Child-rearing has never been easy. Starting in 1940, parents’ task became complicated because of the abundance and diversity of advice available to them.2 Certain specialists urged them to refrain from corporal punishment, while others, of a more traditionalist stripe, advocated its retention. Most writers condemned beatings administered in anger, and the proponents of the New Education advised following psychological principles.
Better informed, parents also became more aware of their inadequacies. Fearing they were not equal to the task, some of them sought relief from their anxiety in humour. Thus one mother wrote that the Clinique de l’École des Parents had its advantages: “It’s where we can vent our spleen.” Some years later, Sélection du Reader’s Digest attributed the following to a mother of seven: “This morning they were kicking up such a racket that I promised to soap the mouth of the first one to shout. Well, I can still taste it!”3 Jokes like this allowed mothers to express their frustration or accept their mistakes with good humour and go on raising their children with less stress.
The role of humour in dealing with personal and social problems has been much studied. In 1900, Henri Bergson looked at the social function of laughter. Laughter, it has been said, is the best teacher of morals, because the fear of ridicule induces people to conform to social norms. Using French comedies as an illustration, the French philosopher outlined what was required to provoke laughter: first, a social error of which the comic character is unaware; second, the at least temporary insensitivity of the audience, for emotion is the greatest enemy of laughter; finally, automatism, that is, an involuntary word or an action that makes a character comic without being aware of it.4 Once these three conditions are combined, it becomes possible to correct parents’ mistakes by making fun of them.
A few years later Freud studied the relationship between jokes, humour, and the unconscious. Humour, he said, can come at the expense of others or of oneself. In the former case it allows a forbidden urge, such as hostility, to be expressed in a socially acceptable manner by joking at the expense of one’s enemy. On the other hand, those who make jokes at their own expense are trying to shield themselves against suffering: the joker withdraws the psychic accent from his Ego and transfers it to his Superego; the Superego then comforts the Ego, seeming to say, “The world you think so dangerous is really child’s play! So it’s best to laugh at it!” Humour implies the triumph of the Ego and of the pleasure principle over a hostile external reality.5 In this way it helps parents to accept their own inadequacies and confront with equanimity the difficulties of raising their children.
Humour could also render children a valuable service.6 Researchers have long insisted on the disastrous consequences of the violence inflicted on the young, but for the past some years they have also been analysing the possibility of resilience, that is, the “ability to succeed, live, and develop positively, in a socially acceptable manner and in spite of stress or adversity, which are normally accompanied by a serious risk of negative consequences.”7
As often happens, a novelist had this insight before it was analysed scientifically.8 We are thinking of Claude-Henri Grignon in L’Histoire de Ti-Prince, a sequel to his famous novel Un homme et son péché. Published in 1955 as a serial in Bonnes Soirées, it imagined that the marriage of the miserly Séraphin Poudrier to Donalda lasted several years, and that they had a child christened Séraphin but nicknamed “Ti-Prince.” One day his cousin Alexis gives the little nine-year-old a nickel, which he donates to a beggar. This charitable act enrages the miser who beats his son severely with a horsewhip (see Illustration 17). Ti-Prince accepts the punishment without a word and remains mute throughout the following three days, which he spends locked in the attic. His mother, a compassionate soul, is astonished: “Donalda found this attitude strange, especially since the child did not allow a single moan to escape him during the punishment. She could not understand that the pride of suffering, enduring, and — why not? – of winning was a source of strength for her child.”9 There could be no better description of resilience. We should point out that this punishment, identical to the one Télesphore Gagnon inflicted on his daughter Aurore, was presented as cruelty, was set in the distant past (in 1905), and was carried out by a father blinded by his obsession, avarice.
In the eyes of the writer and the readers of 1955 only an unnatural father like Séraphin Poudrier could beat his son with a horsewhip, in addition to which the event was set in the past — in 1905.
Source: Claude-Henri Grignon, “Histoire de Ti-Prince,” Bonnes Soirées, no. 1758 (10 Nov. 1955), 14. © Bonnes Soirées, World’s Press and Charlie Delhauteur.
Humour had no place in this novel, but it did appear in the autobiographical writings of other Quebec authors, Louis Fréchette and especially Claire Martin, who represent excellent examples of resilience. The former gave a humorous account of the stern approach to child-rearing that prevailed during his childhood, especially the consequences of some mischief-making that was punished by both the priest and his father, “one wielding the wrath of the Church, the other the whip from his stable.”10 The latter derived the greatest possible advantage from her experience as a child martyr: “A childhood like mine ends either in a premature thickening of the skin or a complete flaying. But I was no nervous Nellie.” In a tale full of dark humour, it is with a “joyful, vengeful alacrity” that she settles scores with her father and the nuns who taught her.11
A sense of humour, which was an important factor in the resilience of these two authors, can have the same effect on the child population as a whole, thanks to children’s literature. “Through humour, the young reader can de-dramatize a situation of conflict, de-mystify authority, and resolve a great deal of tension with a liberating effect.”12 In this way a child raised under constant threat of being beaten might be enabled to cope with his fear more easily if he found a distraction in humorous readings. One example was the comic strips which enjoyed great popularity in the 1950s, despite the outrage of parenting experts at the time.13
It is entirely possible that the authors of comic strips found in their work an opportunity to relive their own childhood memories and to reconstruct their Egos using a professional alibi, rather like the Comtesse de Ségur or Ingmar Bergman.14 However, in the absence of detailed biographies of authors and artists that would allow us to confirm this hypothesis, we shall restrict ourselves to seeking in their works a reflection — caricatural but nevertheless revealing — of the child-rearing problems that confronted families in North America and in Quebec. We also suppose that if they were to have a lasting success the comic strips had to adapt to the public’s changing tastes. We therefore expect to find a decrease in the frequency and intensity of violent scenes over the period under consideration.
From the many comic strips that appeared in mass circulation newspapers and that could equally well be read by both adults15 and children, we have selected three that possessed comparable elements, namely complete families (a father, mother, and children), one with two boys and two others with a girl each, all published in the same era, between 1945 and 1969.
The first of these, Les Jumeaux du capitaine, by Rudolph Dirks (1877–1968), dates back to 1897. It was inspired by Max und Moritz, the work of Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), which first appeared in Germany in 1865 and was perceived as a caricature and satire of the “poisonous pedagogy.”16 Dirks was also born in Germany, and emigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of seven, so he had experienced German approaches to parenting. He initially published his comic strip with the title The Katzenjammer Kids, and later, beginning in 1913, as The Captain and the Kids. His son John, born in 1917, began to work as his assistant in 1946 and took over completely in 1958. This collaboration suggests that the father and son had a good relationship, or else that they resolved their problems through their joint creative activity.
The household imagined by Dirks comprised two boys of school age, Hans and Fritz (Napoléon and Frédéric in the French translation), their mother, and her second husband, a naval officer whom they usually called “Capitaine,” and more rarely “Papa,” and also an elderly school inspector. The twins, who were anything but model children, belong to the literary family of young mischief-makers. They were continually playing tricks on the two men, and were roundly beaten for their pains. Specialists on comic strips consider this work an assault on all forms of authority, if not on society as a whole.17 The original version, published in American newspapers, was available in English in Quebec from the early twentieth century,18 but we will instead use the French translation which appeared in Le Petit Journal between 1947 and 1958.19 The translator tried to give the characters some French-Canadian characteristics: for instance, the Captain addressed his wife as “samère”* (10 June 1951), as Quebec country folk did around the turn of the twentieth century.
The second comic strip was the work of James (Jimmy) Hatlo (1898–1963). For over thirty years, between 1929 and 1963, this American produced the text and drawings for a daily feature entitled They’ll Do It Every Time. The main protagonist was a middle-class man trying to cope with the problems caused by his neighbours, his fellow office workers, his wife, and his daughter. The character of the daughter became so popular that in 1943 Hatlo devoted a weekly strip to her; it was called Little Iodine, and a French translation appeared in the Saturday issue of La Patrie in 1945 and 1946. This little girl, considered the feminine equivalent of the Katzenjammer Kids, also created mischief that caused all kinds of difficulties for her parents, the Tremblechins, for which she was sometimes punished with a spanking.20
The third series, C’est toujours comme ça (English title: There Oughta Be a Law), used a similar set of characters to Little Iodine: a little girl called Castoria Laprune (later renamed Paméla, Nanouche, and then Lili), her parents, the neighbours, and her father’s co-workers. Created in 1946, it was the work of the writer Harry Shorten (1915–1991) and the artist Al Fagaly,21 who was replaced by Warren Whipple in 1965. It appeared in Le Petit Journal starting in 1949.
A systematic reading of the Saturday edition of La Patrie (LPa) and the weekly Le Petit Journal (PJ) for the period between 1945 and 1969 identified 164 strips in which children are subjected to a thrashing or some other kind of corporal punishment, and on which we based our statistics. We have also considered a hundred others, either because they depicted scenes of violence between adults, or because they enabled a better understanding of the authors’ thinking. For instance, at one time or another each of these children receives signs of affection from both parents, so they were not viewed as “child martyrs.”
The number of individual strips studied is large enough to allow consideration of at least three questions. What part might these comic strips have played in the reconsideration of corporal punishment as part of child-rearing? How might this humour have helped children to tolerate their parents’ violence? And how could it have helped parents to deal with the parenting problems they faced? (In this chapter we shall continue to use the word “violence” to refer in a general way to the use of physical force to inflict suffering, while the words “discipline” and “corporal punishment” will correspond to violence used with the object, or pretext, of “teaching a lesson.”)
One fact immediately stands out from the statistical analysis: the twins were beaten much more often than the two girls (see Table 28). It is tempting to compare this with the situation described in the advice columns and the records of the Juvenile Delinquents’ Court (JDC) and the Social Welfare Court (SWC), which show that boys of school age received such punishment more often than girls of the same age. But another explanation seems more likely: the twins were the main protagonists of the comic strip that bore their name, and they appeared in all the episodes. In C’est toujours comme ça, on the other hand, the main protagonists were Josaphat Laprune and his office colleagues. The simple fact that Castoria did not appear every week explains why in her case the misdemeanours punished by a beating were fewer than in the case of the twins.
The beatings were mostly administered by the father, Tremblechin, Laprune, or the Captain, the twins’ stepfather (see Table 29), which corresponds to the situation observed in the other two Quebec sources. Furthermore, in the United States at this time the father was held to be ultimately responsible for discipline.22 The mother would sometimes intervene to defend the children (eleven times for the twins, five times for the girls), but sometimes she too would beat them, or ask their father to do it.
Table 28 Distribution of Corporal Punishment in the Three Comic Strips, 1945–1969
Sources: “La Petite Iodine,” in La Patrie, 1945–46; “Les Jumeaux du Capitaine,” in Le Petit Journal, 1947–58; “C’est toujours comme ça,” in Le Petit Journal, 1949–69.
Corporal punishment generally consisted of spanking with the bare hand. When the adults used an implement the mother usually chose her hairbrush while the men grabbed the first thing within reach. The boys, more harshly treated than the girls, also received kicks on the behind and had their ears pulled (see Table 30), though it should be pointed out that the children were never hit on the head. In this respect the writers respected the limits set by all the experts on parenting, even out-and-out partisans of corporal punishment, for a child’s head was sacred and should never be struck, for fear of damage.23
The level of violence in these comic strips was high. One specialist pointed out that the twins were characterized by “an aggressivity or even wickedness that is rare in similar stories.”24 Another found in the stories of these little rascals “an element of cruelty that acts as a valve that allows the release of a certain repressed sadism in the public.”25
Table 29 Identity of the Persons Who Beat Children in the Comic Strips, 1945–1969
|
NO. OF STRIPS |
|---|---|
Les Jumeaux du Capitaine |
|
The Captain |
80 |
The mother |
34 |
The Inspector |
26 |
Another individual |
19 |
Iodine and Castoria |
|
The father |
32 |
The mother |
3 |
Sources: “La Petite Iodine,” in La Patrie, 1945–46; “Les Jumeaux du Capitaine,” in Le Petit Journal, 1947–58; “C’est toujours comme ça,” in Le Petit Journal, 1949–69.
Note: In the case of the twins the total is greater than 129 because they were often beaten more than once in the same strip.
Table 30 Types of Corporal Punishment Inflicted on Children in the Comic Strips, 1945–1969
|
|
|---|---|
Les Jumeaux du Capitaine |
|
Spanking with the hand |
99 |
Spanking with a hairbrush |
4 |
Spanking with another object |
27 |
Kick on the backside |
10 |
Pulling an ear |
1 |
Iodine and Castoria |
|
Spanking with the hand |
16 |
Spanking with a hairbrush |
3 |
Spanking with another object |
12 |
Uncertain |
4 |
Sources: “La Petite Iodine,” in La Patrie, 1945–46; “Les Jumeaux du Capitaine,” in Le Petit Journal, 1947–58; “C’est toujours comme ça,” in Le Petit Journal, 1949–69.
Some punishments really did border on cruelty, like the thrashings that raised welts on Castoria (PJ, 18 Mar. 1951) or left the twins too sore to sit down (PJ, 4 Jan. 1953). Even the Comtesse de Ségur, who was unsparing in her use of the rod, considered it abuse (rather than a well-deserved lesson) to beat a child so severely that it could hardly move.26 To prevent readers from yielding to sympathy, which would destroy the impulse to laugh, the authors resorted to certain comic devices that were used, with some variations, in all three comic strips.
The first of these was inspired by the idea of automatism, about which Bergson wrote that a character is comic when he is unaware of some aspect of his personality and heaps blame on some behaviour, yet a moment later himself provides an example of it.27 For instance, the Captain forbids the twins to play games of chance and beats them for doing so, but shortly afterwards he loses his shirt playing a similar game (PJ, 28 Dec. 1947). Dirks also depicted ironically the behaviour of the mother, who spanks her sons to punish them for fighting and then adds, in all seriousness, “Let this teach you to be gentle” (PJ, 8 Aug. 1948). In another strip Laprune advises his wife to be patient with their daughter who is having difficulty with her spelling, but he becomes angry when Castoria puts him in an embarrassing position because of a spelling mistake she has made (PJ, 3 July 1949).
But the most trenchant episodes involving automatism dealt with the honesty that parents demand of their children. Both Tremblechin and Laprune beat their daughters to punish them for lying, but then, a short time later, Iodine, in her concern for the truth, contradicts her mother in front of all the customers in a store (see Illustration 18), while Castoria, much to her parents’ upset, repeats to her father’s boss some rather unflattering references to him she had overheard (PJ, 20 May 1956 and 21 Mar. 1965). The twins’ mother also spanks them to teach them to tell the truth. Later she lets them off when they say that the Inspector has a beard like a billy goat and praises their good sense when they say they have “the best Mom in the world,” but when they add, with assumed candour, that she is also “the fattest Mom in the world” she immediately thrashes them and asks if they couldn’t have lied just a little! (PJ, 18 Apr. 1948). Dirks is even more caustic in one episode in which the mother spanks her boys while uttering the consecrated formula “This hurts me even more than it hurts you,” but then when the Captain says the same thing she waxes indignant, hits him with a broom, and calls him a liar (PJ, 10 June 1951).
The second comic device is that of reversal, as in a “trickster tricked” kind of situation.28 It was most frequently used to compare the children’s performance in school with their father’s. When Iodine’s father goes to thrash her because she has been playing hooky, the little girl plays him a recording on which he admits having done the same thing as a child (LPa, 15 Dec. 1945, 8). Just as Laprune is about to give Victoria a spanking to punish her for a poor school report, his wife points out to him that it is one of his own old reports, found in the attic! (PJ, 11 Apr. 1954 and 17 Nov. 1963). And when the Captain asks his former teacher to give lessons to his “two little rascals,” the old master immediately remembers the stepfather’s own childhood: “He had the devil in him! He was beaten every day!” (PJ, 23 Dec. 1951). Such reminders of the fathers’ bad behaviour sometimes resulted in them being punished like children: Laprune’s former schoolmistress sends him to stand in the corner (PJ, 4 Mar. 1951), while the Captain gets a thrashing from both his schoolteacher and his wife (PJ, 23 Nov. 1952 and 23 Dec. 1951). Here the authors are using the theme of the “world turned on its head” as depicted in popular nineteenth-century prints (see Illustration 19).29 This comic device had a subversive quality because it upended the attitude of blind submission children were generally expected to adopt toward adults.30
Illustration 18 La Petite Iodine
TOP Father: I’m not punishing you because you misbehaved, I’m punishing you because you lied to me. Mother: You must never lie, Iodine. MIDDLE L Fishmonger: Salmon? We have two kinds. This one at 35 cents, and that one, of very poor quality, at 15 cents.
Mother: I’ll take the one at 15 cents, after all it’s just for the cat. MIDDLE R Iodine: The cat? But Mom, surely you know we haven’t got a cat anymore. BOTTOM L Mother: Humiliating me like that in front of everyone! I’m going to punish you. Father: No, Mother, remember we told her not to tell lies. BOTTOM R Father: Mother, we should always practise what we preach.
Source: La Patrie (23 Feb. 1946), 8. © King Features Syndicate.
A third comic device consisted in treating the human body like an object. The kicks on the backside inflicted on the Captain’s twins would certainly be deplored by any parenting expert, even the most traditionalist! To make such a deed palatable Dirks gave the children’s bodies a spherical shape, like circus clowns.31 The twins were so plump and pudgy that they looked like large balls. Once, a kick given by their teacher lifts them into the air like footballs — to their great delight, in fact, because as a result they escape school for a day (PJ, 31 May 1953, 14). On other occasions a playmate literally uses them as footballs, and the Captain himself is shot into the air like a ball (PJ, 29 Mar. 1953 and 4 Feb. 1951).
The final device was that of the punch line in the final frame that brought the episode to a comic conclusion.32 This could be in either the text or the drawing, but it often consisted in a play on words that took the logic of the story to an extreme. Almost half the strips ended in a beating (or the immediate prospect of one) inflicted on the children. In one, the mother advises the Captain to count to a hundred before acting when he is irritated, a method he adopts. A few minutes later, as he is spanking the twins, she asks, “Are you counting, Captain?” The affirmative answer “91 – 92 – 93,” corresponds to the number of strokes he has administered (PJ, 11 Jan. 1948). And when Castoria tries to justify a silly deed that has earned her a spanking by calling out to her father, “I just wanted a memento of you!” he answers, “That’s exactly what I’m giving you!” (PJ, 19 Mar. 1950). These were all devices that allowed readers to accept more easily the high level of violence in these comics.
Illustration 19 “The World Turned on Its Head”
CAPTION 1 The wife beats her husband. CAPTION 2 The dog sends its master to the doghouse.
Source: Denis Martin and Bernard Huin, Images d’Épinal, © Musée du Québec and Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1995, with the kind permission of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and with the collaboration of the Musée départemental d’art ancien et contemporain and the Musée de l’image d’Épinal. Photo: MNBAQ, Patrick Altman.
Even if the comic devices were more or less the same in all, there were significant differences between the three comic strips. We have already noted that the boy twins were subjected to violence by adults more often than the girls, at the rate of one beating per day and sometimes as many as four (see Illustration 20 and PJ, 23 Dec. 1951). How could such a level of violence be justified while maintaining readers’ amusement?
One solution consisted in depicting the twins as abominable young ruffians who thoroughly deserved their fate since it was they who provoked the adults. In about half the cases (sixty-five of the 129 strips that form the basis of our study), they initiated hostilities by playing a nasty trick on the men, earning them a beating (PJ, 4 Jan. 1948). In ten other strips they set out to avenge an unjust thrashing, administered at the start of the story, by playing some triumphantly successful trick (PJ, 13 Dec. 1953). A dozen other cases depicted a vicious circle beginning with an undeserved hiding, followed by vengeance, punished by a second beating that inspired the desire for revenge that would serve as the starting point of the following episode (PJ, 28 Dec. 1952), for even when they were caught and beaten the twins never admitted defeat. Nor indeed did the Captain, who said at the end of one strip: “He who laughs last laugh best” (PJ, 23 Nov. 1952).
The male adults — the Captain and the Inspector, respectively the symbols of paternal and school authority — were the most frequent butts of the twins’ practical jokes. The boys rarely took aim at their mother. Sometimes they tried to deceive her, but only as a means to reach their real target, one of the two men (PJ, 23 May 1948 and 21 Mar. 1948), or to take advantage of a situation, like getting their hands on some cakes she had baked (PJ, 28 Mar. 1948). Using a strategy of divide and conquer they also attempted to enlist her as an ally against the Captain and the Inspector (PJ, 5 Sept. 1954). Yet they never showed toward her the kind of rancour that drove them to ridicule the two men.
In addition to refusing systematically to obey their parents, the twins refused to do their schoolwork. About fifteen of the strips described the various ways in which they tried to avoid school and get out of doing any schoolwork (PJ, 31 May 1953). They did their utmost to avoid all the duties that children usually had to perform.
Illustration 20 Les Jumeaux du Capitaine
TOP 1. Giant ants. So what? 2. Look how busy they are! They’ve got to keep at it! MIDDLE L 1. No putting ants in a hat! 2. That’s not the end of it! MIDDLE R 1. No putting ants in my pyjamas! 2. Hold on! Me too! BOTTOM L 1. No putting ants in the linens! Just you wait, kids! 2. O Ya! 3. Stop in the King’s name 4. Look!
BOTTOM R 1. No putting ants in the royal mattress! 2. Oh, no! 3. It’s the first time I’ve seen such a hiding!
Source: Le Petit Journal (5 Sept. 1948, suppl.), 16. © United Media.
Rudolph Dirks used a second way to prevent the reader from seeing the twins as child martyrs: he made them able to counter the strength of the adults with cunning, so that they often emerged victorious from the David and Goliath confrontation. In twenty-two of the strips the story ended with the Captain’s collapse, utterly confounded by the twins’ mischief and sometimes beaten by his wife (ten instances) or someone else (four instances). In any case, the twins accepted the rules of the game: that a beating was the price they had to pay for their misdeeds if they were caught. They protested only when innocent. On one occasion they submitted cheerfully to a beating because of a swindle they had devised to take some of the toll money for a bridge, while on another the beating inflicted by their mother failed to diminish their joy to see a little prince have his bottom pinched by a crab (PJ, 29 Feb. 1948 and 10 Apr. 1949).
For their part, the Captain and the Inspector sometimes indulged in childish behaviour that put them on the same level as the twins. Like children they played a trick with a peashooter and were punished exactly like the boys by being sent to stand in the same corner (PJ, 22 Aug. 1948).
In this comic strip, as in the English classic Tom Brown’s Schooldays,33 adults were depicted as adversaries, or even as the children’s natural enemies, and punishment, far from bringing the younger generation to heel, only fuelled their desire for revenge. In this way the “poisonous pedagogy” based on corporal punishment was ridiculed, as it was in Busch’s work. To make such antagonism acceptable the author took care to choose a stepfather rather than the twins’ natural father to symbolize paternal authority. Indeed it was easier to criticize the conduct of a stepfather than that of a natural father, for in the former case the emotional bond is weaker. This was the approach used by the Comtesse de Ségur with Sophie Fichini in Les Petites Filles modèles and Ingmar Bergman in the movie Fanny and Alexander. In addition, Dirks used the fanciful, unrealistic setting of a tropical island. The Captain spent his days fishing or taking a siesta without troubling to work to provide for his family, and the twins played hooky with disconcerting ease. In short, on every count the activities of this family were most unlike the everyday experience of its young readers. There was therefore no chance that they would take these wild fancies seriously, even if they could, for a few moments, enjoy experiencing such a reversal of the established order, like during the medieval Feast of Fools.34 In this way the comic strip acted as a safety valve, contributing to the smooth functioning of the family and society.
Iodine Tremblechin and Castoria Laprune lived in a much more realistic environment: a residential suburb. They attended school and their father worked in an office, while their mother was a housewife. Colleagues, neighbours, and friends all shared in their misadventures. This made it easy for readers to identify with these families.
Iodine’s behaviour was the closer to the twins’. She played hooky and could sometimes be quite unscrupulous. She developed strategies to frustrate the will of her father after he ordered her to apologize to a neighbour (LPa, 2 Mar. 1946), and took obvious pleasure in uttering truths embarrassing to her parents (see Illustration 18). In addition, the two girls could sometimes be capricious and stubborn. On one occasion Castoria (now named Lili) even boasted of being able to manipulate her parents as she wished (PJ, 6 May 1962). Sometimes, however, she behaved like a model schoolgirl, proud to show her mother a good report (PJ, 11 Apr. 1954). Above all, despite their mischief, neither girl took pleasure in the kind of nasty tricks that were the main activity of the twins, who rejoiced in defying authority.
The frequent beatings the two girls received were usually punishment for an error committed in good faith. On one occasion Castoria was eager to prepare a footbath for her father. The fact that she used plaster of Paris instead of sea salt can be attributed to her inability to spell rather than to any deliberate intention to play a practical joke (PJ, 3 July 1949). And when she uprooted some flower cuttings that she mistook for weeds, she was intending to obey her father who had asked her to rake the lawn (PJ, 12 June 1955).
Other gaffes committed by the girls resulted from their tendency to take their parents’ words literally. This form of humour was often used.35 For instance, Iodine suddenly wakened her aunt Euphrémie by setting off an alarm clock, not as a joke but to check the accuracy of her father’s words when he said, “She has a face that would stop a clock” (LPa, 14 July 1945). Likewise, imitating her mother who has had her baby shoes bronzed to preserve them, instead of bronzing her father’s shoes as a souvenir, Castoria coated them with cement (PJ, 19 Mar. 1950).
Indeed, some of the punishments inflicted on Castoria were perfectly unjust. When she built an electric chair she was careful to unplug it to avoid an accident. It was her mother who connected it again, involuntarily giving her husband an electric shock. So Castoria was right to protest her innocence, though her father would not listen (PJ, 8 June 1952).
In addition to punishing his daughter without hearing her defence and not taking the trouble to distinguish between an intentional misdemeanour and a mistake made in good faith, Josaphat Laprune committed a third parenting error by punishing the child according to his mood. When he was in a good humour he closed his eyes to all Castoria’s misdeeds and satisfied her whims for the sake of a quiet life, but then, when she committed an involuntary error with consequences for her parents his attitude changed abruptly and he punished her too harshly (PJ, 10 July 1955).
But despite all the inappropriate and sometimes unjust punishments she received, Castoria Laprune was no more a defenceless victim than the twins. Like them, she exercised the cunning necessary to defend or avenge herself. When her father accused her unjustly of raiding the refrigerator during the night she was able to prove that he was a sleepwalker (see Illustration 21). Similarly, when he punished her because of “circumstantial evidence,” she schemed to have him beaten by his wife, using a similar proof (PJ, 9 Aug. 1959). In addition, Castoria was able to identify with her mother, who occupied a pre-eminent position in the family constellation. During a discussion with her friend Onésime, Castoria said, “Dad is afraid of no one,” but then added, “Except Mom!” (PJ, 8 Sept. 1957). Another strip illustrated a darker form of humour. Playing “mummies and daddies” with Onésime, Castoria said that a husband’s role was to “shut up and pay up” (PJ, 15 June 1958). In short, the little girl had all the resources she needed to overcome the many parenting errors committed by her father.
Sometimes both fathers followed the precepts of the traditional method: they chastised their daughters by beating them in a calm, collected manner to punish them for a serious moral offence such as telling a lie. But the situation always turned against them, either because the girl was really innocent (see Illustration 21), or because her desire to tell the truth resulted in serious embarrassment for her parents (PJ, 20 May 1956 and 21 Mar. 1965), or because they failed to set her the example of what they preached (see Illustration 18).
Illustration 21 C’est Toujours Comme Ça (“The Sleepwalking Father”)
TOP L Father: There was a whole pie in the fridge yesterday evening! Was it you that ate it? Child: No! It was you! TOP R Child: I saw you come downstairs last night! You sat down here and you ate the whole thing in your sleep! Father: That’s some story, Missy! Mother: She’s right! You’re a sleepwalker! MIDDLE L Father: Let that teach you to eat pies and tell lies! MIDDLE R Child: I’ll prove to him he’s a sleepwalker without waking him! BOTTOM L Father: ZZZ Chomp! ZZZ Slurp! BOTTOM R In the morning Father: OK! OK! I admit it! Come and get this #%?& stool off my backside!
Source: Le Petit Journal (5 Mar. 1950), 14.
The Tremblechins and Laprunes were not completely ignorant of the modern methods of child-rearing based on gentleness, persuasion, and the psychology of the child. Illustration 22 contains a hilarious caricature of a psychologist who suggests to her father that he should indulge Castoria’s whims, while her father does not conceal his disdain of “these experts who think they know everything.” Sometimes the parents tried out the psychological approach, but since it never produced the hoped-for results the father quickly returned to “a good old-fashioned thrashing,” ironically administered using the psychology book itself (PJ, 6 June 1954 and 12 Feb. 1967). The authors were here using a joke that also occurred in L’École des parents and in Sélection du Reader’s Digest: if the contents of a book on psychology are of little help in raising one’s children, it can always be used to give a good spanking!36
However, in 1963 something began to change. Corporal punishment did not disappear completely, but when Castoria provoked her father’s anger, her mother would hastily send her away to a safe distance. In such cases, strong language replaced physical violence: “Do you want your father to skin you alive?” (PJ, 16 June 1963).
Whatever the method used by Tremblechin or Laprune, they never managed to subdue their unruly children or to put an end to their mischief, while they committed at least as many errors and misdemeanours as they. The saying that however you raise your children you will be wrong could well be applied to them, and it does express the feeling of uncertainty among many Quebec parents at the time, a feeling that also emerged in other sources such as the advice columns.
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What was the influence of comic strips on Quebec families? Possibly proponents of the strong-arm approach to child discipline found in Les Jumeaux du Capitaine some support for their conviction that children had an inborn rebellious instinct that could only be repressed by beating. In that case, the humour encouraged their blindness, as Alice Miller has pointed out.37 More subtle readers may have grasped the underlying message, which was that when spanking became systematic it was likely to provoke rebellion in children, bringing new punishment down on them and launching a true vicious circle. The twins’ situation, while described with humour, was not unlike the reality expressed in some letters to the advice columns: some parents had ended up beating their children every day without producing any improvement in their behaviour.
Illustration 22 C’est Toujours Comme Ça (“The Expert”)
TOP L Father: No candies, and shut up or I’ll give you a thrashing! Child: I want some, OK! Bystander: ? TOP R Bystander: I’m a psychologist and some children have a natural need for candies! And this child does have a great need for some! Father: Yeaah! Child: That’s right! MIDDLE Father: These experts think they know everything. The clowns! Child: Waah! I want some candy! Bystander: Tsk! Tsk! BOTTOM L Father: Which one would you like? Child: The red one! It’s bigger! BOTTOM R Father: The expert said you should get what you were asking for! So there you are! There you are!
Source: Le Petit Journal (10 June 1951), 14.
Could parents dealing with all the problems caused by their children find some comfort, or at least some release, in the comic strips? Perhaps witnessing the parenting mistakes committed by the Captain, Tremblechin, and Laprune made them aware of their own inadequacies. Or perhaps the imperfections of these fictional parents simply helped them to accept their own failings with a laugh, to relax and, rejecting all expert advice, simply trust their instincts as Dr Spock advised. Or maybe, lastly, they were made aware of the link between the frustrations experienced by men in their professional and conjugal lives and the way they treated their children. One student of comic strips has described the Captain as “a martyr of domestic resignation, subjugated by his wife, martyred by his children, … very likely the most downtrodden character in the whole history of the comics.”38 Josaphat Laprune’s situation was shown to be even worse: roundly beaten by his wife, his boss, and his neighbour he found one person in his circle on whom he could legally take out his frustrations: his daughter, whom he subjected to many undeserved spankings. But were the authors themselves aware of the uneven balance of power underlying the violence inflicted on children?
The twins, like Iodine and Castoria, were not in the least traumatized by the numerous punishments they endured. They found the inner strength to bounce back. But what about young readers subjected to the same kind of punishment? Seeing the gaffes committed by the Capitaine, Tremblechin, and Josaphat Laprune may well have helped children to put parental prestige into a proper perspective. By identifying themselves in their imaginations with the twins, so often victorious over the adults, such children may have felt strengthened in conflicts with their parents. And finally, the laughter provoked by the final joke in the last frame of the strip may have relieved many a family tension.