Fairies and Indians

I subscribe to Debbie Reese's RSS feed because she puts books on my radar that usually wouldn't otherwise get there. Her blog on the representation of Native Americans in children's literature is not a litcrit blog per se--it's closer to Sociological Images, except there's only one theme: obnoxious and harmful stereotypes about Native Americans.

This is the "strong ideology" model if you like, but it's a theme that bears repeating. Debbie's posts don't have the texture, twists, and turns of, say, Aaron's. But you see the necessity of what she does when time and again she rebuts comments by offended school librarians and authors. They're offended, of course, that Debbie was offended by their stereotyping of Native Americans.

Their first line of defense is of course authorial creativity. It's not books that grossly stereotype (homogenize, Orientalize, temporally displace, and kill off) Native Americans that are miseducating children; it's the terrible people who want to censor creativity. Do we not realize that this is art.

And as a corollary, It's just a book; it's not real.

Ought we forget that there are actual children involved--some of them nonwhite? And that when we depict certain people as "magical," we move them into the realm of the not-real as well?

Is it really a terrible abridgment of artistic license to insist that historically oppressed peoples are not toys for you to play with?



Today Debbie writes about a trope in the unreal-Indians vein:

This morning, I read an article in the Telegraph about the "Latitude Festival," an annual music festival that takes place in Suffolk, England. The first one was in 2006. The article in the Telegraph isn't about the music. Instead, Neil McCormick describes the people and setting. Here's what caught my eye:

People enter into the spirit with colourful costumes: there were parties of American Indians, Smurfs and an engaging posse of pensionable old dears dressed as fairies. The audience is, it has to be said, overwhelmingly white and middle-class (and probably predominantly middle-aged).

Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Reading those words reminded me of an email I received on December 30, 2007 in response to critiques I posted about one of Jan Brett's books. In her email, the author wrote:

Why is there always someone who wants to rain on someone else's parade? Why can't children just enjoy a good read? I am sure you don't believe in Santa, the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny because they are incorrect in guiding young children's beliefs.

For those that want to study the American Indian ways and beliefs, good for them. For now I will read and enjoy books, just because.

It struck me that she would cast American Indians in that particular framework---of things-not-real. She is a librarian in a public school in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Santa. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny.
Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Debbie's post caught my attention because the Indian-as-fairy trope has been something I've been thinking about, in a back-burner way, for a few years now. The Indian in the Cupboard and Disney's Pocahontas are two twentieth-century examples, but it's also powerfully present in the literature of the early 1800s, leading up to and following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. In Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1826), Mary Conant is an Episcopalian misfit among the Puritans, having a "fairy" nature better suited to old England (17). In an act of rebellion carefully staged to evoke British fairy myths, she walks into the woods to find a husband:

...taking a stick and
marking out a large circle on the margin of the stream, she stept into the magic ring, walked round three times with measured tread, then carefully retraced her steps backward, speaking all the while in a distinct but trembling voice. The following were the only words I could hear,

Whoever's to claim a husband's power,
Come to me in the moonlight hour.

And again,—

Whoe'er my bridegroom is to be,
Step in the circle after me.

She looked round anxiously as she completed the ceremony; and I almost echoed her involuntary shriek of terror, when I saw a young Indian spring forward into the centre. (23)

The mapping of Indian to fairy here is unmistakable; likewise, the ideology that fashions the Indian as destined to vanish (as the fairies are said to have vanished from England, inevitably, with the coming of modernity). Comparing Native Americans to Smurfs makes them not-real; comparing them to fairies makes them an anachronism, a move that can be and has been used to justify their brutal marginalization. And indeed, Hobomok eventually honorably disappears to make way for white modernity.

We're used to the figure of the Vanishing Indian in the U.S.; in parallel, some have hypothesized that the Vanishing Fairy in British folklore is actually based on an oppressed indigenous group, the Picts (I don't have the books on hand, but I believe that Diane Purkiss, for one, entertains this theory).

What's interesting is the way that images of Native Americans can be appropriated as symbols of national identity even while that nation founded itself in part on the violent oppression of said Native Americans. This, too, finds a parallel in fairy mythology, here courtesy of John Ruskin:

Suppose you had each, at the back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to run,--no more—and that you could not change your abode; but that, if you chose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it? I hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold.

Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let them all run there. And this little garden you will turn into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the furnace as of the wood... (126-7)

Fairies, vanishing though they be, remain powerful signifiers of English identity. Ruskin argues that it is a tone to transform the English landscape through industry, yet there is a sense of resignation in his words. And perhaps Ruskin can be resigned because, he argues, in spite of everything, the fairies in England will persist. Even if England should lose its gardenlike character (which Ruskin hopes will not happen), England will remain English, hence populated by fairies. In a similar way, Native Americans (who, unlike fairies, are real) are appropriated as signifiers of Americanness even as their anachronism is enforced. And frequently, that enforcement arrives by way of children's literature, which is, don't you know, creative.

The sands of Google

Also found in my Google search of the other day, and just now investigated:

I once wrote a blog post including the words "World of Warcraft," so this blog is hilariously associated with this computer game in the inscrutable mind of Google, via something pertaining to the game called a "quest" (evidently a mini-narrative within the game), which contains my first name.

I could mention that the original post was in reference to the "x of y" construction of metaphor (e.g. "the sands of time," "the ghosts of memory"). I'm still hoping my friend Karen, a linguist, will one day give me the definitive analysis of this construction, but I tend to associate it with inappropriate metaphors and bad undergraduate writing (good undergraduate writing avoids irresponsible metaphors!). A famous South Park episode lampoons the way that gamers (allegedly) think of the world of Warcraft (a game) as being as important as the actual world.

In any case, according to Google, the game World of Warcraft has a quest called "Dearest Natalia":

My dear Natalia has gone missing.

Truth be told, she had been acting strangely for weeks leading up to her disappearance. I had caught her talking to herself when no one was around on more than one occasion. She was adamant that everything was ok and that she must be allowed to continue her research.

I had no idea World of Warcraft was about grad students.

I imagine the object of the quest is to get Natalia a fellowship so she can continue her research. I could really get behind that idea, actually.

Alan Garner, caught in the middle

I've been pondering Alan Garner ever since Farah Mendlesohn told me at MLA that he didn't fit into my media schema (namely, that the Oxford School seeks to reproduce medieval media environments). The work she cited was The Stone Book Quartet, a late work that I still haven't managed to lay my hands on, although I already have some theories about it (surprise, they're related to Philip Pullman).

But the works I've read by Alan Garner are The Owl Service and Elidor, both from the 60s, and the first thing to say about those particular works (of course!) is that they do fit right into my schema; the book is the land and the land is the book. Yes, the paper copy of the Mabinogion rips apart and flutters into the breeze, but that's because the children are living it. What is this but the sign-as-emanation-of-reality?

But what really stands out to me about Alan Garner's work is that the cuddly, discursive narrative voice and the loving world-building that one is used to encountering in Oxford School works is simply not there. The style of these books is telegraphic and abrupt; when Roland keeps insisting that the fate of Elidor is the most important thing there is, we're nearly on the side of Nick, who rejects Elidor, even though we know we're not supposed to be. We know almost nothing about Elidor; unlike in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which we are made to see that Lucy has indisputably stumbled on a wonderland, the style of Garner's writing insists on the fragmentary, uncertain way in which Roland perceives Elidor, and even suggests that Elidor can be seen in no other way.

     "He knelt, his head on his
     forearm, looking at the quartz:
     white: cold: hard: clean.
     ----But a stain was growing
     over it: his shadow, blacker
     and blacker. The light was
     changing." (36)

When the children go to Elidor, it's shrouded in darkness, and it's really in no way clear what's supposed to be interesting or nice about it, or why anyone should want to save a nasty place like that. Most things are left unexplained -- for instance, we never understand who the enemy is, only that they must be stopped. In The Owl Service, the problem is that there is no enemy -- only multiple rounds of human failing (that must be stopped!). Motivations and meanings -- why is Elidor dark? who made it so? who is Malebron? why should the Song of Findhorn save Elidor? -- are subsumed by structures of organization: Elidor is dark, so whoever made it so must be defeated, etc. Character, too, is subsumed by roles; "Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower came," as the epigraph puts it; who cares why?

The epigraph is, to me, emblematic of Garner's positioning within the Oxford School, because I think that, like Philip Pullman after him, he really is looking to counter the medievalized episteme of the 1950s Oxford School with a modernity that favors the book of nature over the books of men -- for this reason, he quotes King Lear, but elides both the source of the reference, the medieval Chanson de Roland, and its nineteenth century descendant, the Robert Browning poem (even though the protagonist's name is spelled "Roland" and not "Rowland" as quoted in the epigraph). If Garner wants to insist on an embodied and non-symbolic relationship to the land, chronicling Roland's direct if imperfect perception of Elidor rather than a reconstructed, synthetic vision thereof, the logic of the narrative is nonetheless imported from medieval romance.

These are interesting and atypical books.

Shout-out

"Not at all," said Ichabod. "The ship is still mostly the counting house, albeit long-transformed and changed. This room is of the counting house, so it will always be connected somehow. If the passageway falls off, some other way will open."

"Through the wardrobe maybe," said Arthur.

Ichabod looked at him sternly, his eyebrows contracting to almost meet above his nose.

"I doubt that, young mortal. That is where I keep the Captain's clothes. It is not a thoroughfare of any kind."

--Garth Nix, Drowned Wednesday (61)

Dumbledore "is" gay, part the second

In his NYT piece, "Is Dumbledore Gay? Depends on Definitions of 'Is' and 'Gay'," Edward Rothstein opines that even if Dumbledore "is" gay, the books make him asexual, like all proper old wizard dudes.

This is why Dumbledore’s supposed gayness is ultimately as unimportant as Ron’s shabby clothes. These wounded outsiders recognize the nature of evil, and finally that is what matters.

But what does "asexual" mean, when the default is heterosexual? Isn't the wise mentor figure above "sex" because he is above women, who are simply defined as the sexual?

When Merlin "falls," for example, isn't it to female pollution, as opposed to the pure Socratic bond with Arthur? It seems disingenuous to suppose that there is no economy of gender at work in the genre, even surrounding the "asexual" mentor figure (isn't it convenient that they're all men, however "asexual"? and that their mentees are similarly male?). Suppositions of sexuality, or lack thereof, are finally not extricable from the gender values that surround them.

I think that if Rowling is arguing for tolerance, as she claims, then it seems odd that she would create a "homosexual" character with, in fact, no discernible sexuality in the books.

It also seems odd that the sole homosexual encounter of the series (if we take it as such) is tragic (not to mention undertaken with a Hitler figure).

Rothstein takes this to mean that we can ignore Rowling's pronouncement. He seems to breathe a sigh of relief, as gayness is brushed to the side as irrelevant.

I'm not so sure.