"Bridge" Texts: The Rhetoric of Persuasion in American Children's Realist and Historical Fiction

Abstract

Literal come in many styles and may be struc- tures as makeshift as a plank thrown over a stream or as complex as the Golden Gate Bridge. Associated with them in our cultural consciousness are activities and images as diverse as long lines of automobiles at rush hour, terrify- ing car chases during gangster films, or the lone presence of a potential suicide perched precariously atop a high suspension bridge. As symbolic tropes, signify simple transitions, complex challenges, even impossible hurdles. Early in our lives we are warned, Don't cross that bridge till you come to it; politicians speak of bridg- ing the gap between one constituency and another; and media trainers who wish to prepare their clients for a bar- rage of hostile questions by reporters teach them to con- struct bridges as rhetorical strategies for controlling negative traffic.2 Both literal and symbolic abound in books for children. Bridges dot the landscape of children's lit- erature as early as Three Billy-goats Gruff, who suc- ceed in outwitting the great ugly Troll on his archetypal bridge.3 The tradition of rhetorical bridging goes back at least to the nineteenth century, with its use of narrative direct address to the reader and anthropomorphized ani- mals or fantasy figures as ways of dealing with change, disorientation, or death. In fairy tales and Alice in Wonder- land, for example, adult narrators customarily condescend to their protagonists and readers—in parentheses or ex- planatory asides. The goal with such narrative bridges is to mediate the child-reader's experience and soften the blow. These techniques of direct intervention have con- tinued, to some extent, into the present, but they are used much more in fantasy or mixed genres than in the realis- tic, historic, or autobiographical texts that I am consid- ering, in which first-person (immediate or retrospective) narration predominates and the author therefore cannot intercede in her own voice or introduce gratuitously fan-