"Adults' Literature," By Children

"The pen has been in your hands," Anne Elliot famously reminds a man, during a dispute in Persuasion about the relative virtues of the sexes. It is Jane Austen's most overtly feminist statement. The child, similarly, can with justice remind adults that the pen has been in their hands. The issue of who holds the pen is after all crucial. And when a child takes the pen in hand, that child is taking a determined step toward the control of language, of representation, of power. The child, usually little, mostly subordinate, always subject to control by parent or baby-sitter or teacher, has a lot to gain by wresting the means of representation from the adults.

Let me illustrate this point by a fairly extended extract from an unpublished story by Cory, a seven-year-old. It may not qualify as "juvenilia," since Cory hasn't grown up yet to create a body of mature works. But still it's a fine example of its kind. It's called "Flying Pigs." ¹

One day I saw a pig, a very fat pig. It wanted to fly.
Then it was night time. I wanted to find that pig, and he wasn't there. I looked everywhere. . . . I looked in the grass, I looked in the mud, I looked in the barn. I could not find him anywhere.
Then I looked up in the sky. There he was!--flying to the candy shop. I found him in the candy shop. He was just getting a lollipop.
Then the owner came, and said, "Do you have money?"
The pig left, and went to my house. He had a soft landing. He was very tired.
[Soon the pig goes missing again, and the family is mystified.]
I said, "He probably flew away."
Dad said, "Pigs can't fly."
I said, "Yes they can. Because yesterday morning I saw Pinkerton fly. . . . He flew to the candy store, and tried to buy a lollipop. But he is a pig. He didn't have any money."
Dad said, "Well, I still don't believe pigs can fly."
[Parents take a lot of convincing! But Cory, our narrator, perseveres.]
We went to the talent show to see if he was there. And there he was! [Begin Page 279]

He could carry a boulder when he was flying. He could fly under bridges. He could fly over buildings.
He got lots and lots of money at the talent show.
Then he went to the candy store and got a lollipop.
THE END

This is a familiar form of self-empowerment, in narratives by adults as well as by children, but here in the narrative of a seven-year-old, it takes an engagingly simple and obvious form. In the central story, the unpromisingly obese pig in his quest for flight is allowed his hour of glory. And in the frame story, the narrator too is empowered. In real life, Cory is the youngest in his family, and, in his own eyes at least, the one with the least privilege, the least authority. He is like Mordecai Richler's Jacob Two-Two, who has to say everything twice, because nobody listens to him the first time. In his story, Cory changes all that. He is the one who gets it right, and authoritative Dad inside the story must learn that lesson.

One could multiply examples. The more disadvantaged and powerless the child, the greater the satisfaction in the empowerment, as in the Cinderella story. Young Anthony Trollope, before he became the famous author of forty-seven novels, spent a memorably miserable youth: he called himself as a teenager "that most hopeless of human beings, a hobbledehoy" (Autobiography 24). He made his unprofitable days bearable by the stories he told himself in which he played the hero. Although he could have recreated himself as a superman, being Anthony Trollope, he schooled himself into modest fantasies: "I never became a king...