The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders (review)

Any adult who has read any of the Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket has to wonder what is happening to the genre of the mysterious and the haunted for children. The darkness of the Lemony Snicket series, even when offset by humor, is unrelenting, and the books rely on children's knowledge of Gothic themes and a desire to see unreality at its worst for entertainment. The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders offers some theories to explain children's interest in the Gothic. The overall theme of this collection, described in its introduction, is that children's version of the Gothic provides not merely a "good shiver" but also a disorientation or a questioning of the safety of the status quo, even to the point of being a radical literature.

This collection of essays covers a great deal of ground, almost none of it the classic path of traditional Gothic effects in children's literature, such as The Secret Garden and Where the Wild Things Are. Instead, these writers consider contemporary works such as the Lemony Snicket series, the Harry Potter series, Goth graphic novels, works from New Zealand and the West Indies, the fantasy of Garth Nix and Neil Gaiman, and cyberfiction. They also embrace a generous definition of the Gothic, from the traditional Gothic settings of the dark castle and family secrets to the mythology of Maui (the Polynesian trickster), haunted beaches, and the grotesque Moaning Myrtle who haunts the girls' bathroom at Hogwarts, all of which point out the elasticity of the term Gothic. Some of the essays illuminate more about the works they discuss than about the Gothic impulse, and each one presents a slightly different look at what Gothic means and how it appears in children's literature. Freud's theory of the "uncanny" is a recurrent theme across many of the essays, and the "unheimlich" qualities of boarding schools, possessed bodies, and identity-shifting are discussed thoroughly by Anna Jackson in "Uncanny Hauntings, Canny Children." Alice Mills, in "Haunting the Borders of Sword and Sorcery: Garth Nix's The Seventh Tower," takes an in-depth look at the Gothic undertones in Nix's fantasy literature and how a Gothic reading of the Freudian concept of the uncanny illuminates the return to stability after the hero and heroine complete their quests. Karen Sands-O'Connor, in her essay about children's novels set in the West Indies or with West Indian characters, analyzes some novels with which American readers may be less familiar, such as Phillip Pullman's The Broken Bridge. Sands-O'Connor writes that because of the history of race, violence, and colonialism playing out in these novels, the "Gothic sense of foreboding" (129) is stronger than in other novels.

Some of the essays argue rather forcibly for the salutary effect of reading Gothic stories. Dale Townshend introduces this theme by tracing the history of horror and ghost stories in children's literature, as it parallels and breaks away from adult Gothic influences. Townshend describes how the Lockean notion that children should be raised without the influence of fearful and intense stories, so that they grow up with rational and steady minds, was consistently in conflict with the educational purpose of children's stories as cautionary tales, with the Evangelical tradition of frightening children into being good, as well as the general popularity of Gothic stories as imaginative or merely entertaining tales. These conflicts are echoed in other essays in the collection, particularly in the writers' need to defend Gothic children's literature. In order to deal with the uncertainty of the future and the seeming boundary-less cyberworld, Nadia Crandall posits that Gothic themes create a distance that "allows the reader to confront the power of the dead past, and in triumphing, reassert their oneness with the living present" (44). Crandall also points out that that even though much of children's cyberfiction is set in...