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

[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)

[recessional]

Preamble: MMV, I am not saying your reaction/take is WRONG, just sharing mine.

For me as a child Terabithia was the same as the others because the position of the book, of the narrative, was still that This Was Make Believe, and also had (for me) this strong undercurrent that even if ~*the idea of magic*~ was maybe important, that Make Believe was important, it was important ~*for kids*~, and had the undercurrent that it was potentially dangerous, and mostly just made me feel judged and condescended to.

Which actually was what put me off it much more than the actual tragedy: its framing of "the magic" felt belittling to me, like oh of course this isn't REAL. (Mind I was already highly sensitized to this feeling by both other books and real-life interactions! But yeah.)

[marycatelli]

I read a book called The Changeling when I was a child where the heroine's friend talked about how she was a changeling and not really born to her horrible family. They had a big fight near the climax where she called it all a lie.

But at the end, she sends her a letter and says that she was lying when she called it a lie.

[queenbookwench]

Yes!

This is by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, and is one of the few "disillusionment-with-magic-as -a-metaphor-for-growing-up" books that I _do_ like, perhaps because Snyder clearly did _not_ disdain fantasy, and actually wrote quite a bit of it. In fact, she later wrote a whole trilogy of fantasy/sf novels based on the world the girls come up with in The Changeling, and I actually read those _first_, before I ever came across The Changeling.

[asakiyume]

I loved that book for many reasons, but the fact that the author included the "I was wrong; I was actually a changeling after all, and so might you be" part was one.

[mrissa]

I came in specifically to make this point if no one else had, so thanks.