5. Problem with Religion Voicing the silenced : between pleasures and therapeutic effects of children`s literature in Judy Blume`s selected novels.
pattern on the walls and ceiling of the store. By then my father is unconscious. I didn’t want to let go of him. The police had to pry me loose.
They let me ride to the ambulance with him. But when we got there, Daddy was already dead. 199
In missing her father, Davey is also characterized as a kid who mourns that she rejects to eat, to take a bath, and to go to school days after the funeral. Davey
thinks her sadness is too deep that it is not enough only to know that she is sad. “I don’t feel very well,” I tell her. “I might be coming down with something.”
I get into bed and lie back on the clean pillowcase. Mom sits down on the edge of my bed. “I remember my first day of high
school,” she says, tossing her hair away from her face. “I had violent stomach cramps. I didn’t want to go either. She takes my hand in hers.
“It’s not that,” I say. “It’s…” “I know, Davey.” Tears well up in her eyes.
“Don’t you think I know?” “Yes,” I tell her. “But having you know isn’t enough.” 20
Such described world in children’s literature suggests that children should not be exposed to situations upsetting them like sadness, fear, disappointment, and
under pressured because this world goes contradictorily to the ideology persuading children of the typical life of the joyful world. It is then understood that broad books
intended for babies in fact show the world as nothing but bright and clean and new and that the flaws, marks, and holes do not even exist. Nodelman observes that such
pictorial even continue to be intended to the older children
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. Therefore, if children were not already the optimistic beings, then the fictions would encourage them by
insisting that the world is uncomplicated and blissful like in adults’ utopia. To
support this, surely, it is done by never giving any information that would suggest
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Nodelman, The Pleasures 98.
anything else about the world. Children are kept away from the access in which books tell them that their life is far from easy, perfect, and harmonized ones.
The data taken says that voicing the silenced brute realities in Blume’s novels
results in ways that the attempts to speak for and about children is not about confirming their difference from and inferior to adults. In the other words, Blume
makes it possible to understand that brute realities do not only belong to mature adults, but also to kids; and that children fictional characters through the stories are
not about stable depiction of young people’s incapability and naiveté in facing the problems.