When did we stop caring that elves aren't real?

[rachelmanija]

Starting around the 1950s, a number of books in English for children had the message that magic isn't real. Helpfully for the historical cause, many of them won Newbery Medals or Honor, so they are very easy to come across.

The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.

There are variants on this, such as Bridge to Terabithia, in which no one ever believes that the magic is real - it's explicitly a game - but it ends in tragedy anyway.

I recently came across an example of this, published in 1996, and realized that it is the most recent example I can recall of the genre. Am I missing examples of it, or did they stop getting written or published?

The thing that has always struck me most about this genre is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Kids believing in magic and elves and so forth is not actually a big social problem, but the books treat it as if is. They are written as if the belief must be broken with a devastating shock, when in reality, most kids gradually learn that their parents are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, without the need for a dramatic revelation.

Those are also beliefs which are over way before kids are old enough to read the "there's no such thing as magic" books. The books aren't teaching kids there's no such thing as magic, because by the time they're old enough to read them they already know that. They're actually teaching them that if they read a book hoping that it's fantasy, it may in fact be a book about how fantasy isn't real.

Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death. But that made me wonder about some things. Why was this ever considered worthwhile to begin with? Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

Comments

[lemonsharks]

I'd bet money there was a wave of this kind of book in the mid-late 90s specifically in response to pulpy kids' SFFH like goosebumps, animorphs, and--huh, I did not realize they were 30 years old--the magic treehouse, as well as ye olde Harry Potter. (And potter-related moral panic.)


(I got Tuck Everlasting and The Bridge to Terebithia mixed up as a kid and boy, that was an experience.)

[recessional]

Actually more or less the opposite way around: for the most part the pulpy stuff (and HP, for that matter) was championed as an active rejection of The Morally Improving Newberry Medal Bleakness. By the time that the pulp stuff was happening, those involved in things LIKE the Newberry Medal/etc were already well onto the "if you give me another book where the dog dies I will literally set fire to it" train, to be SUPER BLUNT.

(Listening to GenX children's librarians rant on this topic is fantastic, especially older GenX ones.)

[el_staplador]

Not an answer to your question, but one of the books I really loved as a teenager was Too Many Ghosts (Paul Gallico), in which the hero investigated alleged supernatural phenomena in the hope that he would find a real ghost one day but in the meantime he was not going to have anyone scammed/scared/etc by crooks. I was mostly fascinated by the various methods used to produce the phenomena. I didn't like the sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable, in which he takes on fake spiritualists, quite so much, but it was just as interesting.

[rachelmanija]

I also really like Too Many Ghosts.

[sholio]

I wonder if it's a combination of mid-century gritty realism blended with a backlash against the popularity of kids' fantasy books? IIRC, the 1940s/50s was when books for middle-grade kids really started to become a publishing phenomenon, and Narnia was the latest in a number of wildly popular kids' portal fantasies going back to the late 1800s. I wonder if all of that tipped over into a sort of concern-trolling fear of kids taking all of this seriously and genuinely believing in fantasy worlds, kind of the 1950s/60s equivalent of "D&D is turning our kids into Satanists!"

I mean, a lot of the massively popular "literary classic" adult fiction from that general time period was also about disillusionment and having your childhood dreams wrecked by the realities of adult life, so maybe this is the kid equivalent of Updike and so on.

[sabotabby]

I think disillusionment is it, rather than the moral panic that happened later. I read a lot of this kind of thing in the 80s when I was growing up, which meant it was probably written in the 70s to parallel gritty realism.

[sartorias]

According to a prof I had who taught a course in Children's Literature in 1973, when that subgenre was still going strong (and when schools were still shoving I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN down kids' throats in high school lit classes), he said it was a very important evolution in literature meant to teach kids that religion was all = Tooth Fairy etc, and an introduction to existentialism, which was the culmination of human philosophy. This thinking, or similar strands, were to be met with in all literature courses through my college years. The only time you could get away from existentialism was if you copped hard to Marxism. "The Marxist views in Chaucer, Marxism, the proletariat, and Piers Plowman, A Marxist examination of JANE EYRE was the ONLY way you could avoid having to write yet another paper on existentialist view of all these. And of course the only contemporary lit we read was yet more of this view.

[recessional]

:points up: What Sartorias said.

Also just the general sense that only that kind of literature HAD ANY VALUE, so of course you wanted kids to read literature With Value, so it had to be that kind of literature, and the other shit would Rot Children's Brains (because it was not Valuable Literature). People who were in The Educated Classes (etc) really and truly believed this, and really and truly believed that if you let kids read "escapist" fiction (or even adults!) you were destroying their minds.

That's basically the mentality through most of the mid-century, in terms of the people who controlled both publishing and libraries (which is where a lot of the awards drew their committees) and universities and so on, held without any irony at all.

[pauraque]

Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

Maybe in part because when you debunk things no one above the age of 12 believes in anyway, you don't get any pushback?

Something I always found unappealing about many books of this type is how terribly safe they are. The author isn't pushing any boundaries, they're just waving the idea of boundary-pushing around and then retreating safely back into the mundane world. When I was a kid I found books like, say, A Wrinkle In Time much more engaging because they actually challenged me to imagine weird and wonderful things outside my own experience. It takes courage to write a book like that, because you're asking people to take the fantasy seriously, at least for the duration of the book, and you're taking the risk that they'll find it too silly or unbelievable. Whereas if you write a book with the message "There is actually no magic" you're not risking anything at all because everyone already knows and agrees with that.

[minoanmiss]

Word.

[cahn]

Huh, I never classified Terabithia as one of these books, despite the Newbery!Tragedy, because Jesse returns to the magic at the end, and introduces May Belle to Terabithia, so the "wiser" part of it is actually an understanding that magic (or even "magic," or even the idea of magic) is important, even in the face of tragedy.

(Though I, uh, kind of feel strongly about this book, so I may not be the most unbiased judge of this :) )

[ejmam]

Jinx! (see my comment below yours)

[ejmam]

I don't really think of Bridge to Terabithia as a variant along these lines, because I remember the ending being that the magic/imagination is real and worth all the pain, not that whatshername died because she believed in her imagination. That's why it ends with the boy taking his sister to Terabithia.

I had also thought the others ones were using Magic as a metaphor for the belief that people were mostly basically decent, which only innocent kids would believe and they needed to wisen up and realize that everyone was a jerk and the whole world mostly sucks. Which is different from the way real fantasy books are sort of a metaphor for the idea that Dragons in life exist but you (maybe with the help of your friends and also common decency) can struggle against them.

[wpadmirer]

I don't understand those books either. It's like they feel a need to take imagination away from children. None of this shit is real, so get over it and look at the real world. WTF?!

[recessional]

Genuine answer to why it stopped, at least part of it: the kids that were forced to read those books and mostly hated them finished growing up into writers and - crucially - public librarians and we fucking hate them and stopped giving them awards or buying them.

Actually mostly GenX did this, rather than Millennials (only a few elder Millennials my age actually had to suffer the Newberry Bleakness), but it was . . . emphatic. GenX hated those books and GenX got onto the Newberry Committees and went "fuck this shit". :P (Listening to GenX librarians rant about this is a great time especially if you give them wine first. The younger-Milennials/Zennials will sometime be like "wait that was a thing?" and BOOM OFF GOES THE CURRENT HEAD OF YOUTH SERVICES!)


Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

Because at the time there was the assumption that the former led to the latter so that if you could Educate and Elevate the Children you would inoculate them against that other nonsense. That adults were around who believed that nonsense was proof that their brains were rotted by Crap when they were children.

[starlady]

Also crystal healing and conspiracy theories hadn't really been invented yet! Both are offshoots of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, which was both anti-science and anti-government. Obviously the big exception in conspiracy theories is antisemitic stuff like the protocols of Zion, which had been around for quite a while, but the invention of the national security state in this same period really goosed conspiracy theories, partly because many of them weren't wholly untrue in the era of Cointelpro and the like. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

[starlady]

This is an obvious statement but WWII, especially the Holocaust and the firebombings and nuclear bombings, did a real fucking number on everybody, and in intellectuals the response was very much a new cheerful variant on existentialism--the key text is probably Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. Kids had to be taught that magic wasn't real so that they could properly accept grim reality and soldier on despite it. You can kind of see this in the fact that it was The Last Battle that won the Carnegie; it's a pretty easy interpretation of that book that Narnia was a lie and the Christian afterlife is real. And of course the train crash for that extra dose of realism.

[recessional]

Mmmhm. The Dwarfs being the way they were was very much something those who pushed this whole mindset would have approved of, as well as the Ape's charlatanism.

Give it another few years and TLB would have been out of fashion for framing the Christian Afterlife as real, but.

[author_by_night]

Not really what you're talking about, but when I was reading/writing recaps for The Baby-Sitter's Club books (published in the 80's and 90's) I realized just how many books pushed the idea that Santa and the Easter Bunny weren't real. As if Ann M. Martin wanted to be CERTAIN that none of her (child!) readers believed in such foolishness. Of course, as one of those readers, I just rationalized that the author no longer believed because duh, she's a grown up. But as an adult, it seems so bizarre.

I also half believed in that stuff probably a bit longer than most kids do when deep down, I knew the truth. I was one of those kids who almost intentionally clueless, and you know what, it was fine.

So yeah, I don't know. It's weird, and if the trend has died, I'm glad.

[sheliak]

I think my childhood was at the tail-end of these books being published—meaning that there were rather a lot of them in the libraries for me to dodge. I developed a habit of reading the end first in part to avoid them. (They probably played a role in turning me off mundane fiction—them and the never-pretended-to-be-anything-else problem novels.)

[fox]

That wasn’t how I remembered Bridge to Terabithia at all, but having googled it I realize I was thinking of Tuck Everlasting, which I must have read about the same time (I think they were both assigned in my fifth-grade English class).

[ethelmay]

Would you class E.L. Konigsburg's Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth with these?

My mother actually wrote one book with magic where the editor got her to rewrite it with the magic not being real. I liked the first version better when I was a kid, but I now think the second turned out better (because the editor was right about the magic not being really integral to the story, and also because the rewrite meant she polished it more).

[rachelmanija]

Your mother is E. L. Konigsburg?!

[sovay]

Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death.

I didn't actually read many examples of this genre as opposed to actual children's fantasies which I read all over the place, but I am leaving these citations of Tolkien and Le Guin on the value of escapism in fantasy because it seems relevant. Tolkien was speaking in 1939, Le Guin in 1974. This branch of children's fiction just looks like a particularly decorated strain of the popular view they were both, in their different generations, pushing back against.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, Tolkien wrote a whole essay on this, "On Fairy-stories."

[princessofgeeks]

Unfortunately this is also the plot of The Egypt Game, one of my favorite books at age 12.I need to edit to explain that I was born in 1961.

And when I read the book I bleeped out the part about how magic wasn't real. The rest of it was what I glommed onto.

As another commenter noted, that was about the same era as "Jennifer, Hecate..."... I adored that book.

Harriet the Spy was another book I read at that age. Also the Prydain books were new when I was around age 10.

I'm not sure what happened to children's lit circa 1980. I missed all that. I was in the era of older trends. A wrinkle in Time was a new rec for me. I was 10 in 1971. FWIW.

Also I was lucky enough to read LeGuin's Earthsea books in real time, and I never missed a step at relating to Ged even as a girl. All the anti feminist stuff she later regretted went right past me.

I just inhaled all the stuff I loved and needed from that trilogy and shrugged off the rest.

I apparently was a child at a Turning Point but of course was OBLIVIOUS.

[ethelmay]

The Changeling (also Zilpha Keatley Snyder) has similar imaginative play, but I wouldn't say either that or The Egypt Game is down on magic. Snyder subsequently (as far as publishing order goes, anyway - not sure of the chronology of the writing) turned the girls' invented world from The Changeling into a fantasy trilogy. (I'm sure a lot of people here already know that.)

[movingfinger]

Scooby-Doo is part of this genre, isn't it?

[sholio]

I think what makes at least some difference with Scooby Doo is that it's scary/bad magic being maliciously used by unscrupulous adults to hoodwink people. So the message isn't "The world is drearier and less wonderful than you realized" but rather "The world is safer and less scary than you thought." I think a Newbery-esque book in which the child protagonist was terrorized by someone using fake ghosts and then rescued by their friends wouldn't have the same disillusioning feeling at all.

[lilacsigil]

I was the right age to read a lot of these (along with nuclear horror stories!) and I think they just sailed on past me leaving no trace, except that I got into fantasy for adults a lot sooner because kids' books were depressing! But I read every single book in the childrens' and teens' sections of the library in order to access the adult section, so I must have read at least some of these, but I don't remember a single one.

[anna_wing]

I am of that era too, but luckily being in a Commonwealth country I got Gerald Durrell and Diana Wynne Jones instead...

Morally Improving Literature is still around, it's just a matter of which ideology is being promoted in any particular book.

[sovay]

I am of that era too, but luckily being in a Commonwealth country I got Gerald Durrell and Diana Wynne Jones instead...

We had those too, fortunately! All of my formative Jones languishes in storage, but my childhood copy of The Amateur Naturalist (1982) is right in my office behind me. I am glad you dodged this particular bullet, nonetheless.

[jesuswasbatman]

Yes, as a UK person of late Gen X I don't think I encountered this at all as a child. Depressing UK children's lit at the time was heavily social realist with protagonists who were too ground down or streetwise to come up with elaborate fantasies. The closest I remember was a novel I read at school which had a heavy plot element about a Alien Big Cat on the moors near where the protagonist lived, but whether it existed or not was left ambiguous and it was more symbolic of the protagonist's inner "wildness" than anything else.

[legionseagle]

I think I was old enough to come in at the start of the dreary social commentary phase (Honor Arundel/Joan Lingard/later KM Peyton) but what I recall was there was still plenty of fantasy about but it got grimmer elements bolted on (eg A Game of Dark, the William Mayne one where the protag escapes into fantasies of attempting to kill a "Worm" which digests its prey in acid slime, to escape the looming conclusion that he's actually the son of the woman he regards as his sister, but it's entirely possible that his father remains the same person.)

[owlectomy]

My theory is that very few people are actually trying to warn children about the dangers of believing in Magic; they're just writing standard Resign Yourself To the Bleakness of Life in General stories that use magic as a hook (because otherwise they would just be standard Resign Yourself To the Bleakness of Life in General stories).

That, or magic is being used to represent art and creativity and imagination, so the message isn't really "magic isn't real" but "it's time to put away art and creativity and imagination and all other childish things and go work at the box factory." I don't entirely buy that as a theory, but it would explain why they haven't been getting published since 1996 - no one works at the box factory anymore, and children might need creativity and imagination to succeed in the knowledge economy.

[rachelmanija]

Ohh, the first theory makes so much sense!

If the second one is true, we should be in for a giant revival of "put away imagination and go work in the gig economy" at any moment now.

[asakiyume]

Wow, the discussion is fascinating! I think my instinct is to go along with whoever it was upthread who said it's about resigning yourself to grim realities and not trying to live in a dream world because that's as bad as drugs, yo!! That's the feeling I got from those books, anyway, when I was young. That believing in fairies or magic or whatever was basically like dropping acid and was going to de-equip you for Life.

[juushika]

This prompted me to reread Lisle's Afternoon of the Elves, which was the example of this trope from my childhood. And... it was actually pretty good?

In no small part because the magic of the elves becomes a flexible metaphor both for building one's own magic/escapism and for learning to celebrate repurposed litter, weeds, and other stand-ins for the unsightly and Other ... like Tragic Kid herself. The protagonist going on to adopt the elf village when the girls are separated and never quite disbelieving in the magic even though she's clearly now manufacturing it, and the village, all by herself all work for me. Like discussion of Bridge to Terabithia (which I also liked as a kid) in the comments, that's the take on this trope I find successful: magic as ambiguous and/or as emotionally real and valuable even when the gritty reality of plot takes center stage.

(That said, my childhood impressions of Afternoon of the Elves were all about the little fairy houses and not at all of the tragic reveals, so, like other commenters, I think that's how children approached and salvaged this trope.)

I still feel like there are remnants of this trope, but all the examples I can think of are YA and all of them are along the lines of "is magic real and/or is it the product of a troubled mind," see: vampire and/or psychosis in Klein's The Moth Diaries (2002), parallel world/portal fantasy or psychosis in Ancrum's The Wicker King (2017). There's actually fair bit of crossover in the resurgence of portal fantasy and its trope inversions, ex. the was it suicide or was she just going back to the portal world? ending of Weymouth's The Light Between Worlds (2018). Taking a serious, psychological approach to post-portal experience frequently hinges the same elements--magic as escapism; is magic real??--as the elves aren't real MG trope, except that the doubt is externally imposed or problematically internalized. I don't know if that's the readers of this trope grown up and interrogating/reapplying it or if it's just a more nuanced and interesting progression of the same concepts. I do know that I dig the approach.

I love a good straight up fantasy book, I read genre for the payoff of magic totally being real, esp. as a kid. But it also engages me as a reader to ask why I would want magic to be real, how far I would go to believe it, what would convince me of it, what I'm escaping into or from; they're interesting questions when they blur the boundary between the genre and myself. I don't think that's intent of the elves aren't real MG books were trying to do; I think I agree with owlectomy that they're "standard Resign Yourself To the Bleakness of Life in General stories that use magic as a hook." But Afternoon of the Elves still works for me, those YA variants def. work for me; there's a seed of potential there that I honestly don't mind.

[conuly]

I actually enjoy Afternoon too, and did as a kid. And I think you're right - the ending is improved, greatly, by the protagonist consciously rejecting grim reality, despite the conviction of literally everybody she knows, in order to build a new elf village.