I’m trying, in this exploratory study, to add to an understanding of how we experiences for children in the outdoors: what professionals see as the “enabling environments’ encouraged by the new Early Years Foundation Stage and, in the context of this particular paper, what messages children’s books give about The Great Outdoors. My interest in this subject stems from my time as a headteacher, and from involvement in the Forest School movement. One particular ‘critical incident’ sticks in my mind: a wet day in a local nature reserve, when a Forest School leader asked the children we’d taken “What do you think we’re likely to meet in the woods?” He had in mind the toy badger with a packet of chocolate biscuits, waiting in a shelter in a pine wood plantation a quarter of a mile further into the woods; the children were not so sure. Where Dorothy and her companions in Oz look for “lions, tigers and bears – oh my!” my class were concerned about Big Bad Wolves – storybook wolves. As Alison Lurie explains, recollecting her move to the country as a child, “Well, I thought, if there were cows, which I’d seen before in pictures, why shouldn’t there be fairies and elves in the woods behind our house?” I suspect the same was true of the children that were with us that day. Before coming to the specifics of the three texts I’ve chosen, therefore, I’d like to start by looking at a larger, mythical landscape.
Imagine a European village – it could be in England, too, for much of England’s inhabited history:, and similar stories exist worldwide, so we might make this a global context: a clearing, with fields, a small group of dwellings, some field system &c, and – woods. It is a landscape we know from picture books – for me, most tellingly, from Michael Foreman’s illustrations for Barbara Walker’s Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman,. Rackham (1980) in the major work Ancient woodland: its history, vegetation and uses in England (London: Arnold) tells us to distinguish Forest from woodland and wood-pasture, managed woodland spaces from the wildwood, or primeval woodland. His view is that this latter type of woodland was cleared very early in the settled history of England. It is interesting to note, however, that large areas of deep woodland are found in those cradles of W. European folklore, France and Germany, still in the early modern period
Nevertheless, the folk inheritance persists: the woods are the place where the unwary get into trouble. We see Snow White taken out somewhere lonely to be done away with; she finds anonymity (for a while) among marginalised miners. In ”The Green Lady” (collected in Neil Philip’s Penguin Book of English Folktales), the unwary Red Riding Hood-like protagonist finds herself mixed up with pagan practice. There are Hansel and Gretl, the Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, Rapunzel and many other stories set in the woods. We also meet this mythic place of magic and danger in the more modern folk-style tale of Linda Williams’ (1986) The little old lady who was not afraid of anything, which sees the eponymous little old lady taming the supernatural in the woods where she is foraging. One of the few stories to exist in both the English and German collections, Rumpelstilzen (Tom-tit-tot in England) has the deep wood as the dwelling of the demonic creature at the centre of the tale. Walker and Foreman’s “Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman” – a tale apparently with world-wide cognates – sees the boys confront not only non-Christian practice but child-sacrifice and cannibalism. In England these woods may not have been extensive, but they may have been a barrier to travel as well as an economic resource. Patterns of kinship and maybe feudal loyalty keep this a close-knit community. People who don’t “fit in” might be excluded: travelling families; foreigners; outlaws. Dangerous people on the margins of society. So dangerous, in fact, that in his chapter “The Ban and the Wolf” in Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben notes the description in early English law of the marginalised and excluded bandit, vilified as wargus, wolfshead or werewolf, who moves from juridical exclusion into “the collective unconscious… a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city…” a mythic representation of the excluded man, friedlos (as Agamben cites an earlier author): without peace and under sentence of death.
Managed or not, the woods, therefore, might be the place where the unwary get into trouble. And in the mediaeval period, get into trouble they did. Shulamith Shahar concludes that “means of preventing accidents were very limited” (1990 p144), and that it may be adult neglect of young children due to work requirements that caused the accident rate to be at its highest in the harvest season. Warning stories, therefore, may be seen as part of the limited preventative measures at the disposal of families in later mediaeval and early modern Europe: don’t go in, and you will avoid danger. But a transgression, an ignoring of the adult injunction takes place (I think at once of Peter and the Wolf, the most recent popular wolf-folk tale), and then the tale unfolds, with the most obvious message: notice the signs, and be wary. Don’t be taken in by the stranger’s hospitability, and seek an opportunity to escape.
It is interesting to note the motif of prohibition and kidnap brings OOT very close to folktales such as the Swan-Geese, meticulously codified in Propps’s Morphology (1968, p96ff). Ida was supposed to look after her baby sister “but never looked” and when the goblins – small, cowled figures, miniature gothic Grim Reapers – come in from outside, Ida makes “a serious mistake” by climbing the wrong way out of the window. So far, a straightforward reuse of the folk motifs, although the prohibitions have not been explicit as they might have been in a true folk tale of this kind, and there is nothing of the ‘temptations’ of adolescent sexuality that mark Labyrinth, the film that springs from the book. For our purposes, what, so far, does the reader of the book know about the outside?
Sendak is able to show a “nice” outdoors, and to return to it at the end of the book, as a place where Mama sits, with the dog, “in the arbour.” Mountain and seas are visible – and Papa being ‘away at sea’ is a current theme in the text and pictures – but at a distance. It’s when Ida and the baby get into trouble that Outside appears less secure. Even the sunflowers in OOT have a dreamlike, surreal quality, purpose: a hint of the triffid about them, perhaps. Where these plants loom in as Ida discovers the kidnapping of her sister, they have a menace that echoes the shipwreck in a thunderstorm in the other window. Nature breaks in, chaos reigns as Ida reveals her coldness towards her sister, while in the other window, symbolizing Ida’s ambiguous anger, a strom is sinking a ship: Papa is in peril; family stability is tthreatened. When she is in “Outside Over There,” Ida is in a dream world, where she is shown to be without a firm footing, “whirling by,” flying or floating, and the goblins are somehow initiating her sister into their goblin world – we must assume permanently – as a changeling. This outside over there world is a jumble of rocks and shore and cave; it has less of the ordered iconography of the scenery we can see from Ida’s garden. Ida’s Papa’s ship is also in the background, an anxiety for Ida and the reader. Ida’s magic music saves her sister, reborn and reconciled to Ida, and they return home – fairly rapidly, as if the land they were in was just around the other side of the house. Because in a way it was; OOT is about a mental and emotional landscape of sibling jealousy and childhood anxiety; the Outdoors what takes up most of the book is the place where Ida’s emotions have dislocated her from her family and her home.
This is a clever use of the motif common to folk tales and much, later children’s literature in which adventures happen away from adults, in a place of greater freedom – freedom to experience peril and to find resolution independent of adult intervention. It is worth noting that similar freedoms can be found in pedagogical literature advocating outdoor play, where risk and uncertainty can be seen as more possible in the nursery garden than inside (Stephenson 2002) “Magic,” as Zipes notes (1983, p 172), “is used paradoxically not to deceive us but to enlighten us.”
It would be too easy to send a lot of time in the exciting, terrifying fantasy worlds of Maurice Sendak – if only because he has been so much discussed. Is this ‘outside’ terrifying because of the breakdown he was experiencing while writing it? Is Ida’s coming outside so fraught with peril because for Sendak as a gay man, he felt menaced by his own coming out? The outside is, after all, “Where the Wild Things Are.”
I must admit that Where the Wild Things Are might have fitted with my other two choices better, given the age range one might expect to read it – yet Ida was modelled on a five year old, and the basic story of the text – sibling jealousy and reconciliation – is one that the readers of Percy the Park Keeper and Charlie and Lola might recognise. “The process of reading (Zipes 1983 p 174) involves dislocating the reader from his/her familiar setting and then identifying with the dislocated protagonist so that a quest for the Heimische or real home can begin. The fairy tale ignites a… quest for home…” The quest of Ida and Percy is the same quest as Frank Baum’s (1900) Dorothy: to discover a way to resolution of their dilemmas, a way home, or a way to create a home.
Quest for home is the central dilemma in Butterworth’s After The Storm. Percy’s world- and the world of his post-Beatrix Potter animal companions – is disturbed by a terrific storm. Five years before publication, mean wind speeds of 86 mph were recorded (Met Office), and 15 million trees were lost in Southern England. Percy has to cope with repairs in the Park following a great storm, which has resulted in loss of habitat for ten or more animals. The blindingly obvious starting point – for which I apologise – is that Percy’s outside world is a park; he is steward of a managed environment. The weather – that limiting factor for so many children – is a force of chaos, disrupting the goodly order of Percy and his friends, but there is little else that will harm them. Only when the troupe of animals and Percy look at the gloomy pine woods as a possible home for the displaced animals do they experience something of the mistrust of the great primeval wood, ‘“too dark” squeaked the mice. Too gloomy,” said the hedgehog’ and the illustrations show them looking dubiously into a dark stand of pine. Percy’s navigation of the stream brings them to a large oak tree, which, with teamwork and DIY, is made into “a fine new place to live.” The tree survives this makeover, but Percy ends the story by taking an acorn to plant where the original tree had been. Here, the environment is a lived in and accessible place, not without difficulties – the weather, problems of finding suitable places to live, streams to fall in, but essentially tameable. Percy lives with animals that retain more of their animal nature than perhaps they do for Beatrix Potter, but nevertheless are anthropomorphised – extensions of the human into the natural world, if that distinction is to be allowed, or, in another light, tamed members of the wild, managed by a benign humanity, to whom they are smilingly grateful.
Nature as inimical; nature as friend I chose three very different books but with certain criteria: they had to be current books but from a wide(-ish) span of publication dates, they had to illustrate something of the outdoors but without an overt ‘green agenda’ message. Given the date of the third text and its subject, the lack of ‘green message’ must be seen as an explicit choice. Samantha Hill’s 2006 retelling of a TV episode based on Lauren Child’s Charlie and Lola Nature is seen as something to be explored. The bolder Charlie leads the overenthusiastic Lola through experiences of winter which allow her to feel comfortable in its strangeness. They see bears swimming in Arctic oceans and penguins sliding on the Antarctic ice. Lola appreciates this, but realises that it wouldn’t do for every day, and gleefully lets her model snowman melt. Lola’s unfamiliarity is conquered, and she is ready to accept seasons and regions: hard concepts. It is the hardness of the concepts perhaps that steer the writers away from current concerns: the polar bears swim in the ocean, they are not victims of a disappearing ice cap; penguins skate on the ice with no thought to environmental damage. This is not to say that Child hasn’t looked at weightier environmental issues, for example in What Planet are you from Clarice Bean? The image of a melting snowman at then end might leave some older, more knowing readers uncomfortable, but we encounter here a very different, third way of looking at the outdoors: Nature is just Nature. Little Lola will have to learn this before being concerned at the fate of anyone further away than the dog Sizzles, stuck in a snowdrift.
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