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How young is too young for a child to get pierced? Join the argument in Table Talk's Mothers area

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R E C E N T L Y

Spice of Life
By Chitra B. Divakaruni
Relearning life through your kids
(12/11/97)

Drama Queen for a Day
'Tis the season for parenting horror tales
(12/10/97)

Porno for rugrats?
By Dawn MacKeen
Should you kiddie proof your computer?
(12/09/97)

Outing your mom
By Kate Moses
The recent spate of mad mother memoirs
(12/08/97)

Boyfriend-In-A-Box
By Lori Leibovich
Men: Can't live with 'em, can't stuff 'em in a drawer
(12/05/97)

BROWSE THE
MOTHERS ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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In the world of grown-up literature, heroes don't just sit there, they do things. That's the point of being a hero. If you don't prove your stuff, whether by stopping the tanker before it spills oil all over the penguins or just by shooting tigers, you're probably not a hero at all -- merely a protagonist. But safe, well-cared-for children don't have those kinds of adventures. Even more than adults, who could perfectly well become skydiving instructors, battlefield physicians or preschool teachers if they really crave action, children have few real world outlets for their questing impulses.

That's why, in children's literature, the Nancy Drews and Jim Hawkinses are joined by an oddly passive breed of heroes: the toys. Like children, toys rely on people much larger than themselves to meet their basic needs, to understand them and to pay them the attention that brings them to life. Like children, they're allowed a limited scope of action in the world: When someone decides it's bedtime, off to bed they go. And like children, they're vulnerable to being ignored or roughly treated; there's not much they can do to protect themselves from abuse or neglect.

These similarities in their situations make toys easy for children to identify with. But since every kid is a grown-up to her teddy bear, stories about toys can also allow children to identify with adults, giving them a chance to check out what it feels like to belong to the larger world. And toys make natural imaginary heroes, because that's their job in children's actual lives.

In some toy stories, such as Hans Christian Andersen's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," the heroes stay in role as inanimates, unable to move or speak on their own. Their inability to make themselves recognized often frustrates them. Though Andersen's eponymous soldier goes on a long, dangerous journey, for example, not a step of it is due to his agency. He gets knocked from a window, swept into a gutter, swallowed by a fish, hauled from the water, miraculously restored to his original family by the cook and ends his life when a little boy -- his rightful protector -- throws him in the fire for "no reason at all."

By nature unswerving and steadfast (the Danish word has the postural connotations of our word "upright"), the tin soldier takes pride in his refusal to complain or fight against his fate. After he tumbles from the window, Andersen tells us, "the maid and the small boy went down at once to look for him, but although they came very near to treading on him, they still couldn't see him. If the tin soldier had shouted, 'Here I am!' they would have found him right enough, but he considered it wasn't done to cry out when he was in uniform." The idea that the soldier could choose to shout, of course, is a heart-wrenching piece of Andersen's signature irony. The only course of action really open to the tin soldier is to feel passionately, while making a virtue of passivity. Children are likely to recognize his strategy of acting brave because he has no other choice.

In other stories (certain chapters in the Mary Poppins books, for example), toys get to speak and move, though usually with some proviso: only at night, only in the toy chest, only when the grown-ups aren't around. E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Nutcracker" is one of these. Forget about sugarplum fairies -- this dream is half nightmare. Roberto Innocenti's illustrations for a recent edition of the tale properly evoke its menace. Nutcracker is strangely helpless for a fairy-tale prince. Wounded by a thoughtless boy (they're everywhere, aren't they?), the hideous enchanted prince loses a battle to his mortal enemies, the mice. To survive, he needs help from the heroine, a girl named Marie.

In Innocenti's version, the villain -- a seven-headed, red-eyed Mouse King drawn in sinister pastel tones -- couldn't be further from cute. As Marie shrinks from page to page, the scenes take on the desperate chaos of a battleground -- or a child's messy bedroom. Has Marie dreamed the whole thing? Following the conventions of such stories, the only people who believe her are her brother, Fritz, himself a child, and Godfather Drosselmeier, Nutcracker's weird creator/uncle. Adults who can follow children into the toy world are scary, suspicious figures. Nutcracker blurs the boundaries between people land and toyland. Not only can creepy Godfather Drosselmeier move between worlds, but Marie herself goes off to live in Nutcracker's Marzipan Castle at the end. This confusion is part of what makes the story so frightening, and it's unusual in toy tales.

More typical is "The Pasteboard Bandit," a rediscovered children's book by Harlem Renaissance writers Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes. Written in 1935 but published this year for the first time, with lovely Mexican-style illustrations by Peggy Turley, the book is a typical paralyzed-toy story. It describes the somewhat passive adventures of Tito, a papier-mâché figure who belongs to a Mexican boy named Juanito and his American friend, Kenny. All three heroes are descended from artists. Juanito's father paints clay pots, Kenny's mother and father are Greenwich Village artists who have come to Mexico to paint and Tito's progenitors could be called sculptors, if you consider toys art. Bontemps and Hughes clearly do. Their simple, straightforward story seems designed to break down distinctions like art and craft, rich and poor or North and South by treating Juanito's and Kenny's experiences with equal weight through Tito's eyes.

Tito serves as an ambassador between the two boys -- another natural role for a plaything. He understands English and Spanish, though of course he can't speak either. And at the book's end he travels home to New York with Kenny, a gift from Juanito and Mexico. Tito's big moment comes (in a chapter tellingly titled "Tito Becomes a Hero") when he rescues the boys from an abandoned mine. He does this in typical toy fashion, by simply standing there. Kenny's parents, searching for the boys, notice him at the mouth of the tunnel where Kenny and Juanito left him as a lookout. To reward Tito for pointing the way to their sons, both sets of parents paint him: Juanito's father refreshes his clothes, which ran when he got wet, and Kenny's mother paints a huge portrait of him. Tito is proud to find himself the size of a real man.

For all their helplessness, Tito, Nutcracker and the tin soldier aspire to masculine roles. It's no accident that they're a pair of soldiers and a bandit. They may be the littlest or even the timidest of men, but they still care about being manly: Tito, like any boy, would hate to have anyone confuse him with a doll. (Another mini-genre, the doll books, similarly opens a window on the littlest women.) Does a child's -- or a toy's -- passiveness make him feminine? If toy stories explore the child's role in an adult world, these three do a fascinating job of separating the boys from the men.
SALON | Dec. 12, 1997

Polly Shulman is a senior editor at Discover magazine.