The promise of unhappiness: Addressing fear, anxiety, death and grief in crossover books

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*Peer-reviewed book chapter for a book that did not go to publication *Images are taken from online sources in the public domain

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The Promise of Unhappiness: Addressing Fear, Anxiety, Death and Grief in Crossover Books Maija-Liisa Harju

When we had to put our old cat down a few years ago, it was very difficult for my

husband and I because she had been a member of our family for 17 years. It was harder still to

explain her sudden disappearance to our three-year-old daughter, whose life she had been

entirely a part of. So we came up with a story, a mantra of sorts that we repeated every day until

we all felt better about her loss. A year later, my daughter still returned to this tale whenever her

name was mentioned: “Where did Ella go?” she would ask, and then answer herself, “She was a

very old cat. She had to go away for a long rest. She was a good cat and we loved her very

much.” In this case, the stories that we told each other helped us move through these feelings, so

that today we are able to share memories of her, as we often do, without sadness.

Many people find that talking about death is a challenge, and this can be a particularly

daunting task when speaking with children. As part of a recent research project, I facilitated a

1 The Dead Bird (M. Wise Brown, Illus. R. Charlip, 1958): https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d5/ef/87/d5ef87a9e82b998063a8a4f57f5c9332.jpg

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small, intergenerational reading group to solicit reader reception to “crossover literature,” the

stories that both adults and children claim as their own (Beckett, 2009; Falconer, 2009; Harju,

2012). One of the key findings that emerged from our discussions was the participants’

compulsion to talk about their struggle with difficult themes, such as death, grief, and everyday

anxiety, both in the texts and in their real world experiences. These conversations revealed the

promise of unhappiness in human life, especially in childhood —a reality that counters

persisting adult constructions of Western childhood as a time characterized by innocence and

happiness (e.g. Jenks, 1996; James and Prout, 1997). Additionally, our talks suggested that

adults and young people could have meaningful and relatable conversations about death and

grief when they shared their responses to stories. These revelations identified the importance of

acknowledging death experiences in all life stages, and the ways that story-sharing can connect

generations.

In the following chapter, I consider the book talk that took place between myself, a

mother, and her eleven year-old daughter in response to the Neil Gaiman books Coraline (2002)

and The Graveyard Book (2008), and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series2 to illustrate the ways

that story-sharing may help intergenerational readers better understand both their story and real

world experiences of death, grief and anxiety3. I begin by discussing the presence of death in

young people’s lives and literature to highlight the importance of these experiences in youth. I

turn then, to a description of the research process to outline my methodology for “reading”

readers, and to set the scene for our talks. As I present the participants’ responses to texts, I use

2 Gaiman is an established cross-writer (booktrust, 2009; Beckett, 2009; Falconer, 2009) who produces stories in formats that have always drawn in a diverse audience (e.g. comics, graphic novels, adult novels, young adult novels, picture books and short films); Rowling’s reach as a crosswriter is indisputable (Beckett, 2009; Falconer, 2009; Harju, 2013) and is, arguably, the driving reason for a renewed interest in crossover books 3 It is important to note that I am speaking about general human apprehensions about death and grief experiences here. There are young people and adults, however, who struggle with serious and debilitating anxieties concerning death. While story-sharing may be useful in these instances, it may not help some readers to speak at length about death issues. In these cases, it would be prudent to consult with health professionals to know whether or not these kinds of conversations can aid readers managing clinical anxiety issues.

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critical theory, such as Sigmund Freud’s (1919) recognition of the uncanny, and Julia Kristeva’s

(1982) conception of abjection to facilitate interpretations of the transcripts. To conclude, I

conduct a ‘crossover’ analysis of our conversations, and highlight that while young people and

adults often share a continuum of fears, they articulate their responses in different ways that

demonstrate their particular, age-based knowledge of the world.

This study reflects a multidisciplinary approach to literary research that combines

knowledge from children’s literature studies, education, death studies, and childhood studies,

and methodologies (e.g. literary criticism, memory work, narrative inquiry) to provoke a greater

understanding of textual representations of death, grief and anxiety in young people’s literature,

and the ways that real readers respond to and make meaning of stories in the real world.

The Promise of Unhappiness: Death Experiences in Young People’s Lives

Most adults would rather not acknowledge that children face fear, anxiety, death and

grief in their early lives because it is easier to believe in “the promise of happiness” (Inglis,

1981) and the myth of childhood innocence (Rofes, 1985; Seibert and Drolet, 1993; Corr, 2004).

As a parent, I have found that I am no different, and would prefer to protect my child from

complex and painful emotions. And yet, scholars in death and grief studies remind us that even

[p]reschool children . . . experience death almost daily. Death is a natural part of their lives, just as it is for adults. Death experiences for young children include stepping on insects, wilting flowers, television deaths in cartoons, movies, dramas, and news reports, death of pets, and death of loved ones from siblings to grandparents. (Seibert and Drolet, 1993, pp. 13-15)

They advise that it may be increasingly necessary to initiate conversations about death issues

with children today, because their media exposure to global incidents of perplexing and violent

deaths is growing (Nicholson and Pearson, 2003). And, because there is no set age for

developing an awareness of one’s own mortality (a deeply unsettling experience), educators

suggest that adults try to create safe spaces for discussion about these things early on (Pyles,

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1988, p. 6). If we want to help children manage the reality of childhood, with all of its shadows,

we must acknowledge the unhappiness in their lives. It is also critical to remember that young

people require an ongoing commitment of support, for as they continue to develop (physically,

cognitively, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally) so too does their perspective on

unhappy experiences, and their ability to manage them (Doka, 1995, p. xi, xiii; Corr, 2004).

Literature can be an important tool here, for introducing young people to death as a reality of

life, to allow them to explore their feelings, and to validate their own death experiences.

“Ding dong bell! Puss is in the well”: Death in children’s literature. Throughout the

history of children’s literature, stories for children have often represented the presence of death

in children’s lives. In early oral storytelling traditions, such as nursery rhymes, folk and fairy

tales, and in religious stories aimed at a diverse audience of children and adults, death was a

familiar and constant theme (Butler, 1972; Demers and Moyles, 1982). Childhood games often

involved children playing out death scenes, such as carrying a “pocket full of posies” and

“falling down [dead]” for the rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” (a reference to the Black Plague),

and trying to avoid ‘the executioner’s chopping block’ of player’s arms for “Oranges and

Lemons” (Burton-Hill, 2015).

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Children also had a greater understanding of death as a natural part of life because their

experiences of it were more immediate. Infant and child mortality were higher and children

4 http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/710-ed-Wimborne-1.jpg

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could not escape being involved in death events because their siblings, parents, grandparents and

other close relations often died or were mourned in their homes (Butler, 1972; Mellor and

Shilling, 1993, p. 421). Later, when children and adults were divided as a literary audience, and

books for children were first produced in England and America at the end of the 17th century,

early tracts such as chapbooks and religious primers exploited children’s fear and knowledge of

death to ensure their religious devotion and their best behaviour (Butler, 1972, p. 104; Demers

and Moyles, 1982; Stallcup, 2002).

In contemporary children’s literature, there is a great diversity of stories produced for

young readers that deal with death and grieving, although these titles are not easily found in

one’s local bookstore (Corr, 2004, p. 339). North American children’s picture books most often

discuss death in relation to the natural world (e.g. Brown, 1958; Buscaglia, 1982), primarily

exploring the death of pets (e.g. Demas, 2004; Newman, 2004) and of grandparents (e.g.

dePaolo, 2000; Woodson, 2000). European picture books, alternatively, provide challenging

death narratives for young readers, addressing the death of children (Rosen, 2005), parents

(Jalonen, 2005), and philosophically examine death as a natural part of life (e.g. Stalfelt, 2002;

Erlbruch, 2007). For readers in their teens, international young adult fiction predictably tackles

more complex and detailed stories about death and grief.

While North American adolescent fiction continues to represent realistic death experiences

contextualized by social issues5 (e.g. Woodson, 2006; Green, 2012), it is also increasingly

turning to the fantastic. Today, vampire (Meyers, 2005), werewolf (Stiefvater, 2009), zombie

(Ryan, 2009) and dystopic narratives (Collins, 2008) proliferate, obscuring and glamourising

death, which may provide young readers with an alternate way to explore death issues at a

5 This follows the development of death as a popular theme in North American adolescent fiction of the 1960s, which introduced frank discussions of critical social problems such as youth gang violence, drug abuse, and class tensions (Moore and Mae, 1987, p. 52).

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distance from their real world experiences (DeMarco, 1997; Bodart, 2012).6 Scholars suggest

that when young people share and ‘perform’ their identification with stories (Harju, 2012), they

are able to make greater meaning of death narratives together. Following their counterparts in

the eighteenth century, children today continue to act out death and grief experiences in their

free play (Rochlin, 1967;Opie & Opie, 1969). In a similar fashion, teens are able to explore

death and mortality when they affiliate with the literary (e.g. Gaiman, 1989-2015) and lyrical

narratives (e.g. goth rock) of death subcultures7.

Though young people may often come to better understand death, grief and anxiety

together, it remains difficult for them to talk about their fears and anxieties with adults (Rofes,

1985). Charles Corr (2004) suggests that initiating conversation through story-sharing is one

way that young people and adults may collectively counter the existential angst and confusion

that death experiences may inspire. And though discussing any kind of narrative can potentially

prompt conversation between readers, I have suggested elsewhere (Harju, 2009; 2012) that

crossover books and cross-reading (a practice in which readers cross age-based readership

distinctions to access stories) may be particularly effective for encouraging meaningful and

reflective discussions between intergenerational readers. Because crossover narratives reflect

human preoccupations with complex themes that engage a diverse readership (e.g. such as

death, time, and identity), and address readers of all ages equally (Harju, 2012), they can prompt

6 This is a necessarily brief and incomplete summary of the tradition of death narratives in children’s literature. As James (2008) has identified, there is a dearth of scholarship in the field on this topic. However, please see Butler (1972), Corr (2004) and James (2008) for more insight. 7 The Goth subculture, for example, has been embraced by young adults, and is characterized by the aesthetics (death, horror, romance) and narratives of 19th and 20th century Gothic fiction, gothic fashion, and gothic rock music (Hodkinson, 2002).

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deeper, and more connected conversations between generations (Eeds and Wells, 1989, p. 5).8 In

the following section, I articulate the particular ways that one intergenerational book group

experienced this process by sharing their responses to crossover books.

Reading Readers in a Book Talk Study

The purpose of this research project was to better understand the “lived through

experience” (Rosenblatt, 1938/1995, p. 33) of a reading event by engaging directly with readers.

My theoretical approach was additionally informed by individualist reader response theory

(Holland, 1975; Fish, 1980), which recognizes that actual readers (as opposed to an author’s

implied readers) understand texts by interpreting stories in individual ways based on their own

life experiences. Readers then contribute this knowledge to their culturally constructed

interpretive community when they share stories with others (Fish, 1980), a process that allows

them to extend their engagement with story worlds and deepen their understanding of the

narrative (Eeds and Wells, 1989; Chambers, 1996; Sumara, 2002). As Kooy (2003) suggests,

“participating in talk around texts offers readers identity and membership in a community. It is a

shared adventure” (p. 141). The research from the following reading group study provides real

world examples of reading as a personal and social practice, and demonstrates how readers

make literary meaning of texts through this shared exchange of both individual and communal

knowledge (Nencini, 2009).

To better “read” a group cross-reading event for this project, I conducted a small,

intergenerational case study of a reading group. I undertook qualitative research, collecting data

by audio-taping and transcribing our “book talks”, photographing reading artifacts and spaces

8 For further explanation concerning the complexities of crossover literature and cross-reading practice please see Beckett (2009), Falconer (2009), and Harju (2012).

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(Riggins, 1994), and soliciting reader responses using memory work (Strong-Wilson, 2006) and

narrative inquiry activities (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990). I then analyzed the data

thematically, drawing out dominant motifs such as fear, death, grief, and anxiety, and employed

critical theory (e.g. Freud, 1919; Lewis, 1966/2002; Bettelheim 1975/1989; Kristeva, 1982) to

contextualize and interpret participants’ reading responses. In using this mixed methods

approach to literary research, I intended to demonstrate how reader response research could be

used to complement traditional methods in literary criticism in order to gain a more holistic

understanding of the role of literature in our lives.

Choosing Readers and Books. In this study, I did not seek to represent the experiences of

all cross-readers in conversation, but meant to create an intimate picture of a small reading

group. The book club was comprised of myself as participant-observer, “Molly” a mother

(approx. 40 yrs old) and “Ginny”, her pre-teen daughter.9 Molly was a PhD candidate and early

childhood education specialist, and Ginny was a bright and engaging 11 year-old who was just

trying to survive the drama of high school. Over a four-month period in the Fall of 2009 we met

to talk about books informally, over tea and sweets as we lounged in the comfort of Molly and

Ginny’s living room in Montreal, Canada.

Molly chose two Gaiman books to read with Ginny because she was a fan of the author,

and because The Graveyard Book (Gaiman, 2008) had just won the Newberry Award (Book

talk, November 8, 2009). The Graveyard Book (Gaiman, 2008) is the story of Nobody (Bod)

Owens, a boy orphaned at infancy when his parents are brutally murdered, who is adopted and

9 These names are pseudonyms chosen by the research participants to protect their anonymity and reflect their affiliation with characters from the Harry Potter series.

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raised by a vampire and a community of ghosts in a neighbouring graveyard. Bod learns and

grows in this liminal space, under constant threat of meeting the same fate as his parents.

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Molly’s second choice Coraline (2002) is similarly macabre, detailing a young girl’s

uncanny adventure in an “Other World,” that she enters through a hidden door in her new house.

In this alternate reality, things seem better because Coraline’s parents are more attentive and her

life is more exciting, but the horror of the place quickly becomes apparent. Molly suggested that

although she was a little worried the stories might be a bit “dark” for Ginny, her desire to share

Gaiman’s stories trumped her concern (November 22, 2009). Our conversation about both books

soon reminded us that readers of all ages encounter the dark side of human experience, though

they articulate their knowledge of this space in varying ways.

Sharing Crossover Fears

Although fears and anxieties manifest in night terrors and nightmares in our early years,

they are not exclusive to childhood; adults must also subvert or learn to address horror (Freud,

1919; Mack, 1965; Harju, 2012). One of the ways we manage fears is by facing them through

10 The Graveyard Book (N. Gaiman, Illus. D. McKean, 2008): http://lh3.ggpht.com/__dzIty4-hYI/SQjzkVVRlCI/AAAAAAAAA2o/E2hX3Wcc5EA/s400/graveyardbook5.jpg

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story encounters (Bettelheim, 1975/1989; Nodelman, 1997; Nicholson and Pearson, 2003) when

we choose to read and re-read classic (e.g. Dracula [Stoker, 1897], Frankenstein [Shelley, 1818])

and contemporary tales of terror (e.g. The Monstrumologist [Yancey, 2009-2013]; Doctor Sleep

[King, 2013]. That readers keep reaching for scary stories throughout their lives demonstrates a

continuing fascination with these themes. It is not just adults that go looking for ghosts; even

children want to be a little frightened (Lewis, 1966/2002 p. 31). Fear is a conflicting emotion—it

rankles, but also makes us feel a little more alive.

Encountering the uncanny. Freud (1919) suggested that there are many fears that cross

over age boundaries, chasing us from child into adulthood. In our book talk, a shared fear of the

unheimlich, or uncanny—an anxiety from the doubt whether an “apparently animate being is

really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate” (Jentsch cited

in Freud, 1919, p. 5)—soon became evident. Ginny, for example, revealed a lifelong anxiety of

the uncanny through her fears of “dead bodies coming to life . . . dolls talking . . . bringing back

the dead, and statues of any kind” (Book talk transcript, November 22, 2009). The three of us

correlated these childhood fears with her adolescent response to the ‘inferi’ in Harry Potter—her

deep abhorrence of the “corpses, and dead bodies that have been bewitched to do a Dark wizard's

bidding” (Rowling, 2005, pp. 59 – 80). Although Ginny and I didn’t have that particular response

to Harry Potter, we did share an unheimlich horror of the hideous Other Mother in Gaimen’s

Coraline (Book talk transcript, November 22, 2009).

In Gaiman’s story, Coraline must make a dreadful choice. If she wants to stay in the

idealized Other World, she must permit the Other Mother to replace her eyes with giant black

buttons11.

11 Coincidentally, in 2010 an American children’s toy brand, Lalaloopsy emerged featuring rag doll characters with equally disturbing black button eyes that were made (minimally) friendlier with the inclusion of eyelashes. That they became popular may also point to children’s ongoing attraction to the uncanny.

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Molly, Ginny and I were equally aghast at the thought of having someone pluck out our eyes

and sew buttons onto our heads, despite the fact that Molly and I are both adults who should

know better. Our anxiety about the button eyes was prompted by both a physical repulsion and

a metaphysical disquiet with the sacrifices one had to make in the Other World in order to gain

the button eyes:

Molly: So I think for those other three children, for whom the ghosts remain, I think that the other mother was able to portray for them whatever they wanted to see, long enough for them to be trapped as well. They serve as kind of Greek chorus behind Coraline saying, ‘She’s lying to you. This is what she does, she strips away your name, she strips away- Ginny: [jumping in] Your heart, your breath… Molly: Your heart, your eyes, she takes everything. Yes, they do say she takes your breath… Ginny: She takes your soul… well, I think at first for the button eyes she takes your eyes first, then your soul, then your heart, then your breath. Molly: And then you die because you forget who you are. Maija: Yikes. Ginny: Yeah. Molly: Again, it is the awareness of death that spooks. The idea that you lose your identity and then your life in order to remain in this perfect, but despairing version of the world.

(Book talk transcript, November 22, 2009) 12 Coraline (N.Gaiman, Illus.D.McKean, 2009): http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/c/c2/Dave-mckean-coraline-the-other-mother.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120809202452

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Molly’s and my revulsion of the Other Mother’s button eyes would not have surprised Freud,

who had already identified that damaging or losing one’s eyes was a “terrible fear of childhood”

that adults often maintain (1919, p. 7). In his prevailing essay on the uncanny, Freud extensively

analyzed ‘eye’ anxieties in relation to E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sand-man, a tale of:

a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with. (1919, p. 5)

In his analysis, Freud suggested that by reading The Sand-man to children at bedtime, with the

intention of “frighten[ing] children into submission” (Stallcup, 2002, p. 126), adults re-lived

their own unheimlich fear, and passed it on to their young listeners. In this way, literature was

used to share fears, intergenerationally, to no good end. Although I do not encourage adults to

employ this tactic today, I do propose there is a time, place and purpose in reading scary stories

together. Discussing Gaiman’s contemporary contributions to a tradition of unheimlich horror

stories certainly enabled Molly, Ginny and I to explore the ways, both somatic and cerebral, that

we respond to and manage our fears.

Dancing the Danse Macabre. In a discussion about an event called ‘The Danse Macabre’

in The Graveyard Book, Molly, Ginny and I mulled over another complex response to death and

grieving that seemed to cross age barriers: the cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) in

knowing and “not knowing” about Death.

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In chapter five, the spirits of the graveyard where Bod lives descend upon the town to take

part in a celebratory dance with the living called the Macabray, in which:

Molly: everybody comes together and living and dead are dancing, and then the living forget, immediately, but the dead don’t forget, they just don’t talk about it. I think at one point doesn’t Josiah say it would be

embarrassing for them to remember? You know, we don’t want to embarrass them by reminding them that they were dancing with us. Ginny: Bod remembers it, but he doesn’t talk about it. Molly: Which is another interesting thing… the remembering, but not talking about it. Maija: But that’s often what happens with people, with death, anyway. People don’t like to talk about those experiences, I don’t really know why… maybe just because we still don’t know how to deal with them.

(Book talk transcript, December 13, 2009) Freud rationalized that humans cannot possibly grasp the notion of their own mortality because

their unconscious “has no use” for the knowledge of its own demise (1919, p. 13). In her

discussion of abjection, Kristeva (1982) also attempted to describe this acceptance and non-

acceptance of the reality of death as a visceral response grounded in the body that “draws [us]

towards a place where meaning collapses” (p. 2). Bataille (1992/1973) best articulates how the

knowledge and fear of death’s constancy:

13 http://totentanz.free.fr/princes10.jpg

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opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me. (p. 303)

In social psychology, the term mortality salience is used to describe these feelings of fear, and

the human struggle to avoid death even though one knows that ultimately those actions are futile

(Greenberg, Pyszcznski and Solomon, 1986). According to the principles of terror management

theory, we are constantly trying to forget that death is forever with because we cannot truly

accept the inevitability of our own deaths (Greenberg, Pyszcznski and Solomon, 1986; Mellor

and Shilling, 1993). In the danse macabre of The Graveyard Book, Gaiman provides a vivid and

affecting analogy that seeks to help readers of all ages better understand this complex and

paralyzing paradox.

I include these two examples of crossover fears, a shared unease with unheimlich horror

and the disquiet in knowing and ‘not knowing’ of death’s presence in our lives to illustrate the

ways that Molly, Ginny and I reported similar responses to Gaiman’s texts. As we engaged in

complicated conversation around the books, our talk also highlighted some critical differences in

how we, as readers of different ages, responded to fear.

“Men Fear Death as Children Fear to go in the Dark”14

A continuum of interest in fearful things doesn’t mean that adults and young people have

the same fears, or that they react to fear in the same way. As the transcripts of our books talks

reveal, Molly and Ginny often expressed their fears differently. When Ginny detailed a general

dread of dead bodies and graveyards: “only because I think a hand will grab up and drag me

down to the earth-sucking darkness of the ground and then the zombies, or whoever, will eat my

flesh,” her anxiety stemmed from her imagination—a fantasy of terrible possibilities (Book talk,

November 8, 2009). Molly’s apprehensions, alternatively, were grounded in parental fears of the

14 Bacon, Of Death, 1624/2010.

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wider world, and her experiences as an educator of small children who sometimes came from

difficult domestic situations and who had had to contend with real life ‘monsters’. In the

following excerpt from our conversation, Molly identified the qualities in the Harry Potter books

that made her most uneasy:

Molly: I think that idea of Tom Riddle as a child, having essentially been abandoned… Ginny: He’s kind of like Harry… Molly: Well, I mean, yes, he’s kind of like Harry, but I’ve worked with children in some ways that are like that… children who have been tossed aside, and it does reflect a basic lack of empathy, and they do have to look after themselves. And I find the making of the Voldemort, one, very realistic and two, that is what’s scary for me as

an adult, I know there are children experiencing quasi- similar things, that this is what happens, they grow up and become non-empathetic sociopaths…

Ginny: I think Voldemort is crazy, he [unintelligible] his soul in seven parts! Maija: So it’s the realistic stuff that resonates with you as an adult, not the supernatural… do you get scared by supernatural stuff? Or for example, the whole thing of the soul-splitting really alarmed me, I think that really freaked me out… it’s not supernatural but it’s something crazy I was trying to get my brain around that sounded really horrifying. You know, Voldemort putting pieces of his soul in different places. Molly: Certainly, reading to her, the issues of a child losing his parents, all of those parental fears wrapped up in that, but reading that to your child, worrying that they’re going to worry that you’re going to die, it’s not really a conversation that you want to have and you’re just trying to read a light book, and then come on, now, now you’re into mortality… Maija: Yes, but that’s true… I don’t know if Harry Potter is light reading, anyway, but it could happen reading anything, and I think that I was very afraid, at some point, of my parents dying, and that didn’t come from a book. I think that’s relatively normal… Molly: Yeah, it’s the awareness that things don’t last and you have no control over other circumstances in the world.

(Book talk transcript, November 8, 2009) Though Molly and I both pointed to Voldemort (a.k.a. Tom Riddle, the series’ ultimate villain)

and the soul-sucking Dementors as the key sources of horror for us in this book discussion,

Ginny seemed to be unaffected by both. She told us that while she was a bit afraid of Voldemort

“at the beginning” she decided that ultimately he was “not scary” because he didn’t have a heart

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(Book talk, November 8, 2009). When I later asked her to clarify what she had meant, Ginny

suggested that because Voldemort literally didn’t have a heart she felt that he was “not real” and

“less human.” She found, therefore, that it was not easy to relate to or even fear him, because

“he felt so distant and weird” (personal communication, February 25, 2012).

In a separate, private discussion that Molly and I had about Ginny’s response, we debated

whether or not her reaction reflected a difference in generational experience, for while Molly’s

responses to Voldemort stemmed from a mature knowledge of dangerous adults, Ginny implied

that she had not yet encountered a person who was so inhuman. Molly remarked that part of her

anxiety about the character of Voldemort in Harry Potter came from “completely relating” to

his choice to disconnect emotionally from other people, noting: “The best villains are the ones

that you can almost understand” which is, one might deduce, a very ‘adult’ conception (personal

communication, November 26, 2011). However, while it is possible that my and Molly’s fear of

Voldemort sprang from our adult understanding of the dark side of human nature, it is important

to acknowledge that children other than Ginny have known and do know frightening adults,

therefore their responses to Voldermort might be quite different than hers. I highlight here, the

individual nature of reader responses and the importance, therefore, of grounding a reader’s

engagement with a text in their particular experience (Rosenblatt, 1995/1938; Fish, 1980;

Nancini, 2009).

In our book discussions of Gaiman’s work, it was not only that Molly and Ginny revealed

distinct fears, but that they also articulated their fears differently. For example, Molly’s fear

responses in our discussions reflected a cerebral conception of horror that was informed by

memory and experience. In contrast, Ginny often responded to organic, sensuous story details:

She felt “creeped out” by the Other Mother’s button eyes and was “grossed out” by her bug-

eating in Coraline (Book talk, November 22, 2009). At a point in the discussion when we were

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talking about telling scary stories, Ginny described her terror of the deep and “complete

darkness” that surrounded her and her bunkmates when they held scary story sessions in a cabin

at ‘sleep away camp’ in the summer (Book talk, November 8, 2009). Her reflections reminded

me of the way C.S. Lewis (1955/1960) articulated his childhood phobia of insects—locating his

fear in their works, “Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all

suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism” (p.3). As a

child, my greatest fear was of spiders, and if asked, I would have simply put my fear down to

their wiggly legs. This way of describing fear, by pinpointing the tactile, sensory details that

disturb, reflects an early, embodied way of knowing the world that we understand most

completely in childhood (Johnson, 2007; Rathunde, 2009). Adult anxieties, alternatively, seem

to swell from the broader associations we make to monstrous things.

Our book talk about The Graveyard Book, Coraline, and Harry Potter revealed many

ways that Molly, Ginny and I both shared and differed in our fear responses. Though sharing our

personal horrors didn’t necessarily dispel them, it was comforting to know that others were

plagued by similar anxieties, and it helped to talk about the different strategies we had for

managing our fears. Some of our discussions, for example, prompted Ginny to talk about how

reading had helped her deal with a very real terror at school. Defence Against the Dark Arts

Over the course of our book talk sessions, Ginny often spoke of the ways that she was

trying to manage confrontations with her personal ‘Draco Malfoy’ (a reference to Harry Potter’s

bully), a girl who had been tormenting her through three years of elementary school. While her

real world strategy was limited to ignoring and avoiding this bully, Ginny suggested that reading

provided her with a far more imaginative and satisfying way of dealing with the problem. In a

18

discussion about The Graveyard Book, I was encouraged to ask:

Maija: What did you think about the way he dealt with those bullies, Ginny? Ginny: I thought it was cool. Maija; [laughing] Maybe if you could fade and take them to the graveyard and scare them silly you’d be good, too. Ginny: Or completely destroy them. Maija: Destroy them! With one of your magical potions? Ginny: Yeah.

(Book talk transcript, November 8, 2009) In this excerpt, Ginny and I delighted in a passage in which Bod uses his powers of invisibility

to taunt his schoolyard tormentors. We also discussed the satisfaction that spell-casting affords

bullied young wizards in the Harry Potter books. In a separate discussion, Molly revealed other

instances where fantasy play through reading had helped Ginny cope with bullying experiences,

relating how Ginny had claimed a sense of empowerment from reading about the kids who have

both special needs and special abilities in the Percy Jackson books (e.g. Riordan, 2005) (Book

talk, December 13, 2009), and had imagined that she was a member of the ‘Assassins Academy’

(a school for assassins) in The Graveyard Book (Gaiman, 2002).

Imagining a supernatural means of responding to bullies may not be realistic, but it can be

deeply gratifying. Even though Ginny’s story experiences may not have provided concrete

resolutions to her problems with her peers, they did act as important talismans for her,

reminding her of her own strengths and ability to address threats in the real world (Jones, 2002).

Talking about bullying in a context of ‘story’ seemed to make it safer for Ginny to broach a

discussion of her real world unhappiness with us, an important point, since too often young

people are afraid to talk about these trials with adults, and adults are too afraid to ask about them

(Derry, 2005; Wiseman, 2009).

It may be that adults choose not to discuss death, grief, anxiety and fearful things with

young people, because they feel that they cannot provide enough answers to counter these

shadows. Molly grappled with the issue in following reflection:

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I think that adults live too much in their own fears and don’t let [children] experience whatever they’re going to get out of [difficult trials]. But just because I’m afraid of questions about death or loss, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable [for Ginny to talk about these things]. [T]rying to pretend that [dark] things don’t exist is useless. Because all it does is reassure the child that the adult isn’t telling the truth and so [the child might say] why should I trust you when you’re blatantly lying to me about what’s going on, or what really is scary?

(Book talk transcript, November 8, 2009) Richard Adams has similarly insisted that adults “must at all costs tell the truth to children, not

so much about mere physical pain and fear, but about the really unanswerable things […] ‘the

essential grimness of the human situation’” (cited in Hunt, 2005, p. 560). And, while I do not

mean to suggest here, that having discussions about the ‘promise of unhappiness’ in life—of

experiencing death, grief, anxiety or fear—is an easy thing, it is necessary for both adults and

children. Even if we cannot completely dispel darkness from human experience, we can at least

find strength and solace with others against it.

This is what seemed to occur, in any case, both during the research process and when

conference participants discussed this study and its outcomes during my talk at the Born Happy:

Happiness, Childhood and Children’s Literature proceedings. By acknowledging and critically

examining the prevailing expectation of happiness in human life through discussions about

literature—not only for children but for adults, too—participants were afforded the opportunity

to share failings and fears and find companionship in these concerns.

In this chapter, I have emphasized how book-sharing between one group of real readers

allowed them to make sense of life’s darker themes, and have identified the ways that crossover

literature, in particular, can create a “circle of companionship” (p. 12) that extends beyond age

barriers to make intergenerational connections possible. The research approach in this work, a

combination of distinct traditions in literary study (e.g. critical theory and reader reception), is

also significant as it seeks to illustrate how real readers come to make sense of stories through

their real world experiences.

20

Roger Sell (2002) proposed that humans seek out stories because, above all, “literature

gives its readers the experience—not just an illusion—of being not alone in the world” (p. 12).

In our grand conversations together, crossover books provided Molly, Ginny and I with safe

harbour against the monsters that lurk and the shadows that linger.

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