alice's adventures in wonderland & through the looking glass book

However, perhaps we can fail a little less and give them Alice.

Of course, we must remember that nothing we can write will ever be more strange or disturbing to a child than the pure, unadulterated world that we will always have failed to prepare them for.

Fill an attic with treasures and the child who enters it may find any number of things-put a single coin in a room and you ensure that the child will find it, but nothing more. There is no need to limit the depth in books for children, because each reader will come away with whatever they are capable of finding. This is also why the Alice stories fulfill another requirement I have for Children's Lit: that it be just as intriguing and rewarding for adults. These things have all the ambiguity, uncertainty, and structure of the grown-up world without the messy, human parts. Carroll did this by basing his fantasies off of complex, impersonal structures: linguistics and mathematical theory.

So, to write Children's Literature, an author must create something complex and challenging, something that the child can turn over in their mind without accidentally revealing some terrible aspect of the world that the child is not yet capable of dealing with. We fear to trigger them because we cannot control the little beasts. I think the real reason that culture often fears sexuality and violence in children is because they are such natural urges. The former is frightening in and of itself, the latter for complex, internal reasons. The education of children is the transformation of an erratic and hedonistic little beast into a creature with a rational method by which to judge the world.Ī child must be taught not to fear monsters but to fear instead electrical outlets, pink slips, poor people, and lack of social acceptance. Children are not born with these understandings, so to make them understand pain, fear, and loss is no trivial thing.

Once a body grows old enough, we are all saddened by the thought of a breakup. Good Children's literature is some of the most difficult literature to write because one must challenge, engage, please, and awe a mind without resorting to archetypes or life experience. It has been my policy that the best literature for children is not a trifling thing, not a simplification of the adult or a sillier take on the world. Children are first protected from their culture-kept remote and safe-and then they are thrust incongruously into a world that they have been told is unsafe and unsavory and we expected them not to blanch. I think that the failure not only of Children's Literature as a whole, but of our very concept of children and the child's mind is that we think it a crime to challenge and confront that mind.

Alice's adventures in wonderland & through the looking glass book