Point of view
The hidden message in children's books
Adults often find surprising subtexts in children's literature - but
are they really there? Hephzibah Anderson delves into the world of Freud
and fairy tales.
Are you a re-reader?
As a child many of my favourite books had food as a theme. One in
particular told the story of a boy who helped save his local burger bar
by becoming a gastro-sleuth to track down a lost secret ingredient.
Long after losing track of the book and forgetting its title, I found
myself in Edinburgh to interview Alexander McCall Smith. He was already
the mega-selling author of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, but
years earlier, he had published a few children's books. There among them
on a shelf was The Perfect Hamburger.
It was my book. Except that it wasn't - not really. While burgers do
indeed feature in lip-smacking detail, this time it was clear to me that
The Perfect Hamburger is actually a tale of corporate greed and the fate
of small businesses forced to compete with big chains.
Revisiting kids' books in adulthood can yield all sorts of weird and
wonderful subtexts, some more obvious than others. How could Dr Seuss's
How the Grinch Stole Christmas be anything other than a parable of
consumerism? Why would it not seem blindingly clear that CS Lewis's The
Chronicles of Narnia are in fact a fantastical re-imagining of Christian
theology?
Similar close readings have rendered the Paddington Bear books fables
about immigration and Babar the Elephant an endorsement of French
colonialism. Alice's Wonderland adventures have been seen as everything
from a paean to mathematical logic to a satire about the War of the
Roses or a trippy caper with drugs as an underlying theme. And what
about The Little Engine That Could? You might know it as a story about
trains that fosters can-do optimism, but it has also been taken as a
you-go-girl feminist tale. (The eponymous little engine is a lady train
and when she breaks down, only another female train will stop to help
out.) As for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: why, it's an allegorical
representation of the debate surrounding late 19th Century US monetary
policy, of course.
Digging deep
It's easy to poke fun at some of these more outlandish readings.
Could they perhaps be the products of parents so addled by a text that,
following their umpteenth nightly recital, the words start acting like
one of those magic-eye images? Stare at them long enough and sense will
materialise. Or nonsense. How else could a 22-page picture book like The
Very Hungry Caterpillar yield capitalist, Christian, feminist, Marxist,
queer and anti-liberal messages?
"I don't think you can ever dig too deeply for meaning," says Dr
Alison Waller, Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton's
National Centre of Research for Children's Literature. Her favourite
class involves applying psychoanalytical theory to Judith Kerr's The
Tiger Who Came to Tea, resulting in some decidedly Oedipal
interpretations of that big cat and his relationship to the family.
"This is a very simple story, but simplicity is not the same as a
lack of depth. There are some exquisite picture books that tackle
existential issues like death and sadness head on: Michael Rosen's Sad
Book and The Red Tree by Shaun Tan are great examples." Just because we
might not be aware of such adult messages when we read books as kids,
doesn't mean we aren't absorbing them, she adds. "However far this kind
of 'message' seems to leap out at the adult reader, it is probably
closer to the truth to say that the message has always been there but
the knowledge that allows it to be recognised has not." Of course,
sometimes meanings seem hidden because we're too caught up in the story,
or because we're simply too young. Only as an adult does Waller
recognise the motivation of Max's mother in sending him to bed without
supper when she reads Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.
Such layered meanings are crucial to the longevity of stories that
become classics, fairy tales being a prime example.
According to the Austrian-American psychoanalytic thoerist Bruno
Bettelheim, Hansel and Gretel is far more than an account of parents who
abandon their offspring and the evil witch who tries to kill them. It is
about children's regression and 'oral greed', about separation anxiety
and starvation fear.
Bettelheim's 1976 study The Uses of Enchantment explains the
therapeutic importance of fairy tales in children's education. Applying
neo-Freudian analysis to stories including Cinderella and Snow White, he
showed how these narratives address the unconscious in a language
similar to dreams, helping kids deal with a plethora of unspoken fears
and desires, from sibling rivalry to ambivalence toward their parents.
- BBC |