Adult Writers: Teaching our Youth (Week 8)

First off, let me apologize for my rambling, maybe a bit off-kilter blog last week. After two 10-11 hour works days in a row and balancing the rest of the week, occasionally add up to really late night and spaced out blogging. Tonight might not be too much better: I've been fighting a migraine since last night and can't seem to shake this throbbing in my head. However, at least it won't be 3 AM, and baby, I'm not lonely.

Alright, enough with the 90s song references.

Like most of the literature we've read so far in my Senior Seminar course, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor is not the stereotypical children's book. When we think children's literature, we think Dr. Seuss and See Spot Run and The Bernstein Bears collections, but in reality, those aren't
really what children read and if we think about it, we know that. We all read books like Little House on the Prairie and  The American Girl book Collections. So why do these come to mind and not books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry which is focused on the racism in a small town?

Maybe it's because we see childhood as a world of innocence that we would rather not tarnish. All we want to see is Spot chasing after his ball, but children are looking for more in their literature. People writing for children understand this. Kelly McDowell states early on in her article ("Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Culturally Specific, Subversive Concept of Child Agency"), that an "adult writer" instructs "the child how the adult world desires her to be" (Pg. 214) through their works. We discussed the same thing when it came to faery tales and it still rings true in modern works. We've seen it in Little House when Laura questions the world and is considered the bad one and Mary, who is subservient and quiet, is considered the good one.

I could point out in everything we've read that could children learn (including disembowelment and thievery), but in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry I think children learn a much harsher lesson than in the other books. They learn the terror of racism in a descriptive and powerful manner. Men get burned to death and lynchings are barely avoided let alone the fact that children on the end of ugly teasing (harassment?) dig a ditch to trap a bus full of children in it. Through out this book violence and vulgarity seem to breed the same. The characters on either side of the race argument are tearing at one another in any way the kind in a small town civil war of sorts. These are hard things for children to handle and a part of me wonders what they take out of this book. Is it violence as an answer? Or do they see the destruction in the hate and seek out ways to handle society in a productive manner? I like to think the author is pointing out how the world shouldn't be, but will children take it that way?

Retrograding Childhoods (Week 2)

“Historians of childhood have debated whether a concept of the child, as an individual with unique needs as opposed to a miniature adult, actually existed.”

This quote from Patricia Demers’s From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1850 really struck me the first time I read it. So much so that I read it out loud to my boyfriend (then had him read it to himself when he didn’t hear me the first time). It makes sense, however, that there may not have originally been any idea of what we would consider childhood. Children for the longest time were “miniature adults”, as we talked about last week. They started out working right away and the stories began as a way to learn about the world around them.

Stories moved into a more education based eventually teaching what we would see as things of importance: the alphabet, math, sciences, etc to children and nowadays books are usually entertainment based for children. However, since children are becoming more adult-like ever maybe our stories should be returned to our original fairytale format: teaching children how to survival in the way of the world.

More and more of our youth are returning to how society used to be or acting as adult as they feel possible: sex and pregnancies at pre-teen years, becoming violent, doing drugs, drinking alcohol etc. We can see this through multiple examples from the internet, like Millie. Are we returning to our past where children had no childhood? Is childhood becoming unneeded or even perhaps, unwanted?

If this is the case, will our youth’s stories and readings return to their original fairy tale state?

We already know that several countries never had childhood for their youths, because the children still work immediately or must fight to survive in a harsh world. Does this mean their stories and literature are still much different from ours? Admittedly, I would love to learn more about it myself. Below are some articles are today’s childhood or the lack of it.

Articles:
Childhood in Britain ‘ruined by lack of outdoor play and aggressive advertising’
Children with no childhood
Theories of Childhood
Children Without Childhood

Twisted Tales with a Modern Twist (Week One)

Little Red Riding Hood, the symbol of naivety growing into maturity (even if a little prematurely), is played with often these days. Just look up “Red Riding Hood” on Netflix: you get a several horror movies, Into the Woods (a musical), and a children’s cartoon version featuring the creepy Bratz dolls. She’s even a popular Halloween costume.  Because every one is looking for their Big Bad Wolf to blow down their innocence.

But really, she isn’t the only character getting a make over. We’ve probably all seen the make over of Beauty and the Beast  in New York with sewers and a district attorney or the new popular Once Upon a Time or the other legions of remakes. However, the best remakes seem to be in comic style.

A current webcomic called Erstwhile is three young female artists who take turns revising fairy tales in their own words and pictures. They don’t necessarily take the most famous tales either, All Fur  and The Little Shroud  being two of my favorite remakes thus far. The Little Shroud is done with almost complete silence even, only Gina Biggs’s art telling the tale, until the last few pages. Part of why fairy tales done in comic style are so intriguing and genuinely heartwarming (or breaking depending on the tale), is because a soulfully rendered picture can give a thousand more words and much more nuance than a million English majors crammed into one room together.

They can also help create a much different, much more horrifying and still comical fairytale world, like in the Vertigo comic Fables . Here we find our fairy tales heroes and heroines in the throes of an epic civil world which crosses dimensional lines when the fairy tales flee into our world, specifically New York City. The Beast changes into a monster when Beauty is mad at him (which is all the time), Prince Charming is no good cheating rat, and you don’t even want to know what Geppetto is up too. This comic which raises good humor and still puts on a very emotional war, is well delving deep into, even if these aren’t the fairy tales we know and love.

Sure, we find other modern plays on the fairy tales, such as John Connelly’s The Book of Lost Things  (a good read about a little boy who must fight a world of twisted fairy tales to save his mother), but these comic renditions really give us a good view of the other world. Besides that, they help us suspend disbelief: we see the giants, the witches, and the monsters. We have some proof, showing us that what goes bump in the night really can creep up on us.