Children’s Literature: the Bad Seed

Recently I began an address at Longfellow Hall, Harvard, by calling on the audience, most of whom were prospective teachers, to picket the English department. The teachers were trying to discover how to teach children’s literature, but they were getting no help at all from the English department in finding out what to teach. The English department at Harvard should be among those taking the intellectual leadership for the entire country in the study of the literature for the future generation. Yet it totally ignores the field of children’s literature—for children’s literature is not a genre but an entire field.

I am not alone in deploring the exclusion of children’s literature from the canon of most English departments. In the February, 1977 issue of ADE, A Journal for Administrators of Departments of English in American and Canadian Colleges and Universities, Professor Mary Agnes Taylor deplored the “outdated snobbery” of English departments which ignore the field. In an essay, “The Case for a Children’s Literature,” appearing in the journal, Children’s Literature, Clifton Fadiman noted that “literary historians leave out children’s literature, as they might leave out the “literature” of pidgin-English”:

The English novelist Geoffrey Trease offers a key example. He refers to “Legouis and Cazamian’s History of English Literature, in which no space is found, in 1378 pages, for any discussion of children’s books and the only Thomas Hughes mentioned is not the immortal author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, but an obscure Elizabethan tragedian.” Further examples are legion. . . C.Hugh Holman’s A Handbook to Literature (1972) is alert to inform us about weighty literary matters from abecedarius to zeugma, but not about children’s literature.

In the same essay, Fadiman championed the validity of the field on the basis that it has a long tradition, many masterpieces, and that children’s literature is a medium nicely adapted to the development of certain genres such as fantasy to which mainstream media are less well suited.

Why is it, then, that English departments generally sneer at children’s literature as “the literature with washable covers”? Through my experiences in teaching children’s literature for 15 years in an English department, founding the initial seminar on children’s literature of the Modern Language Association, and establishing a journal in the field, I think I have confronted the major objections. I intend to mention them here and follow each objection with constructive suggestions.

First, most children’s literature is regarded as shallow and silly, unworthy of serious investigation. Second, it is associated with women, who bear children and are close to them at home and in schools and libraries in the early years. Third, not only scholars but other adults have subconscious resentment of those who will succeed them. Consequently, they minimize the importance of children’s literature.

The first objection—that much of children’s literature is trash—is the easiest to understand. Many children’s books are trash—but so are many books for adults. I said “books” advisedly, because no real distinction is attempted yet between children’s literature of high seriousness and books that are trivial—at least, no such distinction is attempted by most scholars in English departments. Books like Alice-in-Wonderland, The Golden Key, The Wind in the Willows, the Beatrix Potter books, and the more contemporary classics like A Wrinkle in Time, Charlotte’s Web, and Where the Wild Things Are are considered indiscriminately with such books as Mommy and Daddy are Divorced or Sometimes I Don’t Love My Mother, that is, books that are not literature but propagandistic treatises.

Scholars of English literature are understandably confused because they see these pedagogical books reviewed in popular and semi-popular journals as if they were literature. The first step, then, in gaining the respect of English departments for the field, is to differentiate between literature of quality for children and mere books. Only then can clear critical judgments be made.

It might well be helpful to understand how this confusion between “literature” and “books” for children arose. Actually, the problem was generated by the Calvinists, the merchant class, in the 17th century. Branching out from the stories, the ballads, and the plays which children and adults had heretofore enjoyed together, the Calvinists brought out pamphlets or chapbooks designed to keep young apprentices under control. Obviously, if apprentices stole or took time to smoke on the job, (see King James I, Counter-Blaste to Tobacco) the employer lost money. As a result, a number of books were published such as The marchants avizo (1589), The apprentices warning-piece (1641), and A Warning to young men (1680). The books must have been effective in controlling behavior, because at about the same time a large number of similar books were directed at younger children, culminating in James Janeway’s A token for children (1671), an account of the agonizing deaths of 13 children. As an appendix to Janeway’s famous work, Cotton Mather added accounts of seven children from New England, and this work was published in Boston in 1700. (A unique copy is now in the Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts.)

The publication of such books continued uninterrupted through the 17th and 18th centuries and led directly into the Sunday School literature of the late 18th and 19th centuries. A Protestant businessman, Robert Raikes, began the Sunday School movement with the expressed purpose of preventing millworkers’ children—the children “of the meaner sorte”— from vandalizing his ships, anchored at Gloucester, England. The children worked during the week, and Sunday was their day off. Biographers of Raikes (W. F. Lloyd, New York, 1891, J.Henry Harris, New York and Bristol, England, 1899, and Alfred Gregory, London, 1877), and other writers praise Raikes for beginning Sunday Schools, relate how the Sunday School movement spread to the United States through the support of the business community, and sometimes regret the ingratitude of the little children of the sweat shops, who were paid a penny apiece to go to Sunday School and learn of the damnation that awaited them if they did not give their best work to their employers.

The dividing line between the Joyful Death books of the 17th century and the Sunday School literature of the 18th and 19th centuries and the contemporary propagandistic books is almost imperceptible. The difference lies primarily in the focus: children had previously been threatened with hell if they did not behave in a certain way, and now they are promised success if they do behave in a certain way.

A good example is The Queen Who Couldn’t Bake Ginger-bread. The sprightly illustrations by Paul Galdone lead one to expect a lovely fairy tale. Instead, one learns that it is all right to reverse sex roles: that though the Queen could not bake gingerbread, she could play the trumpet, and though the King could not play the trumpet, he could bake gingerbread. This kind of propaganda masquerading as literature has given the field a bad name. In 1968, Carmen Goldings, M. D. , a child psychiatrist at Harvard, wrote an article for the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry (Vol. VII, pp. 377—397) in which she castigated the heavy-handedness of much modern fiction for children. In the words of Narayan Kutty, a Hindu friend of mine, “It sits on the soul.”

II

Of course, scholars in English should be perceptive enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, but, unfortunately, many of them are quite lazy. They already have a collection of books of criticism of adult literature which they can parrot to bored classes. Digging into starkly simple children’s literature and studying the theory behind it, the style, structure, and meaning, is a difficult thing when there are few helpful hints from previous critics. The simplicity of children’s literature stuns, leaves them speechless. Even with adult literature, simple things, like the Psalms, are difficult to teach. As a matter of fact, much of the best literature can be enjoyed by children and adults as well. But more time needs to be spent studying the reason for this—that literature which appeals to this dual audience rises to a higher sophistication in its absolute simplicity. Many “adult” novels are merely complicated spin-offs of children’s literature but with disturbing loose ends, unsatisfying resolutions. Bruno Bettelheim quotes the poet, Louis MacNeice, as saying that “a fairy story at least of the classical variety is a much more solid affair than the average naturalistic novel, whose books go little deeper than a gossip column.”

Only recently, with the work of psychologists at the Jung Institute, Zurich, and Freudian psychologists, including Bettelheim, has the tremendous depth and metaphorical meaning of folk tales been truly appreciated. These tales, which have hitherto been largely discarded as attic rubbish, in Tolkien’s phrase, are beginning to be studied, but an enormous amount of work remains to be done. Those who have spent a lifetime studying them find that they are not only beautiful but that they feed the soul, instead of sitting on it. Bruno Bettelheim has written on The Uses of Enchantment and James Hillman of the Jung Institute for 30 years, a depth psychologist in Zurich, prescribes folk tales to sick adults. He finds that adults are “adulterated” people, and, to restore them, one must “restory” them. Somehow it helps bring the jigsaw puzzles of their minds together. Folk tales, generally regarded as children’s literature, are not only satisfying but therapeutic.

So much for the negative aspects of the field. On the positive side, there are good as well as bad books, just as in adult literature, and there is a tradition of at least three hundred years—longer than that for the adult novel. Further, many famous writers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as well as of our own times have shown a special interest in the world of the child. Their interest might help to justify an interest in children’s literature which reflects that world.

The many possible selections for a course in 17th-century children’s literature include ballads such as “Babes in the Wood,” “Tom Thumbe,” “The Seven Champions of Christendom,” and “Robin Goodfellow.” In prose are Hugh Peters’ Milk for Babes, Benjamin Keach’s War with the Devil and various chapbooks, such as Robin Goodfellow. Then there are games in the oral tradition, such as “Ring a Ring o’ Roses,” while religious verse includes such books as John Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls: or, Country Rhymes for Children, Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs for Children, and, in the Royalist tradition, a book of metaphysical poetry for children, entitled Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver. (The Opies, in their Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, list many children’s rhymes dating from the 17th century.) Then there are plays ranging from puppet shows to Milton’s Comus. Selections from Sir Roger L’Estrange’s two huge volumes of fables written especially for children are also to be found. Though written “only for childish eares,” as the introduction (1699) to L’Estrange specifically stated, a bowdlerized edition of these fables for adults was printed in Paris in the 1930’s, with Alexander Calder illustrations, and subsequently reprinted by Dover Press. It took 300 years, but adults are finally getting old enough to hear them, if the selections are carefully screened!

The 18th century provides an equally rich course choice of texts ranging from the first school novel in English, Sara Fielding’s The Governess, to The History of Goody Two-Shoes (possibly by Goldsmith), Mother Goose’s Melody (nursery rhymes), Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton, Mary Ann Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pincushion, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, Maria Edgeworth’s The Parent’s Assistant, William Roscoe’s (still reprinted) The Butterfly’s Ball, and Samuel Johnson’s children’s story, “The Fountain.”

In the 19th century we have Charles and Mary Lamb’s Mrs. Leicester’s School, Captain Marryat’s Masterman Ready, John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River, George MacDonald’s wonderful tales such as The Golden Key (a contemporary edition has an Afterword by W. H. Auden), The Light Princess, At the Back of the North Wind, and so on. Then there is Lewis Carroll’s Alice-in-Wonderland, Charles Dickens’ Magic Fishbone, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Rose and the Ring, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days, Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, Mason Weems’ The Life of Washington the Great (particularly his fifth revised edition), Jacob Abbott’s The Franconia Stories (first important work of fiction for American children), Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy, Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales, and Eleanor Gates’ Poor Little Rich Girl, with its interesting uses of language. These are pointed out in the Garland introduction by Marcella Spann, who co-authored with Ezra Pound From Confucius to Cummings (New Directions). Poetry includes Edward Lear’s limericks, Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. These are only suggestions. The list is formidable.

To the 20th century belong Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter’s books, A.A.Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books (actually 1894 and 1895), C.S.Lewis’s Narnia series, P.L.Travers’ Mary Poppins, J. R. R. Tokien’s The Hobbit, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeline, as well as books for children by Walter de la Mare, such as Three Royal Monkeys, and by lonesco, Barthelme, and other well known writers.

Not even included are classics not in English such as the 17th-century Contes de ma Mere l’Oye by Charles Perrault and the volumes of fairy tales of Madame d’Aulnoy and Madame de Beaumont, as well as Madame de Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast,” in her Cabinet des Fees (1785—89). From Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen’s tales could constitute a course in themselves. And from Germany, of course, there are the pervasively influential tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.

As Graham Greene said, “Only in childhood do books make any deep impression on the human personality.” If this is so, then it would seem that the books children hear and read are worth study as literature. Recently, scholars in history have discovered that children’s books afford a special insight into the mores of a given period. Writers tend to write in a relaxed way and in conveying information to children convey information about themselves.

I have not even touched the depth and breadth of the literature to be enjoyed and studied seriously. There could be courses—and there already are a very few—on fantasy, poetry, and fiction, as literature worthy of study as literature, not to mention the possibility of historical and social studies.

So much for the first reason why children’s literature is not respected by English departments—that it is too simple.

III

The second objection to the field is implied rather than voiced, and not so much time need be given to considering the objection because the feminist movement has already provided the refutations. Most professors in English departments are men, and they are unreceptive to children’s literature as a scholarly subject because they are unreceptive to women as scholars. Women and children go together in their minds.

My own experience is a case in point. So far as I can determine, I am the first woman to come up through the ranks to full professor in the large English department at the University of Connecticut since the school was established in 1881. In 1965, or just before the feminist movement became strong, I was flatly told at the University of Connecticut that if I wanted work, I would have to discard my years of study in the Renaissance, forget my publications, and teach children’s literature, as the legislature required a course, and the men refused to teach it. The hostility to the field has abated somewhat because of its great popularity with students and the large enrollment it consequently commands at a time when English departments need students. But, in spite of a supportive chairman, the course has not yet been accepted truly on the undergraduate or graduate level. I have taught a graduate course in the field for several years; and though there is a great need to stimulate graduate enrollment, most of the men have long refused to circulate a pamphlet indicating that if students take the traditional courses, they can, with the approval of their topic by the graduate committee, write their dissertations in the field of children’s literature. They give various reasons for their attitude, but the fact remains that they are quite willing to accept such dissertations sub rosa, but they do not want to acknowledge it publicly, even though many schools, including Harvard, are now accepting dissertations in English departments in the field of children’s literature. Harvard recently approved a dissertation on Kipling’s children’s stories—a real breakthrough, because, as Clifton Fadiman has noted, a history of English literature can discuss the whole of Kipling’s works without noting that he was primarily a children’s writer. The men in the department are willing to advertise their medieval offerings, even though much medieval literature is essentially literature for children and adults, as some medievalist freely acknowledge.

Curiously, in spite of the attitude of most male scholars toward the field, a number of the best male scholars have shown an interest in it. Oxford University furnishes the best example. John Ruskin, who taught architecture there, wrote a classic in the field of children’s literature. Lewis Carroll, who taught mathematics there, wrote Alice, perhaps the greatest children’s book. C. S. Lewis, professor of religious philosophy there, wrote a whole series of books for children and said that “a children’s story is the best art form for something you have to say.” W.H.Auden, who taught poetry at Oxford, wrote criticism of children’s books. And J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon there, wrote, among other books, children’s stories.

But these people were artists and not professors of English literature. Because of their expansive imaginations, they may not have had the academic strictures against the field which inhibit less creative minds.

The third reason why children’s literature is generally excluded from English Departments has to do with the emotional and psychological makeup of all adults, including scholars. In the April, 1978 Harper’s, the editor, Lewis Lapham wrote:

(Children) remind their parents of too much that is unpleasant—of death, time, loss and failure—and so they come to be seen as unwelcome messengers bringing bad news to the prince.

He relates this attitude to literature, in discussing the attitude of well-meaning friends:

How is it possible, they say, that I should choose to read stories to my children when I might have the chance to see Norman Mailer throw a drink at Gore Vidal?

The secret hatred and fear of children on the part of adults is reflected in such popular movies as It’s Alive, The Bad Seed, The Exorcist, and so on, and authorities on psychohistory have related the practice of child abuse in many cases to adult envy and fear of children. Oedipus knew all about it—his father pierced his feet and gave him to shepherds to expose on a mountain. Folk tales are full of it and are metaphorical representations of a continuing psychic condition. In the Brothers Grimm tale of “The Juniper Tree,” an envious stepmother shuts her stepson’s head in a chest, breaking his neck. I recall a similar case in Paris in 1939 when a man, envious of his girlfriend’s little boy, stuck the child’s head in a door and then slammed the door, breaking the boy’s neck. The man was convicted of murder. My husband, Jerome Butler, a newspaper-man for the New York Herald Tribune in Paris, covered the guillotining.

IV

By failing to study or teach children’s literature in a serious way, scholars can do the future generation considerable harm. They leave the field wide open to ignorant critics and pseudo-experts who give bad advice which is passed on to parents and teachers and ultimately affects the psyche of children. Here is an example:

In 1977 a book was published entitled, How Can Children’s Literature Meet the Needs of Modern Children: Fairy Tale and Poetry Today. It contained papers presented at the 15th Congress of the International Board on Books for Young People, held at the Pandios School of Political and Economical Studies in Athens, Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, 1976.

Some of the papers were very, very good, such as that by Walter Scherf on Magic Tales and the richly informative article by Virginia Haviland on Fairy Tales and Creativity. But unfortunately some of the essays were horrid. One in particular is the prototype of bad criticism. The essay, “The Poetry of Early Childhood,” written by Mary Jane Anderson, Executive Secretary of the Children’s Services Division of the American Library Association, illustrates the uninformed nature of much criticism of children’s books and the urgent need for scholars with a knowledge of literature to enter the field.

The ALA official began by commenting that an acquaintance told her of his plans to raise his children on Shakespeare. “No Mother Goose rhymes for them, said he.” I assumed that she was going on to observe that there are a number of the rhymes now known as Mother Goose rhymes in Shakespeare, but instead of that she urged the banishing of most nursery rhymes as not “relevant” to “today’s” child.

Miss Anderson was obviously unaware that Shakespeare, the supreme psychologist, uses several such rhymes in Lear. Towards the end of Act III, when the whole world is tilting over for Lear, Edgar as Mad Tom, who is not mad at all but who has come out of the heath to help Lear, repeats a variant of the rhyme, “There was an old woman / Lived under a hill / If she’s not gone / She lives there still. . . .”—a rhyme that expresses the tragic indifference to old age. The rhyme is “Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill / Halloo, halloo, loo, loo.” After the rhyme about the lonely Pillicock, Mad Tom ends the scene with “Fie, fob, and fum, /I smell the blood of a British man.” In scene vi, Tom confronts Lear with: “Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? / Thy sheep be in the corn; / And for one blast of thy minikin mouth / Thy sheep shall take no harm.”

What Tom is saying to Lear is, Leonard Mendelsohn of Concordia University, Montreal believes, “Yes, the world— and the rhyme—are full of confusion, but there is an overall meaning. If nothing more, the structure of the rhyme itself holds the world together.”

Anyone who knows anything about prosody will see on the most cursory scansion that the rhymes are not doggerel, but a varied and subtle mixture of dactyls, anapests, spondees, iambs, and so on. For this reason, the essayist’s assertion is astonishing that “while some of the rhymes have rhythm, Mother Goose rhymes are, for the most part, simply rhymes:

They do not, on the whole, have what fine poetry has, the power to make the hearer “catch his breath in fear, gasp in wonder, smile with delight, or sit back and think.” Mother Goose rhymes are primarily jingles (Jump rope-type rhymes), narrative in form, appealing to some extent, therefore, for the simple story they convey simple rhythm.

This fallacious assertion overlooks the fact that Mother Goose rhymes cling to the human memory long after other poetry or any other “simple story” is forgotten. The mention of jump-rope rhymes touched a sensitive spot in my experience, for I have spent more than 30 years delving into the depths of these supposedly simply rhymes and have by no means completed my study. At the same time, I can remember when I had her attitude of contempt toward these rhymes and even denied that I was collecting them for myself because they fascinated me, but rather pretended I was collecting them for my daughter—a dodge not new among adults. In the 17th century, Charles Perrault pretended it was his son who was collecting the Tales of Mother Goose.

Ms. Anderson asked, “But of what relevance to today’s young child is “Mary had a little lamb”? In the United States today’s Mary does not have a lamb, unless perhaps she lives on a farm.” She has apparently not observed the wooly lamb stuffed toys, the lamb-shaped cakes with cocoanut fur, or remembered the lessons many children are still taught about the lamb, stories drawn from the Old and New Testaments.

After a comment about not being able to take a lamb on a school bus, this literal-minded lady proceeded to attack other rhymes. Possibly the best comment on this kind of inanity is another quotation from the essayist herself:

Do parents today really want to read to their children the rhyme that begins “Hark, hark the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to town. . .”? Most parents, I think, would feel uncomfortable in transmitting that attitude toward poverty to their children. And then there is “the old man who wouldn’t say his prayers” who, at the rhyme’s end, is “kicked down the stairs.” The punishment does not fit the crime in today’s society, and even if it did, should by its nature be repulsive.

The beggars of the first rhyme still are arriving in Washington, D. C. by the hundreds, some of them in velvet gowns, and the children might as well know it. And the old man in the second rhyme is kicked upstairs again in a topsy-turvy way in which Kornei Chukovsky would delight.

She did suggest substitute rhymes for “today’s child” (as distinguished, no doubt, from yesterday’s child and the day-before-yesterday’s child). In so doing, however, she departed in some instances from the criteria she has listed for rhymes, including making the hearer catch his breath in fear or sit back and think. Here is one of her suggestions—Laura Richard’s “The Baby Goes to Boston,” written originally in 1902, which is, at least, “today’s” century.

What does the train say?
 Jiggle joggle, jiggle joggle!
What does the train say?
 Jiggle joggle jee!
Will the little baby go
Riding with the locomo?
Loky moky poky stoky
Smoky Choky chee!

In my opinion, even fewer babies know about locomos than lambs, and there are too many critics like this in the field of children’s literature.

But at least the volume of criticism is increasing. People are taking more interest in the field. Even Harvard, which won’t permit a course in the subject to be taught in the English department, has nevertheless yielded a little to the current interest, and a volume of literary appreciation of Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White by the eminent critic, Roger Sale, has recently been published.

Jonathan Cott, author of Beyond the Looking Glass and of several articles on children’s literature which have appeared, in of all places—The Rolling Stone — has received a Guggenheim grant to do more work in the field. His interest is forward looking. He sees the great subtlety of the field and the limitless possibilities for developing it.

“Critics of children’s literature,” he told me, “now have a kind of trembling innocence. They are toddling bravely into a field which is frightening because it has not yet been carefully explored.” Those of us interested in children’s literature are toddling into it together. Hopefully, we will make the terrain more familiar to the next round of critics—and children, too.