first two, anyway; I bailed on the third, because it was just too awful.) I have no problem with teenagers diving into the adult section of the library if they want to. But I am doubtful of the value of entirely erasing the boundary between young adult and adult novels. Surely there's value in having a garden, provided you can leave it?
I read it this morning while searching for reviews of Hans Brinker, which I didn't find, but I found this article which was even better because it basically lays out a programmatic statement for children's literature from 1870 on - though I don't think modern people would put it quite like this, it has strong vestiges in the way children's literature is discussed today:
"Children do not desire, and ought not to be furnished, merely realistic pictures of themselves...A boy’s heart craves a hero; and he believes in his hero with all the beautiful literalness and seriousness of early childhood. We mature so soon here, we so soon become self-analytical, sharp, critical, skeptical, that we not only cannot enjoy anything but realism ourselves, but we become incapable of comprehending that the young are imaginative and full of faith, and that for them a moral romance – we use the word “moral” broadly – may be made by a skilful writer of more weight and wider influence than many sermons.”
I danced around the library when I found that quote, because it so exactly sets out the dominant model of children's literature in the second half of the nineteenth century which is integral to my thesis about Heroines in Girls' Literature, 1890-1910.
There seem to be three competing models of children's literature, two of which were born in the nineteenth century and one from rather later on:
1. Children's books should be Sunday School tracts. They should inculcate children with good moral values by stringently excluding all immoral things (drinking, swearing, sexuality - more recently sexism and racism) and featuring, if you will allow me another quote from The Nation's December 1873 issue, "painfully and impossibly good and bad children" who act as models for children.
This model fell out of fashion, oh, 150 years ago, but when people rail against didacticism in children's literature they tend to hammer on it anyway. I guess it's just too good a punching bag to let go. (And, to be fair, there's a subset of Evangelicals who still eat this stuff up like candy. They're the ones who complain that Harry Potter is a bad role model because he sometimes breaks rules; they are responsible for the reissue of the Elsie Dinsmore books a few years ago. This latter concerns me for their children.)
2. Children's books should be a pleasure garden, a fun place where children can have a good time. They should be clear of snakes, or at least only contain small and unpoisonous snakes, and they should inculcate good values by gentle hints and lovable but fallible heroes rather than sermons and impossibly good children.
This is the model that came to prominence around 1870 - I'm actually borrowing the pleasure garden metaphor from Mary Mapes Dodge, who edited St. Nicholas, which was the premier children's magazine of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It remains, with minor changes (the specific snakes have changed), the main model for children's books and fairly common for YA.
3. This third model is mainly YA, althought some children's books fit the bill: the public service announcement, which are books where the snakes have taken over. Children's versions deal with divorce a lot; YA versions deal with, like, everything, although books about mental illness and suicide seem to be popular right now. (Seriously. Why all the suicide books?)
This is probably the most controversial model. ("Only probably?" you say. Yes. The Sunday School tracts take enormous vitriol for not merely boring but actively harming children.)
Which brings me, finally, to the recent dust-up about Bitch's list of recommended YA books for the feminist reader. (Abigail Nussbaum offers a comprehensive analysis of the whole thing.) My question is this: why on earth did someone read Living Dead Girl and say, "A book about a sex slave who is grooming her successor for her master the serial killer! Clearly we must publish this in a manner that specifically recommends it to the twelve to fifteen crowd!"
Because to me, Living Dead Girl seems obviously an adult book. The only thing that suggests it might be YA is the age of the heroine, which is the worst criteria ever. Are the Kushiel books YA now, too? Phedre's a teenager all through the first one.
And I read Kushiel when I was 15/16. (The first two, anyway; I bailed on the third, because it was just too awful.) I have no problem with teenagers diving into the adult section of the library if they want to. But I am doubtful of the value of entirely erasing the boundary between young adult and adult novels. Surely there's value in having a garden, provided you can leave it?
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 03:32 am (UTC)I love how you have expressed this. I certainly think the garden has worth, mostly because I was reluctant to venture very far beyond it when I was a teenager.
Also, thank you for the link about the Bitch list saga - that's not a view I had previously seen expressed, and as I find I agree with her, I'm pleased to see that this hasn't been a one-sided debate.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 10:45 pm (UTC)I've been meaning to reply to your entry! I was glad to see it (and Abigail Nussbaum's entry), because I thought I was the only person in the world who thought the whole thing overblown.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 09:51 pm (UTC)This: A boy’s heart craves a hero; and he believes in his hero with all the beautiful literalness and seriousness of early childhood.
Seems also to be the model that books like King Spruce operate on, though that's written for adults.
Your three categories are so clear, and I see such evidence of them--very nice.
When you talk about kids being harmed by the didactic stuff, how do you mean (other than bored silly)?
no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 11:05 pm (UTC)Re: harmed by the didactic stuff - I think part of this is hyperbole on the part of authors reacting against it: they want to show that the new way is better, and of course it helps if the old way is really, really bad.
But there are two specifics leveled against this Goofus and Gallant-level didactic stuff that I still see sometimes.
First, the good characters are so unbearably priggish that the reader wants to side with the bad kids, who suffer such disproportionate punishments for minor sins - and therefore strict didacticism actually encourages badness because it makes goodness so unattractive.
Second, if the kids don't reject the values in the strictly didactic books, those values are often kind of creepy. I've been reading Elsie Dinsmore for my project, and that book is very big on suffering in silence (even when speaking up would end the suffering at once) and instantaneous, unquestioning obedience.
(It's also controversial purely in the sense that people are super-polarized about it: people who like Sunday school didacticism really like it and think everything should be like it, and people who hate it really hate it.)