The Graveyard Book and Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone: The new nature of Childrens Literature - Essay Example

The Graveyard Book and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: The new nature of Children’s Literature In the last twenty years, the nature of children’s literature has changed. Children’s literature has begun to engage in discourse the directly confronts the darker and less joyous sides of life. Death, child abuse, and murder have all become topics in which children’s literature have begun to create dialogues that bring the dark nature of reality into fantasy worlds. No longer are the worlds idealized to the point where innocence can be maintained at an unrealistic level. The heroes of some of the modern literature have been through terrible circumstances, their lives turned from a horror that is realistic to a universe that sheds the horrors of the real life predicaments, only to lead the heroes into reflections of it through adventure that is dramatic and fraught with dangers. Two novels that use this contrasts of worlds are Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and The Graveyard Book. Harry Potter begins his journey from the home of his Aunt and Uncle who, while perhaps not physically abusing him, have mentally abused him for the first eleven years of his life. Harry has been made to live in a space under the stairs, the home not having a space for him because his cousin has a bedroom and a second bedroom. His cousin, in comparison to Harry, is spoiled, all the toys he desires and any attention he wishes are lavished upon him by his mother and father. Harry, on the other hand, is treated as if he is their slave, doing chores that his cousin would never be given and instructed through threats and emotionally harsh behavior (Rowling 1999). In The Graveyard Book, the protagonist is a two year old child when the terror that affects his life occurs. A character that is called ‘the man Jack’ kills the child’s family, leaving him to wander away and into a graveyard. The fantastical beings of the graveyard decide to raise the child, calling him ‘Nobody‘, which is often shortened to ‘Bod’. The nature of the child’s life is full of adventure, which eventually culminates in engaging ’the man Jack’ in a confrontation (Gaiman and McKean 2010). The nature of the story is based upon death, the themes that emerge founded in this general theme, just as the themes of Harry Potter are centered on death. Both Harry Potter and Nobody have lost their parents at a very young age. However, the interesting literary context that occurs in both books is that the acceptance of this fact is taken as a part of life, the conflicts growing as age puts new cognitive information into the context of the events that take their families. As the concepts of death become more clearly and cognitively available to the young protagonists, their engagement with the villains becomes more complex. One of the ways in which Harry Potter frames its topic manner in a way that brings charm to the tragedies of his life is through engaging the British culture through combining elements of the past and the present to evoke nostalgia as a sentimental narrative. The presence of the wizarding world is full of Victorian English trappings, the nature of Diagon Alley a part of the historic Britain aesthetic and reminiscent of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, despite the time period differences. Through the use of nostalgia, the Harry Potter series is able to create charm that buffets the very serious nature of the themes that are presented, some quite questionable in regard to the level of development required to understand some of the actions of the characters. According to Blake, the nature of the nostalgia touches on a core issue within the British culture as it tries to identify its self post-globalization and in the information age. Blake (2002, p. 8) states that “we perforce exist in modern life, but most of us want to live somewhere else”. He goes on to say that “We copy the old rather than turn to the new. England is the land of the mock-Tudor suburb and the restored Victorian house” (Blake 2002, p. 8). The old is made to have the conveniences of the new, where the new is made to have the representation of what is old. Therefore, the dichotomy of the relationship that Britain has with its past as it tries to find its space within the modern world is a part of how society has engaged Harry Potter. It is through the ’imagined community’ that Harry Potter first engages the reader, within an architecturally defined space in which the past English identity is manifested in the trappings of a modern world. Rather than ’mock-Tudor’ houses and the inventions of nostalgia through fusion between the past and the present, Harry’s duality allows him to travel between both worlds, the ’real’ world representing the supposed modern national identity in tandem with the fantasy world of the wizards where the modern conveniences are manifested through magic, thus preventing the modern to taint the charm of the Victorian based aesthetics (Blake 2002). Through a very direct connection to the past, The Graveyard Book engages the nostalgia of Britain in a similar manner. The nature of a graveyard, on the outset, can be seen to be a reflection of the past, its inhabitants of all different ages allowing for a series of different architectural elements that arise through the passing of time and the passing of individuals. A graveyard is built during the life of the past, its spaces filling through time and being pushed further and further from its beginnings. This can be seen in a section that speaks of the little chapel. The funeral chapel “had been decreed over forty years before that the building, in appearance a small church with a spire, was a listed building of historical interest. The town council had decided that it would cost too much to renovate it, a little chapel in an overgrown graveyard that had already become unfashionable, so they had padlocked it, and waited for it to fall down” (Gaiman & McKean 2010, p. 25). This passage puts Blake’s (2002) argument into further context as the past, although historically important, was also neglected. The importance of the nostalgia did not warrant the costs that it would take to preserve it. In this conflict lies the nature of the national identity as it changes, the past having importance, but neglected because the changes have defined the modern identity. Therefore, The Graveyard Book provides the same context as does Harry Potter in helping to define the duality if both the past and the present, the nostalgic charm placing the British identity into the narrative of the novel, providing an idyllic world in which the ‘innocence of childhood is engaged. Through this charm, the novel creates a connectivity within the English children’s literature genre, the concept of a developed national identity, even in its flaws, providing a new context. Even the name of the villain, Jack, is connected to the most notorious murderer in English history, being Jack the Ripper. The events of murder from Jack the Ripper also occurred during the time period that most often is referred to when defining the nature of British identity. The narratives of Dickens brought forth a vision of British conceptualized and idealized identity that has yet to escape the public discourse, the global belief of the British identity still squarely settled on Victorian England with all that is represented past that point having left-over elements of the tatters of the passage of time from that period. In films as recent as the 1990s, there is evidence of the left over identity of Victorian England, movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Full Monty, and Bridget Jones’ Diary all representing a past that continues to claw back the members of society, political and cultural concepts still heavily bogged down by old patterns of thinking (Blake 2002, p. 13). Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones’ Diary represented the elite, hedonistic and vacant with no real concept of the modern, while The Full Monty represented working class people, unemployed and still culturally connected to past patterns of thought. This is how the British identity sits, remaining in its tethered state where its perceived prime is still central to the discourse of identity (Blake 2002, p. 13). In this sense, even in the modernity of the tragedies in which the lives of the child protagonists must endure, the past is connected to the novels, thus creating a charm that is familiar within the British children’s literature genre. However, Hunt (2011) questions if these books, or any books, can truly be termed as ’children’s literature’, as they reflect something deeper within the cultural conscious. He asks “what does that awkward little possessive ’s’ in children’s literature mean? Do the texts really belong to children or are they simply aimed at them?” (Hunt 2011, p. 13). The author, an adult, writes his or her story as he or she defines the concept of childhood. The one defining factor, or at least to some degree, that can be said of children’s literature is that they are nice and remind adults of what it meant to be a child. Hunt quotes Judy Blume, one of the more controversial writers of children’s literature, as saying “Children are inexperience, but they are not innocent. Childhood can be a terrible time of life” (Hunt 2011, p. 13). Therefore the defining element of children’s literature is that while it aims at children, it strikes the nostalgic heart of the memories of adults. Good children’s literature will ride between the two defining elements of age, the child within the adult and the desire of the child to be an adult, in order to touch culture with the story that it intends to tell. If culture is not properly engaged, the story will more than likely fail to meet its goal. This argument can be furthered as one examines the power struggle that is defined by Hunt. According to Hunt (2011, p. 14) “Adults write, children read, and this means that, like it or not, adults are exercising power, and children are either being manipulated, or resisting manipulations: there is a tension between the reader implied by the writer, and the real readers”. The nature of a book is in the control of the writer, the nostalgia belonging to the writer, the world belonging to the writer, and the events that will happen to the characters squarely in control of the writer. The interpretations of the writing is only minimally left to the readers, the world constructed, when done well, in a way that calls for little interpretation that is outside the suspension of belief. This is the age old conflict between the adult and the child: the adult constructing the world and placing the child within it. The child grows in a world in which Father Christmas is real and Mickey Mouse has living lungs and a beating heart all his own within his Disney World costumed avatar. The nature of the world revolves around the myths and fantasies that have been given to them, represented as real and framed within an idyllic culture that represents the best of the memories, or the wished for memories, that adults impose upon them. In truth, it is likely that when a child reads The Graveyard Book, he or she has never heard of Jack the Ripper and has no idea of the terrible truths of the history of White Chapel. Killers are the villains of stories that are created for adults, and while they understand the idea of a killer, children more than likely have no idea of the horror that frames the act of murder. Therefore, the creature that is ’the man Jack’, the nature of his actions are only framed in the same context as Captain Hook, a not quite human representation that defiles the life of the protagonist. This is one of the beautiful natures of the ebb and tide of style within children’s literature. They understand what has happened to themselves, but what happens to others is still remote. Therefore, to have a character that kills a family, such as ’the man Jack’ or Voldemort (in the case of Harry Potter), is to create a remote event, only accepted in relationship to the experience the child has had with death. It is within Blume’s description of the difference between experience and innocence that the best framework for understanding how The Graveyard Book and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone can be defined as children’s literature (Hunt 2011, p. 13). The books aim at children, but along the way they clutch at themes and memories that evoke within adults the nature of a life desired, a childhood in which these stories frame their experiences, expanding them into the world of fantasy from a safe location. They evoke idyllic cultural identities and reminisce about events that have no connectivity to children, but bring into their experience the nature of the past and the identity for which the sentimental narrative provides context. The context of the novels is defined by their wish fulfillment. It is not the story that evokes the greatest amount of sentimental nostalgia, but the idea that the reader of the novels has a life that reflects the memories and implied innocence that would protect them from the deeper meanings of murder, abuse, and sorrow. As the adult sees the child’s perception as being a remote location from these meanings, the child experiences the nostalgia from a remote location, his or her perspective on life possibly yet without context to understand the charm of England as it is framed from a Dickens’ style perspective. However, it is not the truth that rules the concepts within children’s literature, but the hope of protections that disallow true understanding that might come in doses throughout aging into teen years. As the adult writer aims at children, as is done in both novels, the hope is that the child is experiencing life in a way that frames his reading of the novel from the perspective that is intended. This is the desire of all children’s books - to both frame an idyllic world and to reach children who are living an idyllic life. It is in this hope that these novels succeed in being examples children’s literature. Bibliography Blake, A. 2002. The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter. Verso, London. Gaiman N. and D. McKean. 2010. The Graveyard Book. Harper, New York. Hunt, Peter. May 2011. Instruction and Delight. Palgrave. Accessed 24 May 2011 Rowling, J. K. 1999. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Raincoast Books, Vancouver. Read More