Bernadette’s daughter asks her not to come to her school theatre performance because she wouldn’t be able to handle its heightened emotions. My husband and I looked at each other immediately, only to burst into silly faces. Of course, we had to pause Cate Blanchett’s underrated performance in Where’d You Go, Bernadette? How I have never been able to read the many adventures of Pippi Longstocking to my daughter, or never finished watching A Series of Unfortunate Events, or howled my way through both Inside Out films, and how I’ll never pick up Charlotte’s Web, is a significant part of my family’s favourite party-tale repertoire. The latest addition is me crying through The Sheep Detectives.
Fortunately, I’m not the only one with such adventures involving children’s stories. Some of the most hardened men and women I know have confessed to turning into a tear tap while watching children’s films or reading children’s literature. Why are these stories almost inevitably so sad?
Yes, there’s the pedagogical side of it. Children must be taught to deal with unexpected hardships and find a way to work through grief. Through sadness passes the light of joy and redemption. There’s a happy ending waiting for both the character and the reader. Just hold yourself together a bit longer.
But what these stories do to adults is more fascinating. Beyond nostalgia and mythologised childhoods, these stories are about people and processes that were simpler, even if not easier. Friendships are non-narcissistic, and enemies are mostly clearly defined, even if they happen to be scary monsters. Scholar Louise Joy, author of Literature’s Children, says that children’s literature “refracts adult consciousness, offering and enabling us to pass on to our own children the world as we wish it, and precisely not as we find it”. Children’s stories for adults are Narnia minus any real danger.
The creator of the Narnia universe, CS Lewis, said, “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” The story must tug at the heartstrings of all and sundry. The sadness evoked by a children’s story appears heavier because it sits in that part of us which we keep hidden. We were all vulnerable and straightforward once before we understood the machinations of networking and wore the garb of invincibility. I’m not sure if I enjoy being a snotface as an adult waiting for my car after watching a film in the Playhouse, though. The joy of these sad stories is in the moment of a neat denouement. Mufasa is dead, but long live the Lion King!
These moments elude us with such cruelty in real life that any semblance of them is coveted. Children’s sad stories are about hope that we find dimming with each report coming from Gaza, Iran, Sudan, or closer home, with unmistakable regularity of anticipated horror. Psychologists have found that reactions of children to crises like death are not essentially different from those of adults. They also find that adults may not have completely let go of the child within. Children toughen up to behave like adults to survive. Perhaps it’s time for adults to be more childlike for survival purposes. It must be added, however, that scams like “inner-child healing” programmes must be kept at bay, for they prey on the very vulnerability that these children’s stories celebrate and turn into a survival kit. You need not betray the friend to slay the dragon. Or, you don’t have to give up the dragon to those who want to kill it.
The adult experience of a child’s universe is a sobering thing. Children are essentially powerless in an adult world. Our decisions impact them in ways that we have conveniently taught ourselves to forget. Adult life is defined by forgetfulness, real and feigned. Maybe a film like The Jungle Book or Taare Zameen Par, or children’s books by Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, JM Barrie, RK Narayan, and E Nesbit, are vital to trigger the act of remembering what we do not even realise as lost and forgotten.
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal
