by Alison Lurie
A very different approach is evident in the elaborate, fantastic creations of artists like Arthur Rackham, who imagine the events of the rhymes as taking place in a magical but contemporary world. In his Mother Goose (1913), “Hi diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle” is the occasion for a glimpse into a mysterious, surrealistic world. The old man in the wood is a goblin, while Miss Muffet’s spider is nearly as large as she is and has a shiny top hat; but most of the children wear the clothes of Rackham’s own time. In the Blanche Fisher Wright edition, Mother Goose is a kindly old woman in Elizabethan costume; Rackham’s Mother Goose is a witch in a peaked black hat, who rides her goose as if it were a broomstick. Other nonrealistic artists imagine the world of the rhymes as more benevolent: Jessie Wilcox Smith’s Mother Goose is a huge white bird, much larger than life size, who shelters two small children under her outspread wings. In the Vollard edition of 1915, illustrated by Frederick Richardson, each verse is floated in a rectangular cloud above an elaborate painting, providing a collection of brilliantly colored landscapes into which an imaginative boy or girl can walk. The implication of all these artists, and many like them who followed, is that the world of the nursery rhymes is a surrealistic kingdom that contemporary children can enter.
A third type of illustration presents nursery rhymes as essentially humorous, often in a cartoon style. It stresses not the down-to-earth simplicity or magical strangeness of the rhymes, but their comedy and energy. Arnold Lobel’s Random House Book of Mother Goose (1986) is a brilliant example of this approach. His colorful, amusing drawings almost burst from the page. Sometimes several rhymes are combined into one full-page or double-page bouncy panorama; four verses that mention Christmas, for instance, become the text for a Dickensian snow scene.
For Lobel, the world of Mother Goose is an almost continuous round of noise and fun and feasting. It is also “round” in another sense: everyone and everything in most of these pictures is plump and roly-poly—people, chickens, cakes, mice, and hills. The occasionally dark side of the verses is often canceled out by the illustrations. Johnny, who was “so long at the fair,” is seen returning, farther down the page, laden with gifts. The three blind mice are only pretending to be blind and obviously won’t lose their tails.
Readers who know other editions of Mother Goose may be disappointed by Lobel’s. The comic exaggerations and loose, sketchy technique of his drawings, in which pencil lines and brush marks are visible, can destroy the illusion, reminding us that these pictures were made by a human hand and are not magical visions.
In the extreme case the pictures are only cutout symbols of the things and people they pretend to illustrate: flat, two-dimensional, brightly colored shapes sliding on a screen. The implication is that the verses have nothing to do with either reality or imagination; they are more or less pleasant rhymed nonsense, and need not frighten or admonish any child.
A related method of distancing the rhymes is to represent their characters as cute animals rather than human beings. Today, this is almost the standard choice of artists. In Beatrix Potter’s Nursery Rhyme Book, a 1984 compilation illustrated with vignettes from her earlier work, almost all the characters are rabbits, squirrels, and mice, including the old woman who lived in a shoe and Little Jack Horner. This tradition continues, and is sometimes combined with a cartoon style of drawing. In My Very First Mother Goose (1996), edited by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells, Mother Goose is a large white goose, and almost everyone else is a rabbit, though they wear contemporary children’s clothes.
There are, of course, advantages in turning Jack and Jill and all their friends into rabbits and bears and dogs and cats. Theoretically, if the illustrations to an American children’s book are to be truly representative, the artist must make sure that all social classes are shown; that half the characters are male and half female; and that out of every ten, six are pink, one black, one Hispanic, one Asian, and one Native American—a tedious project. The animals in children’s book illustrations are neither white nor nonwhite, neither rich nor poor, and often, as far as one can tell, they are neither male nor female. Any child can identify with them.
Recently, a few gifted illustrators have deliberately updated the Mother Goose rhymes, often adding more recent verses. One striking early example is Willy Pogany’s 1928 edition, which sometimes suggests the paintings of Lionel Feininger. Pogany’s Mother Goose rides over skyscrapers and chimneys, and the pretty maid going a-milking is accosted by a dude in a new convertible with a New York State license plate.
Most remarkable of all are Maurice Sendak’s brilliant and innovative illustrations, which without adding a single word sometimes expand a simple verse into a complex story. His wonderful drawings for a new edition of Iona and Peter Opie’s I Saw Esau (1992)—there is one on almost every page—do far more than illustrate the text.4 They provide answers to the riddles and make jokes (in one picture, for instance, a mother silently turns into a tree to shelter her child from the rain, and then turns back again). They may tell a story that is only implicit in the rhyme, or introduce new characters: a lion as well as a child is shown spying on Esau, and dogs and cats frequently comment on the action by means of speech-balloons. The most amazing events are matter-of-factly portrayed, sometimes in drawings that, like the rhymes they accompany, may give the adult reader a moment’s pause, as with:
I one my mother.
I two my mother.
I three my mother.
I four my mother.
I five my mother.
I six my mother.
I seven my mother.
I ate my mother.5
In the accompanying series of sketches, the baby does literally eat its mother.
Especially interesting are the pictures that illustrate two or more verses simultaneously, suggesting that the world of nursery rhymes, illogical and strange as it may seem, is whole and interconnected. In one picture there is a complete family, created from three different rhymes: it includes Nelly Bligh, who caught a fly;6 Sam, the dirty old man who “washed his face in a frying pan”;7 and their baby, Moses, who “supposes his toeses are roses.”8 The protagonists of a fourth rhyme are visible through the window of the family’s house.
At other times, a character from one rhyme reappears in the illustration to another: the grinning baby “made of bread and gravy” on page 60 is seen again later as a brown pudding that is at the same time also a baby. There are many other echoes and connections, and any observant child will have a fine time tracing them. Adult readers may be equally amused by the frontispiece, which shows Iona and Peter Opie, Maurice Sendak, and Sebastian Walker (the publisher of this collection) as nocturnal birds with human heads roosting in a moonlit forest. Below them two children sleep, guarded by a dog. (It is noticeable that Peter Opie, who according to report was a somewhat prickly character, has the sharpest talons.)
Soon after this book appeared, Maurice Sendak would use his art to create complex stories from simple, even apparently nonsensical verses. In We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1992) two old rhymes are the nominal framework for a tale in which “the moon’s in a fit,” wicked rats play cards, and two shabby men rescue a homeless brown-skinned boy from an orphanage. The result brilliantly and scarily evokes the dark side of contemporary city life.
The artist Wallace Tripp has also created three wonderful collections of rhymes and short poems that are just the jumping-off point for his imagination. His pictures suggest that childhood and the world are full of variety and fun. They are also full of jokes and portraits of famous historical and literary figures. In Marguerite, Go Wash Your Feet (1985), for instance, Albrecht Dürer, Gertrude Stein, Ulysses S. Grant, John Wayne, Robert, Amy, and James Russell Lowell, Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell, Dracula, Robinson Crusoe, King Kong, and the casts of The Wizard of Oz and The Wind in the Willows can be seen—and there are probably many others I haven’t yet identified. The comically charming rabbits and bears and foxes and lions for which Tripp is de
servedly famous also appear. A child can enjoy the book without recognizing most of these figures, but they will add tremendously to the amusement of any grown-up who reads it aloud.
Adults today usually read books without pictures, and unless they have the misfortune to see the film version before they open a novel, they can still create images of its characters and settings in their own minds. For children it is very different. They recognize images long before they can read, and even if not every page is illustrated, those that are guide their imagination. What the artist chose to portray, and how, may deeply affect their view of the book—and perhaps of all books. They will see them as beautiful, mysterious, funny, frightening, or boring, according to their experience. If they are to find the world of literature wonderful rather than uninteresting or terrifying, we must give them the best possible editions of the classics of children’s literature.
ENCHANTED FORESTS AND
SECRET GARDENS: NATURE IN
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
WHEN I was seven years old, my family moved to the country, and my perception of the world entirely altered. I had been used to regular, ordered spaces: labeled city and suburban streets and apartment buildings and parks with flat rectangular lawns and beds of bright “Do Not Touch” flowers behind wire fencing. Suddenly I found myself in a landscape of thrilling disorder, variety, and surprise.
As the child of modern, enlightened parents I had been told that many of the most interesting characters in my favorite stories were not real: there were no witches or fairies or dragons or giants. It had been easy for me to believe this; clearly, there was no room for them in a New York City apartment building. But the house we moved to was deep in the country, surrounded by fields and woods, and there were cows in the meadow across the road. Well, I thought, if there were cows, which I’d seen before only in pictures, why shouldn’t there be fairies and elves in the woods behind our house? Why shouldn’t there be a troll stamping and fuming in the loud, mossy darkness under the bridge that crossed the brook? There might even be one or two small hissing and smoking dragons—the size of teakettles, as my favorite children’s author, E. Nesbit, described them—in the impenetrable thicket of blackberry briars and skunk cabbage beyond our garden.
No longer a rationalist, I began to believe in what my storybooks said. Suddenly I saw the landscape as full of mystery and possibility—as essentially alive. After all, this was not surprising: it was the way most people saw the natural world for thousands of years, and the way it was portrayed in the stories I loved best.
For me, and I think for most children who have really known it, untamed nature seemed both powerful and sentient—a conscious force. The simplest rhymes assumed this: “Rain, rain, go away! Come again some other day,” my sister and I chanted as the gray drops blurred the glass. The clear implication was that the rain could hear us, even if it chose not to do as we asked. This didn’t seem strange; after all, nature often spoke by signs—the rainbow that marked the end of the storm, the groundhog that did or did not see its shadow on February second. Beasts and birds and plants predicted the future, and they even knew what other people secretly thought of us, revealing this through the petals of a daisy: “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me a little, he loves me a lot, he loves me not at all.” Even the distant stars could, if they chose, grant our wishes: “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight . . .”
In fairy tales it was clear that nature was magical. This magic was concentrated in the forest, often referred to as an enchanted forest. If you were a fairy-tale hero or heroine, that was where you went or were sent to find adventures, in contrast to the ordinary world of the village. What you found in the forest might be wonderful or terrible or both. There were wolves there and bears and deer, some of whom might be princes or princesses in disguise; there were houses made of cake and candy, dragons and giants, witches and dwarves. If you met anyone or anything in the magical world of nature, it was important to be polite, kind, and helpful, since they had the power to assist or thwart you, to change your life.
The underlying message of folklore and fairy tales was that nature is alive, aware of us—that it must be treated with care and respect. This was well illustrated in the Grimms’ tale “Mother Holle.” It begins with a girl whose mother does not love her, preferring her lazy sister. In a state of despair the heroine jumps into a well, but instead of drowning she finds herself in a strange meadow full of flowers. She doesn’t just sit there and grieve; she gets up and starts walking, and presently, the story says, “she came to a tree that was full of apples and it cried to her: ‘Oh, shake me! shake me! my apples are all ripe!’ So she shook the tree till the apples . . . were all down, and when she had gathered them into a heap, she went on.”1
You may have noticed that the heroine of this story does not eat the apples. Instead of using them to satisfy her own needs, she cooperates with nature, helping the overburdened tree and recognizing its needs. She walks on, and presently she comes to a little house where there lives an old woman called Mother Holle, who is a domestic version of the pagan German nature goddess Holde. We know who she really is because, like Holde, she is in charge of the weather; when she describes the job she is offering our heroine, she says, “Take care to make my bed well, and shake it . . . till the feathers fly, for then it will snow on earth.”2 The girl does as she is told, and when she goes home she is rewarded with gold. Her lazy, greedy sister jumps into the same well and finds herself in the same meadow, but she refuses to cooperate with nature. She will not help the apple tree or shake the feather bed properly, and she comes home covered with tar.
Fairy tales made it clear that nature could be both protective and destructive. If you were a princess who fell into an enchanted sleep, a hedge of flowers and thorns would grow up around your castle. It would shield you for a hundred years, and destroy all the wrong princes who tried to cut their way through and get at you. Then it would open to admit your true love.
The powerful, magical image of nature found in folktales also appears in many classic and modern works of children’s literature. Even the simplest stories sometimes contain messages about the mysterious importance of the natural world. Consider Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, one of the most popular picture books of the twentieth century. It is a series of rhymed good nights addressed to all the most familiar objects of childhood. There is food (a bowl of mush), toys (a red balloon and a doll’s house), articles of clothing and grooming (mittens and socks, brush and comb), pets (two kittens), and an old lady knitting, who may be a grandmother or a baby-sitter.
In the illustrations to Goodnight Moon, both the old lady and the child are rabbits, something that may seem strange at first, but is in fact one of their most important qualities. Like the animals in the fables of Aesop, they make the story universal. If the child in Goodnight Moon were human, the artist would have to show it as male or female, and as belonging to some ethnic group. But because the rabbit’s gender and race are concealed, any reader or listener can identify with it.
Another advantage of many animal heroes is that they are classless; but the big green room is clearly that of a contemporary middle-class Western child. It is spacious and comfortable, contains pictures and books, and two clocks—being on time is important in this world. There is also a mechanical connection to the outside: a telephone. In 1947, when the book was published, for a child to have his or her own telephone was a great luxury; if Margaret Wise Brown had been writing the book today, the appliance on the little rabbit’s bedside table might have been a computer.
Still, of all the things to which the story bids good night, the moon is the most important. We know this because it is mentioned in the title—after all, the book is not called Goodnight Kittens or Goodnight Mittens, though those phrases appear in the text. The moon also appears twice: once as a crescent in the picture of a cow jumping over the moon, and once as a full moon, surrounded by stars, outside the bedroom window. As the scene darkens,
the objects and figures inside the “great green room” begin to fade, while at the same time the moon and stars glow brighter and brighter. They represent both nighttime and the natural world outside the little rabbit’s bedroom; they will be there while he or she sleeps, and may bring dreams. The last lines recognize this, and also the fact that as we close our eyes the visual world disappears before the auditory one does:
Goodnight stars,
Goodnight air,
Goodnight noises everywhere.3
As we drift toward sleep, the last thing we are usually aware of is sounds: people speaking and moving about downstairs, the crunch of traffic passing, a plane overhead, a dog barking, the chirping of birds as they settle for the night. The tale bids them farewell, the room is dark, and what we are left with is the image of the moon and stars.
Stories written for children are unique in many ways. It is not only that the central characters tend to be children: the whole world view is often different. For one thing, these stories, like fairy tales, usually have a happy ending. The good are rewarded and the bad are punished—as Oscar Wilde famously said in The Importance of Being Earnest, that is what fiction means.
It has been suggested that in classic children’s literature food replaces sex as the principal source of excitement and sensual pleasure. Certainly there is something to this: think of the Christmas dinner of turkey and plum pudding in Little Women, or the picnic on Johnson’s island in Tom Sawyer when Tom and Huck and Joe Harper eat fried bacon and cornbread. It might even be said that when food in children’s books is inedible or unavailable, it is the emotional equivalent of bad or denied sex in an adult novel. One of the reasons Alice in Wonderland is sometimes unpopular with young readers may be that all Alice ever has to eat is drugs disguised as food (“Drink Me” and “Eat Me” their labels command), and they have supernatural and unpleasant effects. She never actually gets any tea at the Mad Hatter’s tea party; and when she attends the banquet at the end of Through the Looking-Glass, she cannot eat the leg of mutton because it has been formally introduced to her, and as the Red Queen says, “It isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to.”4
