Young and Old Alike: The Place of Old Women in Two Recent Novels for Children

Abstract

Young and Old Alike:The Place of Old Women in Two Recent Novels for Children Carol Billman (bio) Two old women in contemporary children's literature, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in E. L Konigsburg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Mrs. Harriet Bartholomew in A. Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden,1 are noteworthy extensions of the fictional convention of the elderly storyteller used by a number of nineteenth-century writers for children. These characters are story makers, who present games of historical detection for the children in their novels. Further, these novels raise interesting questions aobut time and the possibility for human beings—both young and old—to conquer its inexorable passage. Mrs. Frankweiler and Mrs. Bartholomew emerge from a long line of old people depicted in children's literature. Endowed with magical power and hence authority over young protagonists, the old characters in many fairy and folk stories are necessary but, ultimately, auxiliary figures, functional but peripheral in their narratives. Some are guides to direct the young in their tasks, like the old grandmother in the Grimms' "The Devil's Three Golden Hairs." Others offer impediments to the protagonists and are frequently introduced at the beginning of stories to "complicate" the narrative drama, like the witch, Old Mother Gomel, in "Rapunzel," the old troll-hag who transforms the prince into a white bear in "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and even the grandmother who is the sine qua non for the confrontation between Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf. The spare style of these tales generally precludes detailed sketches of the aged characters: be they grandmother, witch, or fairy godmother, they are simply "old." And sometimes even that single descriptive word seems superfluous; for example, stepmothers (typically not cast as "old") can perform the same narrative function as the old witch in "Rapunzel." In other words, the two generations ahead of the young protagonist are not always distinguished from each other. Occasionally, however, we learn more about the old characters. In Charles Perrault's "Sleeping Beauty," the old fairy who wished that the princess prick her finger and die has a context: she is flanked by seven young fairies who present good forecasts to the young heroine. Perrault clearly equates old age with black magic; youth, with white. We are even told that the old fairy is a recluse who has not left her tower for fifty years and is therefore believed to be dead or enchanted. In this story explicitly, and elsewhere in the tradition implicitly, age is viewed as freakish when held against the norm: beauty and youth. Like babies born with cauls, the aged are aberrant and, more likely than not, endowed with the same supernatural abilities as the more abnormal trolls and fairies.2 In addition to being freaks, evil and old characters are fools in their efforts to undermine the triumph of the young. They are stupid to think that age and experience (and even magic) can compete with the strength, confidence, and persistence of youth. Finally, as Bruno Bettelheim among many others has pointed out, it must be remembered that these stories reflect in their images—of the old, the handicapped, the powerful, the rival, and so on—the deep-seated fears and beliefs of the culture that produces or perpetuates them.3 Old characters also appear in the sizable body of literature actually written for children throughout the nineteenth century. In her discussion of these characters as they appear in books for Victorian children in England,4 Susan S. Tamke distinguishes three categories of the elderly: wise and moral old people, who by their example instruct children; foolish old people, who go against social and moral dictates of the period in their self-directedness, and those who exhibit no behavior, who are simply old. We see in this literature, as in the tales, that the old must exist in relation to (and in the shadow of) the norm, that is, the vigorous and the young. Just rewards are likewise given to the good, the bad, and the simply ugly. Old people are commended if they know and keep their...