Audaciously, Archetypally American

Jerry Griswold's study of a dozen well-known nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American children's books is, true to its title, an audacious work of criticism. In a time of unprecedented and often impenetrable critical discourse, this book is deliberately jargon free and accessible—without mysterious hermeneutics and neological obscurities—to both scholarly and general audiences. It is written with clarity and humor, with inventive energy and an agile, synthesizing intelligence. Most important, rather than engaging in the nearly requisite diatribes or revisionings, it presumes to practice an ideologically neutral cultural criticism that provides a context in which Griswold can make some basic sense of an archetypal story, a theme and its variations, that has worn its way deep into the grain of American children's literature.

The thesis of Audacious Kids is that a similar narrative pattern repeats itself with uncanny frequency in American juvenile literature, especially in a group of well-known works from the golden age of children's books, which Griswold dates from 1865 to 1914. The books that he considers are strikingly different, ranging from the feminist concerns of Little Women (1868) to the macho social Darwinism of Tarzan of the Apes (1914). With other examples of how this archetypal pattern is represented, Griswold explores Hans Brinker (1865), Little Women (1868), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Toby Tyler (1881), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885), The Wizard of Oz (1900), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Pollyanna (1913), and Tarzan of the Apes (1914). These disparate works, Griswold finds, are bound together by their fundamental similarities into an "Ur-story" that he entitles, borrowing ideas and approaches from Otto Rank and Joseph Campbell, "The Three Lives of the Child-Hero" (5). With due recognition of other possible patterns that can be created from these same elements, Griswold outlines the primal, mythic story that he sees emerging from these "classics."

A child is born to parents who married despite the objections of others. For a time, the family is well-to-do, members of the nobility or otherwise happy and prosperous. Then the child's parents die, or the child is separated from its parents and effectively orphaned. Without their protection the child suffers from poverty and neglect and (if nobly born) is dispossessed. The hero then makes a journey to another place and is adopted into a second family. In these new circumstances the child is treated harshly by an adult guardian of the same sex but sometimes has help from an adult of the opposite sex. Eventually, however, the child triumphs over its antagonist and is acknowledged. Finally, some accommodation is reached between the two discordant phases of the child's past: life in the original or biological family and life in the second or adoptive family.

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The connecting links between these elements are psychological, Griswold argues, and the child-hero (who has at least a dozen faces) lives these three lives in order to resolve a number of commonly shared developmental tasks, beginning with the problem of dealing with "separation from parents to achieve autonomy," an upsetting but necessary passage that leads to "familiar fantasies of being orphaned, hungry, impoverished, mistreated, exposed" (10-11). In the "Second Life," the child-hero contends with normal Oedipal emotions, which are transformed through "the child's triumph over the antagonist (signaled by the death or humbling of that same-sex parent figure) . . . a salutary symbol of the child's resolution of these Oedipal problems and the achievement of independence" (12). With this settling of animosities, in the "Third Life" a return is possible to those "vanished happy times" before the child was cast out into the world (12). Often, however, because the child-hero is on the brink of maturity at the end of the story, he or she is asked to strike an informed balance between past struggles and the realizations that accompany present empowerment. Dorothy, for example, discovers that...