Children’s literature is tied to some of the 21st century’s most pressing global challenges, including what it means to be human in a changing world. Children are imagined as the drivers of change and innovation, but as the denizens of the future they are also viewed as uniquely vulnerable to global threats such as violence, political upheaval, climate change, and other environmental disasters. Scholars draw on postcolonial criticism, ecocriticism, and animal studies to explore how children are educated about the world they will inherit and the challenges they will face in decades to come. Each of these approaches offers ways to think about global change, whether a matter of the decolonization of the field to honour Indigenous ways of knowing and living, or one of a renewed respect for the earth, through to a recalibration of the power dynamics between humans and animals. The human-animal relationship in children’s literature is one of the most critical; not only because so many children’s literary and cultural works feature animals but because children’s literature, through a unique ability to make young readers imaginatively enter into the experience of animals, is capable of at least temporarily dethroning human beings as the pinnacle of evolution. Through the device of anthropomorphism, the humanization of animals, and the fable form, animals have served as a vehicle to explore human concerns, functioning as ‘people in disguise.’ Yet many contemporary writers for children and young adults imagine ways to consider animal destinies quite apart from human concerns. Animal studies emerges as a critical tool to think through ways of bringing human and animal lives into better harmony, as well as offering a certain candour about the threat that human intervention in animal lives poses to those lives, as we see in a work such as Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972). To understand the potential for a remade human-animal relationship is also to consider the ways in which people have exploited animals and the natural world.
Some of the most exciting conversations within Children’s Literature are ignited when different critical approaches are brought into conversation for the first time. Texts about environmental degradation are often also about colonial exploitation, as seen from Susan L. Roth and Cindy Trumbore’s Parrots Over Puerto Rico (2013), which explores how Puerto Rican parrots faced extinction in the 1960s because colonialism and foreign occupation destroyed much of their habitat. New critical lenses often inspire scholars to look at familiar texts in new ways, and they touch on our current cultural preoccupations. For example, ecocritical approaches and animal studies offer new insights into the hyper-canonical Charlotte’s Web, especially in relation to the ways in which natural spaces function in the book and the complex human-animal dynamics that result. The engagement of children’s literature with the environment, with non-human animals, and across national borders relates back to the questions about human relations I discussed in the last chapter and adds another dimension to new conversations about child-adult relations as children become involved in discussions about our weightiest cultural questions.
My case study for this chapter is Kate DiCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (2013), a book about a deepening friendship between a girl (Flora) and a squirrel (Ulysses). Its premise, that a squirrel unexpectedly gains sentience and a penchant for poetry, is light and whimsical, but also—through Flora and Ulysses’ love for each other—offers an imaginative attempt to bridge a seemingly impossible gap between people and animals. In the process the book does impose a critical consciousness on Ulysses, its animal character, but it also reflects a burgeoning cultural understanding that animals possess their own systems of knowledge and sentience. It also speaks to the possibility of healing fractured relations between people. At the beginning of the book Flora and her mother have a difficult relationship, fuelled in part by her mother’s lack of acceptance of Flora’s nonconformist reading interests and gender presentation. By the novel’s end they reach a rapprochement that can be illuminated by new feminist models of the ethics of care and relationality, as well as the soothing of intergenerational tensions. Flora and Ulysses works in the fantasy mode but offers ways to think through pressing concerns of our contemporary moment. It imagines ways in which very different people—and beings—might come to a better understanding of each other.
Postcoloniality and globalization
Postcolonial approaches reckon with the legacies of colonialism in children’s literature and seek to dismantle structures of imperialism in children’s culture. Children’s literature, whether consciously or unconsciously, has portrayed colonized people as ‘others’ in order to justify colonialism, the process by which a country attains control over another country, settling it, and exploiting it culturally and/or economically. Anglophone postcolonial children’s literature tends to be concentrated on the British empire and its aftermath, with a focus on North America, Australia/New Zealand, India, and the Pacific. We might also think of non-Anglophone colonializing nations, such as Belgium with its Tintin books, or Jules Verne in France. Verne’s Cinq semaines en ballon (1862) depicts a balloon trip from Zanzibar to the coast of Senegal and shows an Africa that ‘was as much terra incognita, to be peopled with Europeans and European fantasies, as the Earth’s core or the moon’ (Dine 1997, 184).
Looking at children’s literature within a postcolonial frame is complicated by a longstanding commonplace that children are themselves a colonized group, as expressed in the work of Perry Nodelman (1992), Roderick McGillis and Meena Khorana (1997), M. Daphne Kutzer (2000), and others. Since children are required to participate in and master a culture made for them and not by them, thinkers in this vein deem children to be colonized subjects. This is reminiscent of Jacqueline Rose’s work, discussed in Chapter 1, which considers children’s literature as a vehicle for the imposition of adult cultural concerns on children. Nodelman’s essay, ‘The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature’ (1992), drew on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, which pointed to the exoticized fantasies that Western scholars and travellers generated about Arab and Asian people in order to justify their colonial ventures. Nodelman argued that our representations of childhood shared similar structures, including ‘inherent inferiority’ (Nodelman 1992, 29).
Yet many postcolonial critics argue that describing all childhoods as ‘colonialized’ elides the experience of actual young people whose lives and political realities were, and remain, affected by the literal experience of colonialism. Clare Bradford forcefully argues that Nodelman’s equation of children and colonialism relegates them to ‘a dehistoricized and homogenized category’ and sidesteps the idea of race, ‘which is central to the binary distinctions between “civilized” and “primitive” on which colonialism and colonial relations were built’ (Bradford 2007, 7). Bradford remarks tartly: ‘The gently reared middle-class children who comprise the bulk of readers implied by mainstream children’s literature are very far removed from the Indigenous peoples who endured the massacres, dispossessions and privations of colonization in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, India, Algeria and many other nations’ (Bradford 2011, 274). In the light of the specific experiences of people who have actually experienced colonialism, comparing children as a category to colonialized people is inappropriate and a false equivalency.
In the light of such critiques, postcolonial critics of children’s literature tend to focus their inquiries on colonialism in classic and contemporary children’s literature, and on the practice of decolonizing children’s literature. Alongside their metaphors of childhood as colonized, Nodelman, McGillis, and Kutzer have also enumerated the ways children’s literature upheld colonialization, such as the various adventure tales that glorify conquest and the subjection of non-Western nations. Kutzer explains how empire surfaces in British children’s texts from the late 19th century well into the post-war period:
As we can see from Kutzer’s varied list, the workings of empire surface in various ways, including settler colonialism and imperialism. Children’s texts both of the past and the present ‘reinvoke and rehearse colonialism in a variety of ways’:
We might think of pioneer narratives, where white settlers are depicted as ‘heroic, resourceful, godfearing, and intelligent’ and Indigenous people seen as ‘cowardly, indolent, savage, and stupid’ (Bradford 1997, 93). Even fanciful, light-hearted books might have a colonialist underpinning, as we see from the presence of the enslaved, or perhaps indentured, Oompa-Loompas in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964). Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is a case in point. Michael Scott Joseph asserts that ‘Max’s heroic subjugation of the intimidating but then gratefully subservient Wild Things is a reenactment par excellence of the colonialist ideal of imposing order upon the other’ (Joseph 1997, 160). Max’s journey, rather than a child’s assertion of independence, can be read as a gleeful enactment of imperialism.
Efforts to decolonize involve the production of books that move beyond the political and social assumptions of empire, including works in Indigenous languages. As one example of many, we might consider India’s Children’s Book Trust: ‘After Indian independence in 1947, the trust was set up to provide books for Indian children in some of the many languages used in this huge country’ (Cave and Ayad 2017, 35). Bradford explains that Indigenous publishing houses saw the urgency of providing children ‘with reading material which proceeds from Indigenous cultures and which treats as normal and usual the values and practices of these cultures’ (Bradford 2011, 274). Indigenous texts, she affirms, must be read within the assumptions of their cultures, rather than within Western frameworks. Noting Canadian books such as Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994), set in Sri Lanka, and Althea Trotman’s How the East Pond Got its Flowers (1991), a picture-book about slavery in Antigua, Roderick McGillis and Meena Khorana note: ‘we can introduce our children to works of literature that represent the range of cultural experiences and histories that make up the national and international communities that touch all of us’ (McGillis and Khorana 1997, 10). These efforts do seem like a useful means of making an imaginative leap into a more global perspective, although the process of engaging with the global in a genuine rather than superficial way is the work of prolonged study and reflection.
A postcolonial approach to children’s literature involves challenging the notion of a ‘universal,’ Eurocentric human character, similar to what we saw in our consideration of race and children’s literature. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe recounts how he once thought European children’s books would help his child’s development, only to discover their colonialist content: ‘Our complacency was well and truly rebuked by the poison we now saw wrapped and taken home to our little girl. I learned that if I wanted a safe book for my child I should at least read it through and at best write it myself’ (Achebe 2009, 71). The remedy seems straightforward, but as the turbulent events of Achebe’s own novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), indicate, separating the writer from a colonial past and education is not quite as easy in practice, notwithstanding the desire to decolonize.
Writing about Australian postcolonial children’s books, Bradford notes that they are ‘products not of a brave new world “post” colonialization, but of social, cultural, and political realities grounded in colonialization’ (Bradford 1997, 90). There is therefore a ‘continued need for a postcolonial studies that remains attentive to the effects and legacies of colonialism and, in many cases, continued colonialism’ (Snell 2017, 177). Postcolonial theory offers a vision of a children’s literature where texts by Indigenous and non-Indigenous producers offer ‘diverse, self-conscious, and informed representations of Indigenous cultures’ (Bradford 2007, 227), and that reckon honestly and fully with the legacies, and continued presence, of colonialization.
Ecocriticism
Another field that seeks to re-make human relationships with the world on a global scale is ecocriticism. Carolyn Sigler traces the emergence of ecocriticism as an interdisciplinary field in the last 20 years
Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism quite broadly as the ‘study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,’ with the potential for an ‘earth-centered approach to literary studies’ (Glotfelty 1996, xviii). Dobrin and Kidd refer to the ‘mutual history of children’s literature and environmental writing and activism’ (Dobrin and Kidd 2004, 3), noting that ‘classic children’s literature has long been preoccupied with natural history, ecology, and human-animal interaction’ (Dobrin and Kidd 2004, 4). Sometimes, as in Victorian and Edwardian fantasies such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) or Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), nature was transformed into ‘little more than a safe and untroubled embodiment of escape from the corrupt world of civilization’ (Sigler 1994, 150). Later, early 20th century children’s literature began to include ‘a pastoral tradition that includes wild nature’ (Sigler 1994: 150), with Gene-Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) anticipating this movement (Sigler 1994, 150).
Ecocritical approaches attend to the many urban spaces of children’s literature as well as rural and pastoral settings, considering the complex interactions between natural environments and built spaces. For example, Jenny Bavidge focuses on how New York City children’s narratives often feature ‘children making or finding very small areas of garden or green, from window boxes to rooftop “beaches”’ (Bavidge 2014, 60). In Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach (1991) the protagonist, Cassie, leaves her rooftop beach to fly over the city streets, which is described by Bavidge as ‘enchanting the city’ (Bavidge 2014, 60). Ecocritics read the city as ‘a place of complex and interrelated ecologies, networks, and relations’ (Bavidge 2014, 69). It is notable that these green spaces are not the nostalgic green places of pastoral children’s literature; rather, organic life emerges from within the gritty spaces of the urban built environment.
Environmental crisis and the urgency of teaching a new generation an ethic of preserving—indeed saving—the earth is a motivating force for much ecocriticism in the field of children’s literature. Whether these lessons are genuinely effective, or reaching their young audiences with sufficient force, is another question. Clare Echterling, for example, has lamented the ways in which environmental children’s texts often ‘resign environmental action almost completely to individual choices and behaviors and disassociate environmental crises from their larger constitutive contexts,’ such as class disparities and other socio-political concerns (Echterling 2016a, 297). She therefore argues for an ecocriticism informed by insights from postcolonialism. Considering books from the ‘golden age’ of British literature, for example, Echterling notes their publication at the ‘height of British imperialism, massive global environmental change, and the formation of imperial conservation practices and environmental ideas that are still very much with us today’ (Echterling 2016b, 93). In her postcolonial ecocritical reading of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia she poses questions which ecocritics might be well advised to take as their starting points.
These questions offer a holistic approach to the consideration of nonhuman nature.
Involved in this new awareness is an understanding that the formative ecocritical texts of the past may not meet all of the needs of the present or speak to every region. Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971), a work critical of the exploitation of natural resources, is a good example. A young boy encounters the remorseful Once-ler, who tells him the story of how he decimated the natural environment by overproducing garments called ‘Thneeds,’ made from the all-important Truffala Trees. The Lorax of the title is an animated, passionate figure who emerges from the trunk of the first tree felled by the Once-ler, to declare ‘I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees’ (Seuss 1971, n.p.). The ending of the book is often interpreted as a call to action for its young readers. The book’s young auditor is given the last remaining Truffala Tree seed and told: ‘UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.’ (Seuss 1971, n.p.).
Due in large part to its sinuous, inventive, and playful language and its fantastic visual depiction of a world of Truffala Trees, Humming-Fish, Bar-ba-loots and Swomee-Swans, The Lorax has become the ‘go to’ book in ecocritical children’s literature. Many critics continue to sing its praises, as Eliza Darling does when she marvels over ‘Seuss’s uncanny faculty for capturing 500 years of industrialization, urbanization and environmental degradation in a few capricious pages’ and ‘his ability to describe the inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production which eventually lead to its own collapse’ (Darling 2001, 53). In inventing the multi-purpose Thneed, Seuss captures the ability of capitalism to invent and stimulate new consumer needs. Matthew Teorey argues that the book calls for a salutary balance of ‘economic development and healthy, diverse ecosystems. It is the vehicles with multiple axes and the Once-ler’s over-harvesting and refusal to replant that are the problem’ (Teorey 2014, 335).
While the book is clearly appreciated, there is an increasing sense that the political models espoused by the Lorax are not necessarily efficacious: ‘The Lorax was a polemic about pollution, impassioned and bristling with confrontation and name-calling’ (Morgan and Morgan 1995, 211). As an advocate for the trees, the Lorax is relentless and hectoring. He shouts down his opponents, in a voice ‘sharpish and bossy’ (Seuss 1971, n.p). The Lorax’s rhetorical choices are not just hostile but could be seen as counterproductive, undermining his own goal of speaking for the trees: ‘The Lorax does not attempt to appeal to the Once-ler in terms that he might understand. For example, he makes no attempt to argue for careful and considered use of natural resources on the grounds of ESD (Economically Sustainable Development)’ (Pleasants 2006, 184).
Instead of retaining The Lorax as the pre-eminent text for environmental education, Kathleen Pleasants argues, we should gravitate towards environmental literature that is more responsive to local environmental contexts, in her case Australia. Certainly, The Lorax does reflect Seuss’s own particular preoccupations and concerns. Although he completed the book in Kenya, Seuss first got the idea when looking out at his view of the north coast of San Diego, ‘shores that had been empty when he first came and now teemed with condominiums and look-alike houses’ (Morgan and Morgan 1995, 209). His own blissful enclave was foremost in his mind. Indeed, the Edenic world before the Once-ler arrives depicts an unrealistic natural world without predators and prey: a pristine ‘original state’ reminiscent of Romantic-era idealizations of nature (Darling 2001, 54; Pleasants 2006, 185). The Lorax is a great achievement in myth-making but Pleasants’ critique rings true, and the book benefits from being placed in conversation with books with a different approach to environmental conservation, or ones that are more attentive to cultural nuances. It should certainly be supplemented with a range of other ecological visions in children’s literature.
Both ecocriticism and postcolonial theory look at children’s literature to ask who holds power and how that power is used. They consider what children’s literature can tell us about damage to the earth and to people, and also offer sustainable models of living in harmony with nature if human beings are to flourish. Children’s literature is capable of registering the environmental and political injustices of the past, often exploring other ways of approaching the earth and human relationships all over the world.
Animal studies and posthumanism
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein estimates that ‘on average, at least two-thirds of the books [in children’s bookstores] are in some form or another linked with nature and the environment, and—specifically and most importantly—with animals’ (Lesnik-Oberstein 1998, 208). Why are animal stories viewed as so suitable for children and what is their cultural function in children’s literature? Animal stories have, of course, long been used as a vehicle to instruct children about social and political life, especially in fables, where, as we have already seen, ‘the animals are not really themselves, but disguised people’ (Blount 1975, 15). We see this both in ancient texts like Aesop’s and in more recent books, such as Roald Dahl’s Fabulous Mr. Fox (1970) or Doreen Cronin’s click clack moo: cows that type (2000), which is a fable for the power of a union’s collective bargaining. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), where two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, lead a successful revolt against a farmer, with Napoleon later emerging as a totalitarian leader, was intended as an allegory of the failed ideals of the Russian Revolution.
Anthropomorphism—the attributing of human traits to animals—has ‘humanized’ the animal world in children’s literature. T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) is a book of whimsical poems about feline psychology and the pursuits of several singular cats like the frail but venerated theatre cat Gus to Mr Mistoffelees, who, in the guise of a hunt for mice, is devoted to magic and sleights of hand. While these characters emerge as supremely cat-like, they are also very much human in their interests and personalities: theatre, or magic, or criminal activity. Despite their human preoccupations and qualities, Eliot’s cats are not merely stand-ins for people, or symbols for humans. Eliot, Stacy Rule argues, has used the unique capacities of poetry to facilitate a cross-species engagement by offering ‘advice about how readers might approach autonomous and internally complex animals and imagines how they might address us’ (Rule 2011, 155). We see this, for example, in Eliot’s poems ‘The Naming of Cats,’ where cats are described as possessing their own secret names which no human knows, and ‘The Addressing of Cats,’ which gently lays down protocols for approaching a cat; finally reaching the goal of calling a cat by his name, with the understanding that a cat is not a dog. This ultimately leads to ‘an equalization of the two species [human and cat] based on singular personalities’ (Rule 2011, 156). Eliot’s poetry helps us see these singular cats as having agency and interests in their own right and not just as reflections of human concerns, as in the case of ‘Skimbleshanks: the Railway Cat,’ where the rhythms of the poetry reflect the cat’s preoccupation. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats also stages a tension between order and disorder in keeping with the concerns of Eliot’s modernist period. We see, for example, cats who keep things in line, such as Skimbleshanks, who watches over the Night Mail train (‘You can play no pranks with Skimbleshanks!’), or the diligent mouser Jennyanydots, and those like Macavity (‘who could defy the law’) who serve to disrupt order. Because it is comic verse with inventive rhymes, its poetic form might be assumed to be simple. But the variations of rhythm in the poetic form make its anthropomorphism more complicated, with irregular line lengths not arranged in a conventional stanza form. Rule argues that Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats challenges two assumptions: ‘children’s poetry is unsophisticated, and animals are simple beings’ (Rule 2011, 150).
Another example of a text that uses anthropomorphism to reflect human concerns but which can be read as carving out a space for animal subjectivity is Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad, the anthropomorphic River Bank dwellers, display a very human class prejudice against the weasels and stoats of the Wild Wood. Yet Catherine Elick sees The Wind in the Willows as genuinely capturing animal ontologies, or ways of being: ‘What has usually been interpreted as a class conflict between the River-Bank animals and the Wild-Wood creatures can also be interpreted as a battle to define true animal nature and determine how animals should live’ (Elick 2015, 50). A segment devoted to the god Pan ‘also represents an attempt at constructing a religion for and of animals’ (Cosslett 2006, 7). Elick’s and Tess Cosslett’s readings represent an interesting departure from the critical consensus that these works merely reflect human ways of living, contending instead that The Wind in the Willows gives animals emotions, thought, and religion separate from human beings.
Sometimes the use of animal figures to signify human social structures can be a source of irritation for critics, who see it as a distorted portrayal of animal behaviour. Richard Adams cites R.M. Lockley’s Private Life of the Rabbit as a source for Watership Down (1972), but LeGuin notes that Adams’s world is ‘a militaristic patriarchy in which males do all planning, thinking, and acting,’ passing it off as animal behaviour when Lockley had made it clear that female rabbits were the leaders in nature (LeGuin 2004, 26). A successful animal story does not require an accurate portrayal of animal life as found in nature, but Adams stated that he sought to portray rabbits scientifically, and so LeGuin’s remarks ring true. At the same time, Watership Down is undeniably perspicacious about the difficulties faced by animals when humans destroy their habitat, speaking to the animal’s position in the face of human domination.
One cultural function of animal stories is to make children aware of how much animals can and do suffer. Animal autobiographies, fictionalized first-person accounts of an animal’s life, are one cultural location for this kind of empathy. They flourished in England and North America after 1824, following the founding of the first animal welfare organization: the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In this genre, ‘animals speak with excruciating candor about their suffering at the hands of humans’ (Elick 2015, 8). The most famous example, Black Beauty (1877), about a wronged cab-horse, helped bring about a ban on the equine bearing rein or checkrein, a fashionable rein that forced horses to hold up their heads uncomfortably high (Elick 2015, 8; Cosslett 2006, 74).
Animal autobiographies form part of an ‘education in sympathy’ (Cosslett 2006, 63), but they spark several questions:
Questions that seem purely formal—such as ‘how can an animal write its own autobiography?’—underscore the form’s artificiality, but also the author’s desire to represent an otherwise ignored or disrespected subjectivity. At the same time it is clear that the subjectivity is very much one which is constructed by the author and imposed upon the animal character. There is also a sense that, no matter how many reversals of power the text encodes, humans remain very much in charge. We might think of all those works where children are encouraged to be humane, but even that humanity is an extension of their power. Amy Ratelle considers how children’s literature and film encourage identification with animals, both implicitly and explicitly, but then require children ‘to position themselves as distinctly human through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film’ (Ratelle 2015, 10). A child may be encouraged to be more humane, without renouncing the power that they hold over animals. A motif where children change places with animals is one ‘rhetorical device of reversing roles, translating animal pain into the equivalent human pain’ (Cosslett 2006, 14). In P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins (1934), for example, ‘the children pay a visit to the Zoo after dark and find animals in charge and humans caged’ (Cosslett 2006, 59).
Can human beings really imagine the lives of animals apart from their involvement in human life? Writers have tried. Sara Pennypacker’s Pax (2016), illustrated by Jon Klassen, is the tale of a young boy, Peter, whose father shames him into abandoning his beloved pet fox, Pax. Realizing his mistake, the boy journeys into the wilderness to bring Pax home; the chapters alternate between the point of view of the boy and that of the fox. Pax grieves his separation from the boy but comes to understand his own wild nature. At the end of the novel the boy finds Pax, only to realize that he must be left in the wild, where he now belongs. Pax is perhaps an extension of the tradition of wilderness tales like Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), set within the Canadian wilderness and espousing an ethic of conservation. But Pax is also a contemporary attempt to depict human renunciation of control over animal lives, and an acknowledgement that their lives and destinies might be, and should be, entirely separate from our own.
Animal studies’ approaches sometimes include a consideration of what is termed ‘the posthuman,’ which describes an entity or person who exists beyond the state of being a human, or a person who is comprised of human and machine. Elaine Ostry argues that the posthuman emerges when the lines between ‘organic and inorganic’ and ‘human and animal’ are crossed through technology or other forms of cultural change: ‘What it means to be human has never been more flexible, manipulated, or in question’ (Ostry 2004, 222). In the wake of these changing definitions of ‘the human,’ children’s literature tests and plays with the boundaries between human and animal, human and vegetable, and human and machine.
One contemporary cultural space where we see, in Holly Batty’s words, ‘a reconsideration of the human/animal binary’ is the Harry Potter series (Batty 2015, 26). Harry morphs into a being with gills in the Triwizard tournament, animagi transform from people into animals, and Sirius Black engages with the animal side of his nature as a werewolf within wizard society. Harry Potter has an affinity for snakes and speaks Parseltongue; in The Order of the Phoenix he has a dream from a snake’s point of view (Batty 2015, 35). In this reading of posthumanism in Harry Potter, Harry has not just blurred the boundaries between human and animal, but become himself something other than human, or more than human.
Posthumanist approaches also focus on the permeable boundaries between child and machine. Zoe Jaques affirms that ‘childhood has slipped indelibly towards the posthuman. The growth of TV and computer ownership places machine-mediated fantasy before the eyes of children as a part of daily life’ (Jaques 2015a, 5). Robots and toys in children’s literature, such as those seen in Pixar/Disney’s WALL-E and Toy Story films, ‘give child readers alternative ways of imagining human interconnections with the artificial’ (Jaques, 2015b, 20). Theories of the posthuman make us suddenly aware of the many inanimate objects that quicken into life in children’s literature, such as Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) or the Tin Woodman of Oz whose ‘meat body’ is slowly replaced by animate tin (although his old-fashioned yen for a heart marks him as a quintessential liberal humanist). Posthumanist children’s literature, like animal studies, necessitates a playful engagement with the biological limits of humanity, and an acknowledgement of the ways in which posthumanism challenges our existing models of identity and subjectivity. It is that playful engagement that marks my case study of Flora and Ulysses, a book that depicts powerful human-animal relationships and the rediscovery of human connection in a new mode.
Case study: Flora and Ulysses
Flora Belle Buckman, the protagonist of Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery Award-winning Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (2013), is a ‘natural-born cynic’ (DiCamillo 2013, 6) still reeling from her parents’ recent divorce. She is devoted to the comic book adventures of THE AMAZING INCANDESTO, although her mother makes her sign a contract pledging to ‘work to turn her face away from the idiotic high jinks of comics and toward the bright light of true literature’ (DiCamillo 2013, 5). Flora and Ulysses pays tribute to popular culture as empowering for child readers; some of the action of the book is related through comic book panels rather than through conventional text.
Flora’s life changes irreversibly when a hapless squirrel is sucked up into a runaway vacuum—the Ulysses 2000X—in her backyard. The squirrel acquires human consciousness and a flair for writing poetry on a typewriter. Flora’s neighbour names him Ulysses, after the offending (yet transformative) vacuum. Flora’s mother, who is no friend to poetry-writing squirrels, enlists her ex-husband to kill Ulysses. Ulysses’s escape and deepening bond with Flora leads to a transformation in human, as well as human-animal, relationships when Flora’s father helps her save Ulysses. By the end of the novel, Flora and her mother also experience a long-needed rapprochement, and, indeed, Roberta Seelinger Trites reads the novel within feminist thought on the ‘ethics of care’ and relationality (Trites 2018, 178–179). Questions of childhood agency, such as those foregrounded by Childhood Studies, are also relevant, with Flora joining the many child protagonists who must defy adults. Animal studies might help us to understand the strong bond that develops between Flora and Ulysses, whether it is a cultural distortion of his animal nature, and the implications of a squirrel developing anthropomorphizing traits such as the capacity for writing poetry.
One of the novel’s signature attributes, in fact, is its insistence on a squirrel’s point of view, which can be seen as a human projection onto the animal world. One theme is Ulysses’s insistent greed and desire for food; he ends one of his poems with the heartfelt line ‘I am very, very hungry’ (DiCamillo 2013, 65). Like many animal protagonists in children’s literature, Ulysses has endured violence in the past: ‘It was a sad fact of his existence as a squirrel that there was always someone, somewhere, who wanted him dead’ (DiCamillo 2013, 76). Yet Ulysses experiences a revelation after his encounter with the vacuum. One of the most affecting scenes in the novel is when he is moved—‘his eyes bright’—by a neighbour’s reading of a Rilke poem (DiCamillo 2013, 82). In children’s literature, relationships with animals often precipitate a change in perspective, and this novel also provides a squirrel with new perceptions and capacities.
Flora’s mother is distressed by what she perceives as Flora’s ‘strangeness.’ Her mother writes romance novels with titles like On Feathered Wings of Joy and simply cannot understand Flora’s devotion to comic books. Flora is illustrated as wearing large glasses and sporting a severe haircut, traits that do not conform to traditional notions of femininity. Her foil and antagonist is a very feminine china shepherdess lamp, with fluffy skirt and pink cheeks, owned and adored by her mother and suspected by Flora to be more like the daughter she would prefer. Flora’s deep attachment to a squirrel strikes her mother as disturbingly unconventional:
Flora’s mother wants to constrain her daughter within her vision of a safe and acceptable life, yet the novel also shows an adult whose thinking becomes more flexible and who subsequently rearranges her own priorities. Late in the novel her mother’s beloved china shepherdess is broken in an altercation with a violent cat. Rather than mourn the shepherdess, as Flora assumed she would, Flora’s mother focuses instead on her daughter:
Flora realizes that she is her mother’s beloved child after all and, in the words of Trites, ‘finds strength in allowing herself to be both the one-caring and the cared-for—and to become in her process of growing more relational’ (Trites 2018: 175).
One relationship that Flora builds is with William Spiver, the boy next door, who consistently annoys her but who she comes to trust as she tries to save Ulysses. The bond between Flora and Spiver seems rather chaste, a matter of some handholding, pointing to friendship rather than eros, but her trust in him mimics the interdependence of conjugality. Like most children’s books, the portrayal of sexuality, if that is what it can be called, is rather oblique here. It is interesting to note that Flora does not renounce her relationship with Ulysses in favour of her friendship with Spiver, as Fern Arable does in Charlotte’s Web when she leaves Wilbur to ride the Ferris wheel with Henry Fussy. The friendship is not treated as part of a developmental trajectory of giving up childhood attachments, as we see in so many of the narratives considered by Eric L. Tribunella, where a boy must wrenchingly renounce a dog in order to reach a painful maturation.
Spiver is a puzzling character in some ways, although disability theory might help us understand him better. At the beginning of the book he believes himself to have been blinded by a traumatic event related to family tensions and a quarrel with his mother and stepfather. He wears dark glasses and has trouble navigating his environment, but his Great-Aunt Tootie Tickham tells him, bluntly, that he is not blind. We might read Spiver’s belief in his blindness as an example of the ‘narrative prosthesis’ articulated by Mitchell and Snyder: a mere plot device. Trites certainly see it as a ‘metaphor for another type of cloaking or veiling; he cannot allow himself to see the truth that he is the person who has damaged his own relationship with his mother (by pushing his stepfather’s truck into a pond)’ (Trites 2018, 178). Yet his belief in his own blindness might also be read as disabling in its own right; while convinced that he is blind he finds it hard to get around. When Spiver’s glasses are knocked off, he realizes that he has never been blind. This might be the novel’s way of making fun of the ‘miracle cures’ of classic children’s literature, but some disability studies approaches might object to DiCamillo's use of blindness as a metaphor, or to the critical consideration of blindness in purely metaphorical terms.
Flora and Ulysses has much to tell us about child agency. To save Ulysses, Flora has to assert her own authority when her mother proves hostile to her squirrel, sneaking out of the home at night and seeking alliances with adults such as Great-Aunt Tootie and Dr Meescham, an eccentric woman living in her father’s building. Flora and Ulysses is so rewarding to consider in the light of new theories and methodologies of children’s literature criticism because it charts a wide range of affective possibilities for child readers, across the species, across generations, and across different gender expressions. Flora and Ulysses thus has elements in common with Cece Bell’s El Deafo that we considered earlier, including a difficult journey from isolation to connection, the use of imagined super-heroes as a means of expressing agency (in Flora’s case her squirrel Ulysses holds those powers), and the key role played by friendship. While some critics are unconvinced that children’s literature can foster empathy in its readers, Flora and Ulysses repeatedly explores dramatic changes of perspective, from a squirrel who becomes a skilled poet to a girl who learns that she is valued and in turn can better value the people around her.