What I'm reading now

During the academic year, most of my reading is re-reading. I always get the feeling that there are other teachers out there who know their books cold, who can recite poetry from memory in the classroom, who stand in front of their classes and wow them with their amazing recall. I am not that teacher.

But as I reread I learn new things, every time. This semester I'm teaching books I read as a child, books I've read to my kids, and even so I am learning them anew. That's one of the reasons I teach, in fact. Things are new, even when (as so often in my classes) they are more than 100 years old.

Yesterday I taught two books I love, in two different classes. In my children's literature class we were talking about Charlotte's Web, perhaps one of the most perfect novels ever written. This simple story of a pig and a spider never fails to touch me, perhaps because it seems to me essentially a fable about the strength of maternal love. Charlotte sacrifices herself for her surrogate child, Wilbur, knowing she'll never meet her own children, the spiders whose eggs she deposits carefully in their egg sac in the last creative act of her life. My eyes always swell with tears as I read of her death, and Wilbur's careful guarding of her eggs until they hatch the next spring.

In my other class, an upper-division course for English majors, I was teaching a far less well-known book, The Princess and the Goblin, though it's one that I read and loved as a kid. Published in 1872 by a renegade Congregationalist minister, George MacDonald, the novel tells the story of the princess Irene, her great-great-grandmother, and the miner boy, Curdie, who encounters them both. Strangely, though, it's also a maternal story, a story of a (great-great-grand) mother who watches over a child, whose love protects even when she herself is out of reach.

Yet both of these fables of maternal love are actually of surrogate maternity. Charlotte is not actually Wilbur's mother (the mind boggles!), and the princess Irene's own mother is dead (or is the great-great-grandmother actually her ghost? it's not entirely clear…)

As I cast my mind back over my favorite books for children, indeed, I find that mothers are strangely lacking even as their love is extolled, and I worry about what this means for me. Just think about it: in so many of our favorite books, the heroes and heroines are orphans, motherless children, or perhaps even abandoned children. The pattern begins in fairy tales: Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the woods by their parents (the mother is sometimes called a stepmother, to soften the blow a bit); Snow White, whose mother dies in childbirth; Cinderella, oppressed by a stepmother and an ineffectual father…the list goes on. In picture books, children are often simply on their own: Peter Rabbit in Mr. Macgregor's garden, Max from Where the Wild Things Are, off in his dream-boat, Frog and Toad, Ruby and Max. As we discussed in my children's literature class today, parents get in the way of a good story. Who wants to read about a well-adjusted kid staying home with his or her parents, after all?

Well, I do. And they do exist: think of Bread and Jam for Frances, for example, or Blueberries for Sal (well, even there, Sal gets separated from her mother and starts following around a bear mama instead, but you get the picture). Still, it seems to me that overwhelmingly our literature for children is about independence and separation from parents, not about connection.

So I'm torn as I reread The Princess and the Goblin once again. Do I want to read it to Nick? In the novel I'm reading aloud to him right now, The Magician's Nephew, the main character's mother is dying, and I stumble over the words as I read them to him, hoping he's not really paying attention to that part, wanting him to focus on the adventure rather than the reason for it.

Children's literature means all new things to me as I read it as a mother. I find myself removed, left out, rejected. Stepmothers fare worse--Snow White's kills herself dancing in red-hot shoes at the wedding ball--but the impulse is the same. And in case you think this is all yesterday's news, that today's stories for kids don't do this, just think of Finding Nemo (dead mother), or The Lion King (dead father). It's everywhere.

In The Princess and the Goblin, as in Charlotte's Web, maternal love is miraculous. It protects and saves without smothering or over-protecting. It reaches beyond physical boundaries and blood ties; it partakes, quite literally, of the divine. Charlotte's miraculous web, and the magic string that leads Irene out of the mine, both represent the invisible ties mothers weave from their children to themselves, binding them in a web of love and sacrifice. Perhaps to attribute such things to real mothers would be too overwhelming, too much of a reminder of the ways in which mothers can truly bind and suffocate their children. Perhaps. All I know is, I'm looking for a fun, adventurous mother in the next book I read.