Bradford: The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature

Clare Bradford, The Middle Ages in Children's Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2015.

Reviewed by: Molly Brown (molly.brown@up.ac.za)

A new book by Clare Bradford, author of Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (2001), Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2007), and New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (with Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, 2008), is always something to look forward to in children’s literature circles and The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature certainly lives up to expectations. As always, Bradford's extensive knowledge of her field is immediately apparent. She discusses no fewer than 59 children's books, refers briefly to many more and leaves one in no doubt that even these represent only a tiny fraction of what she has read.

The texts focused on in this slim but dense volume range from picture books for the very young to sexually-charged YA fairy fantasy. The book is divided into thematic chapters that contrast and juxtapose works for readers from three to sixteen-going-on-thirty. In choosing to do this, Bradford somewhat daringly resists the tendency to rigid age categorization that is so much a feature of most research into children's literature and opens the door to new perspectives on the relationships between fiction for beginner readers and novels for their much older siblings or selves.

As regular readers of the excellent Palgrave Macmillan Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature series know, works within it reflect contemporary approaches to children’s and young adult literature, film and media. In keeping with this focus and with Bradford’s other work, The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature is theoretically informed while remaining accessible to the general academic reader. This is achieved largely because Bradford uses her introduction and opening chapter to show that she is not only familiar with current debates within medievalism studies, but that she is able to summarise them clearly and concisely before applying them illuminatingly to a range of well-chosen primary texts. In fact her introduction and opening chapter, “Thinking about the Middle Ages”, could profitably be read by anyone anxious to understand contemporary literary medievalism and the academic debates around it. Bradford, who is probably best known for her work on postcolonial approaches to children’s literature, also intriguingly points out that the “fields of children’s literature studies and medievalism studies have much in common” (4), since both can be perceived as occupying relatively marginalised positions in relation to the more well-established or traditional disciplines of literary and medieval studies. Yet Bradford argues that while the two newer areas of scholarship may be and all too frequently, are dismissed as light weight, these growing areas of specialization require researchers to adopt nuanced interdisciplinary approaches to understand the social functions and ideological agendas that inform the operations of both children’s books and representations of the medieval in the contemporary world. The importance of this assertion is underlined by the way in which the rest of the book shows that the socialising and pedagogical agendas so readily apparent in works for children all the more clearly demonstrate the truth of Bradford’s  claim that “rather than drawing unproblematically on a “real Middle Ages” for settings, characters and other elements of fiction, children’s authors engage with versions of the Middle Ages that are themselves mediated and contingent” and that these “ texts engage with the afterlife of the past by reimagining ancient stories, and by interpolating spectral visitations and anachronistic intertextual references into their narratives” (6-7) in ways that foreground the complexity of contemporary attitudes to and engagement with the past.

After her incisive opening chapter, Bradford goes on to examine both temporality and spatiality in relation to medievally-themed books for younger readers. The second chapter on temporality draws on the work of Elizabeth Grosz, who suggests that past and present are not discrete entities but constantly bleed into and recontextualise each other, as well as that of Caroline Dinshaw, who uses the concept of asynchrony to describe how the human desire for other ways of being may disturb concepts of linear and measurable time, freeing the past to interact in complex and suggestive ways with the present moment. Texts discussed in some detail in this chapter include Neil Gaiman’s award-winning The Graveyard Book (2008) and Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart trilogy (Stoneheart, 2006; Ironhand , 2007; Silvertongue, 2008), both of which use fantasy settings that combine and contrast the medieval with other periods. The chapter also briefly discusses time travel tropes, novels featuring medievalist video games and contemporary reworkings of Arthurian material, all of which could easily have been expanded into chapters in their own right.

The third chapter concentrates on spatiality, which like temporality, is the focus of considerable critical attention in the field of contemporary literary studies. In fact the two are very difficult to separate since as Bradford admits, time and space are unthinkable without reference to each other. Employing the terms linked to what has been described as the “spatial turn” in literary and cultural studies in the second half of the twentieth century, Bradford shows how medieval spaces and artefacts continue to resonate in contemporary children’s literature and uses the work of Michel Foucault and David Harvey to show that medievalist spaces and places in work written for children are “inescapably hybrid” (63). The chapter also looks closely at the manor house and its functions in works as disparate as Edith Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods (1901), Lucy Boston’s The Stones of Green Knowe (1976) and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (2004), showing how the “protagonists of these novels inhabit their own time and space while calling on the symbolic resonances of ancient buildings, artefacts and gardens” (70). The second part of the chapter then illustrates how the current reinvention of the gothic reconceptualises the past in line with modern sensibilities. The final section on transnational medievalisms then entertainingly explores the transformations of the medieval in works written in countries like Canada or the United States in which physical traces of the European Middle Ages are few and far between. Interestingly, of course, American and Australian scholars, such as Bradford herself, are particularly active in medievalism studies and one wonders if the peculiarities of contemporary constructions of medievalism are not more vividly apparent to those working in spaces less cluttered with the material remnants and cultural echoes of the historical medieval period.

Chapters four, five and six of The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature concentrate in Bradford’s own words on “medieval embodiment” (9). Chapter four considers the extraordinary prevalence of non-normative or disabled bodies in medievalist fiction and film. The idea that a medieval setting may make it easier to allow disabled characters to escape the role of inspirational sidekick and take centre stage as protagonists in their own right is one I had not considered before and I found it very plausible. I was also utterly convinced by her argument that “medieval texts, at a remove from modernity offer a less perilous context in which to represent disabilities” (106) in that events that might result in disability can be reassuringly distanced. Chapter five, titled “Monstrous Bodies, Medievalist Inflexions”, uses monster theory in general and Jacques Derrida’s concept of the monster as the herald of change and futurity in particular to explore the roles of dark fairies, vampires, dragons and werewolves in current young adult fantasy. In examining works by writers such as Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, Melissa Marr and Stephenie Meyer as well as films like John Ajvide Lindqvist”s Let the Right One In (2007) and Sue Bursztynski”s Wolfborn (2010), Bradford is able to show that such texts disrupt unthinking binaries and instead require “a radical reconfiguration of the distinction between normality and monstrosity” (131). Chapter six, “Medievalist Animals and their Humans”, uses Bruno Latour’s version of actor-network theory to explore new literary conceptualisations “of the alliances, networks and exchanges which exist between humans and non-humans” (134). The chapter raises pertinent issues in relation to the way children’s books can encourage resistant readings of modernity, though I found myself wishing that Bradford had linked her conclusions a little more clearly to the rise of postmodern concerns with multiple perspectives and eco-conscious decision making.

The final chapter deals with comic presentations of the Middle Ages, a topic also recently explored in Louise D’Arcens’s lively Comic Medievalism:Laughing at the Middle Ages (2014) . The chapter brings together a wide range of texts including Babette Cole’s picture book parody, Princess Smartypants (1986), Terry Deary’s non-fictional Horrible Histories series, DreamWorks’s animated film How to Train Your Dragon (2010), Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy The Wee Free Men (2003) and Catherine Jinks’s historical novel Pagan’s Crusade (1992). In considering all of these, Bradford deftly demonstrates that while there are different modes of comic medievalism, most of them do not simply make fun of the past, but instead use humour to denaturalise and interrogate both past and current practices, raising questions such as “what constitutes masculinity, what the past means in the present and the ethical implications of laughing at the Middle Ages” (179).

Given the scope of this wide-ranging study, it is perhaps inevitable that the reader should occasionally feel that provocative issues are raised but not fully explored or that limiting discussion of a complex work to one small aspect such as the central character’s relationship with his horse is to give a frustratingly limited perspective on it. I would also have liked to see a slightly longer introduction that did a little more to help readers to see how the different chapters speak to each other and how the work as a whole challenges dominant conceptions of medievalism in children’s literature as either nostalgic, jingoistic or both, but these are minor quibbles about what is a magisterial overview of a large and complex field. In Bradford’s all too brief conclusion, she quotes Umberto Eco’s assertion that the Middle Ages constitute a time and place “in which we still live” (181) and her book methodically teases out the complexities of this contention while also reinforcing its validity. The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature undoubtedly deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in either children’s literature or medievalism.

Molly Brown

University of Pretoria (South Africa)

Ishiguro: The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Reviewed by Arthur Bahr (awbahr@mit.edu)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s seventh and most recent novel, The Buried Giant, is a frustrating one to read. Some part of this effect seems likely to be intentional, not just because Ishiguro can write beguilingly flowing stories when he chooses, but also because this book deals with two of the most frustrating aspects of human existence, memory and regret: the uncertainty of the former, the certainty of the latter, and the always vexed relation between them. Our frustration as readers, then, provides a way of empathizing with the characters whose struggles he recounts.

That’s the glass-half-full version, anyway. Sometimes—too often, for me—the novel was simply frustrating: slow, confusing, or both. The last sixty or so of its 317 pages pack considerable emotional punch, and Ishiguro’s prose is as lovely as ever, but there were many other moments when reading left me feeling aimless and abstracted, inclined simply to put the novel down and wander off. I would not have finished it if I hadn’t agreed to write this review; indeed, this review is overdue because I had a hard time finishing it. At some basic level, that can’t be a good thing to say about a piece of fiction.

But perhaps (glass-half-full speaking again) that too is part of the point. For it is precisely to escape the kind of mental and emotional fog that the novel’s opening pages created in me that the main characters, an elderly couple named Axl and Beatrice, set off from their village in search of their grown son, of whom they have only vague and fleeting memories. Theirs is a very low-fantasy version of Britain, ca. 550 or so: post-Roman withdrawal, but before native Britons like Axl and Beatrice had been wholly displaced by the Saxons, who when we first meet them seem more like immigrants than conquerors. (That distinction gets addressed, at first only obliquely but with increasing power, over the course of the novel).

And so a quest is born: to find not just their son, but also their memories—of him and of their long, apparently happy marriage. It gradually emerges that the she-dragon Querig is somehow responsible for the mental haze in which inhabitants of the country seem generally to wander, so their own, personal quest becomes linked to the larger one of slaying the dragon and restoring the memories of the land and its people.

Any good quest needs companions, whom Axl and Beatrice duly acquire: the brave warrior Wistan, a Saxon by birth but raised among Britons; the strange Saxon child Edwin, who is on a mysterious family quest of his own; and ultimately Sir Gawain, nephew of the recently deceased King Arthur. From a medievalist’s perspective, the characterization of Sir Gawain is one of the least satisfying and frankly most irritating aspects of the book: old and possibly senile, his complaints about the weight of his armor and self-congratulatory non sequiturs about his own past heroism seem at first like comic relief straight out of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And when a monastery that grudgingly offers the travelers shelter proves to be hiding dark and bloody secrets, it’s hard to shake the impression that Ishiguro’s is a stereotyped, limited, and basically unsympathetic perspective on the medieval.

Thankfully, this dismissive attitude becomes more nuanced as the novel progresses, which is a big part of why the reading experience as a whole ultimately becomes more pleasurable. As Ishiguro (very fitfully) reveals more of these characters’ histories, it becomes clear that he is using Britain’s distant and quasi-legendary past as the setting for a didactic fairy-tale about the present: multiethnic societies should be celebrated, but we should be clear-sighted about the practical challenges that they pose; war and vengeance are horrible, but difficult either to eradicate or to forget; ideals are tricky things, worth fighting for but all too easily compromised by the fight. These are wholly conventional pieties of the secular-humanist intelligentsia, and in that sense unsatisfying to have dramatized at such length (don’t any of us who are even vaguely likely to read an Ishiguro novel always-already believe them?), but Ishiguro is a talented enough writer that he offers more than just virtue-signaling. Especially rewarding are his rare, almost reluctant forays into the supernatural; an encounter with pixies proves especially harrowing for its potent blend of the winsome and the malevolent. Fight scenes feel realistic and resolutely unglamorized: even warriors who appear to have the upper hand recognize that they might die, and they plan accordingly; spectators respect the seriousness of what takes place, and the episodes as a whole feel dramatic, affecting, and almost sacral.

Ultimately, The Buried Giant offers a version of one of the most durable medieval stories, for which the appearance of Sir Gawain as a character should have prepared us, his initially farcical appearance having been perhaps a red herring: King Arthur’s ideals have been undercut, partly by his own human frailty, and ultimately they prove as dead as he himself is when the novel opens. Camelot is no more, and perhaps never really was. The book’s brief, quasi-allegorical final chapter reinforces this central truth at a poignantly personal level. Here the confusion over exactly what transpires—elsewhere a source of irritated frustration—feels brilliantly true to the messy experience of life and love. It left me with the desire, not to reread, exactly, but to continue to digest and process what I’d just read—indeed, to write a review that I’d been avoiding. For the question that the novel poses is a real one, too often answered only superficially if at all: what do we sacrifice when we seek to recover the truth, and might the hazy complacency of forgetfulness not prove superior? If such questions sound like heresy, then Ishiguro’s novel—despite and perhaps because of its frustrations—is nevertheless worth reading, for I am less certain than when I began it of the answers to them.

Arthur Bahr

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bohemian Baby Boutique: Camelot Cloth Diaper Series

Bohemian Baby Boutique: Camelot Cloth Diaper series (Knoxville, TN)

Reviewed by Lindsey Simon-Jones (lmj133@psu.edu)

At 8 p.m. on Monday, March 7^, 2016, Bohemian Baby Boutique released the much anticipated follow-up to their exclusive Blueberry brand Arthur and Gwen cloth diapers: Merlin and Morgan. The series was a smash hit. The most popular style of the Merlin diaper sold out in less than 2 minutes. Both prints sold out in all but training diaper styles in about 10 minutes. Earlier that day, they had released the diaper for in-store sales at their Knoxville, Tennessee store. With a scheduled opening of 10 a.m., a line formed, according to an internet source who attended the sale, around 7 a.m.; Merlin and Morgan were sold out less than an hour after opening.

Cloth diapering is making a comeback, just as companies are leveraging social media and online sales to boost excitement and desire for exclusive (sold in limited quantities and available at only one store/boutique) and limited edition (sold more widely, but in limited supply) prints. One trend in the cloth diaper print craze has been for literary inspired diapers. For example, Abby’s Lane is producing a Smart Bottoms brand “Book Club” series (prints released or announced include Midsummer Night’s Dream, Black Beauty, Moby Dick, and Alice in Wonderland), while Lali’s Fluff Shop released a set of solid colored Smart Bottoms diapers  based on the house colors in the Harry Potter series. Cotton Babies has built their entire BumGenius brand on prints reflecting “geniuses” from all walks of life; their literary diaper prints include (Lewis) Carroll, Jules (Verne) and Harper (Lee). Clearly, there is a market for book and author themes in the cloth diaper community.

The market for cloth diapers is complex and varied. Many parents choose cloth diapers because their use significantly reduces the expense of diapering when compared to the lifetime costs of using disposable diapers. However, parents collecting (and using) exclusive prints from high-end diaper companies are likely not doing so solely for the economic advantages. Parents for whom the economic benefit is not a primary motivating factor may choose cloth diapers due to their concern for the environment (cloth diapers are often made from sustainable resources and their use significantly cuts down on landfill waste over the course of a child’s diapering years), hygiene (parents prefer absorbency made from natural, often organic materials over chemically enhanced materials and cloth diapering parents report fewer “blowouts” than disposable diaper users),  diaper rash (parents report significantly less diaper rash in cloth diapered children), and convenience (never worrying about running out of diapers or having to stockpile disposables). These families are likely educated, middle- to upper-middle class parents with some modicum of disposable income. They frequently describe themselves as “crunchy” and are likely interested in current trends in childrearing. Some see high-end, exclusive diapers as a kind of investment, given that such diapers often hold their value very well and can be resold when a child has potty-trained for 50%-75% of their original value. In the extreme, diaper “flippers” may collect and store exclusive prints, keeping them in their original packaging, with the intent of selling for higher-than-retail value in the future. The frenzy for exclusive and limited edition prints has made this possible.

With their Camelot series, Bohemian Baby Boutique seems to have hit on a particularly strong desire for medievalia in the larger community. According to the Bohemian Baby Boutique staff, they had only planned two diapers: a generic knight and princess. However, they named the prints Arthur and Gwen after the designs were finalized because they reminded one of the owners of the tales. Arthur and Gwen were released on December 15, 2015, and quickly became their most popular diapers. Due to the surprising and overwhelming popularity of Arthur and Gwen, the team decided to add two diapers to the set. After rereading some Arthurian tales, they settled on Merlin and Morgan (Morgana/Morgan Le Fay) to round out the series they called Camelot.

Demand for these diapers was (and remains) high. Almost immediately after the sale, a lucky few were able to sell their diapers on the secondary market for double or even triple the retail price (the organic Simplex style was the highest priced style, costing $35). And while fervor has died down some in the intervening months, any Camelot diaper offered for sale at a reasonable price (under 100% markup) on the Buy/Sell/Trade boards is almost immediately purchased (in fact, I bought a used Merlin organic Simplex for a bargain $42 just a few weeks ago). The Arthur diaper is still the most sought after, with Merlin a close second. Morgan and Gwen are also popular, but sales suffer because some parents are disinclined to put their male children in a purple or pink diaper featuring a princess or enchantress, while most parents of female children do not have the same reservations about a blue diaper with knights or wizards. Nevertheless, the skillful use of medieval and Arthurian images in this series is likely to generate continued interest in all of the diapers in this series.

With just the right proportion of whimsy and historicism, Bohemian Baby’s Camelot series does an excellent job appropriating popular medieval themes and incorporating imagery from both classic and popular Arthurian legends. The result is a complex representation of medievalism simultaneously appropriate for a child’s diaper and grounded enough in historical medievalism to be desirable to the novice and specialist alike.  Each diaper includes three main vignettes, featuring the main character of the diaper: Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, or Morgan. What follows is a close reading and description of each print’s use of the medievalia and Arthuriana.

Arthur:

This diaper features a pale blue background, a child-like, brunette knight representing Arthur and a horned, blue dragon. Rather than armor, the Arthur character appears to be wearing a not-entirely anachronistic pea coat, with a red belt, hose, and darker gloves and boots. His helmet is in the style of a late-medieval close helm, with a raised visor and two plumes, one green and one blue.

In one vignette, Arthur stands at-the-ready, with a sword to his side and shield in front of his body. In another, he happily rides the fire-breathing dragon, in flight. At first glance, the third vignette appears to show Arthur fighting the dragon; he stands before the beast with sword drawn. On closer inspection, however, the sword turns out to be a three-pronged fork on which the boy-knight is happily toasting marshmallows with the help of the obliging dragon’s fiery breath.

Arthur’s shield appears both as a stand-alone item and with the knight in the standing vignette; it is primarily red, with yellow edging and a yellow crown centered. The crown has three elongated prongs with small pearls at the top. It references a combination of an antique-style crown and a medieval earl’s crown.

Other medievalia fills print: a Norman-style castle with an arched drawbridge, portcullis, and red standard flying above with a centered, yellow crown (the same as on the knight’s shield found throughout the diaper); and a dark and light blue, vertical striped banner, or perhaps gonfalon, with the same yellow crown in its center and a pinked edge are also included. Void spaces are filled with a pair of pale yellow and green fern fronds and a large deciduous tree.

Merlin:

The background on this print is a more vibrant, cyan blue. The Merlin character on this print is patterned after familiar and popular representations of the wizard: he wears dark blue wizard’s robes with white and gold stars and matching pointed hat. He has a long white beard and holds a wizard’s staff with a crystal ball on the end. Merlin is accompanied by a flightless, green (unfortunately, neither red nor white) dragon with white horns and darker green bony plates along its spine (reminiscent of a stegosaurus).

In one vignette, Merlin happily smiles beside a frothing, purple cauldron; the cauldron is adorned with a crescent moon and stars (a similar moon and an assortment of stars fill the void areas throughout). In another, he stands with both arms raised aloft, holding his staff in one hand, appearing to have performed some sort of spell, as indicated by a helix of stars hovering just above the staff. In this set of images, Merlin is accompanied by a surprised looking, purple and white owl on a wooden perch (a nod to Disney’s representation of Merlin with his owl Archimedes, perhaps). In the third, and most whimsical, vignette, Merlin sits astride a sleeping version of the dragon while reading a small, purple book entitled “Dragon Training.” Whether accidental or intentional, the image of Merlin training his dragon picks up on modern representations of Merlin fighting and/or taming dragons both real and imagined.

The Merlin vignettes are interspersed with a gothic-medieval style castle with five towers and blue, pointed roofs. The drawbridge is also blue and is unfortified by a portcullis. Potion bottles appear in a set of three: dark blue, light blue and white; the white bottle also appears near the cauldron.

Morgan:

The Morgan diaper is awash in hues of purple. A lavender background gives way to a smiling Morgan-child, clothed in a tunic, long skirt and cape in a variety of darker purples. Morgan’s wild, pink and purple waves of hair are untamed by a golden diadem, inset with gemstones and adorned with a star centered on her forehead. A golden belt featuring the same dark star cinches the waist of her tunic.

Morgan’s vignettes all center around spell casting. In one, she sits, reading from a green book simply entitled “Spells” to a raven and two cats (one black and one purple/grey). In another, she conjures with a crystal ball held aloft in her left hand. In the other hand, she holds her staff, raised high, upon which the raven is perched; a second raven sits nearby. In the third, Morgan adds a black liquid from a black bottle into a dark blue cauldron accented with white stars; white steam and pink and purple bubbles are rising from the top; the raven, again, sits aloft her staff.

As noted above, the black cat and raven are predominantly featured on this diaper; the raven is featured in all three vignettes, and the black cat and raven have their own small scene, sitting together amongst the same type of ferny flowers seen in the other three prints. The raven may be in reference to Morgan’s sometimes-supposed origins in the Celtic goddess Morrigan, as well as to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s description of her as one who could shapeshift and fly. The cats reproduce the common image of the witch’s familiar. In addition to her animal companions, Morgan has a small, wooden hermit’s hut with a purple roof; its simplicity stands in stark contrast to the towering castles depicted in the other three designs. The rest of the print is filled with potion bottles of varying shapes, sizes, and colors, and star and crescent moon patterns that are very similar to those in the Merlin print.

Gwen

The Gwen diaper print is set on a soft pink background. In it, Gwen wears a long-sleeved, tea-length, purple dress, with a fitted top and full skirt, and purple flats; her dress is accented by a pink belt and tights. The dress also features three small flowers of orange or white on the right side of the skirt. Her brunette hair is swept into a loose, side ponytail, clasped with a red bow. She has a broad smile and blushing cheeks in each portrait. She wears a golden crown with a flower in the same style as on her dress, centered; her crown features four prongs topped with red jewels.

The Gwen diaper seems to suffer most from its inception as a generic “princess” diaper, and her vignettes have little to do with the legends of the Guinevere characters. In one, she stands, with eyes closed, holding a small bird aloft; one of her legs is lifting up, as she stands in a modified, arabesque position. In another, she leads a dun colored horse with a vibrant purple main, tail, and hooves. The horse is wearing a simple, red noseband for a bridal, and has a matching red bow in its main, near one ear. Rather than a saddle, the horse wears a simple, pink blanket, adorned with the same small flowers that appear on Gwen’s dress (in purple), with red pompon tassels. Like Arthur, she also stands solitary; however, rather than a sword and shield, Gwen stands holding a bouquet of flowers to her nose, smiling as she breathes in their scent.

Gwen’s castle is a blend of the one in the Arthur and Merlin print, with a Norman center featuring purple windows, roofing, and an unfortified drawbridge. The windows are in mirror image of those on the Arthur castle (with the one on the right being placed higher than the one on the left). It flies a purple pennant with a white flower on a red pole. An array of flowers, ferns, hearts and a tree (perhaps a cherry blossom tree in bloom) fill the void spaces; importantly, these are the same fern fronds that appear on each diaper in the series.

Lindsey Simon-Jones

Pennsylvania State University, Fayette