Home Away from Home: One US Reader's Response to Home Words

Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada, edited by Mavis Reimer, offers ten essays, each of which approaches the idea of "home" through a different critical lens. From Andrew O'Malley's examination of how Robinsonade narratives enact domesticity as colonization, to Louise Saldanha's thesis that Canadian multiculturalism offers more a strategy for managing difference than a genuine commitment to cultural pluralism, these chapters offer careful consideration of how and whom "home" includes and excludes. Taken collectively, they enact the sociolinguistic mapping of Raymond Williams's Keywords—on which the title of Home Words productively puns, and to which Reimer acknowledges her debt. As she notes in her introduction, "the multivalency of the concept of home means that senses can be separated from one another and opposed, as well as conflated with one another" (xv). In exploring these variant and conflicted meanings of "home," she chooses, wisely, to make the project "an untidy, rather than a finished, one" (xii), thereby inviting readers to continue the conversation.

Embracing the spirit of the book, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures asked that I evaluate the ideas in Home Words "in relation to other primary or secondary texts that are part of [my] current research," considering "how readily these discourses of home in Canadian texts for young people can be applied to texts published elsewhere," such as "American texts" (Lefebvre). Given my embarrassingly inadequate knowledge of Canadian children's literature, I welcomed the opportunity to acquaint myself with (at least) some of the scholarship and to bring the book's ideas to bear on texts more familiar to me—specifically, on the American children's picture books that I study and teach.

If Deborah Schnitzer's taxonomy of windows is (as she acknowledges in her conclusion) provisional, so, in some measure, are all such formal analyses. In her efforts to delineate how windows function as "homing devices," however, she wisely directs attention to this pervasive but under-analyzed visual trope. In six of Crockett Johnson's seven Harold books, the title character uses his crayon to draw himself home. The first and last of these—Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955) and Harold's ABC (1963)—find the protagonist, in the final pages, creating what Schnitzer might call "windows of opportunity" (150), "two stor(e)y/third-space windows" (155), and "distress windows" (147). Near the end of the earlier work, Harold draws houses with windows and then buildings with windows, but "none of the windows was his window." These might be "distress windows": they signify his lack of access to home, and his experience in the "city full of windows" is confining and alien. He finds home only when he remembers that "his bedroom window . . . was always right around the moon." Drawing the window around it with his purple crayon, Harold returns himself home. In the sense that Harold's bedroom window is (in Schnitzer's words) "charged with homemaking/keeping responsibilities," it is a window of opportunity, translating Harold's art "into prospect and sanctuary" (150). In another sense, this same window might be of the two-stor(e)y/third-space variety, because it "draws attention to the fact that the alternative and sometimes competing stories of home are simultaneously present in a single window" (155). Harold lives on the boundaries between imagination and reality. Inasmuch as his crayon-created world is his only reality, we accept the window and bed he draws next as real; inasmuch as these items are mere projections of his mind, we see them as imaginary. He is both really home and only imagining that he is home. Exploring the multivalent meanings of this visual trope reminds one that Johnson's seemingly simple stories are, in fact, rich and complex.

As Doris Wolf and Paul DePasquale remind us, historicity offers a route to such complexity. In their study of "Canadian Aboriginal Picture Books by Aboriginal Authors," they note that, while picture books lack the "anger and siege mentality" found in most adult Aboriginal fiction, these works for younger readers nonetheless display the...