Nostalgia and Awareness
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Nostalgia and Awareness Representations of Childhood Nostalgia in Adolescent Literature Dissertation C. Wendela de Raat Spring 2014 Student 3416844 Research Master Dutch Language & Literature Universiteit Utrecht – Departement Nederlands “I remember my own childhood vividly …I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.” Maurice Sendak, The New Yorker, 27 September 1993 2 Contents 1. Introduction. Rupture and Continuity: Childhood Nostalgia in 5 Children’s Literature 2. Theorizing Nostalgia. Reflecting on a structure of feeling 15 3. Theorizing Childhood Nostalgia. Contemplating Otherness: 27 Childhood Nostalgia & Children’s Literature 4. “This World is Not My Home.” Nostalgia’s many faces in 49 Floortje Zwigtman’s Trilogy Een groene bloem 5. “Some Perverse Kind of Nostalgia.” Disruptive Nostalgia in 87 Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now 6. Conclusion. Mapping Nostalgia and Awareness: The Need for 111 Theory Bibiography 117 3 4 1. Introduction Rupture and Continuity: Childhood Nostalgia in Children’s Literature In Great Britain, children's literature is serious business. Both economically and intellectually. This country approaches children’s books and its authors with a theoretical ambition that is rare to come across in the Netherlands. It is the very reason I packed my bags and said goodbye to my beloved Netherlands for a year to study children’s literature in London. There are brilliant Dutch children's books. Funny books, serious books. Daring books. And no one will deny that they are ‘lovely’ and sometimes even 'very bright'. But text-approached analysis of children’s books is not quite as common in the Netherlands as it is in Great Britain. And now I am about to write about that problem I promised myself not to write about. Because with this thesis, I wanted, for once, to get beyond this endless discussion about whether children's literature is literary and deserves critical attention. Dutch children's literature deserves critical reflection and international attention. From this desire for a flourishing Dutch literary criticism of children's literature stems my choice to write this thesis in English. It is my personal step towards a more international-orientated field of children's literature and an attempt to draw attention to the Dutch collection of overlooked, under-theorized children's books. My desire is to read and apply theory, because I agree with Peter Hunt when he introduces his book Criticism, Theory and Children's Literature (1991) with the phrase "Good work with children's literature depends, ultimately, on coherent and thoughtful theory." The notion that children's literature belongs in the literary field and with that occupies a place in a theoretical tradition, asks for explorers of that field. As Anita Moss already suggested in 1981: "We owe it to ourselves to explore what is going on in the field of literary criticism, even if we decide to reject it [...] we cannot decide to reject it because new theories in time change our habit of thought, and become the norm." (Moss, 1981: 25) It is for this reason that I have decided to challenge what is often described as what distinguishes and problematizes the critical approach of children’s literature: childhood nostalgia. If we want to take children’s literature seriously, 5 critical reflection on the relation between nostalgia and children’s literature is imperative. In present-day society, children remain children longer than ever before. The moment before children can independently bike to school, drink, or even use a sharp knife, all those cultural standards of maturation, has never come so late in life. The protection of the child from outside influences is fed by anxieties about the potential corruption of its innocence. Childhood is treasured. The child is spoiled and adored in a desperate attempt to keep it safe and happy. A survey in the UK under two thousand parents demonstrates how nearly half of them would not allow their children to play hockey or ride horses due to the dangers involved. (The Times, 21/2/2014) In the Netherlands fewer parents let their children cycle to school, which has resulted in an increasing group of children failing their bicycle exam (VeiligVerkeerNederland, 10/3/2014). The protective environment of schools is critiqued because it diminishes children’s ability to evaluate risks. (DeStandaard, 22/3/2014) Organized around the theme Gevaar! (Danger!), the Dutch Kinderboekenweek 2014 (Children’s literature- week) brought this problem on the carpet by stressing how children are part of the same, dangerous world as adults, which they can only learn to deal with when they are allowed to encounter hazardous situations -and read ‘dangerous’ books. Cultural criticism relates dominant meanings ascribed to childhood in contemporary culture to nostalgia. In The Children's Culture Reader (1998), Henry Jenkins elaborates on this relation between the sentimental, fear-driven approach of the child and the notion that childhood is ‘other’: "Too often, our culture images childhood as a utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination, beyond historical change, more just, more pure, and innocent, and in the end, waiting to be corrupted or protected by adults. Such a conception of the child dips freely in the politics of nostalgia." (Jenkins: 4) The notion of childhood as a utopian space offered by Jenkins is not unique to present-day culture. In Pictures of Innocence (1998) art-historian Anne Higgonet 6 shows how Romantic images of children are defined by this cultural myth, that positions childhood as a separate space from adulthood. One of her examples is Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Penelope Boothby (1788), which was commissioned by Penelope’s parents because they were trying to “capture and preserve what they knew they were losing: the appearance of a three-year-old.” According to Higgonet this English portrait elucidates how “every sunny, innocent cute Romantic child image stows away a dark side: a threat of loss, of change, and ultimately, of death.” (Higgonet: 29) Unlike predecessors in Dutch and French art, these images “do not tell any story about adult life. On the contrary, these children deny or enable us to forget, many aspects of adult society.” (Higgonet: 23) This transition from the portrayal of the child-as-adult to childhood innocence in art history visualizes how the Romantic child is inherently modern. The image of the innocent, unaware child as a fixed, timeless image of eternal youth is the product of a culture that is very much aware of death and the ever-progressing time. Modernity is marked by a belief in unlimited progress and innovation. But progress eventually always ends with that ultimate unknowable: death. The Romantic child can be understood as a reaction on the awareness of death and the irreversibility of time. The ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past. This child is “a sign of a bygone era, of a past which is necessarily the past of adults, yet which, being so distinct, so sheltered, so innocent, is also inevitably a lost past, and therefore understood through the kind of memory we call nostalgia." (Higgonet: 27) This is why in On Longing (1984) Susan Stewart argues that childhood is the prevailing motif of nostalgia. A childhood not as lived, but as voluntary remembered. The Ideal child “implicitly denies the possibility of death - it attempts to present a realm of transcendence and immortality, a realm of the classic. This is the body-made-object, and thus the body as potential commodity, taking place within the abstract and infinite cycle of exchange.” (Stewart: 133) In Child Loving (1992) James Kincaid warns against this Ideal child as an object of adult desire. If childhood is understood as an object, as a blank slate, then adults can freely project their own fantasies onto children, whatever those might be. The innocent child suggests violation. It is this danger inherent to the childhood nostalgia that haunts children’s literature in criticism. Written by adults, stories about childhood might be used as a 7 tool in an effort to socialize, shape, or even indoctrinates children. They do not speak to the child, but to the adult’s desire, states Jacqueline Rose in The Case of Peter Pan (1984). However, such critique on the ideological function of children’s literature originates in the very belief that the child is other from adults. In Artful Dodgers (2009) Marah Gubar states that this critique underestimates children. It depicts them as “innocent naïfs whose literary skills are too primitive to enable them to cope with the aggressive textual overtures of the adult.” (Gubar: 31) Gubar elaborates that such an approach of the child can elucidate why children’s literature is critiqued for constructing childhood as a Golden Age, where in fact many writers demonstrate a skeptical representation of the Ideal child. The discussion around the ideological function of children’s literature demonstrates the inability of contemporary culture to free itself from the nostalgic discourse it contests. Contemporary culture is nostalgic. There is no way this literature can separate itself artificially from the culture it is a part of. Children’s literature explicates a belief in the unique individual through narratives of becoming and growth as a focal point. Even though the cultural myth of childhood innocence is challenged by poststructural theories that question essential notions of selfhood, the most important question remains not whether the subject exists, but what kind of subject it is and how it comes into being. At the same time it is evident that language itself can never provide for this Ideal child.