Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  A BOY NAMED STRU

  Meet Struwwelpeter. A hygienically challenged kid who looks a lot like Edward Scissorhands on a really bad hair day, Struwwelpeter was the creation of Heinrich Hoffmann, a nineteenth-century German psychiatrist. Christmas shopping for kids in 1844, generations before the dawn of the latest video-game craze, was usually a matter of buying a pair of teeny-tiny lederhosen and maybe a sack of pfeffernüsse. But Dr. Hoffmann also wanted to get his three-year-old son a book. Visiting several Frankfurt book emporiums, the doctor was dismayed to discover that most of the children’s fare was insufferably didactic — likely the German equivalent of that year’s hot-off-the-press U.S. bestsellers, I Will Be a Gentleman: A Book for Boys and Passion and Punishment: A Tale for Little Girls.

  Viewing this sappy, pedantic selection of children’s books, Dr. Hoffmann probably uttered the German equivalent of “What are you people, f’ing NUTS?!!”

  Hoffmann’s solution to his dilemma was to buy a blank notebook and write his own droll tales. Those stories became an entertaining little book that would eventually have the not-so-kid-friendly title of Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3–6 Jahren (or, Entertaining Stories and Funny Pictures with 15 Nicely Colored Panels for Children 3–6). Hoffmann gave it to his son for Christmas. Later, a friend in publishing suggested that these stories deserved a wider audience. One of the most controversial children’s books of its age, the book — referred to as simply Struwwelpeter — subverted the sweet and insipid tales of the past by turning them on their precious little heads. It was hardly the first work for children to use violence as a means to an end. The Grimm fairy tales have much to answer to in this regard. Yet one aspect of Hoffmann’s tales that sets them apart from the pack is the sheer manic glee that imbues his stories. For all that they instruct, you get the distinct feeling reading them that Hoffmann wasn’t taking himself too seriously.

  In ten rhyming stories, Hoffmann introduces a veritable rogues’ gallery of misbehaving minors, from Cruel Frederick to Fidgety Philip to Johnny-Head-in-the-Air, many of whom pay a big price — sometimes the ultimate price — for their bad behavior. Conrad sucks his thumb until it is cut off (snip, snip!) by an enterprising Scissor-Man. Hans doesn’t look where he’s going, falls into a pond, and only nearly dies. (Lucky kid.) And Pauline plays with matches and makes an ash of herself. For comic relief, Hoffmann throws in some sympathetic cats, crying into their hankies.

  Each terrifying tale in the collection possesses a pronounced moral, which clearly lays out the tragic and brutal consequences of misbehaving. Since Doc Hoffmann wasn’t exactly known for understatement, he even sketched his own illustrations for the tales, later writing in his autobiography, “The child learns simply only through the eye, and it only understands that which it sees. . . . The warnings — Don’t get dirty! Be careful with matches and leave them alone! Behave yourself! — are empty words for the child. But the portrayal of the dirty slob, the burning dress, the inattentive child who has an accident — these scenes explain themselves just through the looking that also brings about the teaching.”

  The lithe and opportunistic Scissor-Man, doing what comes naturally

  Struwwelpeter found his way to the United States via Mark Twain, who became captivated by the tales while touring Germany. His English translation of the book, Slovenly Peter, doesn’t necessarily grasp the finer subtleties of the language, though it certainly maintains the spirit of the book, with rhyming lines such as, “So she was burnt with all her clothes, / And arms and hands, and eyes and nose; / Till she had nothing more to lose / Except her little scarlet shoes.” Apart from that, the book has been turned into a demonic staged musical, called Shockheaded Peter, which uses puppets to gleefully dismember, burn, shoot, and otherwise tear asunder its little German miscreants. Struwwelpeter became a commercial success in Germany and is still popular there today, but as Maria Tatar notes, controversy has followed it in recent decades.

  For all that we gasp and shudder, scholar Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, writes that the stories in Struwwelpeter are today more like innocuous jokes than anything truly terrifying. Considering our culture’s rampant consumerism and media violence, what seemed at the time to be sadism is no longer shocking. Writing of the musical version of the tale, Jerry Griswold writes that “Hoffmann’s bizarre anecdotes that link child raising with bloodletting are played for laughs,” adding that this type of humor, now seen as being tantamount to the conquering of fears, explains the rise of today’s macabre and popular Lemony Snicket stories. While it might not top today’s bestseller lists alongside tales of pimply wizards struggling against nefarious forces, Struwwelpeter still remains the rare title that can be considered both the grandfather of subversive books for children and one of the few nineteenth-century morality tales still in print today.

  You can’t discuss the history of books for children without understanding that there are rules in place. Children are the eternal battleground upon which all wars are fought, all desires placed, and all hopes and dreams embodied. After all, in the view of childhood as furthered by John Locke in seventeenth-century England, and which still prevails in the schools of both America and Europe, a child’s mind is a blank tablet. The job of adults is to mold these inchoate creatures into good citizens, civilized adults, and — increasingly in today’s world — consumers. It is through, among many other things, reason, self-control, education, and the mass media that they learn these roles.

  With all this in mind, it’s little wonder that adults have always seen books for children as a great place to instruct. One of the first children’s books was the good old Childe’s Guide with its no-nonsense instructions: “This Book attend / Thy life to mend.” And “The idle Fool / Is whipt at School.” Children’s books that followed were just as riveting. Is it any surprise that poor Peter was so popular? And not just compared to the didactic, high-minded books before him on the timeline — but also to society at large. Here we have Dr. Hoffmann — in his eager attempts to entertain his children — writing a set of exaggerated tales in response to the popular, moralizing tales of his age, though clearly his tales instructed in their own way as well. The gentle doctor wasn’t the first, but you could say he started a trend: Mark Twain himself, so in love with the tales, then brought us The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel that makes its own significant contribution toward subverting and satirizing adult conventions.

  Historically, children’s books were generally about edification first, amusement second. As Gregory Maguire has written, they emerged from a “healthy profusion of contradictory origins: nursery doggerel, fireside fables, Bible lessons, tatters of myth, lopsided hunks of legend, cautionary tales, improving lectures, and ferociously apocalyptic object lessons.” Truthfully, some weren’t all that different from books for children today. But as the twentieth century rolled around, the gatekeepers of the form made their opinions clearly known. Children’s literature, finally established as a phenomenon in its own right, was firmly controlled by parents, librarians, and booksellers. And when you are an arbiter of what the “good” literature is, the creative types (authors, illustrators) aren’t always happy with what you’ve deemed acceptable. In his 1941 Caldecott acceptance speech for They Were Strong and Good, illustrator Robert Lawson bemoaned those who “decide what subjects are suitable for children.” Years later, Jack Zipes would write, “We have tried to ‘nourish’ children by feeding them literature that we think is appropriate for them. Or, put another way, we have manipulated them. . . to think or not to think about the world around them.”

  Subversive Lit: A Primer

  The history of children’s literature in America at a glance! Fun for the whole family!

  From the colonial period to 1900, books for kids were simple. They could be placed into five easy categories:

  1. Religion and morals.

  2. Primers, spellers, and ABC b
ooks. You get extra points if you can combine both #1 and #2. Example: The New England Primer — published in 1773 and also known as “The Little Bible of New England” — delivered abecedarian kicks and moral instruction all in one fell swoop: For A, we have: “In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all.” As with any alphabet book, it’s much more fun to see what they come up with for X, and this little book does not disappoint: “Xerxes did die, / And so must I.” Whee! Good times.

  3. Informational and nonfiction subject matter.

  4. Didactic stories meant to instruct little children in the ways of the world. And here’s the crux of our story today. These were perhaps the most enjoyable books of the era, but they still had to teach along the way. 1787’s The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes? Case in point.

  5. Books actually meant to entertain. If we look at children’s literature as books meant to entertain children and not merely preach at them, then children’s literature didn’t take off until well into the eighteenth century. What a young field it is, still in diapers and chewin’ on board books.

  So we come to it: the subversive. As society becomes more or less permissive and its status quo changes, that change is mirrored in children’s books. When society’s rules shift, so do the rules for children’s literature. Those who want to break with tradition will generate more subversive books, while those who want to maintain the status quo will continue to insist on what is considered standard. It all comes down to an attempt to determine social laws for the next generation and teach children what we think is right.

  Yet the very format of a children’s book is, in and of itself, a subversive one. Crediting many of the great picture-book authors and illustrators as perpetrators of “acts of mischief,” Patricia Lee Gauch, editor of three Caldecott Medal–winning books, sees books for kids as ways in which chaos can be introduced into controlled environments to the benefit of the child. Society and gatekeepers may strive to teach children the social laws, but just as soon as they learn them, they can see them broken as well. Believing the best picture books for children to be mischievous, subversive, and exhilarating in turn, Gauch credits everyone from David Small to Tomie dePaola with the ability to tap into the allure of subversion.

  Historically, the gatekeepers of children’s literature also have a tendency to miss things, allowing children’s books a certain level of freedom that adult books lack. While a book written for the adult market is subject to multiple levels of scrutiny, many is the book for children that is discounted merely because its intended audience is of the youthful persuasion. And when you aren’t being watched too closely, creativity blooms. Why else would numerous authors — Langston Hughes, for one — have started writing children’s fare during their blacklisted McCarthy years?

  When you’re not paying attention to those “kiddie books,” not only will creativity blossom; the unmentionable may also get its day in the sun. As Julia Mickenberg and Philip Nel point out, “The children’s literature field represents a relative free space for unconventional ideas.” Alison Lurie writes about something similar: it is in books for children, she states, that unpopular opinions in the world of adults find their expression, and if we want to know what has been censored from mainstream culture in the past, we can always turn to classic children’s books.

  Take one very laid-back bull as an example. When antiwar sentiments were taboo during World War II, along came Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand in 1936. The book was met with acclaim from reviewers and readers of all ages. It told the tale of a little bull in Spain named Ferdinand, who “liked to just sit quietly and smell the flowers,” opting not to fight at the bullfights in Madrid. When he’s taken there anyway against his will, he sits down in the middle of the ring to admire the “flowers in all the lovely ladies’ hair.” And in refusing to fight, the Banderilleros, Picadores, and Matador are forced to take him back to his pasture.

  As the book grew in popularity, critics claimed that perhaps the beloved tale of the Spanish bull was commentary on the Spanish Civil War. In time, the book was accused of being “communist, pacifist, and fascist, and of satirizing communism, pacifism, and fascism.” The Story of Ferdinand was even banned in some countries, most notably by Adolf Hitler and Franco (who called it “degenerate democratic propaganda”). Gandhi, for the record, was a fan.

  Ferdinand is merely a “philosopher,” Munro Leaf later told the New York Times. It was simply something he worked out on a rainy Sunday for his friend, illustrator Robert Lawson, who’d complained he was feeling limited by publishers. Leaf gave him the manuscript, merely commenting, “Rob, cut loose and have fun with this.” When asked about the book’s meaning, Leaf responded by saying, “If there is a message. . . it is Ferdinand’s message, not mine — get it from him according to your need.”

  Whether Leaf intended to equate Ferdinand with Flower Power or not, this free-spirited, antiwar bovine was embraced as a mascot by those waving the peace sign everywhere, settling himself comfortably into the canon of subversive picture books.

  Lest you believe that subversion in works of forty-eight pages or less is a relic of a long-forgotten time, please be so good as to consider a more contemporary book of misbehaving bovine heroes in the present-day classic Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type. (What is it about beef and bucking the system?)

  Written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Betsy Lewin, this title from the year 2000 follows a herd of milk producers as they discover that through the use of a typewriter, they are able to unionize and make their demands known to “the man” (aka Farmer Brown). Laden with choice but suitably simple phrases (“Duck was a neutral party so he brought the ultimatum to the cows”), the book has been labeled as a work of liberal propaganda and even anti-creationist. For example, on the right-wing radio show WallBuilders Live!, Kyle Olson, author of Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism‚ and host Rick Green discussed the book in less than glowing terms:

  Green: So you’ve got these kids who have never been exposed to any of this kind of stuff, have never thought about this kind of stuff, but you’re already planting in their minds the whole union philosophy.

  . . .

  Barton: By the way, that’s not only a pro-union book. It’s an anti-creation book, because it makes the animals equal to people. Those kids who come out of that kindergarten class are going to grow up to be attorneys who fight for the rights of cows, because cows are just like we are.

  Cows that type? Cows with rights? Horrors!

  In the field of publishing in both America and abroad, there has been a long and venerable history of creating purposely subversive picture books. It’s a long line of books intended to undermine the values held so dear by “the man.” In fact, until the late nineteenth century, children’s books rarely depicted children who were not white, male, and privileged. Books for kids didn’t speak to the majority of kids, and if we wonder today why children’s literature is so popular, it may have something to do with the wide range of voices from which we are finally hearing. Back then, however, a kind of radical children’s literature arose out of a system that spoke primarily to only one kind of child about approved and — let’s face it — boring topics. As long as you have an established norm, there will always be a way for children’s books (and authors) to upset conventions and make the world a more interesting place.

  “You Can Go by Foot / You Can Go by Cow. . . ”

  Sometimes it’s just a case of someone desperately wanting to read something into a text. After Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now! by Dr. Seuss was published, in 1972, it was shelved alongside his other books in the I Can Read series.

  In the book, a mysterious and very furry narrator — we readers see only his arm and aggressively pointy finger — urges one Marvin K. Mooney to leave the room already. In true Seussian style, he offers up various imaginative ways Mooney can hightail it outta there, and that’s pretty much the name of the game when it comes to the book’s course
of events.

  Until the final page, that is, when Mooney finally. . . well, he finally goes. Toodle-oo!

  As the decades passed, however, people began to see dear little Marvin differently.

  Wasn’t 1972 around the time people started insisting that President Richard Nixon leave office? Was Seuss writing a parable about the president who simply would not leave? Just as the narrator begs Marvin to leave (and there really is abundant begging), could the author also have been slyly winking at adult readers, having created a delightful political parody?

  As it happens, it’s unlikely that Dr. Seuss/Geisel would have had the president dead in his sights with this one. By 1972, the Watergate scandal had only just broken. We take comfort instead in the fact that the book provides the first known recorded use of the word crunk (albeit in a different context from its current use).

  However, Seuss — to his credit — did understand how beautifully the two ideas flowed together. By 1974, he was sending his friends copies of a new publication: Richard M. Nixon, Will You Please Go Now! Geisel’s buddy Art Buchwald republished it in his own column in The Washington Post on July 30, 1974. As he said, “My good friend Dr. Seuss wrote a book a few years ago titled Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now! He sent me a copy the other day and crossed out Marvin K. Mooney and replaced it with Richard M. Nixon.” This change — with the last line morphing from “Marvin WENT” to “Richard WENT” — definitely gives the end of the tale a satisfying bit of oomph.

  Way to get your crunk on, Ted.

  WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

  Children are the natural audience for subversive literature. Think about it: they have no rights, and they’re continually at the mercy of the adults around them. “Children by dint of their youth,” writes Gregory Maguire, “are a minority population in more ways than one.” Novelist Erik Christian Haugaard has said that the fairy tale belongs to the poor, never taking the part of the strong against the weak. The same could be said of children’s books. The thought that children might be able to upset the rules laid out before them is hugely enticing to them. Lurie writes about A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories as appealing to “anyone anywhere who finds himself, like most children, at a social disadvantage.” With Christopher Robin ruling over the creatures in the Hundred Acre Wood (“the child as God,” she calls it), readers see the child turning the tables on parental authority. Similarly, in the final chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice discovers that the domineering Red Queen is merely her kitten.