Sticks and Stones

The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter

Jack Zipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415928113
• eBook ISBN: 9781135206659
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Have children ever really had a literature of their own? In Sticks and Stones, Jack Zipes explores children's literature, from the grissly moralism of Slovenly Peter to the hugely successful Harry Potter books, and argues that despite common assumptions about children's books, our investment in children is paradoxically curtailing their freedom and creativity. Sticks and Stones is a forthright and engaging book by someone who cares deeply about what and how children read.

The Cultural Homogenization of American Children

1

Since I am going to talk
about children and since I am probably going to
say many unwise things with which some children
might disagree, I would like to give children
the first word and quote three wise statements

from the January 1997 “Monthly Forum for Young Writers” in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. As you will then hear and see, I shall deviously twist the children's words and mold them into a critique of the systematic homogenization of American children that demands our immediate attention, for this “civilizing process” bespeaks the methodological manner in which we cultivate familial and institutional practices to make kids think and act in the same predictable ways. We prep them to respond to the demands of the markets so they will find their niche. Paradoxically, this disturbing homogenization is occurring at a time when we appear to have learned how to appreciate and honor multiculturalism and to provide children with more free choice in their lives. But let us first quickly listen to the children:

I imagine I got my morals the same place everyone else got theirs: instilled in us by those who raised us (our parents and the TV).

— Lloyd Zisla, age fourteen, grade nine, New Brighton, Irondale High School

Invest your money wisely. In the world today, I've learned the world does not take kindly to people with no money.

— Ryan Giannetti, age ten, grade Five, Apple Valley, Westview Elementary School

When I was born, the first thing my parents told me was ‘Hi.’ The next thing was probably, ‘Rule number one….’

— Chris Chamblerlain, age eleven, grade six, Clontarf, Benson Elementary School¹

These are wonderful, insightful statements, but they are also warnings and sad commentaries about our society. Does TV raise children as much as parents do? (Some critics might even argue that TV plays a more significant role than parents.) Is money the major factor in determining a person's worth? Are regulations more important than love? These are some of the questions that the children appear to be asking when they make their comments. I said “appear,” but the sorry facts are that they have already realized that TV is as important as their parents; that they must sell themselves on the market to determine their worth; that conformity will be demanded early in their lives, rather than mutual respect. In other words, these children, who probably represent the views of many children, have realized (at the very latest by age ten) that their choices in life are circumscribed by their parents and TV and that their capacity to earn money will determine their self-esteem. Interestingly, they do not cite the community when they discuss values, nor do they reflect upon alternatives to their socialization.

Perhaps you will now expect me to lament that we have failed our children and to begin developing a moral critique of American society à la William Bennett calling for the return to the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the basic values of the family. But I do not want to preach about absolute or essential American values that we have lost and that may have never really existed in the first place. Nor do I want to pretend that there is an answer to the present predicament of cultural homogenization. What I should like to explore with you is how certain cultural practices play a role in homogenizing American children and send contradictory messages that are bound to undermine their capacity to develop a sense of morality and ethics and to recognize that their autonomy will be governed by prescribed market interests of corporations that have destroyed communities and the self-determination of communities.

In his important study Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Marketing, Stephen Kline argues that “childhood is a condition defined by powerlessness and dependence upon the adult community's directives and guidance. Culture is, after all, as the repository of social learning and socialization, the means by which societies preserve and strengthen their position in the world. The forms of children's cultural expression are therefore intimately bound up with changing alignments that define a community's social beliefs and practices of cultural transmission.”² This does not mean that children (and teenagers) lack social agency and are victims in American and Western societies whose practices have become geared toward making profits out of the young and enabling them to profit from a system that regards them more like commodities than human beings. Young people are constantly reacting against and defining themselves against a culture of institutionalized relations of production that foster sameness and conformity to corporate systematized beliefs and values. For instance, in her book Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture, Ellen Seiter argues that “children are creative in their appropriation of consumer goods and media, and the meanings they make with these materials are not necessarily and not completely in line with a materialist ethos. Children create their own meanings from the stories and symbols of consumer culture.”³ But the actions and agency of young people and adults who seek to resist commercialization and commodification are constantly compromised by the steady, subtle, and crass influences of mass-media conglomerates, bureaucratic demands of social institutions, and political hypocrisy of our so-called leaders, with the result that their struggle for freedom from cultural homogenization and their urges for more authenticity in life are turned against them. Paradoxically the freedom taken by young people and adults to question or to articulate their opposition to homogenization is often used and co-opted by a hegemonic culture industry to represent and rationalize a false freedom of choice, for all our choices are prescribed and dictated by market systems. We are free to consume and become part of a variety package of the same products, and children are predisposed to this homogenization through the toys, clothes, games, literature, and movies they receive from infancy through their teenage years.⁴ To develop my critique of the homogenization processes in American society, I should like to begin by discussing two enlightening but disturbing essays about children's culture by the critics Tom Engelhardt and David Denby to explain what I mean by the cultural homogenization of American children that has ramifications for children throughout the world as American domination of the global media takes effect.⁵

Engelhardt, an editor at Pantheon for many years, is now a freelance writer and author of The End of Victory: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (1995). He also wrote “Reading May Be Harmful to Your Kids: In the Nadirland of Today's Children's Books” in 1991,⁶ and, as the recent debates about the cultural values of R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books that concern proper reading and censorship reveal, this essay is still highly relevant today. Engelhardt points out it was not until the late 1970s that, for all sorts of social, economic, psychological, and demographic reasons, children's book publishing grew into a $1 billion business with four hundred specialized children's bookstores nationwide, five thousand titles published a year, and many authors and illustrators receiving hefty advances. However, this leap was not predicated on the improved quality of children's literature. In his study of the best-selling books of 1990, Engelhardt noted a “disturbing vision, one revealing the complex relationship between glut and deprivation in our age,”⁷ because the books he read were mostly formulaic and predictable, guaranteeing young readers that whatever anxieties and chills they may experience, the end will always be the same. “All told,” Engelhardt remarks, “whatever might be wondrous or inexplicable” to children:

has simply been eliminated, and what energy these books hold seems borrowed from an adult world in the process of discovering its new power over children. During the 1980s—a decade when, by almost any statistical measure, the situation of children was worsening, globally and nationally—the middle-class American child's private space miraculously filled up with toys, tapes, technological gimmicks, even books, a flood of books. Many of the best-sellers I read, stripped down though they may be, celebrate this bounty by portraying children mainly as consumers and the mall as the site of their encounters with abundance. In a number of these books, shopping habits come to serve as a telling indicator of “character”—the positive characters being told they shop for themselves (“selfish”‘) or for parents, teachers, and siblings.⁸

Engelhardt argues that there has been a dramatic transformation in the content of the majority of best-selling children's books and the habit of reading that threatens to make children into simply consumers of “brands” of literature. As he explains it, there was a boom in children's publishing in the 1960s spurred by visions of the Great Society and New Frontier and funded by huge government support of libraries. One result of this support was that libraries had difficulty spending all the money they had for books. More important is that they indirectly stimulated many writers such as Virginia Hamilton, Robert Cormier, Rosa Guy, and others to write highly innovative novels of social realism, and many other imaginative forms of literature for the young were developed. The library was the institution fostering the new children's literature and creating social space in which children could explore and discuss books without being obliged to buy and own them. However, as funds for libraries were cut in the 1980s and children themselves had more money to spend, Engelhardt maintains, children's book publishing was rescued by the fast-growing chain bookstores to be found in malls throughout the United States and by upscale children's bookstores. This social space was different from the library in that the child or parent chose books without the advice or supervision of a librarian or teacher and without discussion of the books’ merits. To attract children and adults as consumers of literature, the very nature of the book—its design and contents—began to change. Gradually, books began to be produced basically to sell and resell themselves and to make readers into consumers of brand names.

Of course, as Engelhardt makes clear, this second boom of children's literature, which we are still witnessing today, was ignited not simply by the commercial bookstores but also by a concern of parents that schools and governments were failing our children. American education was allegedly not as good as Japanese or European educations. Math and reading scores were dropping.

It seemed, though, that even if we could do nothing about schools, government, or any other future-shaping institution, we could, at least, become better parents. Reading, then, was pushed hard both as royal road to success (the earlier mastered, the better) and as parental responsibility. What this offered children's book publishing was not just a business boom of unexpected proportions but a responsibility equal to it: to nurture in the young—increasingly vulnerable to screen culture, glued to Nintendo, and ready to make fashion statements at the local mall—a most crucial (yet imperiled) habit, the habit of reading. That habit was invoked with reverential seriousness by the people producing the flood of new books. To inculcate that habit in the young was, it seemed, not so much a vocation as a consummate challenge in a world where competitive distractions for children came ever thicker and faster. In fact, the issue was increasingly not so much what you read but that you read at all. Anything with words that attracted children (or parents) was seen as a good first step onto a lifelong path leading to that other, less popular adult “joy.”⁹

In order to shape the choices and habits of the readers as consumers (young and old), a publishing house had to develop market strategies so that its books would be more distinctive and acceptable than another publisher's and stimulate “customers” to buy and re-buy its products not only in the form of a book but in spinoffs such as records, tapes, clothing, movies, and videos. When Engelhardt examined the best-selling books for children in 1990—and it is more or less the same today—they were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, New Kids on the Block, Mary Ann and Too Many Boys (part of the Baby-Sitters Club series), Where's Waldo, The Berenstain Bears, Charlotte's Web, and Where the Wild Things Are. In all cases, even with the latter two books, the works have been transformed into products first and foremost. Rather than opening new worlds to children, they invite them to repeat certain predictable and comforting experiences that they can easily and affordably buy into. As Engelhardt puts it:

For even the youngest readers, the “book” has, in a sense, been freed from the page and can now be encountered in an almost unending variety of audio, video, play, and fashion formats. In the same sense, the habits of reading, listening, viewing, playing, dressing, and buying have come more and more to resemble one another. That children, culture, and commercialism have long been wedded is undeniable. After all, John Newberry, the eighteenth-century publisher who first grasped the existence of a children's book market, worked his patent medicines right into his books. In The History of Goody Twoshoes, the heroine's father actually dies for lack of Newberry's “fever powder.” Nonetheless, past commercial book ventures for children—even those of a few decades ago—seem quaint and limited, matters of momentary opportunism, when set against the ongoing rhythms of the present entertainment environment, which involves not just the blurring of bookish boundaries but the changing nature of childhood itself.¹⁰

Children's books are formulaic and banal, distinguishable from another only by their brand labels. Yet book publishers argue that as long as these books get children to read, this is a good in itself. In other words, the habit of reading (one habit among others, like watching TV or going to malls) is a virtue unto itself. Publishers do not explain, however, that they are no longer, as in the good old days, simply small firms with good editors that just produce books. Most publishing houses—and this is something that Engelhardt does not mention— are now part of huge conglomerates and are directed by business managers. Decisions to design and publish books are more often than not made by the marketing people in the firm. Editors are expected to acquire and shape good products in keeping with corporate guidelines. These days a publishing hou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Cultural Homogenization of American Children
• 2 Do You Know What We Are Doing to Your Books?
• 3 Why Children's Literature Does Not Exist
• 4 The Value of Evaluating the Value of Children's Literature
• 5 Wanda Gág's Americanization of the Grimms' Fairy Tales
• 6 The Contamination of the Fairy Tale
• 7 The Wisdom and Folly of Storytelling
• 8 The Perverse Delight of Shockheaded Peter
• 9 The Phenomenon of Harry Potter, or Why All the Talk?
• Bibliography
• Index