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.
2. Bad Sides of Life: Pleasures of Acknowledging Newness, of Escaping, and
Recognizing Gaps
Indeed, Nodelman observes that so many children’s books are achingly, boringly, and mind-numbingly familiar and similar to one another and to countless
thousands of books provided in the past: stories about cute delicate fairies, cute bumptious gnomes, cute talking animals in human clothing, cute princesses with cute
strange powers, and cute sad-middle class children with sibling or parent problems, or cute and incorrectly happy middle-class children. Ironically, the new books are just
the replica versions and variations of the old ones
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. Beside the library budget and the profit, the false claims about children prevent kids from enjoying newness in their
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Nodelman, Reading 236.
books. Nodelman also declares that reading literature with their lack of knowledge; in fact, should not prevent children from enjoying the pleasures
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. On the contrary, in this discussion, this thesis elaborates the pleasures
achieved in Blume’s novels in voicing the brute realities. The pleasures cover the one
of escaping, which is understood as stepping outside readers’ self imaginatively and experiencing the lives and though
t of different people’s lives. Meanwhile the pleasure of newness relates to experiencing startlingly different kinds of stories. Pleasure of
recognizing gaps refers to the use of strategy to learn and fill the information in order to develop readers’ further mastery.
For the first pleasure which is related to the pleasure of acknowledging newness in reading children’s books, the stereotyped depiction about what belong to
children’s problems can prevent readers from one of the enjoyments in reading literature to find unpredictably different newness. It includes newness in language
like vocabularies and expression, in its cultural or historical settings, in perspectives of seeing things, or in stories like new themes, characters, plot, and all new things
might be written in a literary work. When it comes to know that children’s literature has offered same old stories which vary the themes of friendship, family, schools
which end to similar conclusions that home is the safest place, Blume’s novels proves
that the belief children’s life is homogeneous is in fact only a kind of simplification. White in also agrees that “some writers for children deliberately avoid using
words [and topics] they think a child does not know. This emasculates the prose and bores the readers… Children love words that give them a hard time, provided they are
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Nodelman, The Pleasures 34.
in a context that absorbs their attention
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”. In other words, children receive the topics adults assume to be difficult very well especially because they are ready with
exploring newness. For the first example, the perfect, happy, middle-class and neat family has
been widely celebrated in children’s books as it has turned to be stereotypical and ideal to have harmonious nuclear family. Altston has observed even separated for 166
years, the english work from 1830s like Holiday House to the 2005’s Charlie in the
Chocolate Factory share a similar rhetoric of family that true happiness seems to be impossible without the love and support of a dedicated family
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. The depiction of the family in children’s literature remains conservative, ideal, and fixed. It promotes a
specific ideology to instil in its readers certain values which dictate how families should be: loving, respectful, preferably with two parents, contained in domestic
harmony and sharing wholesome home-cooked family meals
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. Breaking the boundaries burdening kids from knowing difficult life as they
are assumed to live in a typical simplicity, Blume raises sophisticated themes which remain untold in
children’s books. Marital problem, as one of those non-children’s matters, appears in It’s Not the End as the primary issue the young character Karen
has to cope. In Margaret , readers can also find the frictions over Margaret’s vacation
to Florida which is driven by their own marital problem of eloping. Blume’s fictional
parents are depicted to be, instead of constantly harmonious, over conflicted or at
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Peter Hunt, ed., International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. Second New York: Routledge, 2004 557.
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Ann Alston,The Family in English Children’s Literature New York: Taylor Francis, 2008 1.
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Alston 2.
