Mirror in the Sea: Treasure Island and the Internalization of Juvenile Romance

From Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. © Scribner's, 1910.

The adventure story is one of the hardiest of all literary genres—and it has often had need to be so. Ever since Gilgamesh (third millennium B.C.) "saw mysteries and knew secret things. . . .went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labor, and returning, engraved on a stone that whole story," tales of man's journeys into the unknown have held an audience—and have done so in triumphant defiance of the common limitations of their authors, the frequent ignorance of their audience, and the pallid disdain of the Academy. Such disdain is familiar to all students of children's literature, for we have all encountered the glib assumption that children's literature, like the adventure story, is inherently shallow and second-rate, generically inferior to "serious" literature. The Academy can forgive anything except popularity—a fact made abundantly clear in the historical evolution of children's literature.

The connection between children's literature and the literature of adventure goes back at least to the Renaissance, and the Humanists' contempt for the barbarous splendor—and the widespread popularity—of medieval romance.¹ Ascham's condemnation of the Morte Arthur ("the whole pleasure of which book standeth . . . in open manslaughter and bold bawdry") is typical of the Humanists' disdain for a literature of action which they found devoid of serious moral concerns, literary excellence, and redeeming social values. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the invidious distinction between serious and popular literature was well established, and the medieval romance which Sidney had fondly described as "a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner," was abandoned to children, the lower classes, and the uneducated. So the romances of the Middle Ages, and the adventure stories patterned crudely after them, were consigned to the chapbooks—where they inevitably influenced the rise of modern children's literature in the eighteenth century. B. A. Brockman notes that "this decadent medieval literature, closely associated throughout the Renaissance with children and with childishness, was in academic minds—and quite possibly in publishers' minds—the paradigm for literature written expressly for children . . . a vague but powerful preexisting academic conception of children's literature as the chapbook derivatives of medieval romance . . . colored henceforth the academic reaction toward the new literature expressly for children."²

There are, of course, significant differences between adventure stories written for children and those written for adults. The formula for the latter demands an encounter with the unknown in conditions involving sex (however sublimated) and violence. In accordance with the wisdom of the tribe, literature for children is denied the resource of sex; whatever children's literature can rely on, it cannot rely on the 42D blonde with the torn blouse. But the encounter with the unknown and the experience of violence are shared by adult and juvenile adventure, and the latter can somehow get along, even though it must forego sugarplum visions of Bo Derek cavorting on a tropical beach in the remnants of her handkerchief.

Now, historians are well aware of the activities of Thomas Boreman and John Newbery, and rightly trace the origins of modern children's literature to the mid-eighteenth century. The result of this historical awareness has been an emphasis on those qualities distinguishing imaginative literature written and marketed for children from other kinds of literature. But similarities are also worth exploring. Juvenile and adult adventure have common features, and a common source in medieval romance, and Mr. Brockman's remarks suggest a question worth asking. The literature of adventure is now a legitimate (if not always a prudent) academic interest; in this too it resembles children's literature. The question is: how has the literature of adventure earned the right to be taken seriously? And what does the evolution of medieval romance into modern adventure have to teach us about the evolution of children's literature?

Now, the key to the rehabilitation and metamorphosis of romance is...