Tag Archives: childhood

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Little Annie’s Ramble

Little Annie’s Ramble, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a story to me that seems one way yet as you continue to read it, it shed light on such a darker tone. In a way, this story can give off two different vibes, an innocent on as well as a darker one. With the darker version, the reader can get a perverse feeling towards that man who is so infatuated with Annie. While going through the streets, the man mentions that “there are a few grown ladies that could entice me from the side of little Annie,” which in a way sounds extremely creepy due to the fact that it seems as though the man in more interested in a little girl. The man is too infatuated with the little girl that even grown women seems to show no interest for him. Does this man know what he is doing and is he doing this on purpose?

For a more innocent approach, one can read this story as a man simply enjoying the company of a young child just so he can enjoy his childhood once again or perhaps the feeling of having a daughter. He takes her off to an adventure just like how any dad would take his daughter out to spoil her. But then again, why didn’t he tell her mother of the adventure?

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Alice’s Transition to Adulthood

Lewis Carroll’s story of  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is jam-packed with situations in which Alice must make a simple decision.  This “simple” decision oftentimes involves mysterious foods and liquids; and whether or not to consume them.  Alice tends to eat/drink whatever is offered to her just because she was told to do so.  She doesn’t consider the consequences and more often than not has to deal with them.

As Alice ingests these foods she would either shrink or grow by tremendous amounts.  This growth/decrease in size represents Alice going through puberty in real life.  As Alice’s size constantly changes throughout the story so does her mindset.  Alice is not ready to become an adult just yet and regularly cries as she keeps changing from big to small and then back again.

Since Alice cannot  come to terms with becoming an adult and all the responsibilities that go along with that, she shows typical adolescent behaviors.  She is insensitive to the feelings and anxieties of others.  She demonstrates an over inflated sense of self and superiority, when comparing herself to others.  She is also moody, temperamental, and cries in response to change.  At length Alice seems to come to terms with the challenges that she is facing.  She realizes that she is in the middle of a dream and that she will eventually wake up to a new and familiar sense of normalcy.

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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.

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Little Annie’s Ramble – Ignorance of the Child

Little Annie’s Ramble by Nathaniel Hawthorne was literally a ramble about his love for this child named Annie. He seemed to think lowly of everything but Annie. In his eyes, Annie, this “child”, was just a pure thing in which he missed in his life. I feel that that is so because at the very end, he said, “As the pure breath of children revives the life of aged men, so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple thoughts…” This basically means that Annie was the thing that could revive his life and allow him to feel more at peace and free; to experience his boyhood again. Throughout the story, he kept going on and on about how pure and beautiful Annie was. She was beautiful because he thought she didn’t know anything negative about the world and that she wasn’t tainted by the evil and the bad. He wished her to disregard him if he started moralizing. This is because he believed she didn’t know right from wrong. Around the middle of the story as well, he said she would rather pay attention to the dolls rather than to the queen, king or knight. In his point of view, she was a child that knew nothing and couldn’t understand anything but her desires for the pretty things and toys such as dolls. He liked her better that way because him, as an adult, knew too much and all the dark things he knew as well caused him to feel that life was not that great and that he would be better off like Annie, who didn’t know much. It is as the saying goes, “Ignorance is bliss.” In this case, Annie is the ignorant one in the narrator’s point of view and the narrator is the one that wishes to be ignorant, to have the bliss that he feels the child has. He misses that ignorance and that bliss.

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Imposed Immaturity

During class discussion of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children, there was a lot of talk about children’s literature having to entertain both children and adult audiences, which I didn’t find that shocking. When taking the class I imagined the books we were to read would be geared towards adults, as well as children, and hold a deeper meaning for the adults that would go right over the heads of these “little people”. Otherwise we would be studying picturebooks with 17 max. pages all semester. What I did find interesting was the part about how “the family” evolved. In the article, Little People: When Did We Start Treating Children like Children?, by Joan Accocella, she discusses how the concept of children is relatively new. Which i related to the books that I’m reading now, which are from A Song of Ice and Fire. In these books, there are children from 8-years-old doing ridiculous things and I usually had to suspend my disbelief that a 10-year old girl* is out their stabbing the hearts of knighted men while riding horseback while trying to navigate a map. After reading the article, I can see how the author of the books I’m reading did some extensive research on the era. The idea that children were not regarded as children clears up a lot of my questions in my own reading.

“Children gradually came to be seen as creatures of a different order from adults: innocent, fragile, temptable, and therefore in need of molding….The ‘discovery of childhood,’ Ariès says, deprived the child of all that and ‘inflicted on him the birch, the prison cell—in a word, the punishments usually reserved for convicts.’ At the same time, children became the objects of ‘obsessive love,’ together with incessant demands for conformity to a family ideal.“

These lines hold true in present day. Many parents that oppose marriage equality will say it is because having two gay parents in a family would pass the “gayness” on to their children—if they can manage to adopt some. Meanwhile, a baby boy can’t even look in the direction of a woman without his parents calling him a little lady’s man, or passing down some other archaic gender roles to their pretty little princesses and tough little men. The innocence of children that is so sort after to protect is sullied by the parents themselves. But then again parents aren’t the only ones to participate in such irony, teachers also play their part. Teaching children on the cusps of their sexuality not to have sex instead of giving them information about what sex is and how to do it safe.

 

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Little People

“Little People” discusses the evolution of not only what it means to be a child, but also the evolution of family life in general. The article gives examples of how a so called “childhood” differs from different generations. Starting in the middle ages, the article discusses how a childhood was seen as working on a farm, to eventually being married off before one turns a teenager. Kids would be sent off from their homes for years at a time to work for someone else only to return home for a little before being married and moving out once again. Then their is a jump in the way children were treated during the 18th century. During this time a large amount of illegitimate babies, and at times these babies would be either killed or abandoned by the woman who gave birth to them. This dramatic shift continues during the late 19th century and 20th century as children were used more as workers in factories to help support their families. Today children are not expected to serve as workers for their families, but are still controlled in a way by their families as they are forced to go off to school to get an education. Even though the lifestyle of children has changed over the centuries, their freedom has not. They’re  fates are tied to that of their parents and it has been the same since the beginning of this whole “childhood” society. 

Not only has the evolution of childhood changed, but so has divorce. Their was a time back was divorce was not even seen as an option to men or women. Then when it became an option it was only granted under extremely drastic measures. Nowadays, divorce is a part of our society, people now don’t even get shocked when they hear that someone is divorced or getting a divorce because it has become something we have accepted into our culture. 

Childhood and divorce will continue to evolve over time and in centuries from now they will look back at how children’s lives were during our time and how divorce was as well.