Day 30: Enchanted Hunters

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar.  ISBN: 9780393066012.

I'm sure this will show up again in my reading, but I want to address it now before I forget, and to be honest this was one of those "not overly inspired" reads.  The book focused a little too much on analysis for it to be appealing to a "casual" reader, meaning anyone who does not have an academic or professional interest in childhood reading.

Tatar titles one of her chapters Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep: Brushes with Death.  I don't know about you, but that prayer freaked me out when I was a kid.  I may have been particularly sensitive to it's insidiousness* due to my family's heathen ways.  I was raised as a Unitarian Universalist so the whole "You're going to die and burn in Hell" thing always seemed way overblown and not very peace-loving if you ask me.  I'd like to think that a God who gave his only son so that we could have salvation might forgive us, or at least not send us to eternal pain and suffering, just because we have enough doubts not to be able to profess being Christian in good faith.  I like to tell people that I would rather risk leading a good and true life as a quiet, private-practicing Unitarian Universalist and hope that God will reserve a special place for us that isn't Hell than to lead my life as a loud, beat-people-over-the-head Christian who's going to Hell anyway because I don't really believe it in my heart.  That latter part applies to me alone and is not meant as a jab at anyone, so put the pitchforks down.

So why am I even familiar with this prayer?  There seem to be numerous versions of the prayer, but the one I'm familiar with is one of the more menacing ones.

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

My Southern Baptist grandmother forced me  to say this every night when I stayed in her home.  There is nothing like being faced with your own mortality every night before going to bed to make you wanna go over to Granny's.  And let's not talk about the potential nightmares.  I was familiar with the concept of death, but I don't think anyone likes it held over their heads.  I don't find this prayer particularly comforting or faith inspiring.  The very thought that God might take my soul, for no other reason than that he could does not sit well with me.  And this is probably one of the major reasons I have never been able to accept the idea of God with blind faith.

*Operating or proceeding in an inconspicuous or seemingly harmless way but actually with grave effect.  Definition via dictionary.com

Day 29: Enchanted Hunters

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar.  ISBN: 9780393066012.

At some point in the introduction, Tatar states that she's going to focus on books that belong specifically to the canon of children's literature.  It got me thinking about how much I read that could be considered "children's literature."  It also fascinates me that nowadays kids aren't reading the books that their parents read when they were young to connect the different ages; parents are reading what their children are reading, and these are books that were written this year or last year, or only three years ago.  And it's not just parents, it's twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, and over, regardless of their childless/child-free state.

Think of what this might mean about our current literary tastes or why we are still reading children's and young adult literature.  I'm not talking about just the classics, those age old tales like Robinson Crusoe and Peter Pan; these are stories that it makes sense to revisit as adults, or visit for the first time if we somehow missed out on them in our childhood.  But what about things like Harry Potter, books that were meant for children from the start and just kind of snowballed into this worldwide phenomena?  Granted, I believe that most of the literature meant for younger audiences that adults are picking up are targeted towards young adults, so there is some overlap, but why are 40-year-old women drooling over Edward Cullen when there are plenty of Harlequin Romance Highlanders willing to actually ravish the girl rather than pussyfooting around?  

I wonder if maybe that's the whole appeal.  Not the lack of sex, but the simplifying of it, and every other aspect of adulthood.  There are young adult novels that do go in-depth on adult topics and address them and their complications, but more often than not we see something that is presented in clear language, with sterilized situations and relationships.  There may be some confusion about relationship roles, etc. by the characters, but they are the typical and familiar confusions that young adults can relate to and "old" adults remember feeling.

For most of us, adolescence is a relatively short time in our lives packed in with far more complications and difficulties than later years.  We're dealing with things like growth spurts and insane hormone levels and friends turning into enemies and vice versa as we try to figure who we are.  We have to deal with new decisions and situations like whether or not to have sex, do drugs, go to college, take extra AP classes, get a job.  Our relationships with our families get incredibly complicated because we feel we deserve that extra freedom, but our parents refuse to even give us the chance to earn it.

Young adult literature takes all of this and turns it into black and white.  We might see the complications, but the author is able to explain the whys and whats so that we don't have to experience the turmoil of young adulthood, but we get to watch someone else struggle through it.  On the other hand, I think another draw of young adult literature might just be that it is easier to read, it usually has larger fonts, the plots aren't overly complicated, and young adult authors totally uninhibited with what they write.  When there's no adult mind judging your flights of fancy, it's much easier to fly higher.