Murder for Kids: Children’s Literature and the Making of an American Tradition

In Bloody Murder, Michelle Ann Abate confronts the familiar but no less puzzling prevalence of violent death—namely, murder—in literature for children and young adults. If children’s literature is didactic, if its social function is to acculturate children (to say nothing of the pleasure it gives young readers), what can it mean that this same literature has what the subtitle identifies as a “homicide tradition”? Abate addresses this question in a variety of ways in the six chapters of her book and extends its implications by questioning how much this violence becomes integrated into children’s identity (32), although that is not quite the main point of inquiry of the study. Rather, she introduces readers to an obsessive American interest in murder that has spanned centuries, assumed myriad representational forms, and become the object of multidisciplinary study. In light of this broad and persistent interest in representing, consuming, and (as the author’s statistics show) doing murder in the USA, children’s literature offers yet another mode and approach to understanding this preoccupation. Indeed, a good deal of the book—from the general introduction to the framing of individual chapters—foregrounds contemporary American crime statistics and methods of policing and punishment and, in doing so, suggests that its subject is more properly murder. In other words, this study at times seems less concerned with what the presence of homicide and other forms of killing tells readers about children’s literature than it is about the new insights into murder that looking at children’s literature might afford. This tension between what is text and what is context has other effects, principally concerning the overall coherence of the book and the integrity of the conceptual field. Nevertheless, Abate’s close readings of texts and of the specific discourses with which they are paired in individual chapters give readers new literary and social perspectives to consider as they think about the forms and functions of literature for children.

In addition to an introduction and an epilogue, the book is composed of six chronologically ordered chapters. Abate makes clear that no progressive relationship between the chapters should be inferred and that she favoured instead a model of “ongoing socio-cultural dialogue” between texts (34). The nature of these conversations, however, especially between the six chapters, could be clearer, so that readers might understand better the selection of texts and the way they are grouped in chapters beyond their dates of composition. For example, neither of the first two chapters concerns American literature, but each is clearly about forms of homicide and allows Abate to consider potential psychological effects and social impacts of reading fairy tales and fantastic literature. In other words, although what these works tell us about “the homicide tradition” in America is unclear, they do establish important parameters for that tradition and the rest of the book.

In chapter 1, “‘You Must Kill Her and Bring Me Her Lungs and Liver as Proof’: ‘Snow White’ and the Fact as well as Fantasy of Filicide,” Abate focuses on the “most homicidal” version of the tale, that by the Brothers Grimm (37). Reminding readers that adults were originally the audience for fairy tales, she argues that the Queen’s repeated and increasingly ingenious efforts to do away with Snow White speak to actual parents’ imaginings about doing harm to their children, so that the literature provides an expression of and outlet for these impulses. This argument is interesting, not least because it does engage with questions of audience, of the difference between books for and about children, and with the changing conception of “the child.” Yet the chapter places an odd emphasis on American statistics about the prevalence of filicide and the incidence of abuse by step-parents to support speculation about the Grimms’ intent when primary research on the texts themselves would have been more compelling (as, for example, when she refers...