fantasy

I love fantasy literature, but I think it's a relatively recent passion with me. Oh, I read the Tolkien books and the Chronicles of Narnia and Madeleine L'Engle's books as a child, but I really spent more time with the Little House books and other domestic realism. Or that's how I remember it now. I was slightly embarrassed in my teenage years by my pre-adolescent love of the Tolkien books, in particular: how could I have spent so many hours in obsessive fantasy-play with those characters, when there weren't even any girls? And what was the point of all that sword-and-sorcery stuff, anyway?

I re-encountered fantasy, after a hiatus of at least twenty years, when my daughter was small. We read the Narnia books, and I didn't much care for them any more. I read her the Tolkien trilogy, ditto. (I did, and do, love The Hobbit, but the trilogy, with its faux-medievalism and its high seriousness, not so much.) I rediscovered Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander, and those went considerably better for me than the earlier ones. Then we discovered, nearly simultaneously, Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. And somehow the floodgates opened, and I began teaching children's lit, and I read The Giver and A Wizard of Earthsea and The Neverending Story (that one I do remember from late adolescence) and, more recently, Skellig and the Chrestomanci books and some Terry Pratchett.

We are living, it seems, in a golden age of children's fantasy, perhaps the third one ever. The first was of course inaugurated by the Alice books and followed up by George MacDonald and a host of other writers; the second, by Lewis and Tolkien. Now we have Gaiman and Pratchett, Pullman and Rowling. Notice the connections? I've got one woman on that list, and not one American. Even if I add LeGuin and L'Engle and Cooper, still it's a list dominated by white British men. And, as a student of mine noted today, it's white British men writing about little (white British) girls--just as in the first "golden age."

Things are, of course, more complicated than that. Many of the books I mentioned are about boys, in fact, and their gender politics are more complicated than mere protagonist-identification could suggest. Britain now isn't Britain then, and the same could be said for little girls.

But this has gone on too long and I haven't even gotten to my point, which is how much bad fantasy is out there now. Has it always been, and I just didn't notice? And how do I distinguish between bad fantasy and good? Here's a start:

The best children’s novels are those that make the real magical and the magical real.

(from a review by Amanda Craig in the Times)

So, the question for the day is: how do children's fantasies make "the real magical and the magical real"? And can domestic realism do the same?

Alice, again

I never get tired of teaching Alice in Wonderland and its companion novel, Through the Looking-Glass. (Maybe you guessed that from the title. And no, the links aren't definitive, just random...) Today was our third day, in the Intro to Children's Lit class, on the Alice books, and we have one more. Every time it's different. This time, no one is really complaining about Alice herself, for example, though there was a time when my students seemed to find her annoying. Now I'm wondering if it had anything to do with me. That is, I was parenting a seven-year-old (or just out of that stage, I think) when my students found seven-year-old Alice annoying. Did I unconsciously lead them to the more annoying aspects of her personality?

I don't think so, but it could be. It is true, though, that I focus on different aspects of the book(s) depending on my own interests at the time. I used to talk a lot about the food and eating scenes. Why doesn't Alice really get to eat? She ingests transformative food throughout the first book, but is denied the food she wants (tea, tarts); in the second book, she's offered food that doesn't satisfy--a biscuit when she's thirsty, hay when she's hungry, and then a feast that she can't eat because she's been introduced to it. There's also the promise of "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never jam today." Why is food such a source of frustration? Two years ago I decided it was because it is, for so many kids. When you don't get to choose your own meals, you frequently don't get what you want. There are critical speculations about eating disorders and such (I'd link, but the critical literature seems to be by subscription only--so trust me), but I think it may be simpler than that.

Still, today it was all about games and play for me, not food at all. The games in the Alice books are so annoying: the rules keep changing, there are no winners (or maybe everybody wins, as in the Caucus Race), and they just end when they end. But again, how much is this like children's real experience? Rules are arbitrary, after all, and they often do change from game to game and day to day; winning may be less important than just playing (oh, I'm sure there are lots of links here, but I'm running out of time); and (case in point) games often end just because it's time for lunch, not because you're finished.

And it's time for lunch, so I'll leave this, unfinished though it is.

About the title

Chapter 9, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. See, especially, Uglification and Derision.