Children's Classics and the Critics

Abstract

Children's Classics and the Critics Susan R. Gannon (bio) Bingham, Jane M. , ed. Writers for Children: Critical Studies of Major Authors Since the Seventeenth Century. New York: Scribner's, 1988. Frey, Charles, and John Griffith . The Literary Heritage of Childhood: An Appraisal of Children's Classics in the Western Tradition. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987. Perhaps it is not surprising that the best essays in both Writers for Children and The Literary Heritage of Childhood tend to be narrowly focused. Children's classics are often strange and puzzling books, very much one-of-a-kind. They don't yield up their secrets easily, and that is probably part of their charm. So the stereotypical reference book article—a dash of psychobiography, a smidgeon of plot summary, and a pinch of thematics—simply won't do for a survey of the classics. These two new books are welcome additions to the reference shelf because—at their best—they treat the masterworks of children's literature with due respect for their uniqueness and their individuality. Frey and Griffith characterize their own approach to the classics in The Literary Heritage of Childhood as "eclectic." They look at the values expressed in Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and Kim, study the biographical background of Wilder's work, and offer "psycho-sexual" readings of Barrie and Andersen. Many of their pieces, like those on Marie Le Prince de Beaumont's Beauty and the Beast or Newbery's Mother Goose's Melody are no more than brief introductory notes, while others, like those on Stevenson and Spyri, are more ambitious. Frey and Griffith are refreshing in their willingness to raise questions they cannot completely answer and to leave the strangeness of some of the works they discuss unexplained. They appear to "find less prettiness or innocence or even conventional happiness in children's readings" than "disruptive energy, rapid and shocking experience, and persistent revelations of contradictions and strangeness at the core of personal, familial, and social life." Their readings thus often stress the contradictions at the heart of familiar works. Their piece on Heidi, for example, suggests that though people often think of the book as all sweetness and light, it is "Spyri's imaginative response to pain, of a definite, peculiar sort." It is, they believe, "for and about, not just nice people, but people who suffer from the need to be nice." Spyri's story can appeal to those who "thrill to the thought of a good little girl whom everyone loves—but who feel, too, the allure of a mountain fastness where love and responsibility can be blown away in a mighty wind that shakes the firs like toys." And Frey and Griffith see marriage in Little Women as representing both fulfillment of a sort, and "a kind of submission to mortality." For "on a certain deep level, not fully acknowledged, the idyl of Little Women suggests that with marriage 'the shades of the prison-house begin to close.'" Frey and Griffith's command of the criticism in their field is evident, for example, in their piece on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But presumably out of deference to the audience they envision of "general readers—perhaps even some youthful ones—" as well as "teachers, students, librarians, and others interested in children's books," their critical sources are silently assimilated rather than footnoted, and the bibliography at the end of the text is skimpy. Surely a book like this would only have been strengthened by the inclusion of individual bibliographies for each of the works covered. (I have never understood why the general reader is thought to be put off by bibliographies. They are easy to skip when they don't interest the reader, and a godsend when they do.) The index of this book is helpful and unusually detailed, offering cross references according to theme which might be especially welcome to teachers. (Sample headings include: "nature," "morality," "love," "didacticism," "humor," "hunger," "identity," "satire," "revenge.") General readers will find this book accessible and interesting, though the essays often read like excerpts from a clever and helpful teacher's guide to a children's literature survey text. In fact—with the addition of some appropriate...