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

[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.

[kathmandu]

Interesting context.

I don't have any special knowledge here, but the 'magic isn't real' books felt to me like the same underlying message as Old Yeller and Bridge to Terabithia and all the 'problem' novels: The world is sad, and big problems exist, and you can't fix them. Parents die, friends die, pets die; you cannot save them. Alcoholism and bullying and poverty happen, and you cannot fix them. You can't even escape them: A Day No Pigs Would Die, and Save Queen of Sheba, and some others, had the message that all your efforts will not get you out of the socioeconomic slot you were born into.

They all felt like the main point was 'the world is grim and you should give up hope now'.
I was reading enough later to not make the connection to WWII.