2016.01.06 为什么英国人讲的儿童故事更好

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CULTURE
Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories
Their history informs fantastical myths and legends, while American tales tend to focus on moral realism.

By Colleen Gillard

Phil Bray / Disney / Walden Media
JANUARY 6, 2016
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If Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn were each to represent British versus American children’s literature, a curious dynamic would emerge: In a literary duel for the hearts and minds of children, one is a wizard-in-training at a boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, while the other is a barefoot boy drifting down the Mississippi, beset by con artists, slave hunters, and thieves. One defeats evil with a wand, the other takes to a raft to right a social wrong. Both orphans took over the world of English-language children’s literature, but their stories unfold in noticeably different ways.

The small island of Great Britain is an undisputed powerhouse of children’s bestsellers: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Significantly, all are fantasies. Meanwhile, the United States, also a major player in the field of children’s classics, deals much less in magic. Stories like Little House in the Big Woods, The Call of the Wild, Charlotte’s Web, The Yearling, Little Women, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are more notable for their realistic portraits of day-to-day life in the towns and farmlands on the growing frontier. If British children gathered in the glow of the kitchen hearth to hear stories about magic swords and talking bears, American children sat at their mother’s knee listening to tales larded with moral messages about a world where life was hard, obedience emphasized, and Christian morality valued. Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the kinds of stories that appeal to the furthest reaches of children’s imagination.

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It all goes back to each country’s distinct cultural heritage. For one, the British have always been in touch with their pagan folklore, says Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of children’s literature and folklore. After all, the country’s very origin story is about a young king tutored by a wizard. Legends have always been embraced as history, from Merlin to Macbeth. “Even as Brits were digging into these enchanted worlds, Americans, much more pragmatic, always viewed their soil as something to exploit,” says Tatar. Americans are defined by a Protestant work ethic that can still be heard in stories like Pollyanna or The Little Engine That Could.

Americans write fantasies too, but nothing like the British, says Jerry Griswold, a San Diego State University emeritus professor of children’s literature. “American stories are rooted in realism; even our fantasies are rooted in realism,” he said, pointing to Dorothy who unmasks the great and powerful Wizard of Oz as a charlatan.

American fantasies differ in another way: They usually end with a moral lesson learned—such as, surprisingly, in the zany works by Dr. Seuss who has Horton the elephant intoning: “A person’s a person no matter how small,” and, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.” Even The Cat in the Hat restores order from chaos just before mother gets home. In Oz, Dorothy’s Technicolor quest ends with the realization: “There’s no place like home.” And Max in Where the Wild Things Are atones for the “wild rumpus” of his temper tantrum by calming down and sailing home.


Landscape matters: Britain’s antique countryside, strewn with moldering castles and cozy farms, lends itself to fairy-tale invention. As Tatar puts it, the British are tuned in to the charm of their pastoral fields: “Think about Beatrix Potter talking to bunnies in the hedgerows, or A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh wandering the Hundred Acre Wood.” Not for nothing, J.K. Rowling set Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the spooky wilds of the Scottish Highlands. Lewis Carroll drew on the ancient stonewalled gardens, sleepy rivers, and hidden hallways of Oxford University to breathe life into the whimsical prose of Alice in Wonderland.

America’s mighty vistas, by contrast, are less cozy, less human-scaled, and less haunted. The characters that populate its purple mountain majesties and fruited plains are decidedly real: There’s the burro Brighty of the Grand Canyon, the Boston cop who stops traffic in Make Way for Ducklings, and the mail-order bride in Sarah, Plain and Tall who brings love to lonely children on a Midwestern farm. No dragons, wands, or Mary Poppins umbrellas here.

Popular storytelling in the New World instead tended to celebrate in words and song the larger-than-life exploits of ordinary men and women.
Britain’s pagan religions and the stories that form their liturgy never really disappeared, the literature professor Meg Bateman told me in an interview on the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Highlands. Pagan Britain, Scotland in particular, survived the march of Christianity far longer than the rest of Europe. Monotheism had a harder time making inroads into Great Britain despite how quickly it swept away the continent’s nature religions, says Bateman, whose entire curriculum is taught in Gaelic. Isolated behind Hadrian’s Wall—built by the Romans to stem raids by the Northern barbarian hordes—Scotland endured as a place where pagan beliefs persisted; beliefs brewed from the religious cauldron of folklore donated by successive invasions of Picts, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings.

Even well into the 19th and even 20th centuries, many believed they could be whisked away to a parallel universe. Shape shifters have long haunted the castles of clans claiming seals and bears as ancestors. “Gaelic culture teaches we needn’t fear the dark side,” Bateman says. Death is neither “a portal to heaven nor hell, but instead a continued life on earth where spirits are released to shadow the living.” A tear in this fabric is all it takes for a story to begin. Think Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark Is Rising, Peter Pan, The Golden Compass—all of which feature parallel worlds.

These were beliefs the Puritans firmly rejected as they fled Great Britain and religious persecution for the New World’s rocky shores. America is peculiar in its lack of indigenous folklore, Harvard’s Tatar says. Though African slaves brought folktales to Southern plantations, and Native Americans had a long tradition of mythology, little remains today of these rich worlds other than in small collections of Native American stories or the devalued vernacular of Uncle Remus, Uncle Tom, and the slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

Popular storytelling in the New World instead tended to celebrate in words and song the larger-than-life exploits of ordinary men and women: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane, even a mule named Sal on the Erie Canal. Out of bragging contests in logging and mining camps came even greater exaggerations—Tall Tales—about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, the twister-riding cowboy Pecos Bill, and that steel-driving man John Henry, who, born a slave, died with a hammer in his hand. All of these characters embodied the American promise: They earned their fame.


British children may read about royal destiny discovered when a young King Arthur pulls a sword from a stone. But immigrants to America who came to escape such unearned birthrights are much more interested in challenges to aristocracy, says Griswold. He points to Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, which reveals the two boys to be interchangeable: “We question castles here.”

In Scotland, Bateman in turn suggests the difference between the countries may be that Americans “lack the kind of ironic humor needed for questioning the reliability of reality”—very different from the wry, self-deprecating humor of the British. Which means American tales can come off a bit “preachy” to British ears. The award-winning Maurice Sendak-illustrated book of etiquette: What Do You Say, Dear? comes to mind. Even Little Women is described by Bateman as something of a Protestant “parable about doing your best in trying circumstances.”

Maybe a world not fixated on atonement and moral imperatives is more conducive to a rousing tale. In Edinburgh—an old town like Rome built on seven hills, where dark alleys drop from cobbled streets, dive under stone buildings, and descend crooked stairs to make their way to the sea—8-year-old Caleb Sansom is one kid who thinks so. Digging with his mum through the stacks of the downtown library, he said he likes stories with “naughty animals, doing people things.” Like Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows “who drives fast, gets in accidents, sings, and goes to jail.” As for American books such as The Little House in the Big Woods: “There’s a bit too much following the rules. ‘Do this. Stop doing that.’ Can get boring.”


Pagan folktales are less about morality and more about characters like the trickster who triumphs through wit and skill: Bilbo Baggins outwits Gollum with a guessing game; the mouse in the The Gruffalo avoids being eaten by tricking a hungry owl and fox. Griswold calls tricksters the “Lords of Misrule” who appeal to a child’s natural desire to subvert authority and celebrate naughtiness: “Children embrace a logic more pagan than adult.” And yet Bateman says in pagan myth it’s the young who possess the qualities needed to confront evil. Further, each side has opposing views of naughtiness and children: Pagan babies are born innocent; Christian children are born in sin and need correcting. Like Jody in The Yearling who, forced to kill his pet deer, must understand life’s hard choices before he can forgive his mother and shoulder the responsibility of manhood.

It turns out that fantasy—the established domain of British children’s literature—is critical to childhood development.
Ever since Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment about the psychological meaning of fairy tales, child psychologists have looked at storytelling as an important tool children use to work through their anxieties about the adult world. Fairy-tale fantasies are now regarded as almost literal depictions of childhood fears about abandonment, powerlessness, and death.


Most successful children’s books address these common fears through visiting and revisiting the same emotional themes, says Griswold. In his book, Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature, he identifies five basic story mechanisms children find particularly compelling—snug spaces, small worlds, scary villains, lightness or flying, as well as animated toys and talking animals—all part of the serious business of make-believe.

“Kids think through their problems by creating fantasy worlds in ways adults don’t,” Griswold says. “Within these parallel universes, things can be solved, shaped and understood.” Just as children learn best through hands-on activities, they tend to process their feelings through metaphorical reenactments. “Stories,” Griswold noted, “serve a purpose beyond pleasure, a purpose encoded in analogies. Story arcs, like dreams, have an almost biological function.”

It turns out that fantasy—the established domain of British children’s literature—is critical to childhood development. With faeries as voices from the earth, from beyond human history, with a different take on the meaning of life and way of understanding death, Bateman says there’s wisdom in recognizing nature as a greater life force. “Pagan folklore keeps us humble by reminding us we are temporary guests on earth—a true parable for our time.”


Today there may be more reason than ever to find solace in fantasy. With post-9/11 terrorism fears and concern about a warming planet, Griswold says American authors are turning increasingly to fantasy of a darker kind—the dystopian fiction of The Hunger Games, The Giver, Divergent, and The Maze Runner. Like the collapse of the Twin Towers, these are sad and disturbing stories of post-apocalyptic worlds falling apart, of brains implanted with computer chips that reflect anxiety about the intrusion of a consumer society aided by social media. This is a future where hope is qualified, and whose deserted worlds are flat and impoverished. But maybe there’s purpose. If children use fairy tales to process their fears, such dystopian fantasies (and their heroes and heroines) may model the hope kids need today to address the scale of the problems ahead.

Colleen Gillard is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has written for The Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.



文化
为什么英国人讲的儿童故事更好
他们的历史为幻想中的神话和传说提供了依据，而美国的故事则倾向于注重道德现实主义。

作者：Colleen Gillard

菲尔-布雷/迪士尼/沃顿传媒
2016年1月6日
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如果《哈利-波特》和《哈克贝利-费恩》分别代表英国和美国的儿童文学，会出现一种奇怪的动态。在一场争夺儿童心灵的文学决斗中，一个是在苏格兰高地的寄宿学校受训的巫师，而另一个是在密西西比河上漂流的赤脚男孩，被骗子、猎奴者和小偷所困扰。一个用魔杖打败了邪恶，另一个则坐上木筏去纠正社会的错误。两个孤儿都占领了英语儿童文学的世界，但他们的故事以明显不同的方式展开。

英国这个小岛是一个无可争议的儿童畅销书的大国。柳林风声》、《爱丽丝梦游仙境》、《小熊维尼》、《彼得-潘》、《霍比特人》、《詹姆斯和大桃子》、《哈利-波特》以及《狮子、女巫和衣橱》。重要的是，所有这些都是幻想。同时，美国也是儿童经典作品领域的主要参与者，它的魔法作品要少得多。像《大森林里的小房子》、《野性的呼唤》、《夏洛特的网》、《年轮》、《小妇人》和《汤姆-索亚历险记》这样的故事，更值得一提的是它们对成长中的边境地区的城镇和农田的日常生活的真实写照。如果说英国的孩子们聚集在厨房壁炉的光芒下，听着关于魔剑和会说话的熊的故事，那么美国的孩子们则坐在母亲的膝盖上，听着那些充满道德信息的故事，在这个世界上，生活是艰难的，强调服从，重视基督教的道德观。每种风格都有其优点，但英国的方法无疑产生了吸引儿童想象力的最远的故事种类。

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这一切都可以追溯到每个国家的独特文化遗产。哈佛大学儿童文学和民俗学教授玛丽亚-塔塔尔说，首先，英国人一直与他们的异教民间传说保持着联系。毕竟，这个国家的起源故事是关于一个由巫师辅导的年轻国王。传说一直被当作历史来接受，从梅林到麦克白。"塔塔尔说："即使英国人在挖掘这些迷人的世界，美国人，更务实，总是把他们的土壤看作是可以利用的东西。美国人被一种新教的工作伦理所定义，这种伦理在《波莉安娜》或《小机器》等故事中仍可听到。

圣地亚哥州立大学儿童文学荣誉教授杰里-格里斯沃尔德说，美国人也写幻想，但没有像英国人那样。他说："美国的故事植根于现实主义；甚至我们的幻想也植根于现实主义，"他指着桃乐丝说，她揭穿了奥兹国伟大而强大的魔法师是个骗子。

美国的幻想在另一个方面有所不同。它们通常以一个道德教训结束--例如，令人惊讶的是，在苏斯博士的古怪作品中，他让大象霍顿吟唱。"人再小也是人，"还有，"我说的是真的，我说的也是真的。大象是百分之一百的忠实"。甚至《戴帽子的猫》也在母亲回家之前从混乱中恢复了秩序。在《奥兹国》中，多萝西的彩色探索以这样的认识结束。"没有什么地方比得上家"。野生动物在哪里》中的麦克斯通过冷静下来和航行回家来弥补他发脾气时的 "狂暴"。


景观很重要。英国古色古香的乡村，散布着发霉的城堡和舒适的农场，适合于童话故事的创作。正如塔塔尔所说，英国人对他们的田园风光的魅力很有兴趣。"想想碧翠丝-波特在树篱下与兔子交谈，或者A.A.米尔恩的《小熊维尼》在百亩森林里游荡。J.K.罗琳将《哈利-波特》的霍格沃茨魔法学校设置在苏格兰高地的诡异荒野中，这并非毫无道理。刘易斯-卡罗尔利用牛津大学古老的石墙花园、沉睡的河流和隐秘的走廊，为《爱丽丝梦游仙境》的奇异散文注入了活力。

相比之下，美国的壮丽景色没有那么舒适，没有那么多的人，也没有那么多的鬼魂。在其紫色的山峰和果实累累的平原上出现的人物，显然是真实的。有大峡谷的毛驴Brighty，有《为小鸭子让路》中拦截交通的波士顿警察，还有《莎拉，平凡而高大》中给中西部农场的孤独孩子带来爱的邮购新娘。这里没有龙、魔杖或玛丽-波平斯的雨伞。

新世界的流行故事反而倾向于用语言和歌曲来赞美普通男人和女人比生命更伟大的事迹。
文学教授梅格-贝特曼在苏格兰高地的斯凯岛接受采访时告诉我，英国的异教和构成其礼仪的故事从未真正消失过。异教徒的英国，尤其是苏格兰，在基督教的冲击下生存的时间比欧洲其他地区要长得多。贝特曼说，尽管一神教很快就扫除了欧洲大陆的自然宗教，但它却更难在大不列颠取得进展，贝特曼的整个课程都是用盖尔语讲授的。苏格兰被隔离在哈德良长城后面--这是罗马人为了阻止北方野蛮人的袭击而修建的--作为一个异教信仰持续存在的地方，这些信仰是由皮克特人、凯尔特人、罗马人、盎格鲁-撒克逊人和维京人的连续入侵所带来的民间传说的宗教大锅酿造出来的。

甚至到了19世纪甚至20世纪，许多人相信他们可以被带到一个平行宇宙。变形人长期以来一直在声称海豹和熊为祖先的氏族城堡中出没。"贝特曼说："盖尔文化告诉我们不需要害怕黑暗面。死亡既不是 "通往天堂或地狱的门户，而是在地球上继续生活，灵魂在那里被释放出来，影射活人"。在这种结构中的一个撕裂，就是一个故事开始的全部条件。想想《哈利-波特》、《纳尼亚传奇》、《黑暗崛起》、《彼得-潘》、《黄金罗盘》--所有这些都以平行世界为特色。

这些都是清教徒在逃离英国和宗教迫害来到新世界的岩石海岸时坚决反对的信仰。哈佛大学的塔塔尔说，美国在缺乏本土民俗方面是很特别的。尽管非洲奴隶把民间故事带到了南方的种植园，美洲原住民也有悠久的神话传统，但除了少量的美洲原住民故事集或雷穆斯叔叔、汤姆叔叔和《哈克贝利-费恩》中的奴隶吉姆贬低的方言外，这些丰富的世界在今天几乎没有留下。

新世界的流行故事反而倾向于用语言和歌曲来赞美普通男人和女人比生命更伟大的事迹。丹尼尔-布恩、戴维-克罗基特、灾星珍妮，甚至伊利运河上一头名叫萨尔的骡子。在伐木和采矿营地的吹嘘比赛中，出现了更大的夸张--《高大的故事》--关于巨大的伐木工人保罗-班扬、骑着旋风的牛仔佩科斯-比尔，以及那个生为奴隶、死时手里拿着锤子的钢铁驱动人约翰-亨利。所有这些人物都体现了美国的承诺：他们赢得了自己的名声。


英国儿童可能会读到当一个年轻的亚瑟王从石头中拔出一把剑时发现的皇家命运。但来到美国的移民，为了逃避这种不劳而获的出生权利，对挑战贵族制度更感兴趣，格里斯沃尔德说。他指出马克-吐温的《王子与贫民》，其中揭示了这两个男孩是可以互换的。"我们在这里质疑城堡"。

在苏格兰，贝特曼反过来建议，国家之间的差异可能是美国人 "缺乏质疑现实的可靠性所需的那种讽刺性幽默"--与英国人的狡猾、自嘲的幽默完全不同。这意味着在英国人的耳朵里，美国的故事可能有点 "说教"。获奖的莫里斯-森达克（Maurice Sendak）插图的礼仪书。我想到了《你说什么，亲爱的？甚至《小妇人》也被贝特曼描述为一个新教的 "关于在艰难环境中尽力而为的寓言"。

也许一个不拘泥于赎罪和道德要求的世界更有利于一个振奋人心的故事。在爱丁堡--一个像罗马一样建立在七座山上的古老城市，那里的黑暗小巷从鹅卵石铺成的街道上掉下来，潜入石头建筑下，沿着弯曲的楼梯下到海里--8岁的卡勒-桑索姆是一个这样认为的孩子。他和妈妈一起在市中心图书馆的书堆里翻找，他说他喜欢有 "淘气的动物，做人的事情 "的故事。比如《柳林风声》中的蟾蜍先生，"他开得很快，出了事故，唱歌，还进了监狱。" 至于《大森林里的小房子》这样的美国书。"有一点太遵循规则了。'做这个。停止做那个。可能会变得无聊。"


异教徒的民间故事较少涉及道德，而更多的是关于通过机智和技巧取得胜利的诡计者等人物。比尔博-巴金斯通过猜谜游戏战胜了咕噜；《格鲁法罗》中的老鼠通过欺骗饥饿的猫头鹰和狐狸避免了被吃掉。格里斯沃尔德称诡计多端的人是 "错误的领主"，他们迎合了儿童颠覆权威和庆祝顽皮的自然愿望。"儿童接受了一种比成人更异教的逻辑"。然而贝特曼说，在异教神话中，年轻人拥有对抗邪恶所需的品质。此外，每一方对淘气和儿童都有相反的看法。异教婴儿生来无罪；基督教儿童生来有罪，需要纠正。就像《年轮》中的乔迪，他被迫杀死了他的宠物鹿，在他能够原谅他的母亲并肩负起男子汉的责任之前，他必须理解生活的艰难选择。

事实证明，幻想--英国儿童文学的既定领域--对儿童发展至关重要。
自从布鲁诺-贝特尔海姆(Bruno Bettelheim)写下《魅力的用途》(The Uses of Enchantment)关于童话的心理意义以来，儿童心理学家一直将讲故事视为儿童用来解决他们对成人世界的焦虑的重要工具。童话故事的幻想现在被认为是对童年时期关于被遗弃、无力感和死亡的恐惧的几乎字面描述。


格里斯沃尔德说，大多数成功的儿童书籍通过访问和重温相同的情感主题来解决这些常见的恐惧。在他的《感觉像个孩子：童年与儿童文学》一书中，他指出了儿童认为特别有吸引力的五个基本故事机制--傻瓜空间、小世界、可怕的恶棍、轻盈或飞行，以及动画玩具和会说话的动物--所有这些都是严肃的化妆事业的一部分。

"格里斯沃尔德说："孩子们通过创造幻想世界的方式来思考他们的问题，而成年人则不会。"在这些平行宇宙中，事情可以被解决，被塑造，被理解。正如儿童通过实践活动学习的效果最好一样，他们倾向于通过隐喻的重现来处理他们的感受。"格里斯沃尔德指出："故事，"服务于一个超越快乐的目的，一个在类比中编码的目的。故事弧，像梦一样，有一种几乎是生物性的功能"。

事实证明，幻想--英国儿童文学的既定领域--对儿童发展至关重要。由于小精灵是来自大地的声音，来自人类历史之外，对生命的意义和理解死亡的方式有不同的看法，贝特曼说，认识到自然是一种更大的生命力是有智慧的。"异教民俗让我们保持谦卑，提醒我们是地球上的临时客人--这是我们这个时代的真正寓言。"


今天，我们可能比以往任何时候都更有理由在幻想中寻找慰藉。格里斯沃德说，随着911事件后对恐怖主义的恐惧和对地球变暖的担忧，美国作家越来越多地转向更黑暗的幻想--《饥饿游戏》、《赐予者》、《分歧者》和《迷途者》的二元论小说。就像双子塔的倒塌一样，这些都是悲伤和令人不安的故事，讲述了末世世界的分崩离析，植入电脑芯片的大脑反映出对社交媒体帮助下的消费社会入侵的焦虑。这是一个希望有限的未来，其荒废的世界是平坦和贫穷的。但也许是有目的的。如果孩子们用童话故事来处理他们的恐惧，这种二元论的幻想（以及他们的英雄和女主角）可能会给今天的孩子们带来希望，以解决未来问题的规模。

科琳-吉拉德（Colleen Gillard）是马萨诸塞州剑桥市的一名自由撰稿人。她曾为《波士顿环球报》和《旧金山纪事报》撰稿。