Time Out: Trauma and Play in Johnny Tremain and Alan and Naomi

Times were hard and toys were few.

—Myron Levoy, Speaking for Ourselves

Trauma inevitably characterizes the depiction of American history in modern children's books about war. The United States, after all, was a nation born out of revolution in a dramatic rupture with the mother country, Great Britain. In turn, the painful suturing of a nation divided through the Civil War and Reconstruction left a wound that has festered in persistent racism and divisive regionalist loyalties¹ Moreover, everyday ethnic strife allied to class tensions took on sombre meaning in the twentieth century, when the Holocaust and internment camps defined our understanding of World War II and exposed problems below the surface of American national identity. The Vietnam War unravelled American myths about our national morality and political leadership, shaping another "cultural trauma" (Fred Turner xi) and triggering a series of studies of trauma itself by Robert Jay Lifton and others. Given the sustained legacy of American conflicts, it is not surprising that some of children's best historical fiction grapples with the meaning and consequences of wartime trauma, whether we call it "soldier's heart," "shell shock," "battle fatigue," or "PTSD"—some of the terms that have been associated with the successive wars in our history (Paulsen xiv).

Individual trauma figures in many children's books: the Bildungsroman often begins with the death of the protagonist's parents. "The American childhood story is almost always the story of an orphan," writes Jerry Griswold (5). But historical fiction poses a particularly complex task, because it must link the individual narrative to that of a society. Fred Turner in his work on the Vietnam War suggests that "memory takes place simultaneously in the individual psyche and in the social domain," and following Kalí Tal, he argues that "trauma is a category that allows us to think about the ways in which individual and social experience construct one another" (xi, xiii).² This mutual construction of an individual memory or narrative and a social narrative is at work in children's fiction about wartime trauma, as we shall see.

In the context of historical children's literature, that duality raises the question of how a young person's sense of agency can be reconciled with the fact that politics are shaped by adult actors. Does this mean that children's historical fiction as a rule presents a kind of double plot—juxtaposing violence in the realm of the young with a realm of adult decision-making and war? If trauma as a term refers to individual physical and psychic wounds, how are these related to the way a war shakes a society's beliefs and breaks down its relationships of power? Is the fictional animation of trauma always a simulacrum, like a toy doll which in its performance "comes alive," in Lois Kuznets's phrase, yet retains the uncanny trace of death?

The success of historical fiction depends on its realistic nuance, in connecting individual experiences to national politics and social experiences. Can children's literature, so often purged of moral ambiguity and afflicted by nostalgia, achieve such a vision? As Adrienne Kertzer has pointed out, in most literature about war trauma aimed at a child audience, "what is distressing is often softened and what is traumatic is made coherent" (Kertzer 254). Authors, parents, and students hope to "protect" their idea of children and children's literature as a "safe space" (251). Even today writers voluntarily censor what they recount in order to privilege life-affirming values, in an "intentional limiting of the reader's understanding" (Bosmajian xiv).³ Children's books, even those about the Holocaust, are asked to be at once truthful and reassuring (Kertzer 257). This split agenda may correspond to the tension within modern trauma theory, between those who believe that true trauma (as in the Holocaust) is unrepresentable and those who believe that the memory of a traumatic experience can and should be relived and narrated in order to put it to rest (see Knoepflmacher, this volume, and Leys).

The realistic depiction of trauma, ironically, may find...