“Has increased globalization and environmental activism changed the stories we tell our children?” This was the question that I was left with after attending John Lampen’s workshop, “Writing for Children with Respect,” at Quakers Uniting in Publications’ (QUIP) annual conference. It was not a question Lampen asked. It was his analysis of why monsters are presented differently today that caused me to think about it. What I found fascinated me and I hope you will also find it interesting to ponder, whether you agree with me or not.
DISCLAIMER: Ideally, I would have time to do more research and cite others, unfortunately I do not. Also, I would love to explore stories from other cultures and parts of the world, but alas, this will be based on my exposure, which is largely in the United States. I do invite conversation and hope that others might be able to make up for my shortcomings.
Lampen presented to us two pictures. The first was an illustration of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. This showed it as a fearsome, if somewhat whimsical, dragon like creature. The second picture was of a toy dragon based on the movie, [How to Train Your Dragon, which is based on a book by the same name. This second dragon was far less scary than the first.
Lampen proposed that this difference is indicative of an increasing lack of respect for children. That over time, monsters in children’s literature have gotten cuter because there is a belief that children can’t handle scary things. To put it in my terms, monsters are being gentrified because we are overprotective of children.
I do believe that we are overprotective of children today and that over time monsters have become gentrified. However, I think there is an alternative interpretation of the facts. In this interpretation both may be the product of similar global forces, but they do not have a causal relationship between them.
In short, I think the gentrification of monsters is a reaction to two forces: globalization and environmental activism. On the other hand, overprotectiveness flows from our fear of a rapidly changing world, that we don’t understand. Allow me to explain.
Let’s begin by looking at the gentrification of monsters. To do this, it is useful to pick two stories that are sufficiently removed from one another by time: Beowulf and How to Train Your Dragon.
Beowulf was written down around 1000 AD, but is believed to have origins from before then. It is the story of the hero Beowulf, who is summoned to protect a kingdom from a monster, Grendel. After killing Grendel, Beowulf then has to kill Grendel’s swamp witch mother. These slayings result in riches and fame, elevating Beowulf to a king. Years later, he faces yet another monster, a dragon, and they are both mortally wounded in the fight.
How to Train Your Dragon, released in 2010, is the story of Hiccup, the son of a Viking Chief. Hiccup’s village is constantly being attacked by dragons who steal livestock and kill people. Hiccup uses technology to capture and befriend the most fearsome dragon, which he initially intends to kill to prove his worth to his father. He then teaches other children in the village to ride dragons. They discover that the dragon raids are to feed a bigger, badder dragon, which the children and dragons team up to defeat. The dragons are freed from slavery and live happily ever after with the Vikings.
Clearly the monsters in these two stories are treated very different. Beowulf achieves economic wealth for himself and his people by killing the monsters. Hiccup achieves the same thing by befriending them. In order to understand this shift, I think we need to look at what monsters represent.
The role of symbolism in literature is always a tricky one. We often try to read all kinds of things into characters and images in stories that are more a creation of our own psyche than the author’s intent. However, monsters are a creation of the imagination (at least as far as I know). I think it is safe to say that whether or not the author intends it, monsters are actually a stand in for different forces in our “real” world. In other words, we put monsters in the stories we tell children to represent more abstract things that would be difficult to explain. In the case of monsters, I don’t think there is a straight forward one-to-one relationship. I think monsters, in children’s literature, represent multiple things in our world.
Monsters first and foremost represent the "other." In adult literature I think this includes the unknown. Lindsay Ellis does an amazing job of exploring this in her video essay on The Shape of Water. But I think that in children’s literature, “other” generally has a more concrete meaning. In children’s stories, “other” most often refers to nature or other people who are not part of “us” or some of both. I will come back to what I mean by not “us” in a moment, but first let’s look at monsters as a representation of nature.
In the time that Beowulf was written down, and for most of human history, nature has been an adversarial force. Whether it was getting lost in the wilderness, drowned in the sea, or starved by a year of bad crops, nature was something that was feared and could lead to a terrible death. Humans had to overcome nature and continually struggle against it to survive. However, it was always a losing battle, because eventually death comes to us all.
You can clearly see this play out in Beowulf. Beowulf kills Grendel, overcoming nature for a time, but he must also overcome Grendel’s mother. This represents the continued struggle against nature, but also shows the rewards of success, as Beowulf becomes wealthy and powerful. However, in the end the dragon kills him, showing that nature will win in the end.
However, in recent times, humans have begun to understand their effects on the environment. Even if some people don’t believe in Global Warming, almost everyone agrees that we need to take better care of the natural world. We no longer fear what the environment will do to us, but instead what we do to it. You might even say we have grown to love nature and want our children to love it too.
Hiccup shows this perfectly. He discovers his love for the monster and uses technology to help it. Much in the same way we hope children will invent ways to save the environment. Hiccup is actually quite the environmental activist, as he works to teach others to love monsters and live in harmony with them.
Now, let’s return to the question of monsters as not “us.” What is “us” depends heavily on context. It could be a family, a village, a country, a race, or so on… In general, it refers to an economically stable unit. By this, I mean that “us” is often defined by a group large enough to contain all the knowledge and manpower needed to continue to live. This is often very time dependent, in the time Beowulf was written down, it generally meant a small kingdom or even a village.
What is important here is that monsters generally represent everyone else. The people who are not “us.” Again, throughout most of human history, those others represented a threat. They competed for resources and might well attempt to kill “us.” A natural reaction is to kill them first. As Beowulf shows, it is completely acceptable to kill monsters. In fact it, it often leads to economic gain.
This too has changed in recent years. Two forces are at work here: the complexity of modern technology and hyper connectivity. These two come together to be what we call globalization.
I realize that there is quite a bit to peel back here; in what is already a very big onion. However, I think it is important to look at each piece. So, let’s start with the complexity of modern technology. I am not going to get into the particular technologies, it is enough to talk about the amount of knowledge involved. In 1945 it was estimated that human knowledge doubled ever 25 years, by 1982 it 12-13 months, in 2020 it was down to every 12 hours. Now we can ask a lot about those estimates, but even if they are an order of magnitude off that is still a lot of information. Remember when I said that “us” is often defined as the group of people who can contain all the knowledge and manpower to live. Well, no group of people can contain all the knowledge, but we can use machines to replace a lot of the manpower. This is the first part of breaking the “us” and “other.”
Next we can talk about connectivity. At the time of US Revolution it could take two months or more for a letter to get from London to New York. We are talking about a few sheets of handwritten paper. In today’s terms, maybe a few kilobytes of data took two months to transmit. That is six messages a year. Today someone can have a video conference call with screen share and a virtual whiteboard in real time. Gigabytes of data moving between New York and London at the speed of light (ok, near the speed of light).
In the world our children are growing up in the traditional idea of “us” no longer makes sense. To thrive in this new world, people will need to be highly collaborative. This is exactly what Hiccup does. He befriends the other, the dragons, and he cooperates with them.
The story of How to Train Your Dragon, and much of pop culture children’s media, is teaching kids skills like cooperation, communication, and acceptance of others. It is also changing children’s relationship to the environment. While it is doing all this through symbolism, in the form of monsters, I think kids get the point. They are intuitive and imaginative enough to internalize the lessons in the stories, otherwise we wouldn’t tell them. In many ways, this “fluff” is doing a better job of preparing our children for the future than schools that focus on knowledge recall and mechanical skills that computers do far better.
While these changes have been building over time, the rate of change is increasing rapidly. I think this rate of change is actually what leads to parents today being overprotective of their children. We instinctively understand that the challenges they will face are going to be different than the ones faced by our parents or ourselves. At the same time, we really don’t know how to prepare them. We send them through the same school system, we try to give them the same opportunities we had, but on an instinctive level we know this is not enough. This uncertainty leads to a great deal of unease and a tendency to be overprotective.
Let’s look at it another way. If I know that learning to hunt will lead to my child’s continued survival then, if he or she fails to hunt, it is relatively easy to throw them back out and say try harder. We have the foreknowledge that they can learn and will succeed if they learn. In other words, tough love is easier if you are sure you know what they need to do.
But what if hunting is not a skill that will lead to survival? What if hunting might actually be counterproductive, but we don’t know what is productive? How do you push your child to learn skills you don’t have, don’t even know what they are, and are rapidly changing? How do you fault a child for not succeeding when you don’t know what success looks like?
Just a quick example: in the 1960’s and 70’s computers were the purview of academics and nerds. No one would seriously suggest that in order to be fabulously wealthy your child should get involved with computers. By the turn of the century pretty much all of the wealthiest people in the world had made their fortunes in computers. Even more than that, not having computer skills was incredibly limiting to gaining any wealth.
I think it should surprise no one that we tend towards overprotectiveness of our children. It is a natural imperative to want your children to succeed, but if you don’t know what success looks like it is natural to react by lashing out. Ignorance is the root of fear and fear is a powerful and irrational motivator.
In the end I think the answer to my question is yes. Children’s literature is being changed by globalization and our changing relationship to the environment. Our overprotectiveness is a product of the same forces, but the gentrification of monsters in children’s stories is not because of overprotectiveness. Instead, the gentrification is an attempt, often an unconscious one, to teach children the skills they need to succeed in this new world.
P.S. If you found this interesting you may find my other blog posts of interest (http://thoughts.oakbear.net/). In particular, I have another inspired by a different workshop at the same conference, "Quaker Writer or a Quaker, writing” presented by Philip Gross, here. I also write fiction, not generally aimed at children, and I am always interested in finding beta readers to help me improve. If you have any desire to read about modern prophetesses or lesbian, Christian, werewolves at MIT, do email me at sam@oakbear.net. Fair warning, my writing does contain violence, sex, and fantastical elements.
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