New troll territory : Hawthorne's literature for children

Reading Laura Laffrado’s critical study of Hawthorne’s Literature for Children, I was reminded of the Black American folktale of “The Farmer and the Snake” retold by Julius Lester in The Knee-High Man (1972). One cold winter morning a kind farmer on the road to town found a half-frozen snake in the road. He picked it up and put it in his coat. When the snake started to move, the farmer asked the snake to promise not to bite him once he was thawed out. The snake agreed, but before they got to town the snake crawled out and bit the farmer on the neck. When the farmer complained to the snake, “You promised that you wouldn’t bite me,” the snake replied, “That’s what I promised Mr. Farmer, but I’m a snake. You knew that when you picked me up. And you knew that snakes bite. It’s part of their nature.” My complaint about Laura Laffrado’s in many respects excellent study of Hawthorne’s writing for children is that it is what it says it is—a biographical/literary career analysis of Hawthorne’s 1841 historical stories (Grandfather’s Chair, Famous Old People, Liberty Tree), his 1842 Biographical Stories for Children, his 1851 Wonder-book for Boys and Girls, and his 1853 Tanglewood Tales. Still, I wish it were not the nature of the critic to read through stories in order to construct the author. Much of their beauty and charm is lost.

The thesis of the first chapter, “The Transcendence of Temporality,” is that while writing Grandfather’s Chair, Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree in 1840 Hawthorne discovers the “neutral territory” where the real and the fabulous meet. Laffrado notes how uneasy Hawthorne was with the disjunction between audience and material, lively children, and stern Puritans. Hawthorne vows he has presented truth but has taken imaginative license in the creation of details. Moreover, in tales such as “The Indian Bible” Laffrado sees strong biographical reflections. John Eliot translated the Bible into an Indian language by creating words to reflect the sounds of the language. Ironically the work survived but scholars could never make sense of it. “Just as Eliot tries (and ultimately fails) to link Indian and Puritan culture through language, so Hawthorne tries to link the actual and imaginary of the past through the language of Grandfather’s Chair” (13). Laffrado concludes that the story “reflects the dilemma of artist striving to communicate what he fears is both essential and ultimately incommunicable” (13).

Chapter two contains a reading of the Biographical Stories for Children (1842) as an almost masochistic “Denial of Invention” (41), in which Hawthorne limits himself to the “harsh world of the actual” (64). Laffrado believes that because Hawthorne’s life was in turmoil as he left Brook Farm in disappointment and had yet to marry, reality “takes a strangle-hold” (43) in these stories of the hard youth and problematic father-son relationships of, for instance, Benjamin West (eye problems), Samuel Johnson (guilt over denying help to his father), Oliver Cromwell (an unwanted child), and (a surrogate son) Christina of Sweden. Laffrado concludes that as do most of the children in the book, so too does Hawthorne invent; he invents a book of stories “which saves him by allowing him to write his enclosed condition, write his frustration, write his attempt at living his resignation” (63). Her argument is a convincing one; the biographies do present a submerged autobiography.

Ten years later Hawthorne writes A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls, which for Laffrado expresses “The Renewal of Imagination and Faith.” She notes the book comes at a high point in the writer’s life: a happy father of three children, basking in the fame of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and living in the Berkshires near the admiring Melville. Having gained the success and familiar authority he craved, Hawthorne abandons the stern, paternalistic narrator of the first two children’s books for Eustace...