Kiddie Lit Stays In Fashion

The stories we read when we were growing up have a profound effect on the way we view the world. I grew up on my mother’s old Louisa May Alcott novels, resulting in a slanted worldview in which, for example, cousin marriage is permissible. (One choice Alcott novel features a plot that requires the heroine to choose which of her eight first cousins to marry.) Though I was informed by my concerned parents at age seven that such practices are, at least in our society, inappropriate, my attachment to Alcott remains.

There comes a time when we are supposed to discard children’s books and read “real” literature. Yet something about the books adults read when they’re young continues to attract and influence them. Books like the Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy owe a large part of their success to fact that they’ve managed to attract adult readerships. And adults still seek to justify the books they enjoyed as children. The Harvard English Department often offers tutorials on children’s literature, and this year one senior wrote her thesis on Alcott.

Why is there such a deep concern about what children read? Children’s literature seems to have some mythic power of shaping the minds of tomorrow. To some extent this power is real: my conception of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is still largely based on its portrayal in “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”

And because of the medium’s power, children’s literature today has become an amalgamation of commercial interests, political correctness, and entertainment. On Amazon.com you can browse the children’s books by the “Issues” within them—which range from “Drugs” to “Multiculturalism.”

Other books like “And Tango Makes Three” introduce children to important concepts like animal homosexuality, as explored in the true story of two male penguins that mated for life and raised a chick in the New York Central Park Zoo.

And yet, personal comfort may still be the biggest draw to the books of our youth. On her blog, Mistress Matisse, a Seattle-based professional dominatrix, professes her love for the “Anne of Green Gables” series “in which no one cursed, vomited, or had a thought about anything below their waist, ever, ever, ever.” No matter how far away our lifestyle moves from the literature of our childhood, some sentimental tie remains.

But “nothing below their waist” is no longer the central mantra of successful children’s lit, provoking a backlash in recent years. The 1996 winner of the Carnegie Medal, Britain’s equivalent of the Newbery Prize, was Melvin Burgess’ “Junk,” a novel about a group of heroin-addicted, anarchy-loving teenagers living on the streets. Apparently worried about seeming too bourgeois, Burgess also included a scene of forced prostitution. Keep in mind that this book is a winner of the same award as “The Borrowers.”

Part of why children’s literature is so appealing is that it retains elements that adult literature has lost. In children’s literature one is free to indulge in pure escapism to another world, whether it be in a wardrobe or an opium den in Bristol. The adult fixation on children’s literature is simultaneously nostalgia for the past and a desire to mold the future. And for some it’s just a good read.

—Staff writer Madeline K.B. Ross can be reached at mross@fas.harvard.edu.