Diana Wynne Jones

The Fantastic Tradition and Children's Literature

Farah Mendlesohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135461355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

British author Diana Wynne Jones has been writing speculative fiction for children for more than thirty years. A clear influence on more recent writers such as J. K. Rowling, her humorous and exciting stories of wizard's academies, dragons, and griffins-many published for children but read by all ages-are also complexly structured and thought provoking critiques of the fantasy tradition. This is the first serious study of Jones's work, written by a renowned science fiction critic and historian. In addition to providing an overview of Jones's work, Farah Mendlesohn also examines Jones's important critiques of the fantastic tradition's ideas about childhood and adolescence. This book will be of interest to Jones's many admirers and to those who study fantasy and children's literature.

CHAPTER 1

WILKINS’ TOOTH

Diana Wynne Jones's first novel, Changeover (1970), was aimed at adults. Her career as a children's novelist began with Wilkins’ Tooth, a curiously hybrid novel that resonates with the conscientious multiculturalism of the 1970s and the concern to focus children's fiction on relevant issues,¹ yet which is placed alongside a fairy-tale and fantasy structure whose tropes intensify the metaphorical understanding of the text. Parallel to this dual structure runs a third strand that subverts the expectations nourished by both traditions. The result is an astonishingly complex novel that almost collapses under the weight of meaning it is intended to carry. This might well explain its almost complete invisibility. Although Wilkins’ Tooth has recently been reprinted (Collins 2001), the novel had only limited availability (there was a 1984 Puffin edition) for almost twenty years. It is omitted from the entry on Jones in the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, and, perhaps more significant, Jones glosses over it. Jones has written that Wilkins’ Tooth was a very deliberately contrived novel designed to break into the children's market. Eight Days of Luke was still being considered but was regarded as too radical: “While they ummed and ahhed, I decided I would write a book with all the current shibboleths accounted for … [but] … would slide in doing my own thing.” The consequence was that Jones “never, for this reason, regarded WT as really one of my books.”² But Wilkins’ Tooth is flawed in very precise ways that suggest that from the very beginning of her career Jones's writing was as much an act of genre criticism as any academic paper. In this context Wilkins’ Tooth, although a minor and marginalized work, demands close attention.

Each of the strands—the realist and the fabulous—that I have described intertwines with the others to create a layered resonance. For each incident there are three potential readings. The first we can describe as an “issues” understanding—something relating to the social context of the story and the political sensibilities of 1970s children's fiction. The second is an interpretation drawn from the world of fantasy and fairy tale that exists first in hints and allusions and is only gradually brought to the fore to become the focus of the novel. Each of these understandings brings with it a weight of tradition in terms of the cast of a novel, of their assigned roles, and of the meaning of certain actions. But the third strand of the novel, the critical strand, works consistently to manipulate the signifiers and to subvert the apparent structures of status, of internal hierarchies, and of morality.

Wilkins’ Tooth is a continual negotiation: ideas and patterns are worked out within the interstices of the conflicting literary cultures represented here. In later works, the result of these critical decisions is not a rejection of these elements but a blending to create a characteristically layered and heavily referential work. In Wilkins’ Tooth, however, the ingredients and layers are unblended, still there for the literary archaeologist to uncover. In this first chapter I will attempt to demonstrate how these three elements not only combine—creating a much richer text than is at first apparent—but also distort the novel, creating something that is neither one thing nor another while generating a precursor text, already alive to many of the possibilities that will emerge in future novels.

Issues books emerged in the late 1960s as a way to tackle the perceived divorce of children's literature from real life. They were powered by new ideas about ways to portray class, by the American civil rights movement, and by changing ideas about the way to depict girls. In addition, they were ostentatiously concerned with a new way of socializing children and explored such issues as bereavement, divorce, and bullying. They rejected what Alison Lurie has described as the “pastoral” assumptions of children's fiction, “that the world of childhood is simpler and more natural than that of adults.”³ Their sometimes strident ideological stance can seem like a break from the past; of course it is not. Those who complained, and claimed for children's literature an ideological neutrality, were championing books such as The Water Babies and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,⁴ with their evangelical messages, the pastoral and child-centered idylls of Five Children and It and Swallows and Amazons, and the many novels of Enid Blyton, with their clear belief that a very particular kind of middle-class existence was the norm for which children should strive.⁵ Even in the work of a writer such as Philippa Pearce, conscious of class and willing to make a working-class boy her protagonist, the assumptions of a book such as Minnow on the Say continually effaced difference in such a way that the emotional focus of the book was on the upper-class friend,⁶ whereas Eve Garnett's The Family from One End Street, an early attempt to go beyond the middle-class family (1937) and a Carnegie medal winner, was a rather patronizing attempt to show the life of a working-class family. In this context, Wilkins’ Tooth is a rather weak example of the new form. It is multicultural and multiclass and has the same number of girls as it has boys. From the beginning Jones makes class a driver of the plot. The assembling of the cast caters to the expectations of the socially conscious novel and shapes the adventure on the mimetic level while, as we shall see, immediately creating a metaphoric resonance that could (but does not) alert us to a potentially fantastic scenario. But although divorce and bullying drive the initial narrative, they rapidly recede into the background, while Jones moves in the direction mapped by Edith Nesbit and brings the fantastic into the urban and ordinary environment.

The novel begins with Frank and Jess, brother and sister, who are mourning the loss of their pocket money after an accident in which they have broken a chair. The opening is conventional—loss of pocket money is a standard mise-en-scène of children's comic book fiction—but here its loss is compounded by their father's insistence that they not undertake to earn money (running errands) to replace that loss. In the lexicon of the issues novels of the period, pocket money is an indicator of social class, at least in urban England. Frank and Jess receive pocket money to make sure they stay middle class (in English terms), which means that they stay children.⁷ Unlike middle-class American children, they are not supposed to work and gain independence; consequently the punishment is not precisely about paying for the chair, it is about restricting possibilities. When Frank seeks to get a newspaper round (“route” in the United States) it is made clear that there is a distinction between his need—for sweets and to pay a debt—and that of Vernon Wilkins, who needs the money for reasons unspecified but implied. Immediately we are introduced to a multiclass world, distinct from the cozy middle-class fiction of the 1950s and 1960s and from the often ostensibly class-neutral world of the children's fantasy novel, but one that does not present poverty as tragic.

Frank and Jess must deal with the denial of independence and agency by their own (loving) parent: the route to independence—work—is posited as illegitimate. The structure is patently unfair and as such establishes one of the paradigms of this book: that fairness is a matter of balance, but fairness cannot be expected in the adult world. The restrictiveness of the specifically middle-class response, that children must be protected from independence (which would grow stronger as children's fiction became more realistic during the next decade), constructs the initial setup of the novel, which then follows the trajectory of a Famous Five or Secret Seven Enid Blyton adventure (children leave home and deal with villain) that were still extremely popular at this time but that were increasingly out of step with ideas about appropriate levels of independence for the young.

But the issue of pocket money and the children's efforts to circumvent parental control can also be read within the context of the fantastic. If their actions are read metaphorically, Frank and Jess have committed a transgression—the breaking of the chair, the decision to avoid the punishment—and wander “into the woods” away from home into the wild world of bargains, debts, and exchanges that structure the traditional fairy tale. The mistakes they make in the real world are paralleled by consequences in the fantastical world that shadows and then intrudes. And in this transgression, they offend a witch. The further into the woods of a multiclass, multiracial world they wander, the stronger will be the structures of fairy tale. Although this part of the book has a fairy-tale structure, it is all metaphoric; that is, this part of the book (except for the hint about the rainbow) is entirely realistic.

In response to their father's edict, Frank and Jess decide to set up in business illegitimately, and they erect a notice facing the river path advertising “Own Back Ltd.” The “Ltd” (a term indicating a limited liability company), they assure themselves in that peculiarly literal understanding common to children, is their get-out should a job prove too hard. Their first job, offered by Buster the local gang leader (a precursor of Ginger Hind in Archer's Goon), seems very much of the real world: to exact vengeance for Buster's lost tooth by securing one from the offender, Vernon. Their payment will be ten pence, the amount Frank owes him. The susceptibility of the text to a dual interpretation strengthens. On one hand, this is the exchange bargaining common to the playground, morally dangerous because by taking the job, Frank and Jess have made themselves complicit in Buster's bullying. But the situation also carries with it the fairy-tale ethic of balance. Balance in the mimetic world—canceling the debt to Buster—is paralleled by balance in the fantastical world—assuaging the “giant” or other villain through service. And the complicity implied in the first turns out to be equally entangled with the second.

Buster, the bane of Frank and Jess's life, is the leader of the local gang. It is almost impossible not to relate this gang to the British comic strip the “Bash Street Kids” (in The Beano, published by D.C. Thomson & Company Ltd, Dundee). It is a large group, distinguished as individuals through physical characteristics such as a squeaky voice. They are obviously working class and, despite Frank and Jess's assumptions, loud rather than evil. They use bad language, a matter over which Jones reaches an uneasy compromise substituting “blank,” “blanketty,” and the names of various colors for swear words (as in the euphemism, “colorful language”). As the terms “crimson nig” and “Take a blanking look at this! … Blanketty Own Back!” indicate, the result is possibly worse in implication than the use of contemporary swear words (such as “bloody”) might have been, but writers of children's books did not use real swear words in 1973 (neither did many writers for adults) and playground language—substitutes for swearing—was common.⁸ Language is indicative of the gang's appearance as the villain, and the language conditions the expectations of the reader, creating a presumption of the morality of the gang novel: Frank and Jess will form their own group of friends who will, in the end, defeat Buster and his friends.

Frank and Jess's difficulties begin because the symbolism, which runs alongside the practical, everyday world is ignored. Buster's demand for his own back—a tooth to match the one he lost—ignores the symmetry already created with the scratch on Vernon's arm. Because this is fairy tale, and with the morality of a fairy tale, Own Back is thus fated to create consequences because it offers not vengeance but feud. The spiral is established early, preceded by the discussion of the biblical injunction to take an eye for an eye. Unknown at first to Frank and Jess, their attempt to secure Vernon's tooth for Buster has already exceeded the biblical directive that limits vengeance. When they do learn that Vernon knocked out Buster's tooth as retribution for the long and rather nasty scratch he received (and Buster's lost tooth is a milk tooth so it is also a temporary wound), Frank and Jess understand that they cannot legitimately extract vengeance. However, fear of Buster leads them to accede to a suggestion from Vernon that sets them on the next turn of the spiral. Vernon points out that they have been asked for “Wilkins’ tooth” and Vernon's younger brother Silas Wilkins is about to lose one. In a moment, the deal is done. Frank and Jess take the tooth to Buster to wipe out the debt Frank owes of ten pence while agreeing to pay Silas five pence for his tooth.⁹

There are a number of elements here that are susceptible to the interpretation of the fantastic: the exchange bargaining that we have already seen moves into the second stage of fairy tale in which debts are shifted from one party to another (e.g., the ant that helps the prince in return for assistance it has received), the exchange is reciprocal and creates a network of interdependence; in addition, Vernon's status is challenged. Although a minor character, he makes here a significant decision that, according to the rules of fairy tale, involves him in the action. The decision will also influence the role he is to play, something to which I will return. The mimetic role of this action is confusion; it is the fulcrum on which a comedy of errors turns and is a pattern that extends throughout Jones's work from Changeover in 1970 to the most recent novel, Conrad's Fate (2005). The third element is the importance of true and accurate naming, something that is a constant theme in fairy tale and fantasy. In Wilkins’ Tooth Biddy Iremonger's name links her directly to the Baba Yaga. Biddy is a name frequently used for hens, (and “old biddy” is a common term of abuse for elderly women), and her surname invites dissection: she is a purveyor of rage and resentment, limited to truth by her very nomenclature. This particular link is never really emphasized, and there is no indication that the meaning of the chosen names is in itself significant—although giving the one black child a Norman name is a nice touch—but the point is made: in terms of the fantastical the significance of this scene in Wilkins’ Tooth is that the truth of Names and the power of Truth, have been ignored—this is the real world, after all. In the period of contemplation immediately after this second exchange, Jess suspects that she might have done something wrong, demonstrating a knowingness that is important for the fantastical element of this book. This short aside in the text also functions as an indication that Jess might be coming to the fore. As if to confirm her worries about witch doctors, Jess and Frank next meet the Adams sisters, Frances (usually known as Frankie) and Jenny.

The naming of Frances Adams has to be a deliberate statement. Apart from its riff on the popular song, “Frankie and Johnny”, Jones also allows Frank to comment on how confusing it is to have two people with the same name. Even here we are allowed parallel readings: one suspects that this an early sign of Jones's critical inclinations, pointing out how absurd it is that in any given novel no two people ever have the same first name—despite the ubiquity of Janes and Johns in the world. More significant, the resonance of names runs as an undercurrent through the book, hinting at connections between characters, bonds that must be worked through. There are similarities between Frank and Frankie—their willingness to believe the bad in others and to act on impulse—that suggest that both are expected to learn about themselves from each other.

Frankie and Jenny Adams want revenge on Biddy Iremonger, who they believe is a witch who ensured that the family had to leave its house and put the evil eye on Jenny so that she is now lame. Frankie is vindictive; Jenny is a follower. The final entry into the series of bargains is Martin Taylor, who now lives in the house that Frankie and Jenny vacated. He wants Frank and Jess to prevent Frankie and Jenny from teasing him—he is not allowed to hit them. Frankie and Jenny cannot afford to pay but are persuaded to desist from teasing as their payment for assistance in defeating Biddy.

With the cast assembled, the plot can proceed. This is relatively simple: the children must get the tooth back from Biddy, tame or recruit Buster's gang, and learn the value of solidarity. Forced to face a very real witch, Jess uses her knowledge of folktales and fairy tales to understand the tools to hand—some material, others human—to hold out against Biddy and eventually to defeat her. Buster's conversion to the side of good, although amusingly depicted, is a bit too easy and obvious. The real interest in this novel lies in the shift Jones makes between the mimetic and the fantastical and the way each interpretative world supports the other through to the denouement of the book. The paralleling is of both deeds and physical context: at the same time that the mimetic landscape is constructed i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Critical Fictions of Diana Wynne Jones
• Chapter 1 Wilkins’ Tooth
• Chapter 2 Agency and Jones’S Understanding of Adolescence
• Chapter 3 Time Games
• Chapter 4 Diana Wynne Jones and The Portal-Quest Fantasy
• Chapter 5 The Immersive Fantasy
• Chapter 6 Making the Mundane Fantastic, Or Liminal Fantasy
• Chapter 7 A Mad Kind of Reasonableness
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliographies
• Index