The Concept of Literature Written Specifically for Children - Essay Example

?Children’s Literature The concept of literature written specifically for children didn’t truly begin until sometime around the mid-1800s. While fairy tales had been told for generations, these were stories intended for a general audience, often including explicit or gory details intended to speak to the adult audience about adult topics. Children's literature emerged during what is now termed the Victorian period. The Victorian era was a time period characterized by a major shift in every element of society. Not only were people’s livelihoods changing from primarily rural and agrarian to primarily industrial and urban, but long-term social organization structures were shifting as business moguls replaced the nobility for power and prestige. Science was starting to understand some of the great mysteries of life and becoming capable of explaining them in ways that didn’t depend upon the church. Political structures throughout the world had undergone significant changes within living memory and were not yet fully settled. Women began to band together against their oppressed status and philosophers were beginning to puzzle out a greater understanding of the human mind and the way it works. The child, up to this point, had often been considered either a sinful and wild creature or a miniature adult yet these new advancements revealed the child was instead something still developing. There was a “veritable explosion of information about this period of physiological and cognitive development in human beings” in which literature became “a central vehicle for expressing ideas about the self and its history” (Steedman 5). The introduction of magic and fantasy through the fairy tale and other stories proved quite effective in teaching children important life lessons in a way they could understand as can be seen in stories such as J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Breaking away from mundane experience through the introduction of fantasy and the magical realm enables authors to personify and exaggerate various behaviors, values and character traits. This provides children with a more accessible avenue to comprehending complex concepts while remaining in keeping with their varying levels of understanding. Although cognitive ability is known to be present at birth, it continues to improve upon skills acquired throughout the preschool years in order to apply and adapt to things that exist outside of the self. There are four main categories of skills developed during this period (Santrock). The first to develop are self help skills in which the child learns to take care of their daily needs such as getting dressed. They also learn social help skills in which they begin to perceive the importance of helping others such as taking part in household chores and demonstrating their ability to think outside of themselves. Academic skills also develop as the child builds analytical skills such as those necessary for mathematics and logic. The final main category of development refers to play skills. These skills enable the child to further perfect previously learned skills by participating in play and physical activity. They also end up placing themselves in situations in which they must analyze situations quickly and accurately to achieve the desired goals. Through such activities, they significantly improve their speech and communication skills as well as comprehension, vocabulary, pronunciation and sentence construction. These are all ideas brought forward in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904). Many of the early fantasy novels such as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan are frame stories. These are stories that reveal a collection of adventures tied together by a unifying thread of narrative. The popularity of this format for these kinds of stories exists in the ability of the frame to reveal the connection between the real world and the world of fantasy. It provides a means of breaking through the adult paradigms of reality that are already at work in defining the child's understanding of the world and opens the fantasy up to all who experience it. According to Donella Meadows, “Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm” (4). Essentially, a paradigm can be defined as a person’s assumptions about how things are supposed to be and result in a commitment to ensuring that things stay that way. It is the means by which we position ourselves within the world and thus provides us with the emotional foundation we need to make sense of our actions in the world around us. As a result, we strive emotionally to enforce these ideas that are a part of our internal nature. Most of the time, these paradigms exist under the surface of our awareness because they are supported by the values and ideals of the society in which we live. In the constantly changing world of the dawning Industrial Revolution, though, people were no longer given this choice as even the children were starting to understand the world differently. Many of the novels produced in the 19th century thus tend to “exemplify the profound questioning of reality” that was taking place within the greater community. As they were attempting to address the children, these explorations were designed to fully break with reality and illustrate a more direct exploration of the emotions that drove them. The frame of Alice in Wonderland is the story of an upper middle class English girl who is bored with the expectations her society has for her because her mind is not content to stay constrained within the strict bounds of female domesticity. Seeking any escape from the low-key life expected of her, she becomes distracted by an odd white rabbit that she sees disappear down a hole. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do” (Carroll 7). Impelled by the same sort of natural curiosity that was then infecting the nation, Alice follows the rabbit until she falls down the hole. There is no simple means of climbing back up so Alice must find a new way back home, experiencing a number of fantastic adventures in the process, many of which seem to be unconnected to each other except for Alice's presence within the scene. Alice’s home life at the beginning of the book is a vignette that launches her into the framing element while also revealing to the reader that she comes from a similar background to their own. Alice interprets Wonderland from the perspective of a child. She only half-remembers the adult lessons she’s been given and she tries very hard to maintain her understanding of appropriate life at home. However, her understanding of how things are supposed to be rarely matches up with how they actually are in Wonderland and she must reconsider what she’s learned, the primary focus of fantasy literature. “The Victorian novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life, represented many Victorian issues in the stories of its characters” (Greenblatt). These conflicts force Alice to constantly reconsider her individual truths in an environment where there are no set standards of behavior. Immediately upon her arrival in Wonderland, before she’s even left the bottom of the rabbit hole, Alice must face new rules of survival that completely break the rules of the society from which she came. This is true to such an extent that she begins to question everything she thinks she knows, such as her own identity. “Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual … But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘who in the world am I?” (Carroll 22). As a means of coping with the strange world she finds herself in, Alice decides to pretend she is actually someone else and makes up her mind to stay in the hole until she changes into someone she likes better. This concept reflects changing social standards that suggested it was possible for a man or even a woman to change the course of her life rather than having to simply accept the position one was born to. According to Greenblatt, everything about life was changing in this period on every level as rich became poor, poor became rich, social status began to be assigned to what one had rather than whose family one belonged to and women began finding new opportunities for themselves in an economy shifting from the farm to the factory. There is also a hint of the ineffective tendency for people who don't like change to hole themselves up in perceived safety until the world changes back to what they want. Carroll introduces the idea that it is necessary to open one’s mind to differing perspectives in his introduction of an entire world of unrealistic characters. Even the mostly normal-seeming rabbit is unusual in that from its first appearance it is seen to have adopted human clothing and mannerisms. This aspect of the character only becomes more unusual as it is realized that the world Alice visits gives the rabbit no true reason for having adopted European attitudes as Wonderland operates to an entirely different tune. Although she doesn’t feel it all that unusual that the creatures all around her can talk and all have their own opinions, Alice becomes quite upset with the way they all argue with her and they all get upset over what to her are quite small issues. Her inability to see the world from another perspective is demonstrated in her conversation with the mouse as they swim in her sea of tears. Although he has already told her how much he hates cats and the obvious reasons why, she immediately launches into a discussion about her neighbors terrier who “kills all the rats and …” (Carroll 21) before she realizes she has offended him but not quite why it is an issue. This behavior is consistent with the ideas of colonialism that abounded at the time. “Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another” (Kohn, 2006) through the imposition of the dominant culture’s values and beliefs over the interests and the habits of the natives in much the same way Alice behaves toward the mouse. By the time she meets the queen, Alice suddenly realizes that she herself is the superior character because of her greater ability to consider the feelings of others. The need to question one’s own traditional rules and practices is also addressed in the book as Alice begins to refine her own worldview. She is horrified at the way the Duchess treats her child, but her attempts to correct the behavior get her nowhere. The Duchess shouts at the child, allows it to be struck by flying crockery and shakes it violently, but tells Alice “if everybody would just mind their own business … the world would go around a deal faster than it does” (Carroll 54). In this statement, it can be presumed that the Duchess means that people would get much more work done in a given day if they are focused on their own business instead of attempting to impose their values on others. Alice interprets her literally, though, and her attempt to save the child prove fruitless as it turns into a pig not far away from the Duchess’s house. This reinforces the idea that Carroll intended to be making a statement against colonialism and was urging instead a return to more childlike sincerity in attempting to get to know other cultures and ways of living. As she makes her way through Wonderland, Alice begins to figure out how to survive, but remains largely confused at the actions of the figures she meets. The Mad Hatter and his party almost seem to make sense to her when she realizes that their watch had stopped at tea time and they felt trapped at the party without the opportunity even to wash the plates, but their continued antics eventually frighten her away and force her to consider revising her ideas regarding rigid rules and traditional behavior. Her encounter with the Queen and her playing card court finally pushes Alice to assert her own internal values over what she considers absurd antics and thus finds her way home. At its most fundamental level, Peter Pan is a story revealing the relationship between the world of fantasy and that of reality. The main action of the story explores the consequences of completely rejecting reality in favor of living in a world of fantasy. Peter Pan, the central character, has so utterly rejected reality that he has stopped aging and become trapped in the timeless world of Neverland. This alternate world has unlimited possibilities in it, many of which are created from the imagination of Peter Pan himself. An example of this is seen in the banquet scene as the boys feast themselves on highly improbable food conjured up entirely from wishing it so. As a result of this origination, Neverland is populated by Indians, mermaids, fairies and a murderous band of pirates led by Captain Hook and his henchman Smee to give it the necessary excitement. Peter is joined on his continuous battles against these other entities by his Lost Boys. These are other boys that he has brought from the ‘real’ world and who, like him, were lost by their parents or are no longer wanted. At least, this is the perception they have. Exploring Neverland, it becomes clear that much of what is discovered in Peter's world of fantasy has been based upon what is known about the real world, but it has become twisted to more appropriately match Peter’s understanding. This reveals a glimpse into the ways that a child only imperfectly understands the concepts presented to him regarding the adult world and how they attempt to reconcile their confusion by filling in the gaps with faulty logic. At the same time, this exploration into the world of fantasy also presents a useful commentary on just how much of our adult reality is actually based upon fantasy. “Peter Pan is a wish-fulfillment story about the triumph of youth over age which caught the mood of the new young century” (Wullschlager 126). Peter Pan is a child’s fantasy story of war in which the evil Captain Hook and his pirates are summarily defeated by Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, with Peter Pan as the ultimate leader and hero of course. By skillfully blending magic and fantasy with reality, Barrie illustrates how the relationship between the real and the fantasy is actually very closely intertwined, not just on a physical level as shown through the delightful antics of the children, but also on an emotional level for all ages as people readily employ fantasy to hide from their realities. This can become so complicated that people, such as the Wendy character in the book, may also use reality to hide from their fantasy. While children are able to grasp the concept that Peter Pan and the Lost Boys could not really fill up on imaginary food, adults are able to grasp these finer nuances of what it means to mistake magic for reality or vice versa. Wendy struggles throughout the book to reconcile such discrepancies as she both yearns to grow up and fears it. Her decision, in the end, to return to the 'real' world is a difficult one, but one that encourages readers to understand that adulthood is yet another grand adventure that can only be experienced by living it. This approach was perfect for its time period as it met with the hope and optimism of a new century and attempted to discover a means of ‘speaking’ to the child audience on a level that they could understand. In presenting the possibility that alternate worlds may exist right alongside the one we have come to accept as ‘reality’ yet in which many of the same major themes and problems occur, fantasy provides ample opportunity for storytellers to challenge the status quo or the social expectations normally given a particular situation. For example, it seems common modern knowledge that a young boy, raised in abuse and neglect throughout his early childhood, would naturally become some sort of criminal element by the time he reached his teenage years. In challenging the norms, authors using magic or the supernatural in order to tell their story appeal immediately to a child’s imagination, regardless of age, and introduces worlds in which all things are possible. In doing so, they are able to demonstrate that strange or different is not necessarily bad even as it tends to encourage the strange or different to try escaping into a world of fantasy to avoid a harsher reality. References Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Signet Classic, 1997. Print. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Branden Books, 1969. Print. Greenblatt, Stephen (Ed.). “Introduction: The Victorian Age.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 8. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Print. Kohn, Margaret. “Colonialism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. May 19, 2011. Meadows, Donella H. The Global Citizen. Island Press, 1991. Print. Santrock, John W. Life-Span Development. (7th Ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill College, 1997. Print. Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930. London: Virago, 1995. Print. Wullschlager, Jackie. Inventing Wonderland. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Print. Read More