Children's Play in Literature

Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child

Joyce E. Kelley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138571426
• eBook ISBN: 9781351334518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While we owe much to twentieth and twenty-first century researchers' careful studies of children's linguistic and dramatic play, authors of literature, especially children's literature, have matched and even anticipated these researchers in revealing play's power—authors well aware of the way children use play to experiment with their position in the world. This volume explores the work of authors of literature as well as film, both those who write for children and those who use children as their central characters, who explore the empowering and subversive potentials of children at play. Play gives children imaginative agency over limited lives and allows for experimentation with established social roles; play's disruptive potential also may prove dangerous not only for children but for the society that restricts them.

1 “Fits of Vulgar Joy”

Spontaneous Play in Book 1 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805)

Alison W. Powell

In a passage in the 1805 edition of his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude, William Wordsworth writes of watching mirthful children on a field at the Grasmere Fair: “How little they, they and their doings, seem,” he remarks, “… and yet how great / For all things serve them: them the morning light / Loves …” (8: 50–56).¹ The reciprocal love between the children and the morning light belies how slight, how “little,” how “pitiably dear” (53) their acts of play are. The children are without presumption, small in body, ego, and action, yet all their needs are met by nature. Wordsworth’s depiction of children playing is quintessentially Romantic, an era known for nostalgic, idealistic portrayals of childhood in nature. In fact, throughout The Prelude, children observed by the poet are welcomed by and easily integrated within nature; this is in marked contrast to his own boyhood escapades, which are consistently characterized as impulsive and transgressive.

The Prelude, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, is a thirteen-book account of the development of Wordsworth’s poetic mind. The poem’s early books trace the childhood adventures of young Wordsworth with a focus on his increasing identification with the vocation of poet. Book 1, “Childhood and School-Time,” shows the boy Wordsworth in various scenes of play, exploring a feeling of sensuous, boundless freedom in nature. While the poet works to paint each episode in a playful light, the episodes typically conclude with either a serious meditation by the speaker or an imagined reprimand from the natural world. In this way, the poet calls the reader’s attention to what is chaotic or morally ambiguous about the pleasure to be found in play—especially when that play contains, as it often does, a destructive element. The trespassing and thievery that characterize the most well-known passages, including the stolen boat, raven’s nest, and woodcock scenes, are usually read as early figurations of the speaker’s initial identification with “mother” nature. They are typically considered Wordsworth’s vehicle to show the power of nature to inspire moral consciousness. Critical accounts rarely consider precisely how the element of play serves as a catalyst for the boy’s epiphanic realizations, however, which tend to occur in response to his impulsive dislodging of one of nature’s harbored objects. In this chapter I attempt a more comprehensive reading, one that demonstrates the particular importance of the ludic element, and by extension that which is spontaneous, flexible, and pleasure-based, in the boy’s moral development.

In The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept, Matthew Kaiser considers the logics of play apparent in nineteenth-century Britain and how they merge with, downplay, or dissolve one another. Kaiser’s approach is inspiring, interdisciplinary, and nuanced; he asserts that our typical approach to play is fundamentally flawed because we approach it in quantitative rather than qualitative terms, measuring it against work, suffering, and reality, when in actuality everything is potentially intrinsic to the concept of play (107). Its ubiquity is useful for our purposes, as play is central to the depictions of the boy’s moral, social, and poetic development in Book 1 of The Prelude. What does it mean for the poet to depict himself in his early days in a playful, but destructive, act against his purported muse (nature) only to then compose projections of that muse’s reprimand? Should we read these scenes as the adult poet’s projection of his beginning conscience onto nature, or as an actual reception of nature’s “real” response? Finally, can we understand his use of those memories, specifically of destruction of nature and later moral reflection, as a new kind of muse, prefiguring the creative work of the adult poet?

Throughout Wordsworth’s work, the natural object that was once a source of pleasure or inspiration for the child becomes for the adult poet a symbol, emerging via poetic retrospection.² Put another way, Wordsworth writes that while as an adult he loves the sun as a symbol of the constancy of life, as a child he loved it entirely because it gave him pleasure (2: 177–188). At the same time, the reconstruction of a memory transforms it into epitaph, an implicit acknowledgment of one’s mourning for what is nonrenewable in the child’s ecstatic discovery of the world. This way of reading Wordsworth is central to Romantic criticism: Wordsworth’s interpretation, his ordering of experiences in producing the poems, is in some way an integration of the adult self with the figure of the child. Using the transitional and transformational objects, defined by psychoanalysts D. W. Winnicott and Christopher Bollas, respectively, I propose that Wordsworth’s process of detailing play in Book 1 is in part an ironic acknowledgment of the impossibility of spontaneous creativity in the written word. By using these childhood scenes of play, he makes a sacrificial offering from the privacy of the self and integrity of memory for the benefit of the poem; simultaneously, he admits his failure to find inspiration in the present moment, a failure signified in part by the destructive acts he details which purport to be “play.”

Introducing Play in The Prelude

To begin, it’s helpful to briefly review those scenes of play in Book 1 of The Prelude and to consider one of the common—and useful—defining features of play: spontaneity. In Book 1, Wordsworth’s intent to establish an innocent, ludic atmosphere is apparent: one scene leads into another, resulting in the intoxicating, cumulative feeling of a youth at liberty. The years “summon” him to “exercise and play”; it is a “happy time ... of rapture” (1: 504, 503, 455–457). He and his friends are a rambunctious, excitable crowd (“We were a noisy crew” (505)). When he and his schoolboy friends ice-skate, not a voice is “idle”; with their noise, the landscape “tinkle(s) like iron” (469). Other scenes of “boyish sports” are more obviously transgressive, with nature’s presence responding by “impress[ing] upon all forms the characters / Of danger or desire” (497–498). The boy hangs from cliffs to steal raven’s eggs out of their nests, or woodcocks from traps laid by other men; the narrator sheepishly reports, “’twas [his] joy / To wander” among the cliffs and woods, saying “In thought and wish / That time … / I was a fell destroyer” (315–317). This and a later observation, “was I a plunderer then” (336), have the tongue-in-cheek feel of affectionate, if self-deprecating, ribs. The misdeeds of the young are often illustrated in terms which undermine their severity: the river tempers the child’s “human waywardness” (281) but does so by shaping his thoughts to have more purpose than their own inherent “infant softness” (282). When the boy steals a boat belonging to a shepherd, taking it for a joyride on the lake at night, the incident is initially trivialized: he is a “schoolboy traveller at the holidays” who “rambled,” impulsively taking the “small skiff” (372–374). Even the identity of the owner as a shepherd undermines the severity of the wrongdoing; the poet later emphasizes his kinship with them, saying they were “the men who pleased me first” (8: 128).

The complexity of Wordsworth’s episodes of play is illustrated in his seemingly simple description of kite flying:

Unfading recollections—at this hour
The heart is almost mine with which I felt
From some hill-top on sunny afternoons
The kite, high up among the fleecy clouds,
Pull at its rein like an impatient courser,
Or, from the meadows sent on gusty days,
Beheld her breast the wind, then suddenly
Dashed headlong and rejected by the storm.

(1: 517–524)

The kite is clearly emblematic of the child self: the first lines show the memory’s immediacy, and the personification of the object underlines its physical intensity (“breast,” “Pull[ing] at its rein” like a swift horse). Note the swiftness with which Wordsworth shifts the tone, however. He begins with easy, happy nature, on some “hill-top on sunny afternoons.” The place and time are ambiguous, as are the indefinable “fleecy clouds” that remind us of patient, nonthreatening sheep. Within the space of four lines, however, we find ourselves within not only a specific time but a specific storm, which “rejects” the kite (or, metaphorically, the child). Just as the kite may be held gloriously by the wind, it may also be violently “Dashed headlong.” As this brief scene reveals, if at times play in Book 1 is an articulation of carefreeness and unbridled creativity, at other times it serves as a metaphor for what is chaotic or destructive in nature, or, alternately, for what must be tamed and shaped in man.

Thus, in Blakean spirit, each “Nurse’s song” in Book 1 portraying childhood as an innocently wayward time is matched by a description of the boy as some kind of “naked Savage” (273, 304). Throughout Book 1, the episodes of play conclude with either an implicit, haunting reprimand from nature or an explicit, stern meditation from the adult poet regarding his childhood behavior. To complicate matters, the latter is often similarly described as a retroactive imagining of nature’s animated response to his earlier transgression. The instability of the poet’s memory of each event is replicated throughout the poem in diverse ways. An otherworldly causal relationship between physical environment and psychic experience is pronounced, for example, when the boy, stealing raven’s eggs, hangs from an icy crag seemingly “suspended” by the wind (345), or when, after stealing the woodcocks, he hallucinates a paradoxically “undistinguishable” motion “among the solitary hills,” with “Low breathings coming after [him]” (329–332). When the boy “stop[s] short” while ice-skating with friends, his dizziness results in a vaguely existential dread, an illusion that the spinning “solitary cliffs” “had rolled / With visible motion [the earth’s] diurnal round” (484–486). Meanwhile, the echo of his friends’ shouting is inexplicably matched by another “alien sound / Of melancholy” (470–471) and “the orange sky of evening die[s] away” (473). Finally, and most famously, after stealing the shepherd’s boat the boy is terrified by the awe-inspiring “spectacle” of a sharp cliff rising up in his field of vision, lit by the moon.

The dual nature of these scenes—play as both innocent and destructive—fits well with a common definition of play as occupying a liminal space within aesthetic, temporal, psychological, and/or metaphysical scales, a vacillation between two defined concepts: art versus survival, child versus adult, fantasy versus reality, idealism versus realism, or, as we will see, impulsivity versus morality. D. W. Winnicott explains in Playing and Reality that play is, essentially, formless experience: a motor-based, sensory manifestation of creative impulse. Within the space of play, that upon which “is built the whole of man’s experiential existence” and allows us to live creatively, we are neither lodged within an inner reality nor a shared, external world. Rather, we exist wholly in “transitional phenomena,” an intermediate space (86). We can create only when our personality is in a state of unintegration; our creation becomes part of us only through the reflection of another (86).³ In Romantic poetry, that reflection often comes not through another individual but through the natural world, or through the memory of a previous, younger self.

The Romantic attitude characterized play as distinct from art specifically as a free interchange of ideas and semblances not yet shaped through the rational mind nor processed in form. This idea was informed by German Romantic philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, who were interested in play’s relationship to the unpredictable nature of inspiration and viewed it as a movement between rationality, or form, and freedom, or formlessness. In Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Schiller importantly adds a parallel dialectic of sensuality versus rationality, yet the association with the sensual does not relegate it to a secondary status as we might expect. Rather, aesthetic education offers an exemplary balance in which sensuous play is as important as form and rationality. In fact, its integrity as play must be intact: “to watch over these, and secure for each of these two drives its proper frontiers, is the task of culture … . not simply to maintain the rational against the sensuous, but the sensuous against the rational too” (87). This attitude is manifest in the writing of the British Romantics, and Wordsworth’s poetry similarly characterizes play as distinct from art. The Prelude is rife with depictions of passive idleness and reflection—what we might understand, in Schiller’s terms, as a type of meditative rationality interrupted by unconstrained impulse. The boy flits carelessly and sensuously between subjective and objective experience, hallucination and shared reality, between that which is just beyond the natural but before culture. He is both trespassing and gaining a first glimpse of morality, and his play launches the speaker’s ultimate integration into the social and rational world.

Spontaneous Composition, Spontaneous Destruction

When anthropologists, play theorists, and literary critics attempt to distinguish art-making from play, they often point to the role of spontaneity in the latter.⁴ Certainly the eighteenth-century “aesthetic of surprise,” as Christopher Miller notes, popularized supposedly “spontaneous” interruptions within texts so that readers experienced their own kind of authentic, if by proxy, moment. Miller argues that the eighteenth-century aesthetic of surprise served to unify the individual’s emotion and intellect in the face of the sublime. Similarly, the aesthetic discourse of the time characterized surprise as an emotion or passion like anger, joy, or fear—much like the boy’s awe in The Prelude as the giant cliff rises before him. There are differences between surprise and spontaneity, but both ensure excitement by making dramatic or lyrical shifts unpredictable, providing the illusion of verse composed without premeditation, and by offering the reader the feeling that he or she is experiencing the sublime moment somewhat as the poet experienced it. By extension, the reader garners some of the feeling or wisdom the poet received, tracing the development of ideas or feelings in the lyric subject even as they are experienced.⁵ Book 1 especially foregrounds the spontaneous nature of play, which is in keeping with the poet’s lifelong preoccupation with temporality and the fleetingness of emotion and inspiration. Take these early lines, for instance:

Thus far, O friend, did I, not used to make
A present joy the matter of my song,
Pour out that day my soul in measured strains,
Even in the very words which I have here
Recorded. To the open fields I told
A prophesy; poetic numbers came
Spontaneously … .

(55–61)

Here, as elsewhere, spontaneity is the appearance of the inspiration that results in the poem. This trope gives the reader the illusion of near-simultaneity with the moment of inspiration—the appearance of the lyric portrait of that muse concomitant with her visitation. In the aforementioned lines, and elsewhere, Wordsworth creates for his reader an atmosphere of veraci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Caution—Children at Play: Investigations of Children’s Play in Theory and Literature
• 1 “Fits of Vulgar Joy”: Spontaneous Play in Book 1 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805)
• 2 Playing at Work and Working at Play in Mark Twain’s Writings
• 3 “Mammy, can’t you tell us sump’n’ to play?”: Children’s Play as the Locus for Imaginative Imitation and Cultural Exchange in the Plantation Novels of Louise Clarke Pyrnelle
• 4 Words with Kids at Play: Sculpting Truth and Forging Childhood Friendship in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris
• 5 Idylls of Play: L. M. Montgomery’s Child-Worlds
• 6 Katherine Mansfield’s Children at Play
• 7 The Buttons of the World are Round: Gertrude Stein’s Toys
• 8 Playing Pioneer: Childhood, Artistry, and Play in the Little House Series
• 9 “I’m ready to play now, you guys!”: J. D. Salinger, Steven Spielberg, and the Healing Power of Children’s Play
• 10 Free Play and the Prescriptive Endgames of Orson Scott Card
• 11 Children’s Play and Mental Illness in Children’s Literature and Film
• 12 “The trampoline of letters and words”: Juvenile Linguistic Play in the Memoirs of Binyavanga Wainaina and Shailja Patel
• Notes on Contributors
• Index