ABSTRACT
Much of western children’s literature and popular culture is imbued with ‘mythical representations of nature’ that ‘glorify nature and animals’ (Aitken, 2001: 26). These same texts are often replete with Nature’s Child figures that attest to Rousseau’s legacy and to the Romantic and Transcendentalist nature traditions that he inspired. Figures of Nature’s Child come in various forms, all of which are shaped and modified by their geo-historical contexts and overlaid by accompanying racialized, classed and gendered discourses. There are a number of ways in which these Nature’s Child figures are represented in children’s fictional texts. They can revolve around children’s intimate relationships with animals (Winnie-the-Pooh, Lassie Come Home, My Friend Flicka, Flipper, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Owls in the Family, Storm Boy), children’s adventures in natural environments (The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn, Heidi, Pippi Longstocking, Storm Boy), or in natural fantasylands (Peter Pan, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). They can rehearse the Romulus and Remus story of the archetypal wild Nature’s Child raised by wild animals (Jungle Book), or be evoked, by proxy, through children’s identification with animal characters in anthropomorphized stories (The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Muddle Headed Wombat, Bambi, The Lion King, Finding Nemo, Charlotte’s Web, Babe). The representations of Nature’s Child that I examine in this chapter take a number of these forms. When we reflect upon the Romantic writings that I charted in the previous chapter, and which gave rise to subsequent generations of Nature’s Child representations, it is clear that these Romantic musings had everything to do with wistful and nostalgic adult imaginaries of some kind of ‘Golden Age’ of childhood (Buckingham, 2000: 9) and almost nothing to do with the real-life
experiences of actual children. This is because the very qualities that make the Golden Age of childhood golden are also those that temporally and spatially distance it from the less-than-ideal real world in which we live. However, even though the Golden Age may be an atemporal and displaced adult fantasy, and even though it may be far removed from actual children’s lives, it is not only adults that buy into it. In discussing the cultural transmission of adult imaginaries of childhood to children through representational practices, David Buckingham (2000: 9) observes that: ‘[c]hildren are often extremely interested in certain forms of discourse about childhood’. Why would they not be drawn to utopian narratives of the Nature’s Child variety? These offer them a highly aestheticized imaginary world in which children are independent, competent and free, often in communion with animals, and who can act without adult interference, control and surveillance. The fact that these narratives of childhood are so ‘unrealistic’ – so different to their own lives – no doubt enhances their appeal. While adults might be nostalgically captivated by the romantic ideal of a lost natural childhood that probably never existed, children seem to enjoy the escapism and the empowerment of the same fantasy. So as Buckingham (2000: 9) notes, it is not only adults but also children who have ‘fantasy investments in the idea of childhood’. It is the idea of childhood, or to be more precise, the cultural transmission of the idea of idealized natural childhood, that is the subject of this chapter. The underlying question I am pursuing is: how do variant understandings of idealized nature affect the cultural transmission of idealized childhoods? Personifying the idea of idealized nature, the Nature’s Child figures that I examine testify to the ways in which Rousseau’s legacy has been disseminated in children’s texts through Romantic and Transcendentalist appeals to glorified nature. But as well as allowing us to trace the continuities of Rousseau’s legacy, these figures also reveal the ways in which idealized understandings of nature (and thus childhood) are modified and reshaped by the specificities of the times and places in which they are produced. Although these Nature’s Child figures can trace a direct lineage back to Rousseau, they are nevertheless clearly representative of quite specifically situated natures (Instone, 2004). They move with the times, but also with the geographies of their production. To retain their currency, relevance and seductive appeal, these Nature’s Child representations must offer creative adaptations of the recurring Roussean motifs, tropes, rhetorical strategies and narrative devices that I outlined in Chapter 1. To illustrate this dynamic combination of representational continuity and adaptation, I offer a selection of early and late twentieth-century children’s cultural texts from the United States and Australia. These ex-British colony settler nation texts transmit specifically wild (i.e. non-European) nature imaginaries to their child audiences. By tracing their continuities and divergences, I show how each of these texts has contributed in quite distinctive ways to perpetuating ‘adults’ and children’s fantasy investments’ (Buckingham, 2000: 9) in Rousseau’s original idealizations of nature, through appropriating and adapting the figure of Nature’s Child to suit a variety of geographical and historical contexts and concerns.
