Here is the powerpoint from last Wednesday’s class.
Daily Archives: 21 Sep ’14
Little Annie’s Ramble: Two stories in one
Little Annie’s Ramble, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the surface appears to be a story about a little girls stroll through town with her adult neighbor, who is also the narrator.The two visit various locations that would attract a child’s attention such as a bakery and a toy store. The “ramble” comes to end when the town crier begins to alert the towns people of a missing girl and the narrator realizes he left with Annie without telling her mother.
This story can be interpreted from the perceptive of an adult man who gets so absorbed in a child’s world that he nearly forgets he himself is an adult at one point. The narrator in this interpretation is just a man who has more admiration for childhood rather than the child. The narrator ends up finding his own childhood in his ramble with little Annie. This could be what causes him to forget to tell Annie’s mother that he went on a walk with her.
The second interpretation is more dark since an adult could easily take the narrators jovial attitude towards Annie as perverse. There is one line in particular that makes the narrator look like a pedophile:“there are few grown ladies that could entice me from the side of little Anllie”. This line makes it sound like the narrator would prefer the company of a little girl over that of a grown woman. In addition, while the narrator claims to have forgotten to tell Annie’s mother he was with her, one could assume he did not tell her on purpose.
This is a rather conflicted text, at least for adults, since it can have various innuendos and interpretations.
“Little Annie’s Ramble”
Little Annie’s Ramble, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is another outstanding example of a children’s story that can be further appreciated and understood from an adult perspective. Annie is a little girl that loves a good adventure. So when she hears that exotic animals from all over the world have been shipped into her town she is immediately drawn in. Annie and her neighbor, a much older man who has lost a child’s perspective on the wonders of life, head into town with expectations of the fantastic . They explore the exotic animals, wonder in the colorful displays and each finds a sense of awe in their individual perspectives.
It isn’t until the town crier’s second appearance that the narrator, also the young girl’s companion, realizes that they had left home without notifying the child’s parents. Each of them was so lost in the spectacle of the circus-she in the present, and he in the past- that reality had been displaced by the marvelous.
Unlike some of the other stories that we have read, I believe that the narrator’s intentions were very innocent. The old man didn’t want to do anything creepy with little Annie, but instead sought to rekindle his own childlike sense of wonderment that he saw in the young daughter of his good friends. It was a great bonding experience between an adult and a child. And, it afforded an opportunity to revisit his own youthful spirit and take a break from his own dreary ponderings of adulthood.
“Little Red Riding Hood” Perrault vs Grimm
In the test case of “Little red Riding Hood”, the author, Zohar Shavit, makes the claim that the concept of childhood as we know it today did not exist until the seventeenth century. Part of this reason was because prior to the seventeenth century there was no educational system in place for children, and no children’s literature was available. Also, the Middle Ages was a tough period where children’s mortality rates were very high. If a child did survive, they were not able to stay a child for long. Back then, children married and went to work very young, making it almost impossible to have a childhood. To demonstrate this, Shavit recalls the classic story of “Little Red Riding Hood”. “Little Red Riding Hood” is a story written for adults and children. Though the original author, Perrault, meant for the story to be told to children, the underlying message of “Little Red Riding Hood” is rather gruesome, and a message that only adults could understand. “Little Red Riding Hood”, in essence, is about a village girl who is taken advantage by a man. The story is underlined with an erotic meaning, as the author goes into detail about the girls beauty and innocence.
Shavit then does to analyze the Brothers Grimm version of “Little Red Riding Hood” that was published 100 years after the original version by Perrault. Shavit claims that the differences are because in 100 years a new emphasis on educating the child was put into place. The Brothers Grimm changed the tone of the story, changing it from satire to amusement; their ending was happy rather than sad/tragic. The Grimm version also was meant to be appropriate for children to read, which was not the case earlier in Parrault’s version. The Grimm version of “Little Red Riding Hood”, to my understanding, is similar to the “Disney” version of Perrault’s original story. As times change, the way we view children change. This is evident in the two evolutions of the same story.