"Wild Trees and Giving Things"

Greetings from Athens on day four of the Big Southern Freeze. Sunday night we had a huge snow storm come in that dropped six inches of snow in about half as many hours, and as a result the first four days of classes at the University of Georgia have been cancelled due to the icy conditions.


So with cabin fever fully in place, I decided to break up my and my roommates' routine of watching nonstop episodes of Say Yes to the Dress and intermittently eating junk food and complaining about our weight with a little bit of productive reading. My dear friend Danielle Perkins, with whom I lived for three weeks this past summer as we nannied together in New York, e-mailed me her (first) senior thesis to peruse. I say first because the wonderwoman that she is is actually taking on a second senior thesis during her last semester before graduation, which I await with great anticipation.


Danielle's thesis, Wild Trees and Giving Things: Rediscovering Awe in Children's Literature, was an absolute delight from start to finish. Not only am I already invested in the subject of children's literature because of my career goals in book publishing and previous jobs as a nanny (one of my favorite things to do with my kids was discover their favorite books and introduce them to some of mine), but Danielle brought such a fresh and sincere perspective to the transformation of this genre over time.


She postulates that "[t]his branch of literature has forfeited its sense of the 'Sacred'—its sense of a metanarrative." Trading sweeping tales of valor and heroism for small, menial narratives which do not encompass a child's sense of wonder, the stories that shape our children now are robbing them of a once rich tradition. Children (and all people, for that matter) have a deep need for a sense of the divine, a concept that is larger than themselves-- slightly out of reach and a bit out of focus, always being hinted at but perhaps never fully grasped. She traces the attribution of "the sacred" from the gods of Mount Olympus to the Almighty G-d, from Lockean notions of Reason into the physical world of exploration and nature, and finally, with scientific advances, to within the human mind.

"Whether it was talking caterpillars or Cheshire cats, a new host of guides invited children into impossible adventures and nonsensical journeys. And what wonders awaited them within the human mind. Seemingly, the only thing more convenient to explore than their backyard was the human spirit. It did not require any sort of travel, and thus the notion of the sacred was diminished one again, shifting from encompassing the world to the individual."

But with the advent of postmodern ways of thinking came an aimlessness in children's literature. Overarching metanarratives were exchanged for cyclical storylines, purpose traded in for tales with no room for the wonderful. Danielle examines the ways that three modern children's authors treat the sacred in their work: Roald Dahl, author of Matilda and The Witches, who uses magic and personal will power to provide a sense of the sacred; Shel Silverstein, author of The Missing Piece, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Giving Tree, who espouses an ideology that "circumstances are uncontrollable, people are unpredictable, and life is uncertain,"; and Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety, Pigglety, Pop!, or There Must Be Something More to Life, who seems to recognize the brokenness implicit in the world but points his characters and his readers to a hope beyond it.


One of my favorite passages from the paper is as follows and details the appropriate response to mystery:

"...[M]ystery helps create another side of the sacred by evoking reverence, or awe. When Corduroy Bear wandered from his shelve into the large department store, he marveled at the size of a world he never could have imagined. And when Lucy stepped through the wardrobe for the first time into Narnia, she could not help but gape at the snowy forest before her. When individuals are faced with the sacred, it is both frightening and alluring, and at times the only response offered is reverence. This is captured in the moments in literature when the narrator fails. Impotent before natural majesty, terrified before the unknown, overwhelmed by beauty or by fecund detail, everyone, at some point, fails. The lush verbiage of natural description or the blow-by-blow reportage of events invariably, at some moment, gives way to silence. (Lerer 184)"

Each of the three authors on which Danielle focuses "attempted to make beauty out of the chaos around them. And with each attempt, they learned that the human mind--while capable of many wonderful things--is not powerful enough to create a metanarrative able to satisfy the human heart."


And that, I am convinced, is a truth that applies far beyond the world of children's literature.