85 research outputs found
Happy Birthday Lore Segal! Ellen Handler Spitz Celebrates the Return of “Tell Me a Mitzi”
No full texthttp://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2018/03/09/guest-post-happy-birthday-lore-segal-ellen-handler-spitz-celebrates-the-return-of-tell-me-a-mitzi
Who Was Beatrix Potter? by Ellen Handler Spitz
No full texthttp://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2015/09/29/anticipating-the-sesquicentennial-who-was-beatrix-potter-by-ellen-handler-spitz
Imagination and Picture Books: Gleaning Wisdom from 11 Sources
No full texthttp://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2019/03/28/guest-post-imagination-and-picture-books-gleaning-wisdom-from-11-sources-by-ellen-handler-spitz
Remembering Maurice Sendak, Who Brought Loneliness to Children's Literature
No full textMaurice Sendak, Childhood, Stories, Bedtime, LonlinessRemembering Maurice Sendak, Who Brought Loneliness to Children's Literature
Ellen Handler Spitz
Like many other enduring contributors to children’s literature (Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, James M. Barrie, and Margaret Wise Brown), Maurice Sendak was childless. For inspiration, he drew not on the diurnal trials, joys, and encumbrances of nurturing the young but on a bygone childhood of his own, which festered within his mind raw and accessible for many years—indeed, perhaps, for his entire life. That childhood, which began in 1928, was spent in marginal health, in a Brooklyn Jewish/Sicilian neighborhood, with ravaged working-class immigrant parents whose efforts were spent rescuing overseas Polish Jewish relatives from impending doom.
Sendak, who passed away yesterday at the age of 83, translated this childhood gradually into books that, particularly in the decade from 1960 to 1970, galvanized the entire field of late-twentieth century American children’s literature. He lay bare authentic features of childhood that had, in this genre, previously been overridden by edifying guides to behavior, bypassed by compendia of information thought to be informative for youth, or papered over by merry entertainment. His art opened floodgates that, by now, have been completely broken through. What Sendak let in were surely the dark fantasies that many commentators have noted, but something else too: loneliness.
Sendak knew from within the profound sense in which every child, from time to time, perceives himself or herself to be alone—an outsider—and feels the need to retreat into some private space, some nook or secret hiding place. Sendak’s books are themselves such places; they can so function even when being read aloud by an adult. Sendak’s supreme gift, as visual artist as well as author, was to discover pictorial as well as verbal and narrative means to portray the existential separateness of childhood. Perhaps his capacity to do this—to recognize, acknowledge, and openly reveal the anomie of childhood—stemmed from his exposure to psychoanalysis, which, during the decade of his finest work was enjoying its American heyday.
Max, Mickey, and Ida are, respectively, the protagonists of Sendak’s trilogy: Where the Wild Things Are (1963), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside Over There (1981). Each of these child characters exists within a solitary world, and at the end of their stories they remain isolated and apart. All three are, at least momentarily, misunderstood, unrecognized, and insufficiently well loved. Such uncomfortable feelings, rarely if ever explored so openly in the pages of picture books, are ones routinely experienced even by the most cherished child. Who has not suffered the emotional unavailability of one or both of one’s parents? In Where the Wild Things Are, Max’s mother (who, like Kafka’s insect, is never depicted, and who is thus a fertile field for projection) grows angry at him for his naughtiness and sends him to bed without his supper. Mickey’s parents are presumably together in their own room and unresponsive when he becomes upset and hears the “racket” that angers him: “QUIET DOWN THERE!” he shouts. Ida’s father is away at sea, and her depressed mother ignores both her and a baby sister. In each story, as the plot unfolds, Sendak limits his child protagonist’s sensibility: He or she remains solely within a private world of fantasy.
As we follow the trajectories and dénouements of each of these stories, we see that Max sails away, Mickey flies away, while Ida turns away and vanishes out a window. When each fantasy ends, however, we are reassured—in a not wholly believable adult voice—that things are fine now. Dinner is hot even though you and your mother have not reestablished any direct rapport or communication. You are carefree and dry in your bed even though you are still clueless about the noise that upset you and that kept you awake in the dark. Your papa loves you still, even though it is not certain that he is alive any more and his letter has charged you to take care of your mom and baby sister indefinitely. Sendak carefully provides imagery to accompany these soothing words, but silently betrays them: Max has food but no suggestion of his mother’s arms or smile. Mickey appears smug, hugging his bottle solipsistically to himself. Ida, in profile, wiggling her big bare feet, fondles strands of her own hair and wears a distracted expression as she hears disembodied words about her bravery.
His characters’ ambiguous estrangement (we might include Johnny and Pierre from The Nutshell Library) lies at the heart of Sendak’s legacy. By leaving his protagonists alone, Sendak makes sure his child readers are not alone. The children encountering his stories realize that he understands what they are feeling, and they are thus empowered to feel less lonely or angry or left out. As children enter the realms of his picture books, they are not wholly disconnected or lost. And, after all, isn’t this what literature, at its best, whether for children or for adults, is about?
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book, Illuminating Childhood, was recently released in paperback by University of Michigan Press. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Sex for Beginners
No full textChildren, Literature, Sexuality, Adolescents, ReproductionSex for Beginners
Ellen Handler Spitz
It's Perfectly Normal
by Robie H. Harris
Candlewick Press, 96 pp., $12.99
Among the many purposes served by children’s books, that of teaching kids about subjects that their parents cannot or will not broach ranks high. In our increasingly libidinous and violent culture, and amid our advancing contraceptive technologies, breakdowns in societal structures, and the waning influence of religious warnings and prohibitions, some form of sex education would seem downright urgent. For even in the highly eroticized global culture of today, alarming numbers of young people do not know the basic biology of sex and human reproduction. (When teen pregnancy occurs, this is what we hear: but we only did it once; but we were standing up; but he pulled out.)
Openly or secretly, every toddler wonders at some point: Where did I come from? Moreover, pre-adolescents trouble over the rate and the dimensions of their changing body contours. A recent New York Times article reports that some American girls are now starting puberty as early as seven and eight years of age—highly disturbing data. A child in a woman’s body can handle neither the concomitant hormonal upheavals nor the ensuing advances from men and boys.
Robie Harris’s fine book on sexuality has been updated and reworked for the fifteenth anniversary of its publication. It actually lives up to its promise and delivers “honest, reliable, accurate, and accessible information” about human sexuality and reproduction. Harris’s scientific bent prompts her to provide thoroughgoing up-to-date research on every topic from reproduction and contraception to HIV/AIDS and abortion law. But this book is far from a heavy-handed textbook.
Harris has chosen her title with care. Her principal purpose—beyond that of importing crucial information, which is clearly paramount—is to render her subject non-threatening. Most books on sexuality for children offer anatomical diagrams and pictures of the sexes at different stages of development. This one, by populating its pages with humorous and friendly-faced folks, bears brave witness to acts rarely depicted in the others. Drawn disarmingly in a light-hearted vein, the images here include a boy having an erection, a boy putting on a condom, a young girl masturbating and a boy doing likewise, a girl upside down studying her genital area with a mirror, and an interracial couple in bed, smilingly making love. Young readers viewing these pages, even if they skim the text, may find visual answers to their unformed questions. Another normalizing technique introduces a duo of pint-sized characters—a cartoon bird and bee—both wearing shirts and sneakers, who cavort through the book and comment in comic-strip bubbles, section by section. These embedded creature-critics cleverly represent the attitudes of both an embarrassed, defended, disgusted child who doesn’t want to know (Bee: “Are we finished with all this body stuff for now?”) and a curious child who does want to know (Bird: “No! Definitely not!”).
The last page of It’s Perfectly Normal reiterates its principal message. Bird and bee discuss whether thinking and talking about bodies and sexuality is “normal or gross.” Missing here is what this otherwise excellent book lacks, namely, a serious engagement with why the subject itself continues to prove so embarrassing, stressful, anxiety-ridden, confusing, and shrouded in mystery and innuendo. By gleefully agreeing that it is all “perfectly normal,” the bird and the bee elide this darker side of sexuality. Perhaps this is because adults—including most writers, reviewers, and even endorsers of children’s books—are themselves prey to some measure of ineradicable apprehension when faced with this intricately entwined realm of fantasy and behavior. Still, Harris is too casual here. To imply that sexuality should be all sunny and soothing is misleading, and pedagogically inadequate. There remains the hard task of trying to think through, in the company of young people, rather than as their wise guides, some of sexuality’s daunting contradictions.
This challenge has been nicely met, by contrast, in Lynda Madaras’s two books, What’s Happening to My Body?, for boys and girls. Inevitably covering the factual material found in Harris and Emberley but with black-and-white line drawings devoid of any special character, Madaras addresses her reader directly in the second person and starts off with an immediate focus on context. She begins her girls’ book with an anecdote about the nastiness of pre-pubescent girls who gossip maliciously behind each others’ backs, and ostracize their chosen victims, and betray one another by switching loyalties. Instantly we are in the thick of the difficult terrain, plunged appropriately into a psycho-social milieu, and it is from here that the biological story of sexuality unfolds. Even when one breaks down the subject for children, one needs to confront the puzzles.
A few serious and jarring notes might have deepened Harris’s presentation and enhanced its value for adolescents. In regard to menstruation, for instance, there is hardly a mention of the ongoing—and devastating—history of taboo, and none at all of the subtle ways in which this event alters forever the dynamics within the family and changes a girl’s relationships with both her mother and her father. The feelings that go along with such a life-changing event deserve acknowledgment in a book on sexuality. Likewise on the subject of giving birth: uterine contractions and vaginal dilation rarely occur in the absence of pain, but this unpleasant fact is left unstated. To become a mother is to bear a child, and labor is never an unmitigated joy. And what about the morning after sex, which may not prove as pleasurable as the moment during which it occurs? And the resultant changes to one’s sense of self, which can be dramatic and intense? To have explored these psychological facets of sexuality might erode the upbeat mood, but it would have made this otherwise valuable book even more valuable. Since parents often find it hard to broach these topics, a book like this can be offered to a young teenager—placed in his or her room—in hopes that, after being read privately, it might serve as the springboard for live intergenerational conversation.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her forthcoming book, Illuminating Childhood, will be published next fall. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
No full textChildren, LiteratureAlice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Ellen Handler Spitz
The Alice Behind Wonderland
by Simon Winchester
Oxfod University Press, 128 pp., $11.95
IN A MERE HUNDRED PAGES, Simon Winchester’s new book encapsulates reams of research and commentary in the overcrowded field of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) studies. Dodgson, born in 1832, was a mathematician, logician, writer, Oxford don, and a devoted portrait photographer who for most of his adult life occupied rooms in Christ Church College, where he befriended the children of Dean Henry George Liddell, the eminent classicist and lexicographer. Winchester’s suggestive title hints at revelations heretofore unsuspected, but these are not forthcoming, as his account is principally factual rather than interpretive. But a canny reader might notice, and wonder at, Dodgson’s dramatic shifts in sensibility. His photographs of children, including those of Alice Liddell, the dean’s fourth child, of whom he made eleven portraits, radiate an intensity and ambiguity of mood, an aura of melancholy, often a sense of muted loss, that catch a viewer’s attention and sustain it. Dodgson’s child portraits (which he made by the dozens and preserved in lovingly labeled albums) attract and perturb; they slow us down and compel us to pay them unmeasured heed. Whereas his masterpiece of children’s literature sets a wholly different pace—brisk and vibrant.
Right from its second page, when that waistcoated rabbit consults his pocket watch and exclaims over his lateness, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland propels us forward impatiently, so much so that we cannot really linger over its every instance of logical mischief and playful nonsense, or parse its verbal jocularity. It leaves us delighted, bemused, and bewildered. How shall we account, then, for Carroll’s inconsistent aesthetic modes? Do they complement each other or compete? Winchester’s book stimulates this question without asking it directly, but the contrast is worth exploring.
A parallel discrepancy concerns Dodgson’s visualizations of Alice. After making his own drawings to go with the story, which he had invented one summer afternoon and told to ten-year-old Alice Liddell, whom he had taken rowing with her sisters and who later asked him to write it down, Dodgson requested John Tenniel to do the famous illustrations, ubiquitously reproduced. These portray his heroine as a frizzy long-haired blonde, with an over-sized head and absurdly small feet. The now canonical image, clearly approved by Dodgson himself, differs dramatically from the likeness that emerges in his own photographs of the cuius causa, Alice Pleasance Liddell. She appears before us with delicate pre-Raphaelite features, graceful limbs, and a crown of rich chestnut brown bobbed hair. Not to mention her rather large feet. If Alice Liddell is indeed the model for the literary Alice, rather than simply a motive for the work, how should we understand this divergence? Should we see it as an element in some arcane process of distinguishing one Alice from the other, and deliberately not melding the two?
The literary character Alice, in my re-reading of the original alongside Winchester’s new book, recalled to mind a lecture in which I heard someone describe a poignant sense of loss for what is unrealized in each human being in terms of gender, an unconscious grief at the fateful assignment, male or female, that causes the relinquishing forever of the possibility of living as that which one is not. The idea harks back, of course, to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium and to the ancient myth of Tiresias. Dodgson, for all sorts of personal and cultural reasons, created his protagonist as a little girl. But even though he loved to play with and photograph little girls, both clothed and unclothed, and probably thought he knew them quite well, there is, regarding Alice, an uncanny quality, a strangeness, a sangfroid, and there is the inescapable fact that she is often frightening to children, even when they are attracted to the charms of Wonderland. A century of re-workings and updates have tamed and feminized her considerably, so that very few American children today encounter her any more in her original incarnation.
Children are sometimes frightened by Alice as much as for her. Sudden falling doesn’t faze her. (She even peeks into a marmalade jar on the way down.) Lost, she scarcely worries or misses anyone she ever cared for before the fall (except of course her cat Dinah, who, as she is fond of announcing to the rodent and avian population of Wonderland, enjoys eating birds and mice). She never fears that she will be missed at home by those who love her. Indeed, she meanders through Wonderland as if all her former human relationships have ceased to be. Whereas decades later in 1900, across the Atlantic, Dorothy desires desperately to go home, Alice, when asked by the Cheshire Cat where she wants to go, says she does not much care so long as she gets somewhere. She never befriends the peculiar creatures she meets in Wonderland or attaches herself to them as Dorothy does the oddball types she meets in Oz, whom she fiercely champions and staunchly defends, or, as Wendy does in Neverland, where she tenderly nurtures the Lost Boys and Peter. The menacing denizens of Wonderland fail to intimidate Alice. She holds her own, even when threatened by the Queen’s “voice of thunder.” Cruelty abounds in Dodgson’s fantasy, but it is children who feel it most.
Other girl characters in children’s fiction, while equally brave and independent, connect emotionally as Alice does not. This, I suggest, is because Dodgson, obsessed with intellectual puzzles, rhymes, word play, and games of all sorts, had little if any capacity to create a believable girl. Like playing cards and later chess pieces, Alice is a manipulated speaking object. To reassure herself that she is still herself after having changed size so many times, she tries a math problem: “Four times five is twelve,” she states, “and four times six is thirteen.” Thus, Dodgson pokes fun at her himself, adding another layer of emotional distance. Relying exclusively on cognition, Alice attempts to make her way by means of rudimentary logic and adherence to the rules of polite conduct. When the cook throws saucepans and hits the howling baby whose mother the Duchess has called a Pig, Alice responds by discussing the earth’s rotation. Literally remote from herself (“Good-bye, feet ... I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now”), she inhabits a world in which characters use and abuse one another with no grave consequences and where all that matters is the game.
Dodgson, as has been the case with many brilliant and successful authors of children’s books, seems to have experienced childhood as a perennially available state—preserved out of time, like a photographic image—to which he could return and in which he could perpetually dwell. Childless, like Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter, he had no responsibility for the upbringing of children, a task that radically changes the rules of the game. Which is why the Alice behind Alice may really be the shy, curious, emotionally naïve Oxford mathematics don himself rather than, or as well as, the living, breathing Alice Liddell, even though it was to her he gave his first copy, called Alice’s Adventures Underground, in 1864, as a Christmas present. Perhaps he chose to write about a girl character as another way of approaching girlhood—along with the photographs—as his own lost idyllic state.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book is Illuminating Childhood: Portraits in Fiction, Film, and Drama. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
The Storytellers
No full textChildren, LiteratureThe Storytellers
Ellen Handler Spitz
The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm
translated and edited by Maria Tatar
W.W. Norton & Company, 368 pp., $16.95
Year after year, we print and re-print fairy tales. What is it that makes them valuable? Should we keep telling them, and if so, why? What about their detractors, the self-appointed child protectors who complain about their violence and cruelty, not to mention a different set of worriers who protest their “false” happy endings? And surely the tales do not teach morality. Remember the egregious brutality of that spoiled princess in The Frog King who, after hurling the little animal who helped her against the wall, gets rewarded. And we quail at even a mention of The Jew in the Brambles, an outrageous portrayal of barbarism and prejudice, which, in Maria Tatar’s new selection of the Grimm fairy tales, wisely appears only in a separate section marked for adults.
Nor do the tales psychologize or philosophize. What they do, instead, is what all great children’s literature does: they literalize metaphor. They lower their glittering buckets deep into the psyche’s well. Loyalty lifts spells. Jealousy becomes murder. Love trumps death. Fortune reverses. Wishes come true.
Not quite like ancient myths, which use nymphs and satyrs to explain recurring natural phenomena; nor like fables, whose timeless moral lessons are parlayed through the escapades of animal characters; nor like legends, which exude the pungent aromas of one particular locale and its history, fairy tales are stories spun into gold at the wooden wheel of a miller’s daughter: stories made to summon wonder, horror, enchantment—and not necessarily anything more. Uncanny in the purest sense of the word, which is to say, both bizarre and familiar at once, they are meant to be told, not read, and they truly possess an inexhaustible power. Children hold on tight, turn pale, close their eyes, and beg for more.
The Grimm Reader, a compilation of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, newly translated by Tatar, who has published voluminously and illuminatingly on these writings for decades, comes to us with a mischievous title. It reminds us that, in the wake of global terrorism, parents and teachers are questioning ever more nervously what sort of tales we ought to be telling children and why. In Lilith some years ago, Naomi Danis aired these anxieties, with responses from twenty writers and editors associated with children’s literature, a significant number of whom warned against “smarmy” sentimentality and against books that offer superficial “healing.”
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) were brothers who collaborated closely throughout their lives. Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, they studied law at Marburg, and through their linguistic and philological studies, became fascinated by age-old popular German oral cultural traditions, which they feared were in danger of disappearing under the threat of industrialization. They began to gather tales and songs and amassed a monumental collection but did not readily reveal their sources, which later proved, in many cases, to be not of direct folk or peasant origins but filtered through intermediaries of their own social circle.
In her introductory pages, Tatar reminds us how the Grimm brothers altered successive editions of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen, which were originally published in 1812 and 1815, cleansing them of erotic innuendo—notably of references to pre-marital sex, pregnancy, and incest—and hoping thereby to make them more suitable for youthful readers. Violence, however, was fine. Elsewhere Tatar has shown that Wilhelm Grimm was also ready to bowdlerize the tales by routinely changing mothers into stepmothers (as in Hansel and Gretel), so as to preserve the sanctity of motherhood and, beyond that, to seek on all feasible occasions to link feminine attractiveness with self-sacrifice and to associate feminine beauty with the virtues of diligence and domestic labor.
One of the finest qualities of this book is that, light and unencumbered by annotation, it is clearly meant to be read lovingly to children. Fairy tales were originally recited aloud, and that format gave the listeners considerable power. They were able to exercise a direct and partially controlling effect on each recounting. If attention waned, stories were modified. They could be spiced, embellished, or curtailed. But contemporary American adults rarely tell fairy tales to children anymore. We read, slavishly adhering to a text. Such reliance denotes a diminished narrative inventiveness among us, even a dereliction in regards to the sacred task of passing on our cultural heritage. With this new book in hand, however, readers may be inspired to depart from the page and improvise. The translation is fluid and open, as if welcoming interpolation. In Rapunzel, for example, finding the line “Let your hair down” too blunt and insufficiently evocative, I intone rhythmically instead: “Let down your golden hair.”
The Grimm Reader also stimulates interpretation and improvisation by eschewing illustrations. In so doing, it provokes serious reflection on the function of pictures in children’s books. The dearth in this text makes us weigh their role as enhancers or detractors. Arguments against them of course claim that they tend to fix a particular visualization and tamp down what should be left loose and free. After being exposed, say, to Gustave Doré’s haunting engravings of Little Red Riding Hood, it would be hard to imagine those scenes any other way. Here, by contrast, words are given license to perform their sorcery unaided. Pages are decorated only occasionally with delicate borders, medallions, or illuminated letters. This pleases me immensely: in a culture determined to flood itself with garish, sensational imagery to the detriment of the unaided word, this book reminds us that, as Tatar herself has written, the words of children’s stories are magic wands in and of themselves.
Rustic, often coarse, yet sparkling with silver and gold, the Grimms’ tales match, with an almost miraculous precision, children’s own ways of thinking. They transform contiguity into causality, and they maximize contrast. Their smoky looking glasses mirror, to our glossy, high-tech, twenty-first century children, hidden aspects of their own inner lives, buried treasure all too rarely tapped. I cannot understand those who deem these fairy tales unsuitable for children, and those who would purge them of their so-called inappropriate elements. If they find these old tales powerful enough to require censorship, then perhaps they themselves have not outgrown them. Fearlessly and sometimes fearfully, the Grimms embrace a welter of intractable human dilemmas—themes that, our advancing science and technology notwithstanding, have never vanished from life. Deceptively simple, their magic appeals to us not only when we are young. They perform a lasting and invaluable educational task: they teach us to marvel, to quest, to seek. We learn from their twists and turns—from a girl’s seven brothers transformed into ravens and then back again, or from a greedy fishwife who ends her days in a pigsty—that truth may abide in the strangeness of fantasy.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her forthcoming book, Illuminating Childhood, will be published in early 2011. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
The Age of Adolescence
No full textChildren, LiteratureThe Age of Adolescence
Ellen Handler Spitz
Jepp, Who Defied the Stars
by Katherine Marsh
Hyperion, 385 pp., $16.99
THIS PAST SUMMER, with a transfixed ten-year old by my side, I stood in Madrid’s palatial Museo Nacional del Prado, face to face with Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. We gazed at the self-portrait of this grand master of the bravura brush stroke, gripping his palette in his left hand and wielding a paintbrush in his right, and we admired the wasp-waisted five-year-old Infanta Margarita who poses pertly before him in the endlessly fascinating Las Meninas. I pointed out diminutive King Philip IV and his queen, caught in their black-rimmed mirror just left of a coffered door, which opens mysteriously onto a dazzle of light. But about the court dwarfs—Maria Bárbola, with her bulbous head and short arms, and Nicolasito Pertusato, who kicks the lazy mastiff—I had little to say. A barrage of earnest questions from the child beside me exposed a glaring lacuna in my art history background. Why are they there? What are they doing? Were they servants, too? Why did the Spanish court keep them?
As a girl, Katherine Marsh was similarly mesmerized by the dwarfs in Velázquez’s masterpiece, and by those that appear in other paintings of the period. To explore their plight, she conceived Jepp, Who Defied the Stars—her latest venture into books for young readers. Jepp is a first-person narrative, an historical novel set in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands of the late sixteenth century and in Denmark. Permit me a sigh of discontent that Las Meninas is nowhere to be found between the covers of her book, for its reproduction would have served as a model for the way that works of visual art can spark literary creation. This very painting, after all, inspired Oscar Wilde’s heartbreaking tale of an Infanta who laughs a little dwarf to death on her twelfth birthday.
Throughout Jepp, Marsh’s well-imagined title character and her other court dwarfs provide answers to some of the questions raised by Las Meninas. After a happy childhood in a village near Utrecht, Jepp arrives at the Spanish court of Coudenberg in Brussels to become a court dwarf. He is brought there by a strange courtier, Don Diego (who later proves to be Jepp’s absent—and deceased—father’s younger brother). At fourteen, the boy is no taller than he was at seven.
In Brussels, the Infanta treats Jepp and his cohort handsomely, but rather like toys or pets. She expects them to amuse and divert her, but they are not regarded as fully human. Courtiers and servants shamelessly touch their bodies ad libitum, costume them at will, and make them suffer a host of indignities (Jepp’s first is to jump out of a pie served to the Infanta). Far more horrifyingly, a delicate blond dwarf named Lia, Jepp’s friend, is victim of a secret rape by a courtier named Pim. Lia persuades Jepp to accompany her in an attempted escape so as to bear her baby in freedom, but she dies in childbirth.
While it successfully conveys the degradation to which the dwarfs were subjected historically, the inclusion of this dark episode in a book for young readers may expose some pre-teens to an excess of depravity. Before her violation, Lia enjoys a close friendship with Robert, a kindly Hagrid-like giant who is also retained by the Infanta as a grotesque, and the court immediately assumes that it was he who made her pregnant. Marsh’s florid evocation of this huge male copulating with this tiny female, even though it proves false, may seem to corroborate widespread childhood fantasies of sexual acts as aggressive conquests.
Eventually Jepp is banished from the Infanta’s presence, and his story continues while he is en route to another castle, Uraniborg in Denmark; he is transported there from Brussels in a cage reminiscent of the contraption occupied by the outsized Lemuel Gulliver in Brobdingnag. The latter parts of Marsh’s novel find him under the aegis of the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, an eccentric island-dwelling, silver-nosed scientist, whose beer-guzzling moose attends dinner in his castle. Jepp is made to eat on the floor under the table at Tycho’s feet.
What makes all this particularly poignant in the context of “young adult” fiction is that Jepp and his cohort—diminutive persons who appear neither adult nor child—can so easily stand in for the book’s intended readers. Suffering extreme humiliation, Marsh’s characters not only teach historical injustice but, closer to home, they mirror the manipulation, objectification, and failure to be taken seriously that many teens and pre-teens feel they endure under uncomprehending adults. The dwarfs in Marsh’s novel, moreover, are propelled by their frustrations into unproductive behaviors: at Coudenberg, one preens constantly before a looking glass, and another is addicted to hippocras. Under conditions of oppression, their relations with one another are tarnished by rivalry and suspicion.
Thus the dwarfs become, in Marsh’s skillful hands, supremely sympathetic figures. In pre-adolescence, our bodies morph, betraying us day by day. Alien to ourselves as well as to others, we yearn to shoot up instantly or to stop growing altogether—to shrink back into warm childhood, where right and wrong lay neatly folded in separate piles on a shelf. But the door to childhood is shut. Adolescents are newly encased—like Jepp—in bodies that seem too small (or too large) but never a match for what is inside them, which nobody else can see. Marsh’s characters capture many near-ubiquitous experiences of this particular stage of life. Jepp exists in relative emotional isolation: his body, psyche, and surrounds feel intermittently out of sync.
Features of Marsh’s plot parallel with psychological acuity deep levels of pre-adolescent experience. Haunted in a fatherless household by the mystery of his paternity, Jepp longs to find his father. The desire to find one’s true, lost parents animates, as we know, not only the fantasy lives of youth who have endured bereavement, abandonment, and adoption, but also of many a discomfited teen. During much of Marsh’s story, Jepp narrates his adventures while traveling like a small animal in a cage. A rough keeper named Matheus tosses in his daily food, and he knows not his destination. Again, modern echoes abound: despite the plethora of insignificant choices accorded them, young people’s lives are not in their hands, and they often feel cooped up in prisons not of their making. Marsh’s doubled narration (Jepp reminiscing about Coudenberg on his way to Uraniborg) mirrors the way youth balks haltingly at the regimentation of cultural clock time (alarm buzzers, class bells), their jerky back-and-forth between outer and inner worlds captured so brilliantly by Bill Watterson in his Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. Marsh evokes this wonderfully, with all its puzzling confusion. As one reads Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, present and past entangle just as childhood and adulthood spar.
Over the course of this fine novel, what matters principally is that a meek, naïve boy, easily manipulated and duped to the point of endangering himself and his friends, develops—despite his handicap—into a more mature character, capable of assuming responsibility for his choices and responding finally to the devotion of a fiercely independent young woman. Jepp progresses from adoration of frail Lia to love for Magdalene, the daughter of Tycho Brahe, who is not a dwarf. In an image that reverses the Robert-Lia fantasy, Magdalene towers over Jepp, and from her he learns the necessity of accepting fate while acting “out of love rather than fear.”
Caught between worlds, Jepp not only grows up, he becomes real. He exits forever the world of Las Meninas, but this time with life and with hope.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book is Illuminating Childhood. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Harsh Lesson
No full textChildren, Literature, Punishment,Harsh Lesson
Ellen Handler Spitz
Struwwelpeter
by Heinrich Hoffmann
Dover Publications, 32 pp., $6.95
First, a heartfelt thanks to the small number of devoted publishing houses like Dover, Universe at Rizzoli, and the New York Review Classics, who have undertaken the laudable project of reissuing classic out-of-print children’s books. Their diligence matters, because, while used copies of originals may be searched online, the reprinting of classics resuscitates and revitalizes them, recalls them to mind, and, most importantly, brings them to the attention of an entirely new generation of parents and children. It also compels us to revise our assessment of them.
All this occurred to me as—with a fascinated seven-year-old boy at my elbow—I pored over the refurbished pages of Struwwelpeter (reissued by Dover), one of the most controversial, influential, and excoriated children’s books of all time. It was written and illustrated in 1844 by Heinrich Hoffmann, a Frankfurt medical doctor. Subsequently translated into more than one hundred languages, the book has been parodied, mocked, revised, adapted to multiple mediums (including a so-called “junk opera” that debuted in London in 1998), and condemned for its alleged sadism, didacticism, and supposed advocacy of blind obedience. It is a book that adults love to hate and that children find enthralling.
Humorous, whimsical, outrageous, and bursting with wild exaggeration as well as with an undeniable and notorious streak of terror, Struwwelpeter is in truth a delight. It grips child readers and teaches them not only about the baleful consequences of misbehavior, but also about the subtle lesson that art is made up of powerful contradictory feelings and ideas: that art and literature can be both grim and funny, frightening and cheerful, momentous and banal—like myths and legends and fairy tales.
Shunned perennially for its sometimes brutal punishment of children, Struwwelpeter was never intended to be fearsome. It was meant to be merry and droll, an antidote to the pedantic books for children that were typical of its time. Published under the title “Humorous Stories and Funny Pictures with 15 Beautifully Colored Panels for Children from 3 to 6” (Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3-6 Jahren), it reaches out (“See! Now look…”) to draw us in. Felicitously joining its comically painted pictures with rhymed couplets composed into the briefest of tales on cleverly designed pages, Hoffmann’s art causes us to smile, to tremble, and to laugh (albeit with a mirth born from fear). Thus, by subjecting us to a gamut of emotions, he offers learning under stress and fixes his work the more tenaciously in our minds, thus ensuring our lasting retention.
In one famous episode, a girl named Harriet (Paulinchen in the original version) curiously and recklessly strikes a match. Children, of course, know the lure and the trepidation of fire. Mesmerized, we watch as her ribbons, her bright green dress, and her hair go up in flames. Red and yellow burst startlingly from her person, smoke billows in clouds around her, and we witness that she has fizzled at last into a pile of ash, leaving only her dainty red shoes behind. To mitigate the dread of all this, and for comic relief, Hoffmann supplies two pussycats at the bottom of the page, their tails tied with the child’s no longer needed ribbons. Into ample pleated linen handkerchiefs, these cats weep copious feline tears at the demise of their ill-fated mistress. Thus, with tragic drama and ribald comedy conjoined, the dangers of matches and fire sink in. A moment later, we realize, looking up from the trance induced by all this, that Harriet is not really us, even though what happened to her could happen to us, and that children, after looking, hearing, and feeling their hearts pump faster, are invited now, calmly, to reflect.
More frivolous because the offense is a danger neither to others nor to the child himself, and equally frightening to nearly all children who encounter it, is the tale told of little Conrad who disobediently sucks his thumb when his Mamma goes out. In a flash of instant retaliation, a menacing tailor prances on scene wearing ballet slippers, with a flying top hat and a tape measure unfurling from his pocket. Wielding a gigantic pair of scissors, he quickly shears off the offending thumbs, leaving the mutilated child alone to meditate sadly on his plight. The boy I was reading to pointed out that the terrible punishment meted out makes it impossible for the character ever to do again what he had done wrong (an interesting seven-year-old reflection on the theory of punishment as being the prevention of further crime); and so primitive is our human fear of losing body parts that this page cannot help but evoke that perennial anxiety in spite of its farcical exaggeration.
Another character, Augustus (initially called Kaspar), refuses the dish of soup that is put before him day after day at mealtime. He wastes away until he becomes a veritable stick figure, and at last all we see of him is his grave marker, with a soup tureen resting comically beside it. A colleague of mine who recalled this image from his own childhood reported that the grave of Augustus made an indelible impression on him as a little boy: never before had he realized that children could die. Stories teach lessons far beyond what they intend, and in this way Struwwelpeter gets under the skin. More than merely fitting each punishment to a crime, it touches, seduces, provokes, and actually fortifies its child readers. Such is the magic of art.
Children are bewitched by this book because it challenges them in ways that adults can no longer fathom nor recall. Struwwelpeter stands or falls on the credo that children can bear to be scared by art and thereby grow. It addresses its youthful audiences as such. Understanding that children ought not be burdened with scenes or themes that go far beyond their own experience, Hoffmann draws deft, bright lines between each childish act and an extreme consequence. This matters today, when a generation of parents is being compared with hovering helicopters and snowplows. In this book, it is not the parents who are in control. They pronounce their interdictions and then, as Becket would say, things take their course. I see this as a source of strength and as a corrective—a means of fostering autonomy and responsibility. Struwwelpeter puts all the moral power into the child’s own hands. Horatian, in the sense of being both delightful and concise, as well as philosophical—a tragicomic picture book that, after 165 years, still speaks to children of the real world. Here they will learn things they need to know: about cruelty to animals, jealousy, greed, prejudice. As my youthful interlocutor pronounced at the end, “scary and funny, kind of all at once.”
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her forthcoming book, Illuminating Childhood, will be published next fall. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Remembering Children's Books of Yesteryear During National Library Week
No full textChildren, Reading, Natioanal Library WeekFeeling rebellious over our dizzying speed-mad era of e-books, e-readers, digital and virtual realities, I want to advocate for the practice of borrowing a good old-fashioned book from the library—especially now, during National Library Week. I want to remind everyone of the simple joy of settling down in a cozy nook, turning well-worn pages, and reading aloud to a child.
To read a book we once loved as a child to a child today is like soldering silver chains between the generations. Why silver? Because silver is just as beautiful as gold, but if you want to see it gleam, you must polish it. Besides, it is not intergenerational bonds alone that are being polished when you do this but links between actual childhoods. To read a book you once loved is to connect a 21st century child with worlds gone by. Recall how milk was delivered in clanking metal cans or later in bowling pin-shaped bottles of stamped glass with wired paper tops; how dresses with scratchy layers of tulle crinoline had to be pulled over little girls’ cringing heads; how children hid with pounding hearts behind parterre drapes when the dreaded tutor or sitter arrived. By ambience and innuendo, the books of yesteryear expose today’s children to bygone worlds of sensibility. They enlarge the scope of what it means to be a child today. They foster a sense of self that expands through historical imagination.
Of course, like blown soap bubbles, all aesthetic criteria dissipate moments after taking shape, but cultivating taste in childhood matters. And every book encountered in childhood fosters an awareness of visual design and language. The finest old books enchant our eyes with subtle palettes and artful, uncrowded designs. Rarely busy, loud, or frenetic; never garish or slick, they can however be spontaneous and quirky. Take Dorothy Kunhardt’s Now Open the Box of 1934, where an upside down circus lady balances on an umbrella with a teacup on one foot and scissors on the other, and not without plenty of room left blank on the page for curious eyes to tarry. Notice that when artists leave room on the page this way an invisible door swings wide to welcome children’s own projections. Such pages spark silent dialogues instead of enforcing passivity. They offer trust and also a bit of a dare. They go deep without our even noticing. Whimsy and surprise, after all, attract the eye, but children’s hearts are held by feeling. In Kunhardt’s Now Open the Box, a curled snake rolls itself as it climbs upstairs. Circus performers weep short vertical dashes. “Big” is a double-page spread; “little” fits under your fingernail. With psychological brilliance, this simple story taps into widespread secret fears of losing the unconditional love accorded to you when you are a tiny baby, fears of growing up bigger and bigger into a world of adult demands, where everyone must “perform tricks.”
The old books often spring from linear plots. (Look: Aristotle is winking his approval.) This matters because young children’s own first stories are post hoc and paratactic; which means, they narrate by saying: “and,” “and,” “and”). But careful books foster an awareness of propter hoc, that is, of causality. And since causality is the ground of ethics, it matters that it be modeled in what we offer children. Even as beguiling and zany a tale as Three Ladies beside the Sea of 1963 by Rhoda Levine and Edward Gorey, which foregrounds the enduring power of childhood wishes, presents its story line as causal.
Which brings up the question of “message.” Rarely do older books spell entertainment pure and simple. Children, after all, are constructing worlds! No matter how piously we rail against didacticism and say “we shouldn’t tell kids what to do,” young children take in and learn from everything we make available: “Children will listen.” Unburdened by publishing guidelines as to “age-appropriate” vocabulary, many older books afford chances to reach. They tantalize, judiciously withholding their rewards, drawing children back again and again to their pages. Take Ounce, Dice, Trice of 1958 by Alastair Reid, with its merriment augmented by edgy artist Ben Shahn. This book teaches a poet’s love for language. It catches the way children play with musicality, repetition, and unpredictability, and how much children love the haunting, slippery behavior of words. Busily acquiring language, young children treat words like balls, toys, and magic wands. Their pleasure skips right along with an initiation into what is supremely valuable.
With no slight intended but rather my sincere appreciation to the wonderful children’s book authors of today, I urge you to check out the classics of the past. Borrow them from your library. Share them with the children in your life. Their quality rewards sustained attention—hushed, absorbed hours. Read alone or with an adult, they allow today’s children to slow down, to turn away from trivial distractions, and to expand inwardly in historic time, from generation to generation…
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Note: For those readers who wish not only to borrow the old books but to own and gift them, The Children’s Collection imprint of The New York Review of Books is dedicated to republishing the finest of out-of-print children’s classics.
About the author: Ellen Handler Spitz has been serving as Honors College Professor at UMBC since 2001. She is the author of Inside Picture Books, The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood, and Illuminating Childhood, among other books; her signature seminars are titled Great Books and Cultures of Childhood. She reviews children’s books from time to time for The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review
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