The Power of the Child Protagonist in Fiction
By Kathryn KulpaShe did not care for children's books in which the children grew up, as what "growing up" entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows. --The Little Friend, Donna Tartt
Reading the passage in Donna Tartt's novel The Little Friend in which twelve-year-old Harriet reflects on the dull fate of child heroes who grow up reminded me of all the fat Victorian novels I used to take from my mother's glass-front bookcase and leave three-quarters unread. They began, as books did in those days, at the beginning: Chapter One. I am Born. And so, lying on my stomach on the seventies-vintage orange shag rug, I'd settle into the maroon-and-gold thickness of David Copperfield or Of Human Bondage or one of the other big books from the same leather-bound set. At ten I considered myself too old for children's books; my mother considered me too young for most "adult" books, unless she had vetted the content, but "classics" were always acceptable. I'd devour the first fifty or one hundred pages in dreamy, satiated fascination. The heroes and heroines were generally orphans, oppressed by cruel cousins or wicked stepfathers or vicious headmasters; they lived in gloomy but vividly described surroundings and were always being locked in haunted rooms or made to sleep in coffins or sentenced to some hideous public humiliation before their whole school. I adored them.
But suddenly they would be snatched away, and in their place would be some bland twenty-year-old doing insipid things for which I had no use. With the exception of Oliver Twist, who never grew up, and Jane Eyre, who did, but somehow retained her child-strong intensity, my erstwhile heroes would begin to bore me. Every ounce of my sympathy was given to David Copperfield, disgraced by having to wear a sign reading "HE BITES" to boarding school or poor, club-footed Philip in Of Human Bondage, forgotten by adults in the greater bustle of his mother's death, but I never cared about them becoming a lawyer or doctor or marrying the boss's daughter or throwing their life away on some tartish waitress. And so I'd put them aside, vowing to return at some other time when my patience might be greater, but never getting around to it.
At the end of one of Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories from The Jungle Book, we are told that the wild wolf-boy will someday leave his jungle ways behind and become a solid burgher of the village. "But that is a story for grownups," Kipling wrote, and, wisely, he left it untold. The struggle after happiness is always more interesting than its attainment. Perhaps it's for the same reason that fairy stories end with marriage, rather than beginning with it. I discovered this for myself when I started writing stories that became sequels, then series. Once the long-suffering lovers were united at last, what else was there to do with them -- except to give them children, who would then become the focus of the new tales? (Thus grew the "Gerold Family Saga," which eventually required the drawing of family trees and historical timelines for me to keep up with.)
Is childhood really so much richer in event than adult life? Perhaps not, but it feels richer in detail, experienced more deeply and freely, without weight of comparison or analysis. Flannery O'Connor once said that anyone who survives childhood will never lack for material to write about, and I believe she was right: when writers like Dickens or Bronte (or Stephen King, for that matter) draw upon their own childhood for emotional if not literal inspiration, their writing takes on a power and resonance not always present in their other work. Fiction centered on the child as narrator or protagonist, whether written for children or adults, has a particular hold upon the imagination, and if the child happens to be sensitive and misunderstood, and to be an orphan or near-orphan, to appear insignificant, but to have some unguessed talent and courage, then we are back in the realm of our own childhood reading. Small wonder, then, that so many adults wait eagerly for the next Harry Potter book. To read of Harry, confined by his horrible aunt and uncle to a cupboard under the stairs, discovering in himself the gift of magic is to re-experience The Secret Garden or A Wrinkle in Time, that intense world of childhood secrets and suffering.As a child reader, I was happiest when my heroes were most miserable, like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess after her father dies penniless and the heartless headmistress Miss Minchin makes her live in the school garret and work as a general slavey; brave Sara befriends rats and scullery maids, and, though nearly fainting from hunger in front of a bakery window, spends her last penny to buy a roll for an even poorer street child. All our heroine's suffering is ennobled by the knowledge (this being the book world and not the real world) that fortunes can be reversed, that those thought dead may return, that miraculous rescues are possible.
The childhood world takes on a greater intensity the farther it is removed from the adult world, which is why child heroes are so often orphans or are incompletely or inadequately parented. Jane Eyre, when her story begins, is a ten-year-old orphan living on the grudging charity of a resentful aunt; so too is Harry in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Mary, in the chilling opening scenes of The Secret Garden, is the only one left alive when a killing fever strikes her family. Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird has a father but no mother; Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time has a mother, but her father is trapped in another dimension, from which only she can save him. In Heather Quarles' young adult novel A Door Near Here, Katherine's father has essentially abandoned the family to be with his new wife, and her mother has retreated into alcoholism.Harriet Cleve Dufresnes of The Little Friend is similarly left to herself; after the death of her brother, her father finds it convenient to be away "on business" most of the time, and her mother alternates between overt depression and a state of dreamy confusion. When trouble strikes, and it always does, these children don't look to adults for help; orphans against the world, they face its mysteries and dangers alone, or aided by their friends: the kind of friends, as Stephen King said in "The Body" (later filmed as Stand by Me) that one has in childhood, and never again.
The Little Friend is 555 pages long, and like the best books of childhood, it captures a world too fully for us to ever want to leave it; less than halfway through, I was already dreading the end. Harriet is twelve and a heroine that those of us who grew up with our noses in books can't help but love: "Harriet … was neither pretty nor sweet. Harriet was smart." Smart enough, she decides, that she can not only solve the unsolved murder of her brother, hanged in his own backyard when Harriet was a baby, but can also see to the punishment of the killer. In this quest she is aided by her friend Hely, who loves James Bond movies, Evel Kneivel cartoon shows, horror comics, and Harriet. With elements of Southern gothic, murder mystery, and coming of age tale, the novel is also as passionate a paean as I've read to the pleasure and the importance of reading fiction, not as a sterile educational task but as a way of experiencing the world.
Sentimentalizing childhood as a "time of innocence" misses the point. Innocence is a self-destroying quality, and what children are about is the business of gaining experience. It is the moment of gaining knowledge that we remember most vividly, and this, perhaps, is why the books of childhood stay with us so long. We remember them not because they were the best books we ever read, but because they were the first to move us in a particular way, the first to take us to places that existed only inside ourselves, and thus were everywhere.
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Additional ReadingThe Goats by Brock Cole. A boy and girl, social outcasts on the brink of puberty, are stripped naked and abandoned on an island as a camp joke. The story moves from simple physical survival (finding clothes and food, getting off the island) to a complex journey of spiritual and emotional growth, and the insights into preadolescent consciousness feel raw and real.
The Absence of Nectar by Kathy Hepinstall. This story is told by Alice, an 11-year-old whose mother has married the wicked Simon Jester, of the human subspecies step-parentis terribilis, i.e. he may have killed his last wife and child. As in her previous works, Hepinstall features a brother-sister duo and several other strange and unfortunate juveniles, including the unforgettable Persely Snow, locked away in a mental hospital for poisoning her parents.
That Night by Alice McDermott. A neighborhood scandal, or tragedy, is played out before the wondering eyes of a young girl awed by the doomed love of her teenage neighbors: "I remember only that my ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all."
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. A Gorey-esque series (there are nine of them so far, commencing with The Bad Beginning and progressing to The Carnivorous Carnival), these tongue-in-cheek melodramas follow the trials of the beleaguered Baudelaire Orphans; we begin with a mysterious fire that kills their parents, and then things get much, much worse.
The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell. The author styles himself 'country noir,' and this Southern gothic is a shotgun marriage of Greek tragedy and crime novel, all filtered through the narration of thirteen-year-old Shuggie Akins, who loves his mama just a little bit more than he ought to.----------------------
Kathryn Kulpa is a graduate student in the Teaching Certification Program of the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, where she gets to read kids' books for credit. She eventually did get around to reading all of David Copperfield and Of Human Bondage, but still likes the beginnings best.
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Copyright © 2003 Kathryn Kulpa. All rights reserved.
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