At Arm’s Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

By Mike Cadden

Literary critics and authors have long argued about the importance or unimportance of an author’s relationship to readers. What can be said about the rhetorical relationship that exists between author and reader? How do authors manipulate character, specifically, to modulate the emotional appeal of character so a reader will feel empathy, awe, even delight?

In At Arm’s Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children's and Young Adult Literature, Mike Cadden takes a rhetorical approach that complements structural, affective, and cognitive readings. The study offers a detailed examination of the ways authorial choice results in emotional invitation. Cadden sounds the modulation of characters along a continuum from those larger than life and awe inspiring to the life sized and empathetic, down to the pitiable and ridiculous, and all those spaces between. Cadden examines how authors alternate between holding the young reader at arm’s length from and drawing them into emotional intensity. This balance and modulation are key to a rhetorical understanding of character in literature, film, and television for the young.

Written in accessible language and of interest and use to undergraduates and seasoned critics, At Arm’s Length provides a broad analysis of stories for the young child and young adult, in book, film, and television. Throughout, Cadden touches on important topics in children’s literature studies, including the role of safety in children’s media, as well as character in multicultural and diverse literature. In addition to treating “traditional” works, he analyzes special cases—forms, including picture books, verse novels, and graphic novels, and modes like comedy, romance, and tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jun 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496834607

Mike Cadden

Mike Cadden is past president of the Children’s Literature Association. He is author of Ursula K. Le Guin beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults and editor of Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature and Teaching Young Adult Literature.

Book preview

AT ARM’S LENGTH

Children’s Literature Association Series

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2021 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2021

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cadden, Mike, 1964– author.

Title: At arm’s length: a rhetoric of character in children’s and young adult literature / Mike Cadden.

Other titles: Children’s Literature Association series.

Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. | Series: Children’s Literature Association series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021008826 (print) | LCCN 2021008827 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3458-4 (hardback) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3459-1 (trade paperback) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3460-7 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3461-4 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3462-1 (pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3463-8 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Children’s literature—History and criticism. | Persona (Literature) | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1009.A1 C26 2021 (print) | LCC PN1009.A1 (ebook) | DDC 809/.927083—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008826

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008827

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1  •  A Rhetoric of Character

2  •  Between Life Sized and the Larger than Life

3  •  Between Life Sized and the Smaller than Life

4  •  No Man’s Land

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Nothing is really accomplished without help, and I’d like to acknowledge those who made the work not only easier but possible. So, here are those who share the blame for this:

Thanks go to my friends and colleagues Karen Coats, Kay Siebler, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Dawn Terrick for reading and sharing notes and suggestions.

Thanks to my students in many sections of children’s and young adult courses over the past several years. They not only helped me work through my arguments and examples but also offered other insights valuable to the development of ideas. They also often did that sideways head thing that dogs do when you are saying something new and weird to them.

Thanks to the folks at the Café Pony Espresso in St. Joseph, Missouri, the location for much of the writing, where I spent many wonderful Friday mornings writing and being left alone by the parts of the world that don’t bring you food and coffee.

Thanks to the editors of The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature for allowing me to use portions of my essay from volume 17, number 2 and to the editors of Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly for allowing me to use portions of my article from volume 36, number 3 in this work.

This effort, along with so many others, is dedicated to the Brown-Eyed Ladies on Lovers Lane, St. Jo.

Preface

Often when we think of literature for the young, we think of particular authors, such as Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, or Beatrix Potter. Particular books spring to mind, such as Goodnight Moon, The Snowy Day, or Tuck Everlasting. Another association is with character. We often focus on the characters that populate our childhoods, like Pippi Longstocking, Matilda, or Arthur Read. In fact, we often distill a book or an author’s entire works down to a single character. Rowling’s series is simply known as Harry Potter. Milne’s books are known as the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

This book attempts to understand the rhetorical appeal made to the reader through the modulation of arguably the most emotionally significant and affecting aspect of literature: character. What is the rhetorical effect of changing a character over the course of a book or an entire series of books, whether serial or episodic? When, why, or how does an author make a character more sympathetic, absurd, or larger than life? When less so? How is Junie B. Jones designed to appeal to us differently than Katniss Everdeen? Why does it matter? I want to consider children’s characters as rhetorical gestures that are modulated (and sometimes not) by authors who want to, with the best of intentions, manipulate a young reader’s sympathies. This book is an attempt to understand character change as a rhetorical modulation.

I first began to wonder about character effect on the reader when I was discussing Junie B. Jones with my university students. She is so much like a first-grader! they would argue. That is so typical of little kids, they would say. This surprised me. I consider Junie to be a pretty exaggerated creature. I began to notice that students assumed young children would identify with Junie B. I, on the other hand, assumed young readers would laugh at her rather than with her. She’s laughable, and you don’t want to laugh at yourself, after all. At the same time, my students would argue that young readers wouldn’t identify with Harry Potter because he was so extraordinary, but then why all the Harrys appearing at my door on October 31 for the last two decades? There was at work here some disconnect between adult assumptions about identification and what young people were doing with the texts. I started to notice and care about the differences between identification that was about projection (the desire to be or create a connection with a character) and identification that was recognition (actually seeing yourself in a character) and when there was to be no identification at all despite our enjoying the character immensely, such as our response to a Gargamel. It occurred to me that those three things were not only related but related in particular ways, and it’s that observation that is the basis for this book.

It is my hope that the reader will regard this study as one of many useful tools available for considering character in young people’s literature and culture; it is not my intention to suggest that this is the rhetoric of character in children’s literature and culture but a rhetoric of character. It is my greater hope that readers will find applications for the ideas here that are only hinted at or not predicted at all. What I discuss may be important to the understanding of character in other literary contexts, so if it’s useful in the study of a type of literature that I don’t address, I am happy and grateful. What I say about character in this study might well apply to books for adults as well, but I’m discussing a phenomenon that I think is important in literature for the young.

My claims for character owe a great deal to Maria Nikolajeva’s important book The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Literature, which stands as an implied antecedent to what I’m doing here. I think of that work as a taxonomy for the possibilities for character in children’s literature. What I offer here is a consideration of how authors manipulate those characters in order to modulate the distances (measured by sympathy) between character and reader.

AT ARM’S LENGTH

Introduction

The Rhetorical Exchange

Literature for young people is characterized and regulated by distance—by holding children at arm’s length or pulling them close. While the use of distancing effects is a phenomenon present in all literature, literature rhetorically situated because it’s named for readers—literature for young people relies on textual and contextual distance in fundamental ways.

What do I mean by distance? First, we can acknowledge the more measurable textual distances: there is the type of narrative distance found between levels of story created by embedding or framing stories, and there are also the distances that exist between events and between characters, and those between story times and story spaces. We can also, as I do here, consider the rhetorical distance modulated between author and reader as well as the distance created and modulated between character and reader. By thinking and caring about safe and appropriate distances created in literature for the young (which we don’t consider at all with literature for adults), we acknowledge the truly rhetorical nature of a genre named for readers. Naming a genre by its readership immediately calls to mind two ends of a rhetorical exchange. If this is for young people, then it’s from, or offered up by, adults. Gifts have givers, after all. But there are those who would take away those gifts: censorship in the United States, for instance, is usually conducted in relation to children and their worlds—their classrooms, school libraries, and children’s publishing houses—sites on par with the author regarding power and the relationship to the child. The for in "literature for young people" implies something about calculated distancing, and for that reason we shouldn’t adhere to purely structural questions when discussing literature for the young. While literary critics who deal with literature generally might have misgivings about addressing authorial motivation, and have for the better part of the last fifty years, it is a major focus for people studying children’s literature. Reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated in children’s literature.

The relationship between authors and young readers can be characterized by the nature of the pushmi-pullyu from The Story of Dr. Dolittle. The pullyu is at work when we hear and read the comments from our students, the media, and even our colleagues about how children’s literature draws in the reader, pulls kids in, makes kids identify, and—maybe the most ominous if the implications were considered—makes a story come alive (literally and dangerously in the cases of the books in the restricted section of the Hogwarts library or the characters in Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart). When faced with the anthropomorphic in a children’s book, adults will say that such characters draw in the young reader because, well, kids love animals, kids are like animals, or kids can relate to animals (or even that kids "are animals). But there is also always a pushmi. Maria Nikolajeva argues that for children to successfully understand what the author seems to want for them, the balance of engagement and disengagement is a prerequisite" (Reading for Learning 89). Perry Nodelman also sees a tension that needs to be navigated in addressing the child reader that creates a balance between the contradictory impulses of being appeased and being challenged (The Hidden Adult 185). Reader, we want you to fall into a book and be immersed, as the library posters tell you, but here’s a bit of bungee, a life preserver, a narrative chain-link fence through which to look. The pushmi-pullyu is a creature drawn in two directions, after all, and balance is important for any creature, even those fantastical. So, in those larger arguments that critics have about how children’s literature is or isn’t different from other kinds of literature, I’d like to add to the list of defining features a consideration of this tension between drawing in and pushing away that happens in books for young readers. When we see one technique that seems intended to draw the reader in, we usually see an opposite (though not always equal) attempt to push away or hold back. So it might be fair to say that a successful book for young readers is one that balances the techniques of attraction and repulsion: it keeps readers within arm’s reach but simultaneously at arm’s length. With this notion of separation—a separation that is hierarchical—there is also an attendant agenda of protection. Invitation is accompanied by an uneasy knowledge that the invitation is sent to one who isn’t the speaker/writer’s equal—who isn’t old enough to drive herself to the party and, once there, partake of all the refreshments.

An author might use different techniques to accomplish this balance of distances. For instance, in picture books like Where the Wild Things Are and Arlene Sardine, the author/illustrators provide a balance between potentially frightening language and subject matter with the comforting, cartoonish illustrations that mitigate that fear. Rosalyn Schanzer’s award-winning nonfiction book on the Salem witch trials, Witches!, balances an engaging and questioning voice that involves readers in horrifying events with wood-cut illustrations that distance us through her use of folk-art symbolism. One quality of the book serves as pushmi (the pictures) to the pullyu of another (engaging language).¹

The verse novel for young adults, a genre that has become a publishing phenomenon in the twenty-first century, offers an interesting site for examining this tension regarding distance. Techniques used to draw in the young adult (YA) reader include the inviting visual openness of the text, the sign-posting of section headers, lists of dramatis personae at the start (sometimes with convenient pictures of characters, as in the case of Karen Hesse’s Witness), the use of enjambment and caesura to guide oral delivery and emphasis, a dialogue-driven narrative that is short on lengthy description, and the emphasis on character narration. The distancing techniques include the absence of description (which forces readers to rely on dialogue for all information), the tendency to rely on potentially confusing multiple character narrators, the fragmentation of presentation and action, the absence of plot sign-posting, and, well, the fact that at first glance it looks an awful lot like poetry. Because the genre in its contemporary incarnation is almost exclusively the province of literature for the young, we can question whether this is the case because of the balanced tensions of distance.

In some cases, however, the balance involves a single textual element. Above, I note how description’s absence in the verse novel can be seen as both a draw and a barrier. Lars Bernaerts argues that the textual device of anthropomorphism offers a "double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization" (69). Anthropomorphism is often used to both draw in readers and then also protect them. Gary Paulsen pushes us away at the opening of his autobiography Woodsong by showing us a wolf pack taking down a deer. He describes how he, upon witnessing this, was indignant at the bad wolves attacking the innocent deer, and he points out that we all tend to root for the deer and see the wolves as the villains, which Paulsen then goes on to argue is a misreading of the natural world that he lays on the doorstep of the anthropomorphic practices of children’s literature (most notably Disney’s). That said, later in his autobiography, he can’t help but show his own sled dogs as clowns and dupes: one dog taunts another with a bone, consciously messing with another dog, and this would seem to draw the reader in by humanizing the dogs, which is what leads the author to give up eating meat—because animals are like us.

Anthropomorphism is one of the textual features that people use to define literature for the young, and yet there’s little agreement about what it really does or what authors mean to do with it. Some argue that children relate to animals because they are vulnerable like themselves. Suzanne Keen argues that it isn’t the animal to which readers connect, after all, but the humanized aspect of that animal (68). They connect despite the animal, which would argue that anthropomorphism is more a tool for distancing than for embracing. Lisa Rowe Fraustino has it that anthropomorphized characters act as screens or covers for messages and allow humor and whimsy to disguise didactic messages that point to the child’s own foibles (148), which marks the