From the Myth to the Wake of Home: Literary Houses

"And what would comfort be?" This question at the end of Adrienne Rich's "In the Wake of Home" voices a central concern of modern literature. Leonard Lutwack concludes The Role of Place in Literature with a chapter entitled "Placelessness: The Concern of Twentieth-Century Literature" (182-245), having noted early on in the book that, despite its rich history and symbolism, "the house is no longer a significant place in the writing of our time" (37). As he and many others point out, T S. Eliot's Waste Land named and described the world that prevails in our literature: a hell of fragments and loss, without security or comfort, without God or meaning.

For the most part, writers for adults portray us as both deprived of a familiar home and free in an unfamiliar universe. Implicitly, they show that comfort, or the belief that one can be at home in the world, is myth. They also show that the myth of being at home continues to comfort us despite our more or less conscious awareness of what Rich calls "the hole torn" in belief. Within each of us, to use Rich's words:

The child's soul carries on in the wake of home building a complicated house a tree-house without a tree finding places for everything the song the stray cat the skeleton The child's soul musters strength where the holes were torn but there are no miracles: even children become exhausted.

(ll. 133-42)

Rich implies that our attachment to myth is childlike in every sense of that word—we cling with a child's innocence, energy, and enthusiasm, a child's need for security and certainty, a child's persistence in the face of contradictions. Her emphasis speaks especially to the concerns of children's literature. Whereas much adult literature laments our homelessness and reflects the fragmentation or loss of myth, most children's literature celebrates home and affirms belief in myth.

Images of home abound in children's literature, not only in houses, such as the little house in the big woods, but in a variety of other places, such as Tom's midnight garden, the Island of the Blue Dolphins, the yellow brick road, the river at Green Knowe, the forest of Pretty Pearl, Earthsea, and the East Side of New York City, where Harriet spies. Many critics have noted the celebration of place in children's literature. In Fairy Tales and After, Roger Sale emphasizes the importance of snug and cozy places throughout the history of children's literature. Phyllis Bixler, Lois Kuznets, Anita Moss, Jon Stott, and others write of the pastoral or lovely place in Victorian and twentieth-century children's literature. Kuznets writes of topophilia, or love of place itself, as expressed in The Wind in the Willows. And I have written about the magic circle that is home in the Little House books. My impression is not only that home is the dominant place in children's literature, but also that the house is the chief form it takes.

Why children's literature thus differs from adult literature is an interesting question. If we believe in myth as something outside the material order of nature and therefore alien to the adult rational and scientific mind, we may—like Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Rowe Townsend, for example—see children's literature as one of the last strongholds of symbolic truth and pure storytelling. Of course, this conception of children's literature is under attack these days, most notably by Jacqueline Rose, who argues that the "glorification of the child . . . suggests not only a refusal to acknowledge difficulties and contradictions in relation to childhood; it implies how we [adults] use the image of the child to deny those same difficulties in relation to ourselves" (8). More specifically, she explores how the myth of childhood, as "an ultimate beginning where everything is perfect or can at least be made good" (138), has denied throughout history the ambiguities and abuses of sexuality, class privilege, language, economics, and politics for both child and adult...