Viewpoint: Peculiar Places and Strange Guests: Obsolete Resorts in Some Mid-twentieth Century Children’s Books

Our perceptions of the built environment are without a doubt structured by texts of all kinds, from prescriptive literature that directly addresses buildings and landscapes to works of fiction that feature architecture only incidentally, or else use buildings to advance a plot or give life to a character. In some cases, a work of architecture is a character, and to cite just the most obvious (and sinister) examples of this phenomenon, consider the doomed English country house Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) or the voraciously carnivorous Crain homestead at the center of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). Beyond the examples of Gothic novels and ghost stories in which architecture plays central roles, however, there are other works in which architecture figures dynamically, if less sensationally. Sarah Luria has argued that among modern American authors, Henry James and Edith Wharton were particularly committed to architecture as more than a literary metaphor, using it to propel their narratives forward and carefully adapting it in their own lives, creating homes that were the indispensable settings for their literary production.¹ Wharton is perhaps the most persistent literary devotee of the built environment, for any number of her books, from the early treatise coauthored with Ogden Codman Jr., The Decoration of Houses (1897), to her late novel Hudson River Bracketed (1929), critically assess architecture, feature architect characters (as in Summer [1917]), or read architecture as symptomatic of the social set that produced it. In one of her most well-known books, The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton uses “descriptions of the built environment to pass judgment on the [elite] society she depicted.”²

Architecture has also been crucial to the genre of children’s literature, at least as far back as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–69), in which the central March family’s residence is modeled on the Alcott family homestead, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts.³ In the novel Alcott’s fictional stand-in, Jo March, appropriates the attic for her writing, mirroring a widespread and long-standing practice in which children have adopted and adapted spaces made by and for adults to their own purposes.⁴ Even as specialized spaces have been designed and built for children in the modern period—from nurseries in middle-class Victorian homes to rec rooms in postwar American suburban tract houses—young people have persisted in asserting their rights to both outdoor and indoor spaces.⁵ In many instances those spaces have been comprised of parts of the built environment with little utility for adults, such as cramped corners under staircases, low-ceilinged attics, or abandoned outbuildings, to name just a few. Outdoors, even as dedicated play areas were increasingly provided to both urban and suburban children, they persisted in using streets and other places that were seemingly inhospitable to recreation for their own enjoyment. Spaces made for the use of children, or appropriated by them, have been a relatively neglected field of architectural history, and fictional spaces produced for the young have been even more rarely considered, and then only on infrequent occasions and mostly by historians and critics of children’s literature.⁶ Nevertheless, the ways that spaces are constructed by or for the young can tell us a lot about how society thinks about architecture and children, as Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith have shown.⁷

Similarly, children’s books in which the built environment plays a central role warrant more consideration than they have previously received, for the reason that they simultaneously record a particular society’s view of how children inhabit and use spaces and shape how young people will go on to think about all kinds of spaces, including architecture, in later life. Thus, this article examines three popular novels by well-known children’s authors that appeared at the middle of the twentieth century and in which buildings occupy important positions: Gone-Away Lake (1957) and Return to Gone-Away (1961), both by Elizabeth Enright, and The Pink Motel (1959), by Carol Ryrie Brink...