"If the Children Don't Grow Up...": The Cultural Construction of (Anti)Modern Childhood in Interwar Canadian Children's Literature by Saman Jafarian Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2009 © Copyright by Saman Jafarian, 2009 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaONK1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre r6f6rence ISBN: 978-0-494-63638-1 Our file Notre r6f6rence ISBN: 978-0-494-63638-1 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondares ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. 1*1 Canada DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY To comply with the Canadian Privacy Act the National Library of Canada has requested that the following pages be removed from this copy of the thesis: Preliminary Pages Examiners Signature Page (pii) Dalhousie Library Copyright Agreement (piii) Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) , For Soosen, who I have known since I read only kids' books. For Kirsten and Sonia, who I feel like I have. And for Julia, who I wish I had. IV Table of Contents Abstract vi Acknowledgements vii Chapter One Introduction 1 Historiography of Children and Childhood in Canada 6 Historiography of Children's Literature 14 Methodology and Chapter Breakdown 18 Chapter Two Surpassing the Feminine and the Savage: Boys' Coming-of-Age Narratives and the Politics of Antimodernism 24 Chapter Three The Ascent of (M)Animal: Anthropomorphic Animal Fiction, Familial Emotionalism, and the Spatial-Age Divide 66 Chapter Four "Choose Your Books As You Would Your Friends": Girls, Respectability, and Modernity 98 Historicizing Girls' Respectability 100 Children's Literature Criticism and the Influence of Anne 102 Domesticity, Self- and Peer Regulation, and the City 105 Money and Financial Respectability 114 Learning to be 'Ladylike,' Fitting in, and the Power of Ancestry 121 Chapter Five Conclusion 132 Bibliography 137 Appendix 1 Chronological List of Books Consulted and their Categorizations 154 v Abstract Interwar Canada saw a profound yet troubled shift from Victorianism to modernity, and a simultaneous renegotiation of the tenets of modern childhood. Children were tied to the future of a modernizing nation, and, according to medical experts and social reformers alike, 'proper' childhood needed regulation. Interwar English-Canadian children's books serve as a cultural contribution to this wide gamut of institutional regulatory discourses concerning children and childhood. Interwar children's books have yet to receive much scholarly analysis from literary critics or historians. Nevertheless, examining a wide corpus of these books demonstrates the differing ways in which contestations to English-Canada's transition to modernity were manifested in these books in varying forms of antimodernism or modernism, the permutations of which were dependent upon and specific to the fictional subjects that were depicted. Focusing on boys' coming-of-age narratives, anthropomorphized animal fiction, and girls' fiction exemplifies these varying and various forms of antimodernism and modernity. VI Acknowledgements This thesis was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and those nearest and dearest to me. I am grateful for all of this financial support. To my mom and dad who, respectively, changed The Stinky Cheese Man into the "Canadian Edition," and rephrased Green Eggs and Ham to read "Saman I am," and who both let me spend hours on end in bookstores when I was young, my never-ending thanks. And to Suzan, who I know is the mastermind behind the care packages! To all three, thank you for your constant support and encouragement. My thanks to my thesis defense committee, Drs. Jerry Bannister, Claire Campbell and Todd McCallum, for making the process a bit more enjoyable than I had expected! To Claire Campbell, an especial thanks for allowing me to bounce ideas in a sometimes over-animated manner. I was lucky to have an enthusiastic and understanding supervisor for this thesis; my innumerable thanks to Todd McCallum for all of the comments, criticisms, and encouragement that made this process seem worthwhile, and for encouraging me to pursue further studies in the first place. To Val and Tina, too: thank you for all of your help and day-of calming down. My friends at university most made this process thoroughly and entirely enjoyable—my thanks to all of the Bleak Housers. The occupants of Room 11, Matt Sugrue and Julia Mitchell, especially made coming in every day not only bearable but downright fun. And thanks to Emily Parker for so generously sharing her office when I had to vacate my own. Thank you as well to Gwen Cross, my interwar comrade in caffeine. And to Tim Hanley, especially, for the frequent visits and idea bouncing; in the end, I submit that "we know [stuff]." LiLynn Wan also deserves a very large thank you for reading over multiple chapters and providing insightful comments on all. So too does Julia. She, Amanda McQuarrie and Brandon Stevens all kept me relatively sane this past summer, and I will forever remember our (multiple) evenings on the porch—perhaps one more than others... To Susan Zakaib not only (b)edited several chapters, but also graciously put up with my increasingly frequent absences online, and provided long-distance support. Kirsten James and Sonia Markes also did much of the same. Saying thank you to you three is nowhere near enough. And to someone who is more than pretty good with words: my own can't even begin to express; so thank you, to say the very least. Finally, as always and forever, thank you to coffee. vn Chapter One Introduction Heavy steps are accompanied by the sounds of seagulls. "I didn't want to wake you up," says a husky voice to a boy with a dirt-smudged face, "but I really want to show you something." Cue the melodic refrain of the acoustic version of The Arcade Fire's "Wake Up." As frontman Win Butler softly tells the movie trailer's audience what happens "if the children don't grow up," a series of melancholy images of our grubby protagonist, Max, flash across the screen: while at school, he looks longingly out the window; in bed, he cannot sleep, perhaps because he has witnessed his mother kissing her new boyfriend. If the scenes seem bleak or troubled, decidedly less rosy than the sepia- toned eternal summertime we might think childhood ought to be, it is because they are so on purpose.1 Director Spike Jonze's filmic adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, has been surrounded by controversy since February 2008, when test screenings were dubbed failures because they made at least three children cry.2 Although Warner Brothers representatives said that the movie had extensive problems with both scripting and casting, their main problem was that the 1 Where the Wild Things Are (Trailer), dir. Spike Jonze, Legendary and Warner Brothers, 2009. Accessed through <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NOkQ4dYVaM>. Last accessed 9 August 2009. 2 Rolling Stone's Logan Hill has gone so far as to suggest that "[n]o film project has enthralled the indie-blogiverse more." Logan Hill, "Hot Movie Drama," Rolling Stone <http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/24692976/hot_movie_drama_where_the_wild _things_are>, 11 December 2008. Last accessed 9 August 2009. 1 movie's tone was "too weird" and "too scary" for young children. Jonze also had his own beliefs about acceptable content for children: from the project's inception, he warned Warner Brothers that, unlike the book, his movie was "not for all four-year- olds."4 The forthcoming film apparently concentrates on developing the characters of the wild things significantly more than does Sendak's book. To Jonze, the wild things are "sort of about wild emotions" that every person possesses, but which are "scary because they're unpredictable [...] and as a kid you don't know how to process them."5 Others involved with the project elaborated on the importance of creating wild characters with which children could identify. Forest Whitaker, the voice for wild thing Ira, emphasized that "[the dark scenes] are the point of the movie," explaining that "children can identify with a character who is upset." Such an identification is beneficial because of its universality; children, he noted, "need to see that other kids are dealing with [similar issues]."6 Indeed, the trailer emphasizes the ubiquity of wild emotions: "inside all of us is..