Home in Children's Fiction: Three Patterns

Abstract

Home in Children's Fiction:Three Patterns Lucy Waddey (bio) Children's attitudes toward home vary from day to day, shifting with the tides of parental demands, pressures from the outside world, and inner confusion and change. Good children's fiction reflects this mixture of attitudes, but being art, imposes some order on the chaos of feeling. Although so deep and subtle a subject as home eludes any final categories, the artistic use of home as both a setting and theme in children's fiction falls into three basic patterns: home as a frame, home as a focus, and home as an evolving reflection of the protagonist. As soon as a child begins to walk and talk, he explores his home. Then he begins to chafe at the enclosure of his backyard, and finds that interesting things happen away from home. Because home is his anchor and refuge, he feels free to explore. Peter Rabbit, an archetypal child-figure, leaves home deliberately to experience adventure, but returns gratefully to the sandy rabbit-hole. Jeremy Fisher, Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Thumb, and Hunca Munca, while not themselves child-figures, also survive many dangers away from home and are glad to get back; they reveal Beatrix Potter's keen understanding of a child's two-sided attitude toward exploration, the love of adventure and need of security. We might call this pattern the Odyssean one, and it shapes not only books for young children but also many folk fairy tales and tales of high fantasy. In books with this Odyssean pattern, home is also usually an important theme. The characters in such books romanticize their homes; their memories invest the simplest hut with rich beauty, because there they are safe and there they truly belong. In the Prydain books, each time Taran leaves Caer Dallben, it is with a mixture of reluctance and eagerness, and the measure of his danger and discomfort is his memory of the security of Coll's garden, Hen Wen's pen, and even Eilonwy's insults. Gradually his longing to be a hero dissolves into his longing merely to be safe again at Caer Dallben. Other characters—Flewddur Fflam, Doli, and even Glew—experience the same longing. The theme of home as revealed in the attitudes of such Odyssean characters as these keeps the books from being merely picaresque fantasies; home is the point of the compass which draws their circle true, and their realization of that makes their adventures meaningful. In many children's books, of course, home itself is the all important setting, and the events which happen there also provide the primary theme. The grande dame of these books is Little Women, and we can trace a line of descent through the Little Mouse books, and Homer Price, to Judy Blume's books. In these plots, home Click for larger view View full resolution Illustration by Arthur Rackham in The Wine in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (The Heritage Press, 1940). is the beginning, middle, and end, an objective reality, a place where important things happen, unromanticized by distance. We might call this the Oedipal pattern, and we need not be too wary of the Freudian implications of the term, for in Freudian psychology there is nothing inherently wrong with Oedipal longings. It is the attitudes, rather, of parents and children toward those longings which make them more or less dangerous. Just so the Oedipal pattern in children's books. The girls in Little Women love their home and each other; the Little House books, too, are cozy and pleasant in the attitudes they reflect. But in more recent fiction, attitudes toward home and parents have changed; indeed, one mark of contemporary realism for children is its ambivalent depiction of home and family life. Now we have Harriet the Spy, whose home is a safe haven, but whose parents are always going out, and who eventually must see a psychiatrist to find out why she can't relate. Or we have M. C. Higgins, who can find solitude and a sense of power at the top of a pole, but who learns eventually to accept his home. Mary Call Luther in Where the Lillies Bloom...