ABSTRACT
In the literature of childhood, the green world may serve to expose the cruelty and waste of our society. In revealing the various ways we are ruptured from our nature, these stories can be as deeply critical as the literature for adults. They may, therefore, insist on a return from the pastoral, so that the discovery that took place in nature can be integrated into our world in an offering of hope and renewal. In The Secret Garden, nature is the holding environment for all children, those who have been mothered as well as the motherless, the adult children. In The Amazing Bone, William Steig depicts the child/pig, Pearl, caught developmentally between the socializing world of education, and the early childhood world of wonder and awe. The green world here is located liminally between school and family, portrayed in a forest set in gentle pastel tones, a place of peace and harmony, the mythical first home of childhood.
