ABSTRACT
It seems that much contemporary writing for children is more explicit about the traumas of children than ever before. The accompanying feelings of grief, terror, loneliness, anger, and anxiety are explored more fully and, I believe, demonstrate the release that such expression often offers to the characters in the stories and to the empathic reader. Freedom from inhibitions about what one can and cannot write can inspire creativity and originality in children. Even in fantasy literature, children's darkest fears and the various taboos implicit in the horror story are portrayed more directly and graphically than in their predecessors. Whether the focus is on sex, death, or a conflation of the two, Kimberly Reynolds I offers two different understandings, both from French feminists, Julia Kristeva and HeU~ne Cixous. She claims that Kristeva sees the entry from the "maternal semiotic realm to the paternal symbolic realm," the basic socializing process, as generating the images of horror. She writes,
She offers such examples as "leaky bodily fluids" and "inarticulate," babyish monsters. It seems to me that infantile parents suggest another frightening and compelling source. Reynolds goes on to state what many psychologists and psychoanalytic critics have noted, that "[t]he images that frighten us are pervelted and disguised images of what we long for," particularly in adolescence when "the
process of separation begun in infancy is generally reactivated" (Reynolds, 7). Cixous, on the other hand, sees children's fascination with the "bizarre and the uncanny" as "flirting" with the idea of death in that a figure such as a ghost represents both an attempt at adjustment to and an escape from the idea of mortality (in Reynolds, 7). Everything today is more explicit and we seem, as a culture, less protective of children. What Geraldine Brennan says of David Almond's books for children might well be said about popular novels for young adult readers. Brennan points to a tension "between children's legitimate fears, adults' fears for them, and adults' fears for themselves."2 However fears are conflated, whether treated as fantasy or fiction, books which explore the child's psyche as a dark journey dominate the contemporary scene of children's literature and culture. My concern here is to find in the imaginative expression of childhood a poetics for children. How is their experience captured so that it becomes a landscape where they can tum for solace as well as inspiration?
