The
history of children’s literature is something of a jumble. John Locke claimed
that children should learn by playful and fun reading material. John Newberry
was one of the first to produce works for specifically for children. And so it
began…though sensibilities have certainly changed. Or perhaps…changed back?
There are myriad familiar (and less familiar) stories that have been passed
down through the ages from storytellers to children, who then grow up to be
storytellers themselves. There are familiar versions (edited from perhaps somewhat
disturbing earlier versions) of fables and fairytales that we know from Disney
films and from other gently (or severely) altered publications from the 1930s
through the 1950s. Traditional versions of stories, like “The Little Mermaid”,
are very different than their Disney reinventions. Disney does not have the
ill-fated mermaid as losing the love of the prince and falling overboard to die
and become at one with the sea foam. Along with other forms of censor, Grimms’
Fairytales and Hans Christian Anderson stories were re-envisioned to provide ‘happily
ever after’ endings and offer clear divisions between good and evil. Stories,
in which the protagonist may have behaved badly, perhaps chopping off a head or
two, would still present the ambiguously good hero as righteous. And then,
fearful of the delicate sensibilities of the young, grown-ups began to change
these beloved old tales to fit into nice packaging and send the reader to a
happy place. Even John Newberry, namesake of the Newberry Award, seemed to be
called into question since he wrote, in the letter from “Jack the Giant-killer”
that “Little Master Tommy” would be “whipt” if found to be lacking in
appropriate skills and demeanor. Goodness! We could not let our children know
that there was any such thing! The little mermaid got the guy and no child
would ever have to hear about chopped off noses or cloven boys who were raised
by witches. It was believed, for those interim years, that scary stories had to
be abolished. From the people who brought the fig leaf to Michaelangelo’s
nudes, we got clean and happy, all day, every day.
But then, psychology gave us a surprise. Children LIKE scary and WANT to
hear stories of danger and yuck. Children who learn to navigate the treacherous
fantasy and can better cope with the real. And why stick to the straight and
narrow? These stories were handed down and altered over the centuries. Why not
take it further? We now have stories like The Three Little
Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene
Trivizas and Wicked by Gregory
Maguire, both revisiting the ideas we have always held about good and evil and
who is right or wrong. We now understand that it is a
fine thing for kids to read Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales or tales of the
Grimms closer to the originals, which can often be fairly disturbing.
Middle
Grade books still straddle ideas about adolescence and issues that are
considered to be challenging to childhood innocence. But, perhaps, we know how
smart and capable young people are. We know that every story isn’t tied up with
a bow. We have learned that being on the edge of your seat is sometimes an important
place to be when reading a book. There are such fine authors here at PMGM and
I, personally, have been on the edge of my seat more than once as I perused the
pages of their novels. And it is, indeed, a fine place to be.
-Eden Unger Bowditch
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