Susan Cooper’s Dawn of Fear: Cross-writing, the Uncanny, and a Childhood in Wartime

Susan Cooper is best known by children’s literature scholars as an award-winning author of fantasy, and her Dark Is Rising series (1965–77) tends to be the focus of most of the academic commentary on her work. Written in between the first two volumes of that quintet, Dawn of Fear (1970), her realist, autobiographical novel about a British boy during the Second World War, has been largely overlooked. Despite being well reviewed upon publication,¹ few academics have examined the novel, and when they do, they discuss it within the context of other fiction or within the rest of Cooper’s oeuvre.² Yet Dawn of Fear has much to offer readers interested in children’s war literature; most significantly, it challenges assumptions that ally children with innocence and play. This potent alliance of childhood, play, and happiness—as opposed to adulthood’s connection with work and experience—is one that Cooper’s novel dismantles as my analysis of Derek’s growing fear will reveal. Dawn of Fear also illuminates how the secret knowledge from which adults work to shield children—most often about sex and/or death—keeping them “innocent,” is already known to them.³

Dawn of Fear troubles the notion that childhood is a space and time apart from the experience of adulthood by calling attention to war’s parallels in children’s lives (see Mikkelsen; Rosenberg; and Sainsbury); it elucidates how a large part of war’s terror for civilians is its dreadful familiarity. Although the novel examines the tragic depredations of war wrought by adults, it simultaneously illuminates the ways children are not solely victims of war but also perpetrators of violence and suffering,⁴ thereby complicating our understanding of youth. Dawn of Fear skillfully uses cross-writing and the uncanny to problematize limiting assumptions about childhood, depicting youth as competent and far more knowledgeable than some adults would like to admit.

Susan Cooper’s Dawn of Fear exemplifies U. C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers’ definition of cross-writing as the “colloquy of past and present selves,” found in many writers’ literary works, which expands temporally limiting definitions of identity (vii). They explain how cross-written texts “activate a traffic between phases of life we persist in regarding as opposites” and discuss how Maurice Sendak’s particular skill at “maintain[ing] contact with ‘the psychic reality of [his] own childhood’ shapes an original classic such as Where the Wild Things Are” (Lanes [247] quoted in Knoepflmacher and Myers viii). Similar to the psychological acuity that distinguishes Sendak’s work and his “wonderful understanding of the interplay between adult and child,” Susan Cooper’s novel also reflects the creative return to a writer’s childhood interests (Knoepflmacher and Myers viii). Significantly, however, Cooper’s recollection and description of childhood spaces importantly extend the largely chronological definition of cross-writing.

Knoepflmacher and Myers do mention how cross-written texts “rely on settings that dissolve the binaries and contraries that our culture has rigidified and fixed,” but their focus is primarily temporal (viii). Settings such as war, especially, can help authors productively challenge the temporally bound oppositions of child and adult, since children cannot be sheltered from knowledge of violence many readers associate with the experience of adulthood rather than the innocence of childhood. Indeed, in her later work on children’s literature about war, Myers makes clear that “[m]ore … perhaps, than any other genre, war stories embody techniques of ‘cross-writing’ that make permeable the boundaries between ‘fiction’ and ‘history’ and between audiences of children and adults” (333). Indeed, the publishing history of Dawn of Fear reflects how war stories trouble the boundaries between child and adult readers. Susan Cooper initially titled the novel The Camp and was unsuccessful getting it published as an adult work. Her editor declared it a “children’s book,” and advised her “to cut some over-adult reflective passages” as well as give it a new title (“Susan Cooper” 77). Although this history reveals the proximity of Sandra Beckett’s term “crossover” (2009; 2011) to cross-writing...