"Home Itself Put Into Song": Music as Metaphorical Community

They left the great granite plain and flew over a garden even more beautiful than anything in a dream. In it were gathered many of the creatures like the one Mrs. Whatsit had become, some lying among the flowers, some swimming in a broad, crystal river that flowed through the garden, moving in and out above the trees. They were making music, music that came not only from their throats but from the movement of their great wings as well.

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (66)

Writers of some of the most enduring children's books characterize and affirm community through collaborative musical performance, as Madeleine L'Engle demonstrates in this vision of celestial harmony. The association between community and music is apt; both rely on a spirit of cooperation and the players' collective commitment for existence. Musical metaphors for community are fundamental to narrative development in texts spanning the last century. Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins, Gene Stratton Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost, Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" series, Maud Hart Lovelace's "Betsy-Tacy" books, and L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door provide a representative sampling of children's books in which the authors convey the significance of community through depiction of its musical abilities.¹ As the antithesis of community, silence universally signifies isolation in these texts.

Perhaps because they are traditionally more capable of the negotiation that sustains social constructs, women commonly depict and affirm the community in literature. As Carol Gilligan asserts, "the standard of moral judgment that informs their assessment of self is a standard of relationship, an ethic of nurturance, responsibility, and care" (159). With little variation, the narratives of many traditional "children's writers" adhere to the characteristics described by Sandra Zagarell in "Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre":

They tend to be episodic, built primarily around the continuous small-scale negotiations and daily procedures through which communities sustain themselves . . . . writers present details of local life as integral parts of the semiotic systems of the community, and readers are urged to recognize local language and activities like washing and gardening as both absolutely ordinary and as expressions of community history and values.

(503)

In domestic fiction, for instance, the narrative structure commonly depends on the minute details of daily life for textual richness. Zagarell argues that for the writers of such fiction, "the everyday . . . is ritualized, and they provide ways of reading it as such" (516), indicating the significance of minute details.² The fictional communities in children's literature, and the everyday events within those communities, are consistently characterized through musical metaphors.³ The "musicality" of a community serves as a reliable gauge of its spiritual and physical welfare.

Newcomers are often accepted into a community through a musical "initiation." Alcott depicts this ritual in Eight Cousins, as an orphaned heiress and an orphaned servant experience their first Campbell family Christmas:

They were all standing about the hall lingering over the good-nights, when the sound of a voice softly singing "Sweet Home," made them pause and listen. It was Phebe, poor little Phebe, who never had a home, never knew the love of father or mother, brother or sister. . . . I fancy the happy family standing there remembered this and felt the beauty of it, for when the solitary voice came to the burden of its song, other voices took it up and finished it so sweetly, that the old house seemed to echo the word "Home" in the ears of both the orphan girls, who had just spent their first Christmas under its hospitable roof.

(230)

Wilder also includes numerous music-oriented rituals. Mrs. Boast tells the Ingalls family, "we were so glad to see your light. And when we came nearer, we heard you singing. You don't know how good it sounded" (Shores 186). A familiar pattern evolves in which, hearing their music, other travellers stop and are welcomed to share the Ingalls' comforts. As Reverend Stuart says, "glad we are to have found you folks here. We...