Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood

The Innocent Child in the House of History: Storytelling and the Sensibility of Loss in Molesworth’s The Tapestry Room

elizabeth gargano • The Innocent Child in the House of History Storytelling and the Sensibility of Loss in Molesworth’s The Tapestry Room Mary Louisa Molesworth’s two best-known children’s novels, The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room, appeared in print within two years of each other and bear striking similarities: both depict innocent children who come to inhabit vast and ancient houses that seem burdened by the weight of their own history, and both depict children who suffer from a paralyzing ennui that at times amounts almost to despair. Imprisoned in houses that are comfortable only for adults, and rather elderly adults at that, they find little room for self-expression and few opportunities to play. Yet, as they continue to explore these vast and in some ways forbidding domiciles, the children find secret spaces within the houses that open on vistas of fairyland ; through dreamlike journeys, often at night, they escape to a visionary realm linked with a romanticized childhood innocence. Significantly, however, these songs of innocence inexorably fade into narratives of compromised adult experience; the promised escapes into fairyland lead back to the cul-de-sac of history, as magical, fairylike figures narrate scraps of tragic family history to the listening children. Like so much children’s literature, Molesworth’s novels might be irreverently described as practicing a bait and switch on their naïve child protagonists (and child readers). Enchantment is the sugar coating for the The Innocent Child in the House of History 73 bitter pill of a moral admonition. Yet, the situation is not quite so simple as this formulation implies, for if The Cuckoo Clock punctuates its magical adventures with didactic advice, The Tapestry Room does not. Further, neither novel ends with a simple moral or clear lesson; rather, Molesworth’s narratives seek to cultivate a generalized sensibility of loss that can deepen children’s emotional connections with others. At the same time, these two conflicted novels glamorize and, to a degree, fetishize childhood innocence , even as they seek to erode it by acquainting children with the struggles of daily existence and the tragic nature of history. While The Cuckoo Clock is generally regarded as a more polished and coherent work, I choose to focus on the relatively ignored later novel. A more fragmented and problematic work, The Tapestry Room is also less didactic. Working not through direct moral injunctions but rather through generalized appeals to a culture of sympathy, the novel grapples more directly with its own conflicted agendas, revealing contradictory longings for innocence and experience. In The Tapestry Room, the dark and shadowy house of history is a difficult place to inhabit. Often lonely and even frightening, it dwarfs the child’s body, and tempts children to escape into its secret passageways in search of fairyland. Yet, all such journeys are only temporary digressions, and the house itself constitutes the children’s final destination , since its secret doorways to magical worlds close inevitably as the children grow up. Like its predecessor, The Cuckoo Clock, The Tapestry Room draws on a long tradition of children’s literature that situates innocent children in houses that typify a dreary or oppressive adult society. From Alice’s discovery of a mysterious looking-glass house that lurks behind the drawing room mirror in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), children’s literature has offered rich depictions of small children exploring mysterious houses that have a talent for shape-shifting: as the daring child explores further, these shadowy structures reveal hidden recesses and secret stairways—or in Alice’s case, a drawing room in reverse that opens onto an exciting but disorienting complementary world. While the child is small, fragile, and innocent, the house often looms large, freighted with the weight of social conventions and adult dispensations. In Looking-Glass, Alice repeatedly associates herself with her black kitten, whom she playfully describes as 74 Elizabeth Gargano a “wicked little thing” (Carroll 107). The kitten is “wicked” because she disrupts the orderly, utilitarian activities that Alice regards as adult; she resists being washed and unrolls balls of yarn. Similarly, in a house that seems locked into perpetual stillness, Alice, too, is playfully disruptive. In Tenniel’s classic illustration, the drawing room oozes propriety and solemnity; Alice is tiny enough to fit on the lace-draped mantelpiece, between the glass domes covering a clock and a vase of flowers. Under her playful ministrations, the...