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

[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.

[green_knight]

This matches my Mum's research on the topic (she was a litcritter) which I only heard of second-hand. (She could not get into Fantasy at all but had no objections to me reading it). Her research was on German children's literature, but the pattern is _exactly_ the same: children's books must be educational, and none of that silly escapism.

[recessional]

Escapism rots the brain and makes you credulous and stupid! And this will end in RUIN! It's BAD and MORALLY SUSPECT and definitely intellectually corrupting.

[marycatelli]

If we were all on board ship and there was trouble among the stewards, I can just conceive their chief spokesman looking with disfavor on anyone who stole away from the fierce debates in the saloon or pantry to take a breather on deck. For up there, he would taste the salt, he would see the vastness of the water, he would remember that the ship had a whither and a whence. He would remember things like fog, storms, and ice. What had seemed, in the hot, lighted rooms down below to be merely the scene for a political crisis, would appear once more as a tiny egg-shell moving rapidly through an immense darkness over an element in which man cannot live. It would not necessarily change his convictions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute down below, but it would probably show them in a new light. It could hardly fail to remind him that the stewards were taking for granted hopes more momentous than that of a rise in pay, and the passengers forgetting dangers more serious than that of having to cook and serve their own meals. Stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us.

― C.S. Lewis

[rachelmanija]

Was it too controversial to directly say that religion wasn't real, and instead the idea was that magic = religion? It never occurred to me that magic and religion had anything to do with each other - the only books I read that had religious themes at all, whether pro or anti, were all fantasies.

[sartorias]

I think it was considered to be controversial--the thinking, at least in publishing, was colored by textbooks being published by this conglomerate in Texas at the time. So there was this sense of tiptoeing around certain subjects, and of course texts were definitely still cram packed with patriotism and whites only stuff at that time.

But that's me talking, not the prof. There was this odd atmosphere beginning around the mid-sixties and going on through the mid-seventies when I was in high school wherein teachers/profs would take on this tone that their words were daring, or shocking, or that the Religious Police were going to leap out of the woodwork and force them into remedial Sunday school for their astounding words. . . except they *all* talked that way. I remember being seventeen or so, and thinking in my literature class, oh here comes the big lecture on existentialism again and tuning out.

By the time I got to grad school in the early/mid seventies, some of us were using Marxism as a way around the "yet again" hammer. It was the only other acceptable approach. In fact, I fell in with a bunch of Marxists (who incidentally were the most materialistic people I ever knew) because of this. (I also remember that American Marxism was not nearly as crazy-eyed fervent as German Marxism, as I experienced in Germany and Austria, the young people my age in a reactionary swing of the pendulum from their parents, who grew up during WW II, but that I guess is a whole nother ball of wax)

Oh yeah, the Marxists didn't want me talking abut fantasy at all, and I even had to keep my fantasy and sf in the bedroom, whereas it was okay to have history and German Lit books out for all to see. It was like I had to hide my horrible, degrading habit.

[mrissa]

Data point: a friend's 4yo who is being raised by agnostics but with a Christian grandmother opined this week "I bet Grandma believes in that," when some werewolves came on his cartoon, because his 4yo theory is that Grandma believes in supernatural stuff and he does not and Mom and Dad are somewhere in the middle. His parents are working with him on this because approaching other people with the idea that supernatural entities and events are an all or nothing proposition is not a very good idea.