The House as Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children's Literature (review)

Houses are omnipresent constructs in our literary traditions, so essential to human identity that the house itself can define a story: Mansfield Park, Bleak House, The House of the Seven Gables, Howard's End. "House" and its attendant "home" embrace a complex of experiences, myths, political realities, and desires. Within the house, one gains a mythos of origin, one measures one's development, one experiences justice or injustice, healing love or its opposite, and one steps into new social roles, some desired and others imposed. In its deepest sense, the concept of the house roots itself in spiritual soil. In the human imagination, the sense of home can expand to include the entire earth, even the universe, or contract into the smallest spaces. Its reach is material and immaterial. As concept and symbol, then, the house or home proves enormously variable. That is its power as archetype. Across cultures, the idea of home stands as a central motif and human obsession. In children's and young adult literature, however, the house is particularly resonant, for maturation, identity, and adaptation to life's circumstances are such central themes. The home, as scholar Pauline Dewan asserts, is "a child's first universe" (4). What happens in this first universe is the stuff of memorable storytelling.

As Dewan's study reveals, all genres of children's literature spin out stories of home. The range of relevant titles in a study of the house is voluminous. Dewan's encyclopedic knowledge of the literary traditions in children's literature is one of the strengths of her study. Her careful readings of such diverse authors as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mary Norton, Lucy Boston, Penelope Lively, Jean Craighead George, and Cynthia Voigt (to name but a few of the authors this study closely examines) demonstrate Dewan's ambidextrous talents. She is as comfortable on a desert island, delving into the rich tradition of the Robinsonnade, as she is in the surrogate homes of postmodern protagonists, adrift in a new kind of exile. Gaining control of such a vast field of texts would be a challenge to any scholar undertaking this study. Dewan has chosen thematic chapter titles—"Inside and Outside Houses," "The Search for the Ideal Home," "Houses Past and Present," "Land, Sea, and Island Homes," "Home Away from Home," "The Search for a Home and Parents"—that connect to larger cultural questions (nature versus nurture, time and space, childhood versus adulthood, for instance) and to the desires such probing unleashes (yearnings for unconditional love, for a less constrained and more natural existence, for freedom). The study's selections present a spectrum of houses from most to least nurturing; its protagonists run the gamut from human to human-like to animal. These characters share a need for love and for a connection to family, to community, and to place. Scholar Yi-Fu Tuan has written that "in an ideal sense home lies at the center of one's life, and center . . . connotes origin and beginning" (128). Dewan's selections and her organization seek to understand this quest for life's center, a quest often thwarted by outer contingency and inner imperfection. The longing for a centering home, however, remains potent in these texts.

Home also remains in creative tension with a protagonist's need to grow, change, and individuate. A protagonist's desire to enact choice and to explore that which is outside home—often identified as freedom—opposes the construct of home as stable center. As Dewan argues, "the house is juxtaposed with other types of settings, and the interplay between these contrasting settings is central in much of the literature" (14). Dewan's ability to analyze the competing claims of home and freedom across genres energizes this study. Implicit within the idea of home is one's eventual separation from that home. Paradoxically, that which centers also represents decentering and rupture. How one survives maturation and adapts psychologically to new stages in...