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"Every Mother's Dream": Cynthia Voigt' s Orphans Cynthia Voigt began her talk to parents and teachers at Youngstown State University's 1990 English Festival by reporting a comment she received from a mother shortly after Homecoming was published. "It's every mother's dream," the mother said, to a rather astonished Voigt. The story of four children, aged six to thirteen, abandoned by their mother in a shopping mall parking lot (their father had abandoned them years before when the youngest was conceived) , walking for days, hungry and tired, to their aunt's in Bridgeport, Connecticut, only to find that their aunt is dead and their cousin cannot give them a home; then taking off again to find their grandmother, who, by the way, they did not know existed and who might be crazy or violent or both— "every mother's dream"? Voigt said the more she thought about it, the less crazy it seemed. Her greatest fear as a mother, she said, was that something would happen to her, and then what would become of her children? Her dream, the more she thought about it, was that her children could survive on their own. And so we have book after book about orphans, resilient and selfsufficient : Cynthia Voigt' s image of the child. But of course Voigt is not the first author to so conceive of the child. Fairy tales are positively crammed with such orphans, mistreated and cast out to make their own way in a hostile world. Voigt calls our attention to the parallels early in Homecoming. As the Tillerman children sit in their old car in the shopping mall parking lot, waiting for their mother to return. Dicey, the oldest, orders James, ten, to tell the youngest two children, Maybeth and Sammy, a story to keep them quiet. He tells them "Hansel and Gretel." The fairy tale becomes something of a leitmotif in the book, until the end when Dicey, eating a plate of spaghetti, finally meets her grandmother: "You like my spaghetti?" her grandmother asked. "No," Dicey said. "But I'm hungry. Do you like it?" "It's easy to fix. You know what I sometimes think?" Her grandmother looked straight at her, her mouth chewing. "I sometimes think people might be good to eat. Cows and chickens eat corn and grass and turn it into good meat. People eat cows and chickens. In people, it might turn into something even better. Do you ever think that?" Dicey shook her head. "Especially babies," her grandmother said. She swallowed thoughtfully. "Or children. Do you have brothers and sisters?" (251) Voigt 's orphans not only find themfeelves in fairy tale situations, but they have the qualities of fairy tale heroes and heroines. Therefore, Voigt' s novels are reassuring in the same way fairy tales are. The small and powerless child can and does 127 succeed through cleverness, resourcefulness, and active innocence. Rather than waiting for the authorities to find them and put them in foster homes, probably separate ones, Dicey has them set off on foot to find the aunt she believes will take them in, with a map as her only guide. They alertly pick up stray coins careless shoppers have dropped. Dicey feeds her brothers and sister from the day-old baked goods rack of large supermarkets, among other economies, and she stays near the ocean so they can fish and find mussels. Sammy, the youngest, even "finds" a family's picnic lunch on the beach and takes it to his family, in the same way Jack "finds" the giant's treasures and takes them down the beanstalk to his mother. When they finally reach their grandmother's, Dicey does not push her grandmother into the oven, but she wins her over through the ploy of the never-ending task: they make themselves useful and so give their strong and endearing personalities a chance to work on her. So Voigt uses as one metaphor for the child the fairy tale hero, the orphan cast out from any parental security but journeying to find a mature love and life of his or her own. But Voigt also uses another metaphor for the child, one essentially...

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