Mere Creatures: A Study of Modern Fantasy Tales for Children by Elliott Gose

Abstract

Elliott Gose, Mere Creatures: A Study of Modern Fantasy Tales for Children (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 202. $13.95 The animal story has often served as an argument in favour of following Nature, yet the validity of Nature as a model was questioned by J. S. Mill a long time ago when he argued that man’s duty was to improve Nature, not to follow it. Despite Mill’s essay, writers and critics of children’s literature con­ tinue to see a “natural” link between children and animals, and often place “truths” about human nature in the “other” world of the animal. That children identify with and are attracted to animals is taken for granted by Elliott Gose; that children also recognize and are comforted by the dif­ ference between themselves and animals he also acknowledges. How many children really cry when Bambi’s mother is shot? In Charlotte’s Web, a spider, not a child, dies. The very difference makes the subject of death accessible. Even when restricting ourselves to the human, we initially reassure our chil­ dren that only the very old, not the young, die. But the difference between humans and mere creatures makes Gose’s subject — the use of fantasy to help us arrive at psychic truths — more troublesome than his argument suggests. Perhaps by using this form, we also avoid psychic truths. From Aesop’s Fables to Watership Down, the animal tale has certainly served to confirm man’s view of himself, but children are not male only, and what are the psychic truths for female readers of Watership Down? Gose may well begin by accounting for the appeal of animal existence as “lower and thus less than human but. . . also simply other and thus potentially more than human,” but a study that cites Bruno Bettelheim and has an appendix based on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces proves to be oblivious to the female reader’s experi­ ence. The only heroine examined is Dorothy of the Oz books and, not sur­ prisingly, we soon read that she does not fit Gose’s thesis as snugly as the male protagonists. Even the phrasing, “other . . . more than human,” is ominously like Victorian vocabulary for viewing women. Gose is interested in how readers and characters achieve “a sense of the self.” The term comes from D. W. Winnicott whose theories of play are dis­ cussed and placed in the context of C. J. Jung’s individuation process and Bettelheim’s concept of integration. In addition to his concern with depth psychology, Gose is keenly aware of how fairy tale patterns are frequently utilized in these tales. The author of The World of the Irish Wonder Tale, Gose is very sensitive to the reappearing patterns and to the prominence of the trickster figure. It is these three subjects — depth psychology, fairy tale pat­ terns, and the trickster — that unite his examination of ten texts, but the unity and coherence of his text (old-fashioned terms, but ones he seems to believe in) are threatened when he states his aim: “I will be adapting some general­ ized findings of depth psychology, applied to fairy-tale and myth, to provide 352 insight into the literary qualities of the books: their use of language, charac­ terization, theme, and plot structure.” Who is the intended reader of Mere Creatures, a student of children’s literature or a reader totally unaware of psychological vocabulary and children’s books? The excessive summary and repetition, both of plot and theory, implies a reader ignorant of both psychol­ ogy and children’s literature. The ten works discussed, Just So Stories, Winniethe -Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, The Jungle Book, The Wizard of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Mouse and His Child, Watership Down, and The Hobbit, with the possible exception of Ozma of Oz and The Mouse and His Child, are all familiar to Canadian students of children’s literature. In his Acknowledgments Gose gives credit to his own students of children’s litera­ ture, and while a concern with literary qualities might well be the object of a course, would such students require so much plot...