"Unlocked by Love": William Steig's Tales of Transformation and Magic

Although William Steig insists that he lets his stories take him where they will, that he doesn't start out by intending them "to be about anything" (Higgins 12), critics have noticed that his award-winning books reverberate with human concerns that have always informed stories that endure, from The Odyssey to The Hobbit. Anita Moss, for example, has persuasively located two of Steig's novels for children, Dominic and Abel's Island, in the tradition of both the heroic and the pastoral, showing how, in creating a tension between these two conventions, Steig achieves a vision that integrates urbane sophistication with innocence and art with nature in order to redefine a civilization truly informed with humane values. Barbara Bottner points out that Steig's works embody classic themes, such as an outer journey symbolic of an inner one, the beauty and mystery of life, or the fear of death, in ways that touch the knowledge and perceptions of both children and adults. Certainly his tales draw beauty and power from the fact that they "ponder the universal order" (Bottner 5) and may therefore be enjoyed by people of all ages. Furthermore, I propose, some of Steig's books have a special appeal for young children because they speak movingly to the inner experiences of childhood.

Like the literary artifices of the pastoral and the heroic, these stories transform the chaos of experience into a vision of hope while acknowledging what Moss has called the "darker layers of existence" (138). Within these layers resides, most fundamentally for the child, the fear of being abandoned or unloved and of being punished for having the power to make one's deepest wishes come true. Abel and Dominic are, after all, adults—albeit in the guise of animals—who, as Moss observes, achieve in their maturity the ideal blend of work, play, thought, and action, as well as an appreciation of the meaning of human bonds, that characterizes our best vision of ourselves as grown-ups. Another Steig character who achieves, as an adult, an integration of this kind is the mouse-dentist Doctor De Soto in the book by the same name; in this story the protagonist cleverly invents a way to reconcile the practical implications of a predator's appetite with the ethical imperatives of civilized behavior by which he feels obliged to govern his life.

Many of Steig's protagonists are not adults, however, but children, for whom nature and art, innocence and creativity do not conflict. To the child's eye, magic inheres in the nature of things, and the transforming power of one's imagination is a fact of life. Although as children we have less power than adults, we paradoxically perceive ourselves as more powerful because we believe so deeply in the efficacy of our thoughts and wishes. Steig's picture books reflect his knowledge that belief in such power informs our experience as children and frightens as well as gratifies us. I would argue, then, that an important source of the eloquence of Steig's stories is their appeal to the unconscious conflicts and anxieties of childhood. Structurally and functionally, Steig's books, like traditional folk fairy tales, are illuminated by what psychologists tell us about how children view the world.

Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim notes that the conflicts and resolutions of traditional folk fairy tales mirror the anxieties and wishes of childhood (see his introduction to The Uses of Enchantment). Given the egocentrism of young children, who view the world as extensions of themselves, it is not difficult to accept Bettelheim's assertion that the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is "an externalization, a projection of the child's badness" or that The Three Little Pigs represent different stages in the maturation of the child. Adults may be horrified by the disfiguring punishment of the three ugly sisters in the Grimm brothers' Cinderella, but children have a more unfettered sense of justice and know that evil deeds must be punished and not rewarded, as they are in the Disney version, based on Perrault's decorous revision. Steig...