Not About Daredeviltry

A delightful editorial in today's New York Times questions the true purpose of The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls. It says:

Here are some excerpts. Try these, girls, if you dare:

Page 57: “Putting Your Hair Up With a Pencil.”

Page 82: “The Daring Girls Guide to Danger.” (“5. Wear high heels.” “7. Try sushi or another exotic food.”)

Page 47: “Throwing the Ball.” (“Start with the ball in your right hand, stretching your arm straight out behind you. Standing with your feet apart, one forward and one slightly back, point your forward foot — or, the foot on the side of your glove hand — in the direction the ball will go ...”)

Hmmm. Maybe the “Dangerous” boys’ version is more adventuresome:

Page 98: “Making a Paper Hat.”

Page 180: “Wrapping a Package in Brown Paper and String.”

Guess not.

Having read both books, we can assure you that very, very little in them is remotely dangerous or daring, and that anything on the borderline, like shooting bunnies (“Dangerous,” Page 238) or climbing trees (“Daring,” Page 158), is covered by a very strict NOTE TO PARENTS: “All of these activities should be carried out under adult supervision only.”

We’re not sure if that applies to Page 171 of “Dangerous”: “Skipping Stones.”

These books are so clearly not about daredeviltry.

They are about ineptitude. They seem to perfectly capture a fear, floating in the culture, that a generation of preoccupied parents has been raising a generation of children full of sophisticated knowledge that is useless when the power goes out or the batteries die.

Ironically, the Style section of the same newspaper on the same day includes a review of The Daring Book for Girls which concludes: "It’s something you’d be glad to have on hand, in a house full of daughters, if the power ever goes out."

Anthony Horowitz: "How Depressing It Is"

A while back I linked to this complaint in the tabloid Daily Mail from Anthony Horowitz, creator of juvenile spy Alex Rider. Reading the graphic novel adapted from the movie script adapted from the original novel brought that article to my mind again today.

Horowitz claimed it was just too hard for him to create villains when he had to avoid ethnic and other stereotypes:

How depressing it is that Herod Sayle, the Lebanese businessman that Alex Rider fought in his first adventure, Stormbreaker, quietly morphed into Darrius Sayle, Californian trailer trash, by the time the film came out last summer.

In the UK edition, he's the son of a failed hairdresser, but in the American edition that had to be changed when I was accused of homophobia - because to some people hairdressing would seem a gay profession.

Over there, he's the son of a failed oral hygienist.

Horowitz's article didn't acknowledge that the original name "Herod Sayle" was a cheap pun to begin with. It left out how the character had already "morphed" from Lebanese to Egyptian in the US edition of the book, undoubtedly with his approval, so he had long compromised the original characterization.

What's more, Horowitz's whinging about losing "hairdresser" in favor of "oral hygienist" obscured how that he apparently believes boys who grow up poor in the Third World must have a "failed" father. Actual grinding poverty has no place in this view of life.

Whether Egyptian, Lebanese, or Californian, Herod/Darrius Sayle is born poor and tumbles into an elite British education. In the books, he as a young child saves rich people's lives. In the graphic novel, his mother wins a lottery. Sayle hates the bigotry and bullying at his new school so much that it motivates both his success as a computer magnate and his genocidal scheme.

Of course, anybody would hate bigotry and bullying directed at them; I've already written about Horowitz's lack of understanding and compassion on that point. His implied lesson in Stormbreaker, in all its forms, is not that the future prime minister shouldn't have bullied Sayle at school, but that Sayle shouldn't have been sent to that school in the first place; he would have been happier in the Lebanese slum/Egyptian slum/California trailer park where he began.

Just as Horowitz's characterization and plotting seems to play to bigotry, so does his Daily Mail essay. It's a standard-issue rant against the constrictions of "political correctness"--yet how in the world does that follow from the essay's start?

When it comes to children's literature, the most fun that a writer can have is creating the bad guys ... and the fact is that there's nothing kids like more than a good villain.

At the end of the day, Peter Pan is just a girl in green tights, but when Captain Hook enters the stage, the theatre comes alive to the sound of jubilant boos and hisses.

Who is it we remember from Treasure Island? Is it Jim Hawkins, the cabin boy, or the effortlessly stylish Long John Silver?

Ethnicity and "political correctness" never come up with those classic villains. Stevenson and Barrie didn't build those characters on stereotypes, and they didn't write to newspapers lamenting how much easier it would have been to do so.

In fact, the roots of Captain Hook's character rest in--irony alert!--an elite British education. In the stage play, Hook's last words are "Floreat Etona," the motto of Eton College, and Barrie later wrote a speech titled "Captain Hook at Eton." In the novel, Barrie's narrative voice whispers, "Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze." Captain Hook was an insider, not an outsider, which made him a character for the ages.

Given Horowitz's article from last year, we might wonder what he came up with as the antagonist in the newest Alex Rider adventure, Snakehead? The Telegraph reports he's the leader of an "Asian crime network" named Winston Yu:

In typical Horowitz fashion, though, he is far from being the usual two-dimensional villain. He is the son of a Chinese woman who has sent her boy to an expensive public school (Harrow) on the strength of her earnings as a hired assassin.

Yes, that's "typical Horowitz," with more than a little ethnic stereotyping at the foundation.

Constabulary Notes from All Over

From the Times-Tribune police log (via Daily Ozmapolitan):

SCRANTON — Police responded to O’Malley’s Tavern on Birney Avenue early Sunday after an unknown woman in a Dorothy costume allegedly pushed and attempted to punch a city woman.

Jennifer Lam, of South Ninth Avenue, told police she was dancing when the woman dressed as a “Wizard of Oz” character pushed her and “tried to swing at her,” Sgt. Richard Patchcoski said. The complaint was filed shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday.

Knights and Ladies in Knight's Castle

One of the weaknesses of E. Nesbit's fantasy books is that her children aren't very distinct. It doesn't help that there are often three or four of them, all from one family. And it doesn't help that they tend to fall into gendered types: the commanding boy, the maternal girl, the youngest, and so on, so even what sets them apart from each other doesn't make them individuals. I think her child characters have delightfully childish dialog and thinking, but they just don't stand out.

Nesbit's acolyte Edward Eager largely avoids that problem, though he, too, uses multiple children as protagonists. I think in Knight's Castle Eager exaggerates the types a bit, making each more distinct. And he reverses the usual stereotypes by depicting one girl, Eliza, as the most aggressive of the bunch, while another, Ann, is the youngest and shyest.

And here's a passage when those personalities and gender expectations come out most clearly.

"Don't!" said Ann. "Once you start moving them around you never can tell what might happen!"

"What could happen?" said Jack.

"Almost anything," said Eliza. "You don't know what that magic's like when it's roused!"

"Ah, don't pay any attention to them," said Roger suddenly and basely, full of his new manly importance as Jack's friend. "They're just a couple of crazy girls."

After that, Ann did not take much part in the conversation.

Eliza's reaction to being called a crazy girl was different. In the process of her reaction a chair leg came off and the floor was scratched, but no one was seriously hurt.

Later Eliza also proves to be the most bloodthirsty of the children in battle: "I cut off four heads and cleaved three knights in two. How did you do?" Roger is feeling a little queasy at that moment.

As for Ann, just at the moment in the book when she's feeling most small, there's a need for a small girl. A bit neat, to be sure, but satisfying nonetheless.

Horn Book Fantasy Roundup

This month the Horn Book's website added a selection of fine essays on fantasy from issues past.

I particularly enjoyed Lloyd Alexander on E. Nesbit's narrative voice in a 1985 essay:

A lot of Victorian children's writers give off a sort of mealy-potato quality: much rolling of eyes heavenward; children dying beautifully of some unidentified (but not messy) ailment. But E. Nesbit has a freshness, tartness, without gushing or talking down. Today's writers owe her a debt. We are modern thanks largely to her. As much as anyone, perhaps more, she helped us to find our twentieth-century voices.

Interesting samples of that narration posted here and here.

A Picture Book That Could Not Come from America

Little Vampire Goes to School was published in France in 1999. Its story and drawings are by Joann Sfar, with the text translated by Mark and Alexis Siegel. I picked it up to examine the melding of comics and picture books, but was struck more by the book's foreign sensibility. It discusses religious differences, a topic many Americans tend to avoid. Even more startling, after raising some tough religious questions, this picture book leaves them unresolved.

The story starts with Little Vampire wishing to go to school and learn, only to find that the local school (which looks tres français) is empty at night. He ends up sharing a desk and notebook with a boy named Michael. Eventually Little Vampire invites Michael home to meet the ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and monsters.

The leader of those ghosts, called the Captain, asks Michael to swear an oath of secrecy. The dialog balloons go like this.

Michael: I swear to devote my life to protecting the dead and keeping their memory. And if I break my word, may a thousand curses befall me.

Captain: Now do the sign of the cross.

Michael: No. I can’t do that.

Captain: It would give more strength to your oath.

Michael: But I’m Jewish, Captain. The cross doesn’t mean much to me.

Captain: Do the sign of the star in that case.

Michael: We don’t do that either.

Captain: You should think about all that some more. Sad times often open miraculous doorways.

The next panel shows Michael and Little Vampire alone.

The book doesn't treat Michael's lack of faith or gratitude in God, or the young characters' mystification at the Captain's remarks, as problems to be solved. They're just there, part of being human (or vampire), and the story goes on.

Grimms and Gilded at Harvard

In a borrowed copy of the latest issue of Harvard Magazine I found a profile of Prof. Maria Tatar, known for her work on the Grimms' fairy tales.

Craig Lambert's article "The Horror and the Beauty" states:

Tatar is trying to escape the adult perspective on children’s literature. (“The psychosexual readings have become predictable,” she says.) “I’m trying to capture what happens in the child,” she explains. That’s an ambitious goal, because children themselves are not particularly articulate on such matters, and adult recollections brim with distortions and idealizations. So Tatar also goes directly to the literary texts, mining her insights from words on the page, an admittedly speculative enterprise.

This approach has led her to consider magical thinking and how stories teach children that you don’t need wands--just words--to do things. The so-called classics are classics for a reason: they have powerful language, and use not just sparkle and shine but also gothic gloom to get children hooked on a story and on reading. The marvels that tumble thick and fast through these narratives lead readers to wonder not just about the world of fiction but also about the world they inhabit.

“The radical view is that it doesn’t matter what story a kid reads,” she continues. “In some ways, children’s literature is pulp fiction: it’s melodramatic. John Updike called fairy tales ‘the television and pornography of their day, the life-lightening trash of preliterate peoples.’ Children who read escape not just from reality but into opportunity: they learn how to navigate in the larger world; they become more connected and curious, energized by the propulsive wonders of Narnia, Oz, or Never Land.”

Also in this issue is a very intriguing article illustrated with photos about an exhibit now at Harvard showing how Greek statuary probably looked when it was all painted and gilded. In a word, different. (For Oz fans, the technical term for that style of sculpture was "polychrome.")

Rowling's Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

I'm finishing this past Harry Potter Week (and a Day) with an observation I've been musing on for a while. Author J. K. Rowling's recent remark that she considered Prof. Albus Dumbledore to be gay adds another example to a pattern of how her books have been progressive on the surface but undercut those themes in how their larger story plays out.

Rowling is clearly progressive in her politics. She went to work for Amnesty International right after college. Since 2000 the British press has tried to peg her as a supporter of Gordon Brown, now Prime Minister for the Labour Party. She's used her celebrity to support aid for single parents.

That progressivism shows up in her books' messages of inclusion, particularly at Hogwarts School. Both that school and the quidditch played there are for girls and boys equally, contrary to the history of British (and most other) schools and sport. The student body reflects the modern UK's multi-ethnic population, with no visible tensions. The headmaster is Dumbledore, so far the most important figure in children's literature identified by his creator as gay. The books also have a progressive attitude toward notions of aristocracy.

From the start inclusion and exclusion has been a major theme. In the family or under the stairs? Muggle or wizard? Rich or poor? Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin? On the quidditch team or off? In the Triwizard Tournament, in the Order of the Phoenix, in Dumbledore's Army? In Hogwarts itself?

The overarching story is a battle for inclusiveness against aristocratic racists who want to exclude "mudbloods," "half-breeds," and other undesirables. The final battle in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turns out to have its roots in a similar battle against fascism before 1945, and to require the combined forces of wizards, elves, centaurs, giants, and other creatures.

Fantasy lets authors depict evil in embodied form, and we readers expect that evil to be vanquished by the end of the saga. That victory can restore an old order or give rise to a new one with more promise. Consider the government reforms under way at the end of the Bartimaeus and Lionboy trilogies, their outcomes undetermined. Consider the breakdown of theocracy itself in His Dark Materials.

Rowling chose a different path. Her story is one of restoration, not reform. No part of the wizarding world is more tradition-bound than Hogwarts School, which becomes Harry's true home. In each book, Hogwarts is threatened and rescued. Its restoration includes the traditions that Harry comes to love because they define Hogwarts culture. The epilogue assures us that the Sorting Hat and house rivalries that divide the school remain intact, and there's no hint of pedagogical change. Thus, however much the books espouse progressive values, their primary narrative is a regression to the past.

Another overarching plot follows Harry's desire to enjoy a happy, intact family of the sort he briefly knew as an infant. The epilogue to HP7, set years after the rest, shows him with his wife and three children, his best friends with their children. (And his old school rival with his children, too.) Support and love outside the nuclear family structure, as the Order of the Phoenix provided in the middle of the series, is not apparent. And there are no single-parent families of the sort that Rowling supports in real life.

And what about the books' inclusiveness? Dana Goldstein's "Harry Potter and the Complicated Identity Politics", published in The American Prospect, suggests that the fantasy genre itself complicates any message of tolerance and mixing:

Rowling's ideology cannot simply be described as anti-racist, for as strongly as she condemns racially-motivated violence, Harry Potter remains a classic work of fantasy. And fantasy is a literary genre intent, above almost all else, on the reassuring order of classification and categorization, of blood lines and inheritances.

I think that's too reductive. Just as fantasy authors don't need to show a return to "reassuring order," they don't need to emphasize categorization and inheritance. But Rowling chose those strains within the fantasy genre, and I think they ended up working against her stated themes. Again and again, we see the action of her books undermining the values that Harry learns.

Stated Value: Inclusiveness for all ethnic groups. Action: Harry, his two closest friends, apparently all of his teachers, his godfather, and all but one of his mentors and protectors appear to be white and English. The British learn to appreciate French and Bulgarians as relatives and friends--but they still talk funny.

Stated Value: Equality of the sexes. Action: Boys get beat up a lot more than girls.

Stated Value: Appreciation of other species. Action: In HP7 Griphook snatches up the Sword of Gryffindor because goblins believe artworks never stop belonging to their makers. But later the sword magically pops into Neville's hand; a human idea of property not only prevails but receives magical endorsement. House elves start out enslaved to the human owners of their homes, and end up more loyal than ever. Centaurs want nothing to do with us, but come around to seeing that attitude as a mistake. Humans don't have to compromise their lifestyles or their values.

Stated Value: Respect for differences. Action: The books assure us that it's okay to be a werewolf like Lupin, and it's okay to marry one, as Tonks does. It's okay to be a free house elf like Dobby. It's okay to be gay like Dumbledore. But all those characters are violently killed. Killed by the racist villains, to be sure, so the books don't endorse their murders. Nonetheless, they're all still quite dead.

For me this amounts to a recurring dance of two steps forward, one step back. That does leave us a few steps forward. But Rowling might have been able to create a more thoroughly progressive narrative by choosing a different structure and details that better reflected her themes.

Circling around to the announcement that spurred this week of Oz and Ends postings, I suspect that Rowling's identification of Dumbledore as gay will become a milestone in children's fantasy literature. However, it's such a limited picture of gay humanity that within a generation it will seem no more progressive than the portraits of African-Americans in Uncle Tom's Cabin. We'll have to struggle to remember just what an impact Rowling had.

Quotation Do's and Don'ts

For folks who were at my Rhode Island College presentation on "Do’s and Don’ts of Dialogue" this morning, here is my list of ways to create distinctive speech patterns for characters.

And, just for laughs, the Blog of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

A Resemblance I Don't Believe Is Coincidence

Harry Potter Week continues, even though I'm off at Providence College speaking about dialogue tags. (It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.)

Today, on the left, a publicity still of Imelda Staunton as Prof. Dolores Umbridge from the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

On the right, the cover of a magazine from Uruguay, displayed on the web by the US Embassy in Montevideo.

Click on either picture for a closer look.