(Philomel/Macmillan/Harry N Abrams/Harper Collins)
Adults often find surprising subtexts in children’s literature – but
are they really there? Hephzibah Anderson delves into the world of Freud
and fairy tales.
As a child many of my favourite books had food as a theme. One in
particular told the story of a boy who helped save his local burger bar
by becoming a gastro-sleuth to track down a lost secret ingredient.
Long
after losing track of the book and forgetting its title, I found myself
in Edinburgh to interview Alexander McCall Smith. He was already the
mega-selling author of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, but
years earlier, he had published a few children’s books. There among them
on a shelf was The Perfect Hamburger.
It was my book. Except that
it wasn’t – not really. While burgers do indeed feature in lip-smacking
detail, this time it was clear to me that The Perfect Hamburger is
actually a tale of corporate greed and the fate of small businesses
forced to compete with big chains.
Revisiting kids’ books in
adulthood can yield all sorts of weird and wonderful subtexts, some more
obvious than others. How could Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole
Christmas be anything other than a parable of consumerism? Why would it
not seem blindingly clear that CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia are
in fact a fantastical re-imagining of Christian theology?
Similar
close readings have rendered the Paddington Bear books fables about
immigration and Babar the Elephant an endorsement of French colonialism.
Alice’s Wonderland adventures have been seen as everything from a paean
to mathematical logic to a satire about the War of the Roses or a
trippy caper with drugs as an underlying theme. And what about The
Little Engine That Could? You might know it as a story about trains that
fosters can-do optimism, but it has also been taken as a you-go-girl
feminist tale. (The eponymous little engine is a lady train and when she
breaks down, only another female train will stop to help out.) As for
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: why, it’s an allegorical representation of
the debate surrounding late 19th Century US monetary policy, of course.
Digging deep
It’s
easy to poke fun at some of these more outlandish readings. Could they
perhaps be the products of parents so addled by a text that, following
their umpteenth nightly recital, the words start acting like one of
those magic-eye images? Stare at them long enough and sense will
materialise. Or nonsense. How else could a 22-page picture book like The
Very Hungry Caterpillar yield capitalist, Christian, feminist, Marxist,
queer and anti-liberal messages?
(Harry N Abrams)
“I don’t think you can ever dig too deeply for meaning,” says
Dr Alison Waller, Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton’s
National Centre of Research for Children’s Literature. Her favourite
class involves applying psychoanalytical theory to Judith Kerr’s The
Tiger Who Came to Tea, resulting in some decidedly Oedipal
interpretations of that big cat and his relationship to the family.
“This
is a very simple story, but simplicity is not the same as a lack of
depth. There are some exquisite picture books that tackle existential
issues like death and sadness head on: Michael Rosen’s Sad Book and The
Red Tree by Shaun Tan are great examples.” Just because we might not be
aware of such adult messages when we read books as kids, doesn’t mean we
aren’t absorbing them, she adds. “However far this kind of ‘message’
seems to leap out at the adult reader, it is probably closer to the
truth to say that the message has always been there but the knowledge
that allows it to be recognised has not.”
Of course, sometimes
meanings seem hidden because we’re too caught up in the story, or
because we’re simply too young. Only as an adult does Waller recognise
the motivation of Max’s mother in sending him to bed without supper when
she reads Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
Such
layered meanings are crucial to the longevity of stories that become
classics, fairy tales being a prime example. According to the
Austrian-American psychoanalytic thoerist Bruno Bettelheim, Hansel and
Gretel is far more than an account of parents who abandon their
offspring and the evil witch who tries to kill them.
It is about
children’s regression and ‘oral greed’, about separation anxiety and
starvation fear. Bettelheim’s 1976 study The Uses of Enchantment
explains the therapeutic importance of fairy tales in children’s
education. Applying neo-Freudian analysis to stories including
Cinderella and Snow White, he showed how these narratives address the
unconscious in a language similar to dreams, helping kids deal with a
plethora of unspoken fears and desires, from sibling rivalry to
ambivalence toward their parents.
No age limit
So-called
children’s literature has plenty to offer adults, too argues Dr Sheldon
Cashdan, professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. As he explains in his book The Witch Must Die: The Hidden
Meaning of Fairy Tales, these stories enable kids to see the struggle
between good and bad – a struggle that they feel within themselves –
acted out on the page, with good prevailing and the witch meeting an
invariably gruesome end.
These battles persist throughout life.
“Notions of greed, of wanting more than you actually need – you can see
this in the bonuses of hedge fund managers and [people who have] houses
with five bathrooms. Or the subtle, maybe not so subtle, ways that
people lie – dating and telling things that aren’t exactly true, fudging
their income tax returns”.
(Grosset & Dunlap)
To underscore his point, he’s just published a novel called
Emma von N, about a woman who goes into therapy with Freud as a young
girl then returns as an adult and becomes Freud’s mistress. She is
consumed by fairy tales and constantly refers to them, finding them
useful metaphors for all that life throws at her. Even when she’s
trapped in a miserable arranged marriage, she can imagine herself to be
the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin, awaiting the one who will help her spin
gold from straw.
It’s only as adults that we make the mistake of
thinking that children’s literature, along with fairy tales, is
essentially escapist. When we pick these books up decades later, we’re
surprised to learn what we doubtless always sensed as kids, even if we
lacked the vocabulary to articulate it: that these stories are about
eternal human strengths and weaknesses, about how to exist in the world.
Then
again, the hidden nature of their messages is crucial to their magic.
As Bettelheim noted, explaining to a child what makes a story so
captivating would ruin it. Its power to enchant “depends to a
considerable degree on the child’s not quite knowing why he is delighted
by it”.
In other words, the next time your children nag you to
read The Very Hungry Caterpillar at bedtime, think of it as the tale of
one creature’s obsessive-compulsive quest to fill a hole that can’t be
filled, or as a prose poem about demonic possession – just be sure to
stick to the words on the page.
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