The Age of Disenchantment
When my daughter was three, I tried to read her a picture book version of Little Red Riding Hood. We were at the best part, where Little Red Riding Hood tells the wolf in Grandmother’s bed, “What great big ears you have,” when my daughter ripped the book from my hands and threw it across the room. Then, for good measure, she picked it up and set it pointedly behind a stack of other books on a high shelf where it remains to this day.
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I considered my error; my daughter is very close to her grandma and at the time was deathly afraid of dogs, so why did I think she would like a story about a grandmother being swallowed whole by a wolf? I tried to tell her about the happy ending, how Little Red Riding Hood and Grandmother turn out OK, but she wasn’t buying it. Why should they have to get eaten by the big bad wolf at all?
It’s conflict that makes a story, but as a preschooler, my daughter couldn’t accommodate any plot more fraught than a typical episode of Daniel Tiger. Fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson variety are famously violent, but I remember being raised on them; these days most picture books smooth out the rough edges of these stories so that they are almost unrecognizable.
In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bruno Bettelheim took a psychoanalytic approach to the reading of fairy tales, suggesting that these stories are a kind of peek into the collective unconscious of children, a place for the working out of conflicts inherent to development and maturity. What do you do when you find yourself alone in the woods? How do you complete the task? How do you escape the wolf?
Today, Bettelheim’s reputation has suffered under attacks of plagiarism, but the main idea here, whoever had it first, continues to animate our reading of fairy tales. Stephen Sondheim activated this concept in his musical Into the Woods, a meta-investigation into the nature of storytelling. “Careful the tale you tell,” the witch cautions in the finale—“That is the spell.”
My daughter intuited the power of a story at an early age, one that she understood she wasn’t ready for. Now she is about to turn seven, and she has told several people, proudly, that her mother’s first book is coming out soon. When the box of galleys arrived, I showed her the cover, on which the face of a young girl is seen as if through a car window in the rain, streaked and blurred. “Next time,” my daughter said frowning, “Try to write something with rainbows and unicorns.”
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My novel is about two 12-year-old girls who conspire to murder another girl in their neighborhood, believing they are following orders from a supernatural being they call Him. I’ve told my daughter I’ll tell her all about it when she’s older.
The girls in my novel have reached what you might call the age of disenchantment, that awkward growing-out phase that hits most people around middle school, when everybody’s bodies are undergoing mysterious transformations, and the rules that defined the social world of childhood are falling away.
Suddenly, instead of playing, girls perch in small groups on the edge of the climbing structure, whispering secrets. What happens if children refuse to leave behind their games of pretend, if they cling to them a little too desperately? What if they insist on the realm of the imaginary impinging on the real world? This is more or less the premise of my book.
I remember a sense of mourning at that age, a feeling that I had lost something that could not be recovered, the unselfconsciousness of a child at play. “Let’s say my name is Melody and I work at a restaurant,” my daughter says. Then, a little while later, “Let’s say my name is Lisa.” Pause. “Let’s say my name is Lisa and Melody.” At my daughter’s age, there are still an infinite number of people to become.
Of course, people have long seen in Little Red Riding Hood a metaphor for transition from girlhood to womanhood—the red cloak as symbol of menstruation, the wolf as lurking sexual threat. But as a child I only understood that the wolf, in putting on the grandmother’s clothes, was hiding his voracious nature behind the familiar signs of a grandmother’s love. It is the deceit that draws Little Red in, and her salvation comes always at the hands of someone else—the woodcutter who happens by and hears her cries. In this way, fairy tales often break the implicit rules of modern fiction, where plot hangs on causality and the young heroine must, through some act of agency, save herself.
In E.M. Forster’s formation, “the Queen died and then the king died” is a story while “the king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. Fairy tales are often stories in this sense—one thing happens and then another. We may accept that our lives are more story than plot, but as a rule, we get fed up when books do this because we turn to them to make meaning out of the chaos.
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To grow up to be a novelist is, in a sense, to refuse to grow up, or at least, to preserve into adulthood faculties that most people sensibly abandon sometime in middle school. I remember one creative writing teaching saying to me with a sigh sometime in my teens, as if he were sorry to be the bearer of bad news, “I think you’re a writer. It’s not an easy life. Most of us would choose something else, if we could.”
Joan Didion wrote about this phenomenon while observing her own daughter, who she thought seemed free of whatever it was that pushed her to write. Her daughter was “delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” Writers, according to Didion, make discontented children, “afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to see my own child so clearly or be so confident in my assessments. I think my daughter has the kind of sensitivity to the world that is characteristic of people with an artistic temperament, but she also has a healthy desire toward self-protection. If I could have chosen for her, I would have chosen for my child to be one of those people with a thicker skin, if only because it would make her life easier—but parents don’t get to choose these things.
If Little Red Riding Hood went to Grandmother’s house and there was no wolf, it would be a very different story—it would not really be a story at all. I tell my daughter these kinds of stories sometimes before bed—a description of a person’s day, a laundry list of one thing after another. But already she is starting to get tired of these recitations, to tell me that something has to happen. For now, Little Red Riding Hood is still hidden away on the shelf. I am happy to leave it there, knowing that soon enough the time will come to take it down.