The Uncanny in Children's Literature

Abstract

The Uncanny in Children's Literature Roberta Seelinger Trites "All our stories are about what happens to our wishes," Judith Robertson quotes in her essay in this issue, "What Happens to Our Wishes: Magical Thinking in Harry Potter" (38). The story of the production and success of Harry Potter serves as an accurate metaphor for what has happened to the wishes in the field of children's literature: the discipline that once lived under the stairs of the Great White Male Canon has emerged from the closet and now soars on a broomstick made of multiple international journals, prominence in the MLA, NEH seminars, and book sales higher in the last decade than in any other era in the history of children's book publishing. By 1999, the Harry Potter books brought the success of children's literature to national attention. Many of us in the field have reveled in the attention brought by the books and the movie. The commercial tie-ins may be painful for the Marxists among us, but we rationalize it to ourselves that at least the books have children reading. And if some of us are still curmudgeonly about the books, wondering why this particular set of derivative novels has generated so much more enthusiasm than other, better written series, at least we've had the good sense to still appreciate (albeit occasionally grudgingly) the international attention to children's literature. Robertson's essay on wish-fulfillment in Harry Potter takes on one of the most important principles that motivates international children's literature: the unheimlich, the uncanny, that unknowable and unreasonable fear—of death, speculates Heidegger; of castration, speculates Freud—that lurks in the subconscious for everyone. Literature is one way we manage those fears, and Robertson admirably analyzes the ways that J.K. Rowling employs aesthetic tools from the Gothic to hyperrealism to demonstrate how literature for children deals with the unheimlich. The unheimlich, too, lies at the heart of Naomi Wood's essay on Virginia Hamilton's Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush. The protagonist, Tree, is a character filled with fear because of her brother's fatal illness, her mother's abusiveness, and a new presence in her life: the ghost of her uncle. He is the unheimlich personified, and he teaches her how to negotiate the tensions of growing and pain and adulthood and death. Wood argues eloquently that the vehicle with which the text teaches the adolescent to maneuver through the unheimlich is by means of a series of culturally relevant metaphors and symbols that includes the tension between the enclosed space in which the young girl dreams and the autonomy that is realized in fantasies of the freedom wrought by automobiles. Claudia Mills also demonstrates the importance of cultural relevance in how misbehaviors—the enactment of the unheimlich —are medicalized in the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Mills' reading of these books testifies to the ways that texts demonstrate the culturally relevant history of ideas. During the era of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books' greatest popularity, Canadian and American children were treated by adults who frequently believed that their problems were best controlled not through play, not through wild flights of fantasy, not through indulgences of emotion (as the Romantics before that era might have argued), but rather, that children's needs were subjected to the increased medicalization that marked the Modernism of the twentieth century. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle advocates "magic" and "medicine" for miscreant children, but invariably underlying her potions is a belief that something in children—something perhaps defined as the unheimlich —deserves to be repressed. In exploring the internal life of characters and how their thoughts are dialogically depicted by means of various types of discourse, Maria Nikolajeva explains a theory that has relevance for the way that focalizers control the unheimlich through narrative theory. "Imprints of the Mind: The Depiction of Consciousness in Children's Fiction" explores aesthetic depictions of the interior thought processes of characters. What makes these thought processes so essential to the narrative process is their capacity for demonstrating the various narrative strategies writers employ to communicate with the reader about how a character is managing conflict, including the unheimlich. While I am generally...