The
idea of “childhood” itself is a fraught idea. Though it can be spoken of in the
singular, as a universal event that all of us who have made it to adulthood
have gone through, each of us has had our own childhood. This childhood is
different based on so many socioeconomic and demographic factors, as well as
gender, and geographic, considerations.
So of course, we really speak of childhood in
the abstract, as a separate place, free from adulthood and as a place to be a
child and to practice being an adult. This practicing is both in the games of
play that children and the stories that we tell them. By constructing a world
outside the day to day realities of the world outside, the world of the
imagination is a safe space to be anything and to do anything. But it is also important not to give wholly
instrumental values to the idea of play. It does recreate the world but play
itself is also very important for its own sake. As Robert Louis Stephenson
notes in his essay “Child’s Play”:
For children think
very much the same thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and
marriageable women. No one is more
romantic. Fame and honour, the love of
young men and the love of mothers, the business man’s pleasure in method, all
these and others they anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us, who are further advanced and fairly
dealing with the threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to
glean a hint for their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at soldiers are far more
interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom both are busy
imitating.
What
we do have as universals now about a broad-stroke unifying “childhood” is an
invention that correlates with the rise of industrial capitalism. These are the
stories that arose in the nineteenth century with the brothers Grimm and Edward
Lear and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. This flowering of Victorian
Era was in the next century taken in by Walt Disney and painted in technicolor.
The
Victorian Era was not all prefiguring technicolor. In his examination of the
Manchester of the early Victorian era, Friedrich Engels notes that the life is
hard, where the working-class lives in “enfeebled conditions” that cause people
to “age prematurely and die early” (116). This pushes the mortality rates to
the point where there is a mortality rate for children of the working classes
where 57 percent of their children die before they turn five. This is opposed
to the upper classes, where a frighteningly high 20 percent of children will
die (120). Added to the privations of the living conditions, many children are
put to work, so that a child of nine is sent to work in the mill for six and a
half hours daily, increasing to twelve-hour days when they become what we would
call teenagers (160). Children, in their masses, were forced to become adults
in terms of entering the workforce because of need in their families for
another worker and the lack of formal education options for most lower-class
children. The stories that are passed down to us for consumption by children do
not show this working-class life. The closest we come to realistic portrayals
that remain in the popular imagination of this other side comes from the pen of
Charles Dickens, where we see the suffering of Tiny Tim or the wiliness of Pip
or Oliver Twist.
It is through writers like Nesbitt and Graham
and Milne via Disney that an ideal childhood is drawn. It is idyllic and
pastoral. Importantly, there are no adults. The common theme of child alone is
highlighted later by the English Author Roald Dahl in his book “James and the
Giant Peach,” where on the very first page we see James living a happy life, up
until his parents are “suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, on a
crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the
London Zoo” (Dahl 1). Although the Golden Age of Children's
Literature constructs the child as an "other" separate from
adults, children in our texts frequently play adult roles. The situations in
the text forces children to play-act these roles, so that the characters learn
and grow through taking on the adult role as well as presenting the reader with
the situation to model in their minds the reactions they would have – both an
escapist and a didactic function for the readers. In the rest of this essay, we
will examine two examples of children behaving as adults by discussing the
situation, the presence or absence of adults, and the effect such behavior has
upon the child and on those around him or her in Lewis Carrol’s Alice
in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, as well as Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure
Island. We will explore such issues on how the adult role presented
as a developmental step, a game, or a combination of the two, and what it implies
about "real" adults and the children as grown-ups. In both texts we
will see that there is a central turning point where the main character must
take an adult role and gain agency which becomes the crux of the story.
We
begin with Alice. For the Alice books, there are a lot of different levels of
creation and points for interpretation and analysis. We have the creation of
the stories, as Charles Dodgson making up fanciful scenes for little Alice
Liddell and his other pre-pubescent muses, stories “made up almost wholly of
bits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves (281 from Alice on
Stage). Then these stories were put to paper and published as the original 1865
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with the sequel Through
the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There coming six years later. It
received its Disney version in 1951, in a version of Alice evolved from the
original Tenniel illustrations of the original publication.
There are a couple of
things that are very striking at looking at the texts and their evolution over
time. The first is that the individual scenes in the chapters are incredibly
episodic. The movie version of the story that American children are first
presented with is one where there is no separation between the first adventure
in Wonderland and the second adventure in the looking-glass world. The writers
of the Disney can conflate the two stories and pick and choose to create their
own arc for Alice as well as excising the stories that do not necessarily fit
into a context of what an American child is supposed to know. Animators will
not be able to draw footnotes to explain why a lion and a unicorn would be
fighting, but at the time same time, Carroll’s writing is such that on the face
a fight between a lion and a unicorn is entertaining on the surface level and
would translate to the absurd action that is present in so much more of the
book.
As
a follow-on from this episodic nature is that there is very little natural arc
to speak of. The logic is that of a dream. As Peter Coventry puts it, it is a
commentary on Victorian life, “But it is not simply that. It is not simply anything. Even in this first and
greatest work, there is a content not far removed from nightmare. Alice in Wonderland has the
claustrophobic atmosphere of a children’s Kafka. It is the frustrated ‘quest’
for the ‘Garden’ which in the event is peopled with such unpleasant creatures”
(from Escape 331). What defines the Alice books from the very beginning is this
nightmare logic. As the reader first meets Alice, they see Alice “beginning to
get very tired of sitting by her sister in the bank and of having nothing to do
(Wonderland 7). It is there wild dreaming of the book her sister is reading
that the famous white rabbit streaks by, and “burning with curiosity she ran
across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large
rabbit hole under the hedge,” following the rabbit down the hole “never once
considering how in the world she was to get out again.” (Wonderland 8). Though
there is no clear demarcation for the reader or for Alice that Alice has gone asleep,
this dream logic and the episodic nature takes hold as Alice tries to go home.
The creatures that she meets are never very helpful, from a confounding caterpillar
to the Duchess giving Alice a child that turns out to be a small pig, to
meeting the Cheshire Cat, foregrounding the nightmare logic: “We’re all mad
here. I’m mad. You’re mad. // “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. // “You
must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here” (Wonderland 51).
This
madness of the Cheshire cat, and his claimed madness of Alice makes the reader
question what we are doing in Wonderland or in the Looking-Glass world at all.
There is a casual cruelty with which the world treats Alice and tosses her on
to her next adventure so that Alice herself becomes as like the red queen: “it
takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get
somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” (Looking glass
127). Being in these separate places is heightened by the fact that there are
few recognizable and identifiable adult figures around except those identified
by royal title. And even those characters, given hierarchical titles, are drawn
as somewhat fanciful and grotesque by Carroll and Tenniel. Even at this level,
once the queens are running Alice through mock-lessons, they are diminished, as
Gillian Avery says, to a “manganese absurdity” (326).
Both
the Looking-Glass world and Wonderland are mirrors to the world of the
bourgeoise Victorian child, where adults were absent and absurd if present. The
main choice that Alice makes is the fact of following the white Rabbit down the
rabbit hole where she finds herself upside-down. These episodes that
characterize the Alice books are scary and absurd while Alice is passed around
to experience these scenes without a knowledge of what is happening, or even a
real knowledge of a goal. The central point of the entire story comes just at
the end. Alice has been brought to give evidence in a mock-trial, mock as all
things are in the adult world and as all things are in wonderland. She has been
growing, and then she realizes the absurdity of the entire situation and cries
out ““Who cares for you?” Said Alice
(she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
(Wonderland 98). Of this scene, Nina
Auerbach writes “Although her size changes seem arbitrary and terrifying, she
in fact directs them; only in the final courtroom scene does she change size
without first wishing to, and there, her sudden growth gives her the power to
break out of a dream” (338). Here the reader sees the character’s the physical
and mental growth into a more mature person. Alice is no longer just following
the episodes, but she has taken control of the world that she had created in
her own mind by calling it out and recognizing the fact that the dream world is
just that, one created in the slumber.
On
the other side of Wonderland is Treasure Island. Where Alice tried to navigate
a world of strange creatures dictating to her actions, the world of Treasure
Island, and the hero Jim Hawkins, the world is one made up of adults, and
predominately male adults at that. Treasure island is an adventure tale, but
also one where there are several possible figures to emulate and to follow.
What the reader finds in Treasure is a moral ambiguity between the world of the
Pirate and the world of respectable culture. This is drawn, as Bradley Deane
writes, instead of a clear black and white, but in Treasure Island “Stevenson offers what amounts to an alternative
ethical code, one that frames the characters' incessant judgments of one
another and of themselves, and one which sets the terms in which masculinity
can be defined” (365). What is notable
about Jim’s developing moral system is that even as the narrator of his own
tale, there is a desire to live in both camps – whipping clean those
distinctions between the black and the white and living in a world of
gray. The author Avi, writing in the
introduction of the Aladdin edition of Treasure
Island, notes that there is draw to the character of Long John Silver, one
that made Stephenson think to title the book after Silver originally. Silver is
supposed to be a bad guy, as Avi writes, “there is very little good to say about
Long John Silver. He’s a thief and a killer. He lies. He switches allegiance
often, depending on who is winning at the moment. And yet, and yet…he is a
wonderful, truly loveable rogue, who gives more life to the tale than any other
character” (xvi). The reader sees Jim as the protagonist because he is the
narrator. The story is his, but again like in the Alice books, we find a
character that is largely a victim of circumstance. In one of the key scenes of
the book, Jim sees Silver murder a sailor who is reluctant to join the mutiny.
There exists in the book a larger narrative plot that Jim is a part of, but not
necessarily the driving force behind the events. This is not bad for Jim or
Stephenson’s young readers. Treasure Island, like Wonderland, exists as a
separate place where the protagonist can put on mom and dad’s clothes but are
only on the surface of this secondary world. For Deane, this secondary world
for Jim is the very nature of the play ethic that Stephenson describes in his
essay quoted the introduction to this essay – play itself as both mirroring the
adult world, but entirely separate from the adult world: Their game accommodates horror and brutality,
and its score is kept by counting the lives of the remaining players. When Jim
is given the chance to score a kill of his own, the scene emphasizes both the
continuity between pirates and boys and the subversion of Christian moralizing
by the play ethic” (399).
It
is with this scorekeeping that we see Jim playacting the adult role in what is
the moral center of the book. Though surrounded by other deaths, Jim has not
been the agent for one until his skirmish with Israel Hands in chapter 26. The
fight-as-play is noted by Jim in his narration of the tale: “It was such a game
as I had often played at home about the rocks of Black Hill Cove” (251). In a
fight to the death, even then Jim’s reflections show his childish nature. As
Alexandra Valint notes: “In general, adult characters openly and proudly take
responsibility for their kills, but Jim’s slaying of Hands is oddly
disassociated from him. He shoots his weapons without “my own volition” and
“without a conscious aim.”” (12). Jim is ultimately successful in the fight.
Israel Hands dies at Jim’s hands, but it is oddly passive voiced. Here is the
moment of the highest action, the one where Jim Hawkins has the chance to join
the world of the adults, and his first murder just…happens. This scene
reinforces the character’s immaturity and he again fades back into a
participant but not a driver of his own plot.
Jim’s
reticence to act and his own agency are reflected in the very end of the novel
as well. The ship returns with only and handful of the people whop set out to
go to Treasure Island, this other place. They have been successful in their
venture, “All of us had an ample share of the treasure, and used it wisely or
foolishly, according to our natures” (339). It is as if the act of returning erases
the whole adventure as anything but a story that the reader had just read. Jim
as the narrator tells what others did with their share, but the reader is left
to wonder how much Jim had or what he did with his, other than setting aside
and telling his story.
With
both the Alice books and Treasure Island, the reader can see that the idea of
Victorian Childhood as constructed through the texts aimed at those children
have several commonalities. Both for the female Alice and the male Jim, the
world of childhood is a separate place, but the imagination makes it such that
the riverbank or home at your mom’s inn is not enough. The characters are
mostly passive, as participants in their own stories. What is notable is in
comparing the make up of the world around them. For Alice, the world is
dominated by nonhuman creatures or if they are humanoid, grotesque simulacra of
mostly female adults. For Jim, the ideal world is one where there are no women.
This is a world where even the bad guy is a loveable rogue, but it allows the
reader to live in the adult world of moral ambiguity much more than they would
get from reading Pilgrim’s Progress. This gendered difference between the
worlds is on the second level of acculturation. If theses stories are on the
surface about action, and creating fun universes, they do reflect the larger
world that the author was trying to create. As Nina Auerbach writes in the
introduction to Forbidden Journeys, “women
lived the condition Carroll, MacDonald, and Barrie longed for. If they were
good, they never grew up” (1). Not entering the world of men, however, is not
an option for male children, so books like Treasure Island allow the reader to
be observers in that world. The reader lives Jim’s story as they do Alice’s,
but Wonderland is much harder to find.
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