A NEED FOR HEROES Mollie Hunter Ladies and gentlemen, good evening, and thank you for inviting me to your conference. Thank you also, Margaret Esmonde, for that splendid introduction. I sometimes have the feeling that my work has been studied to the point where people know more about it than I do myself. It's rather startling, occasionally, but also exciting and rewarding to find that people do pay attention to something that has cost me a lot of thought and effort. I'd like to speak to you tonight under the title of "A Need for Heroes, and, coming from legalistically-minded forebears, I propose to start by defining my terms of reference . When I use the word "hero," I am not thinking of the leader type or the apotheosis of the leader type -- Superman, sweeping down from the skies on bionically-powered biceps. When I talk of a need for heroes in children's literature, I am most certainly not thinking of the cops and robbers situation , where one side slugs it out toe to toe with the other, each behaving in as amoral manner as the other, and distinguished at the end of the story only by the fact that the cops offer a few mealy-mouthed platitudes about saving the world for civilization. Superman, if you are an adult, with an adult capacity for objectivity, can appear to you as just so much rubbish. Not that there s any particular objection to children's reading rubbish so long as there is plenty of good stuff available to them, but this could be pernicious rubbish because it's also an over-simplified concept which elevates the use of force to a fine ethos. And the cops and robbers theme undoubtedly is^ pernicious rubbish, because it blurs the essential demarcation line in the very situation it attempts to project -- that of the perpetual struggle between good and evil existing in this world. It also divorces that struggle (as, indeed, does "Superman") from its true battleground , which is in the human psyche itself. Now, when I speak in terms like this it might lead you to expect that you're going to get a sermon. Well, first let me emphasize that I have never (I think it's my misfortune , but it is the case) -- I have never been able to subscribe to any formal religion -- a situation, I may say, which caused a friend of mine to remark worriedly to a clergyman of our mutual acquaintance, "I think Mollie has trouble with God"; to which he, being a man not without humor, replied gently, "I'm quite sure God has trouble with Mollie!" Well, that is as may be. We'll find out eventually. This preoccupation with the struggle between good and evil has, nevertheless, been a main feature of my thinking for the greater part of my life, and it's in demonstrating how it has also been a main thread in all my work that I hope to define my concept of what a hero is and to show why there is a need for heroes , in my terms . Now I'm not going to try to do this through any analysis of my work. Obviously, as has been indicated, there are people doing this seriously for themselves. All I want to do is to take an example in each of the three genres in which I work -- fantasy, historical novel, and realism -- to show you, by showing how stories have been built up in each of these genres, how I have portrayed the hero and how I have gotten to the point where my concept of hero emerges. For the fantasy, I have chosen the book I called The Haunted Mountain, the plot of which rests on the very firm, factual basis ô~f a farmer who has only a little piece of land. Very practical also is the situation that this farmer -- McAllister by name -- needs to cultivate every inch of that land because of the beautiful girl he wants to marry. Fantasy enters in, however, with the tradition in his part of the Highlands of Sctoland (which is where the story takes place) that...