kids’ books
In the summer, I often like to wax nostalgic by reading children’s literature, better known these days as YA (that’s shorthand for “young adult”) fiction. Sometimes I pick stuff that was marketed to preteens when I was in elementary school, such as Dicey’s Song. This summer it’s been classics of the genre, including Anne of Green Gables and The Railway Children.
What I’m noticing this time around are both the idealistic goals of the books and their gritty realities. Anne of Green Gables, of course, is the plucky, chatty orphan adopted by mistake onto a farm on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Her backstory, glossed over in the book by Anne herself, is unrelievedly grim: parents dead of illness when Anne was a baby, abusive foster parents who put Anne to work as a skivvy and nanny, and no education to speak of. She doesn’t even have peers; her imagination instead finds solace in pretend friends, including one concocted out of her own reflection in a pane of glass.
So her relative normalcy, once she arrives at Green Gables, is something shocking. She is sent to regular school for what seems like the first time and, at age 12, does just fine. She makes friends with ease, despite no previous experience of real friendship. She works hard (something she was, presumably, used to in her prior life) but somehow still finds plenty of time and energy for wandering the hills and daydreaming, a talent all the more surprising for never having been encouraged.
Anne of Green Gables is, of course, the first in a lengthy series of books about the increasingly conventional life led by the heroine. She wins a scholarship to college, but chooses to stay home and care for her ailing adoptive mother instead. (Naturally, she does this while helping to run the family farm, teaching at the local school, and continuing her college studies by correspondence.) She eventually completes college and dabbles in a career as a writer, but then decides to get married and settle down. Numerous children later, in the book Anne of Ingleside, she has a midlife crisis of sorts, wishing she’d done more with her life, but then decides that, really, she’s OK with how things have gone for her. Anne Shirley, successful housewife.
In The Railway Children, three Edwardian-era kids accustomed to a petit bourgeois life in suburban London are suddenly uprooted and sent to live in a country cottage. Their civil-servant father has disappeared, their mother is very sad and won’t talk about their father, and they are forced to live on very little money — so little that, like Anne Shirley in her pre-Green Gables days, school is out of the question.
Instead, the three siblings, in a Shirley-esque idyll, wander the pristine English countryside, hanging out at the local train station and exploring their new community. Their mother shuts herself up all day to write, ahem, children’s stories, since this is how she supports her family now, and lets her real kids run wild on the moors, which they are quite happy to do.
Like Anne Shirley, the railway kiddos make friends everywhere, a talent they use to help their father return to them (he has, à la the Dreyfus affair, been wrongfully imprisoned). As the Guardian put it,
Like so much Golden Age children’s literature, The Railway Children is a retreat, the celebration of the rural idyll of an England that never existed. It also presents an idealised view of childhood, in which unfettered and tenacious children, unencumbered by school and drawing only on their own resourcefulness, prevent derailments and set in motion the wheels that allow their falsely incarcerated father to return to the bosom of the family.
Both the Anne of Green Gables series and the Railway Children are still popular today, presumably for their classic formula of winsome charm and virtuous earnestness triumphing over grinding circumstance. This, in fact, is the standard setup for pretty much every book featuring youthful protagonists, including such classics as Oliver Twist, The Children of the New Forest, and practically everything written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Even fantasy books for kids (think Susan Cooper and Philip Pullman, not to mention J.K. Rowling) and the recent wave of what the New Yorker has dubbed “dystopian fiction for young readers” can be seen as ultimately upbeat, at least for their heroes and heroines.
But the vision of ultimate vindication peddled by these books, satisfying though it can be, starts to feel thin when compared with the real lives of the authors. Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote the Anne Shirley series, and Edith Nesbit, who wrote The Railway Children as well as several other children’s series, both had troubled marriages and difficulties with their children. Maybe they wrote about perfect couples and winning offspring because they needed to believe in both, despite the disappointments of their own lives. Maybe they wrote such appealing visions because they knew the mirages would sell.
Both women were the breadwinners for their families, in an era (more than a century ago) when this was surpassingly uncommon. Of course, this was also the era of cheap, live-in servants, but presumably both women still frequently felt terribly isolated. And while Nesbit, in her non-writing life, was heavily involved in radical politics, the sad fact is that the legacy of both women was not female empowerment but popular books that, not so subtly, told women that empowerment waited for them in the home.
This distinction — between individual satisfaction and societal contentment — was underscored in the recent, much-discussed New York magazine article about modern parenting, “All Joy and No Fun”:
One hates to invoke Scandinavia in stories about child-rearing, but it can’t be an accident that the one superbly designed study that said, unambiguously, that having kids makes you happier was done with Danish subjects. The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children — and happier parents.
Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free) — well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”
Perhaps, as a friend of mine suggested recently on her blog about children’s literature, these women wrote children’s literature for the same reason we read it: to face “one’s primal fears, and vicariously vanquish them. . . . One gains strength by seeing what it’s possible to overcome.” In kidlit, that is, you are offered visions both of what society is, and what it could be.
As Pamela Paul recently noted in the New York Times Book Review, adults who like to read books frequently like to read children’s books. Paul quotes Amanda Foreman, the author of the biography Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as claiming a uniqueness for children’s lit: “Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or disappointed people.” Well, actually, they are. It’s just that in children’s lit, those afflicted with middle age, anomie, and disappointment — think Anne’s adoptive parents, for example, or the parents of the Railway Children — are redeemed by the children in their lives.
