The Embodiment of Evil in Children's Literature. How Villainy and Adulthood are Interconnected in Children's Stories

76 Pages·2020·1.002 MB·English

by  Almut M. Amberg

Amberg, Almut M.: The Embodiment of Evil in Children’s Literature. How Villainy and
Adulthood are Interconnected in Children’s Stories, Hamburg, Diplomica Verlag 2020

Buch-ISBN: 978-3-96146-802-7
PDF-eBook-ISBN: 978-3-96146-302-2
Druck/Herstellung: Diplomica Verlag, Hamburg, 2020

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Danksagung

“Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately
have room for one feeling only at a time.” – J.M. Barrie (PW 53)

Nur Platz für ein Gefühl zu haben, kennt wohl jeder, der unter Stress steht. Nun, da
dieses Buchprojekt abgeschlossen ist, beherrscht mich vor allem ein Gefühl:
Dankbarkeit. Da ich im Frühjahr 2020 zu meinem Studienabschluss eine Feier
ausfallen lassen musste, möchte ich an dieser Stelle nachträglich allen danken, die
mich in den sechs Monaten beim Verfassen dieser Studie unterstützt haben. Mein
Dank gilt…

… Prof. Dr. Peter-Paul Schnierer vom Anglistischen Seminar der Ruprecht-Karls-
Universität Heidelberg für die fachliche Betreuung dieser Studie, viele inspirierende
Kurse, die mein gesamtes Studium bereichert haben, und besonders für die
persönliche Unterstützung und das mir entgegengebrachte Verständnis während der
Ungewissheit in der Prüfungsphase durch die Corona-Pandemie.

… meinen Eltern für die beständige Unterstützung, ihr Vertrauen in mich, meinen
Weg zu wählen, und die Leidenschaften, mit denen ich aufgewachsen bin – mit
Büchern und Geschichten.

… Sophia Krämer für den fachlichen und kreativen Austausch und die Unterstützung
bei der Recherche in der Bibliothek der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.

… meinen zahlreichen (un)freiwilligen Korrekturleser*innen für das kritische Auge:
Anna Becker, Laura Brandt, Carl Dahmen, Sophia Krämer, Isabella Kremer, Sina
Koller, Kevin Schmidt, Sarah Treiber und Anna Wollbaum.

Almut M. Amberg
Heidelberg, Herbst 2020
Content
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 7
2. Theoretical Approaches ....................................................................................... 9
2.1. Children’s fiction ............................................................................................... 9
2.2. Adults in Children’s Fiction ............................................................................. 12
2.3. Villainy ............................................................................................................ 16
3. You’re a Bad Man, Mr Gum (2006): The Nasty Idler ......................................... 20
3.1. Description of Mr Gum ................................................................................... 20
3.2. Mr Gum’s Villainy ........................................................................................... 25
4. Matilda (1988): The Child-hating Teacher ......................................................... 28
4.1. Description of Miss Trunchbull ....................................................................... 29
4.2. Miss Trunchbull’s Villainy ............................................................................... 31
5. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950): The Cold Seductress ............ 36
5.1. Description of the White Witch ....................................................................... 37
5.2. The White Witch’s Villainy .............................................................................. 40
6. Peter and Wendy (1911): The Well-Mannered Pirate ....................................... 46
6.1. Description of Captain Hook ........................................................................... 47
6.2. Captain Hook’s Villainy ................................................................................... 52
7. The Bad Beginning (1999): The Scheming Actor ............................................. 56
7.1. Description of Count Olaf ............................................................................... 57
7.2. Count Olaf’s Villainy ....................................................................................... 63
8. Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 68
Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 72
1. Introduction
Villains always have been people of interest and the most iconic and memorable
characters of a narrative are often found amongst their ranks. They exist in all forms
of literature and are by no means absent from children’s fiction which they have
inhabited from its beginning on. In fairy tales and fables, which are often considered
the earliest forms of children’s literature, villains have been present as archetypical
figures like the Big Bad Wolf, the Witch or the Evil Stepmother. Though under the
prejudice of being too clear cut and presenting a world which is too black and white in
its moral judgements, children’s literature has taken on the challenge and diversified
its representation of villainy in the last decades. Contemporary embodiments of evil
such as Mrs Coulter from His Dark Materials, both antagonist and mother to the
heroine Lyra, and You-Know-Who from the Harry Potter series pose as the villains of
their stories and fulfil their role satisfactorily without being flat or one-sided
characters.
The study of villainy in literature is a fairly recent one. With edited volumes
such as HEIT’s Vader, Voldemort and Other Villains (2011) or FAHRAEUS and YAKALI-
ÇAMO(cid:246)LU’s Villains and Villainy - Embodiments of Evil (2011) modern scholarship has
only started to collect and publish contributions since the beginning of the decade.
However, villainy in children’s literature is still under-researched and not as broadly
covered as other genres are. The study of villainy so far often seems to focus on
genres like e.g. comic books, while evil in general is a present topic mostly in the
academic field of philosophy and theology.
The other aspect of this study, adultness, has moved into the focus of children’s
literature research from the field of age studies which analyse the cultural
implications of age and ageing. The scholar Vanessa JOOSEN has recently
contributed to the topic of children’s literature and perspectives on age with her
monograph Adulthood in Children’s Literature (2018). She provides an extensive
overview of the presence of adult characters in children’s fiction. However, her
analysis is focussed mostly on parental characters, the fact of being adult, performing
parenthood and, thereby, performing adultness. She rarely remarks on the role the
adult takes within the work of fiction as this study will focus on.

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Here, the adult villain will be examined. Through the analysis of selected
children’s books’ villains in terms of villainous and adult traits, the research question
of a possible interrelation of these characteristics arises. This study will attempt to
find out whether there is a reciprocity or causality of adultness and villainy in
children’s literature.
The children’s books chosen for analysis in this study are either considered
classics of the first (mid-19th century to World War I) or second (1950s-1970s)
Golden Age of children’s literature or are part of the contemporary canon (a criterion
of popularity). They all are centred around one villainous main character and
antagonist whom this study will focus on (respectively: Mr Gum, Miss Trunchbull, the
White Witch, Captain Hook, Count Olaf) although there may be more than one adult
character with villainous traits in the story. I chose not to consider villains or
antagonists who are parents to avoid a focus on the child-adult relationship and to be
able to regard the villain as a standalone character. As a result both the Wormwoods
in Roald DAHL’s Matilda, the protagonist’s horrible parents, and J.M. BARRIE’s Mr
Darling will not be analysed.
Chapter 2 provides a working definition of children’s literature alongside an
overview of the previous research of adults in children’s books and a concise
theoretical consideration of villainy for the purpose of literary studies and especially
this book. The following chapters (3 to 7) will provide the analysis of the primary
sources with regard to the link of villainy and adultness and the research question.
The order in which the books are analysed has been determined by the suggested
reading age either stated by the publisher or author.

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2. Theoretical Approaches
2.1. Children’s fiction
In the academic field of study of children’s literature there seems to be an unspoken
consent that no matter the aspect of the specific study, a working definition of what
the subject of literary criticism of children’s fiction actually is has to be included. Since
the emergence of the research in children’s literature in the 1980s and 1990s,
various approaches to define children’s literature have been suggested.
Several scholars have expressed the axiomatic assumption that children’s
literature is literature written for children. This “primarily children’s literature”, as
EWERS (2012:8) describes it, is literature which is intended for children in its original
version – which would exclude titles like Robinson Crusoe and Oliver Twist. Both
novels have been published without any intention of having a child audience but
since have moved (sometimes in abridged or adapted versions) into the general
canon as children’s classics. The notion of authorial intent is a problematic one after
poststructuralism postulated the death of the author in the publication of Roland
BARTHES’ influential essay (La mort de l’auteur, 1967). Even without following
poststructuralist criticism, the intention of the author as a dead or living actual person
is a category hard or near impossible to study in academic terms. A biographical
approach to a work of fiction always runs the danger of reading real-world facts into a
text which might not be there for readers not aware of the author’s biography instead
of letting the text speak for itself. Also, post-publication statements of the author
about their work (often in the form of paratext, e.g. prefaces, commentaries etc.) are
a double-edged sword when taken into consideration: the seeming or assumed
authority of the artist over their work may limit our own perception and evaluation of
the text.
Difficulties with authorial intent further arise when children’s book writers do
not even claim to write for children, whether in their poetological writings or in
paratexts. Some authors refer to their works as writing for themselves. One example
of this notion is C.S. LEWIS, author of the Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). He
famously states that the way to write for children, “which is the only one [he] could
ever use [him]self” (LEWIS 1966:23), is not to consider a specific target audience
while writing but to focus on the formal boundaries of a children’s story which he
considers to be a genre that simply expresses messages in a certain way, not to a
pre-selected audience. Others, like Roald DAHL, have been claimed by biographers
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to have “remained a child in spirit” (JOOSEN 2018:149). JOOSEN further lists Dutch
authors like Annie M.G. SCHMIDT and Dick BRUNA as examples, who said of
themselves to have maintained the spirit of an eight- or respectively four-year-old
child (DAHL is said to have considered himself eight years old in spirit as well). This
depiction seems to be considered a quality enabling imagination and an art output
which does not ‘write down’ and thereby allies them to children. The poetological
implication here then is again a notion of writing for oneself – or the child within
oneself. By putting themselves in the position of a figurative child they implicitly claim
an insight to the children’s world and suggest they write in a way that sincerely and
sympathetically entertains themselves and children instead of a supposed and
constructed audience. Though this is not directly stated, it certainly makes the notion
of writing for children more complex than EWERS’ definition can contain.
While authorial intent as the defining criterion for children’s literature has been
dismissed as a working definition for this study, another approach is closely
connected. Peter HUNT suggests that a children’s book is a book where the child is
the implied reader (1994:12). The concept of the implied reader has been introduced
by Wolfgang ISER (Der implizierte Leser, 1972) and does not consider the author’s
intent but the reader embodied in the text structure. Therefore, the text can speak for
itself and its implied readership is part of the text. While this seems to be a good
criterion to define the subject of the study of children’s literature and is widely used,
there still is the possibility of vagueness since it is hard to pin down the implied
reader. Also, the implied and intended reader may be one and the same, rendering
this approach less helpful in distinguishing a quality distinct to children’s literature.
One major difference between the implied and intended reader is pointed out by
KULLMANN: while the intended reader is consciously chosen as a target audience, the
implied reader not always is (2008:19). The implied reader might be subconsciously
chosen or not chosen at all. So the implied reader may differ from the intended
readership. A misaddress might occur – a text intended for adults with an
accidentally implied child reader for example.
Some scholars have tried to avoid the issue of intent by defining children’s
literature as the texts real-life children actually read. EWERS suggests the
subcategories of “successful reading offerings” and “unsuccessful reading offerings”
(2012:4f), a mediated selection of what adults offer children to read – and they might
enjoy or not. So instead of taking the adults’ preliminary selection for granted, an
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approach of actual reading would have to consider children’s taste (KULLMANN
2008:13) as well. However, conversely, a child reading a text does not make the text
children’s literature. This “unintended actual reading” (EWERS 2012:4f) would open
the range of children’s literature, theoretically, to any book. EWERS further comments
on the limited ability of literary reception by young children. Enjoyment or
entertainment is too weak of a criterion to be the single one defining children’s
literature as such. Children’s tastes are also hard to be taken into consideration on a
wider academic range. Though there may be endless statistics to generate here, the
reliance on quantitative methods to sketch a field of literary study might have its
dangers as well. Taste changes over time with zeitgeist – we cannot collect data on
the children’s favourites from past decades anymore. So, are we to dismiss studying
Arthur RANSOME and Enid BLYTON, whose heydays were in the 1930s, because they
probably would not make the top 20 with today’s eight-year-olds? Since adults are
not able to reconstruct the reading experience of children (KULLMANN 2008:15 and
ROSE 1984:9), the children’s literature canon would be highly limited to a
representation of its contemporary readership, who might outgrow their own taste in
less than five years’ time.
Another lay or popular definition of children’s literature is that its contents and
form are suitable for children. EWERS lists this as “kinder- und jugendgemäß”
(2012:12). He admits to this statement being an overtly normative definition and
elaborates upon it: compared to the reader’s reception approach the suitability is
directly mirrored in the book market. Adults decide what is children’s literature
because in all states of its production and publication adults are involved – and will
adhere to these norms and standards set by society. While I personally would argue
that the topics impossible to address in children’s literature are only very few to none,
the way they are being portrayed (in word and illustration) has limits due to moral
values (taste, tact, etc.). Not only publishers, who might be held legally responsible
for such content, but also authors, who in general want to be published, will comply
with these societal norms of suitability.
This discussion of the book market leads immediately to the next and final
definition: Children’s literature comprises “literary texts that are published and sold as
children’s books” (KULLMANN 2008:13). Again, intent is the keyword, but it is not the
intent of the author. The bookselling market shapes readers’ perceptions of a text
even before they read it by giving publications a cover and putting them on the shelf
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alongside with other similar – or assumedly similar – titles. This has a lasting
influence on what we consider appropriate for children and what becomes a
children’s book in our minds. One example of the influence on perception of a work of
literature via marketing is the Harry Potter series (1997-2007) by J.K. ROWLING. The
books were initially marketed for children by Bloomsbury Publishing with colourful
illustrations of the characters and the wizarding world on the cover. The company
also released editions with ‘adult’ covers due to the series’ success with adult
readers. The darker colouring and the focus on a single, photorealistic object relevant
to the plot was supposed to open the Harry Potter universe to adults. This implies
that the colourful cover determined the books as ‘merely’ children’s literature in the
public eye. Conversely, we only consider books children’s literature that are clearly
marketed as such. This marketing approach to children’s literature is the most
objective and most easily accessible one. It is impossible to restrict the wide variety
of children’s literature by a mere definition of content. There are too many topics and
genres and literary forms to choose from in children’s literature – just consider picture
books, comic books and theatre as subcategories. The scope of possible research
subjects broadens once the content and author’s intent are laid aside and the range
of children’s literature is defined by the preconditions of its distribution.
For the range of this study, I have only considered this last aspect when
selecting primary literature. Having been legally an adult for seven years now, I can
hardly claim to have my taste or reading preferences or assumptions reflect what
children’s literature is. The premediated selection of the bookselling market, however,
may consider or include the other approaches to children’s literature
(sub)consciously as guidelines since the literary canon of children’s fiction features
many of the criteria mentioned above.
2.2. Adults in Children’s Fiction
Academic writing about children’s literature often goes hand in hand with an analysis
or at least summary of the history of the perception or – more accurately –
construction of childhood. Whether during the early didactic and authoritarian
dominance over children before or the Romanticist appreciation of the child after
John LOCKE’s tabula rasa concept of social constructivism (= the child as product of
their education and surroundings) and Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU’s innately morally
good child (= an innocent corrupted by society and experience), children were
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