A Nostalgic Image of Childhood: Nancy Ruth Patterson's The Christmas Cup

A Nostalgic Image of Childhood: Nancy Ruth Patterson's The Christmas Cup In the 1979 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, "Beyond the Garden Wall: Some Observations on Current Trends in Children's Literature," Sheila Egoff briefly traces the prevailing image of innocent children in literature for the young from Victorian times to the late 1950s and early 1960s and traces the development of the problem novel and the new realism in fiction for children, which began in the early 1960s. Professor Egoff points out that from the mid l800s to the early 1960s, realism and fantasy for children were characterized by the portrayal of childhood as different from adolescence and adulthood, the period of time when books depicted children as "basically good and innocent and [when] childhood was . . . valued for its own sake" (258). Up to the 1960s writers for children "sheltered and nourished and developed those special characteristics of children's literature: warmth, wonder, gaiety, sentiment, simplicity— in a word, the childlike" (271). In the 1960s, however, the prevailing image of innocence that had characterized children's fiction for a hundred years changed. The garden, to use Professor Egoff's metaphor, representing "seclusion, protection, confinement . . . order, serenity, [and] aesthetic delight" (261) was torn down. Literary historians often name Louise Fitzhugh' s 1964 novel, Harriet the Spy, to mark the beginning of the "new realism" in children's literature, the first major novel for children de-emphasizing the image of innocent childhood. While Harriet does reflect some qualities that can be called "childlike," and though Harriet's problems are real, there is little that is innocent or childlike about the ostracism, rejection, and parental neglect Harriet suffers . Nor is there much that is childlike about Robert Burch's Simon and the Game of Chance (1970) in which Simon suffers from the repression of his reserved and fanatically religious father. Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead! (I965), Bette Greene's Summer of My German Soldier (1973), and Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War (1974) dismayed many adult readers of children's fiction if the three novels did not shock them. The protagonist in Judy Blume ' s Then Again, Maybe I Won't (1971) has enough problems to send an adult howling to a psychiatrist if not to a locked and padded cell. These, of course, are only a few isolated examples, but there were many others in the decades of the 60s and 70s, novels which made Joseph Krumgold' s . . . And Now Miguel (1953) and Madeleine L'Engle's Meet The Austins (I960) seem more like pablum for saps rather than books for children. Before the 1960s it was a rare story in which there were divorced parents; in which there were deaths, except for a few that occurred off stage; in which there were illegitimate , alienated, abandoned, and abused children; in which there were drugs, abuse, violence, suicide, and a host of o^her topics considered taboo for children's fiction until the 1960s. 293 Though the number of problem novels of the 1960s and 1970s has diminished somewhat during the past decade, the problem story still prevails from picture stories for the youngest to stftries for young adults. Many recent picture books deal with senility, death, and other problems of old age as these problems affect young children. Typical and well known among the stories about a child and a grandparent is Tomie de Paola's Now One Foot , Now the Other ( I98I ) , in which a little boy, whose grandfather has helped him learn to walk, helps his grandfather learn to walk again after he has had a stroke. Vera Cleaver's Moon Lake Angel (I987) deals with the problem of an unwanted child, and Betsy Byars' Cracker Jackson (I985) deals chillingly with wife abuse as seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. Yet, there is a growing number of exceptions to these problem novels, and a recent one is Nancy Ruth Patterson's The Christmas Cup (I989), which does not emphasize the problems of its protagonist, Ann Megan McCallie , but presents the image of a charming and relatively innocent child reminiscent of the older realistic fiction for children. Patterson emphasizes not the problems of Megan but...