Twisting Mother Goose

We have something to look forward to this fall: a new publishing house called Month9Books which will specialize in fantasy fiction.  First title, due in October, is Two and Twenty Dark Tales: Dark Retellings of Mother Goose Rhymes.

Besides the annoying redundance, the title is an obvious rejoinder to that Wall Street Journal column by Meghan Cox Gurdon a year and a half ago: “Darkness too Visible.”  Ms. Gurdon’s article was an inquiry into the grim trend of Young Adult fiction, and proved to be a lot more than the author bargained for.  Most of the outrage subsequently directed at Ms. Gurdon suggested that she was naïve: didn’t she know what tough challenges teens faced?

Georgia McBride, founder of YALITCHAT.com, was one of the many who responded.  “. . . I began to think about a Mother Goose book that my sister gave me when my daughter was born eight years ago.  Reading it, I always get caught up in the darker parts of the rhymes.  And it occurred to me that there are things like servitude, murder, and kidnapping in those rhymes—which is not comforting.  But you don’t hear people complain about Mother Goose, or about some of the dark sides of Disney stories.  Somehow these are accepted by our culture, yet when we consider the dark aspect of YA literature, we start to put the brakes on.”  That gave her an idea: what about a YA anthology of “dark and twisted retellings of Mother Goose rhymes”?  “I thought it would be really cool if done in a positive way.”

Here’s Ms. McBride’s take on Humpty Dumpty, minus the rhyme: “He’s been bullied, and has had enough.  He posts a letter online that he’s going to commit suicide.  All the people who tried to help him just weren’t able to.  And my short story about Little Miss Muffet is a sick and twisted version of the rhyme—with lots of spiders.”  I guess that’s what she means by positive.

I still have my 1933 edition of Watty Piper, and of course I read many versions of many rhymes to my children, and I’m still not sure what she means about all the servitude, murder, and kidnapping.  As a child, I remember feeling sorry for Jack after he broke his crown (Jill is implicated in further verses), but not too bad about Humpty Dumpty.  Suicidal tendencies notwithstanding, he was an egg.

The Two and Twenty Dark Tales is probably supposed to be taken in good fun, and that’s swell—I don’t have to read it.  It’s Georgia McBride’s take on traditional nursery rhymes that seems odd.  “Traditional” means they originated in a world that most of us would consider dark—a world without anesthetics, as C.S. Lewis remarked, not to mention antibiotics, aspirin, and air conditioning.  The rhymes were not supposed to rub children’s little faces in real life’s harsh realities—real life did that.  Primarily they were intended to entertain, instruct, and lull to sleep, as well as serve as an introduction to the notion of meter and rhyme.  But on a deeper level they did more than that: nursery rhymes provided a way of taking ordinary experiences and making them epic.  I mentioned Thomas Howard’s Chance or the Dance? in an earlier post about poetry.  Howard uses a Mother Goose rhyme—surely the lowest and most primitive form of poetry—to show how humans impose a “form” on daily existence, through little ceremonies and rituals:  “One foot up, the other foot down;/That’s the way to London town.”

I like the way he says it:

It is imagination that plants in us in the first place the idea that the turning [i.e., the routine one-foot-up-one-foot-down] may be robbing us of our only chance to live, unless we find out that at the center of every turning there is a still point, and we move toward that point in whose stillness there are held all the turnings that seem so helter-skelter to us. . . [Poetry] addresses our imagination and, with everything that is at its service, it tries to beguile us into the intense awareness of experience . . .  and to return us to life with the awareness that it is packed with glory . . .

The form of order many authors like to impose today is political: even for nursery rhymes.  I don’t want to read too much into Ms. McBride’s take on her daughter’s Mother Goose book, but it does seem that she’s making a point about the socio-economic conditions described therein.  If everyday nursery rhymes have their dark side (she’s saying), why do nervous nellies get their drawers in a twist about “dark” YA fiction?

Leaving the YA issue aside for now, the dark side of Mother Goose is irrelevant.  We hear how many of the rhymes have grim origins: “Ring-a-Round-a-Rosie” supposedly references the Black Plague (though there’s some doubt about that), “Mary Mary Quite Contrary” was inspired by Bloody Mary Tudor and her persecution of Protestants, and so on.  But by the time Mother Goose takes up residence in the nursery, none of that matters.  Little rhymes, joyfully chanted, trivial in subject but large in form, present a way to think about what life is: just a series of events, or “conditions” that need to be fixed, or something greater?  Mother Goose shows little ones that order is possible, enjoyable, and to be desired.

If you’re in the market for a basic Mother Goose book, the top sellers are these:

Mother Goose, illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa.

Favorite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose, illustrated by Scott Gustafson.

My Very First Mother Goose, by Iona Opie and Rosemary Wells.

Mary Englebright’s Mother Goose: One Hundred Best-Loved Verses, illustrated obviously by Mary Englebright.

It’s been a long time since I was asked to read nursery rhymes, so I haven’t browsed these books, but they look like a good place to stop if you’re in the market.  Buy or borrow a good Mother Goose book, curl up with a favorite child, and read some rhymes.  They are a legacy of being human.

As for Ms. McBride’s comment about fairy tales a la Disney, that’s a subject in itself.  Come back on Friday!

Let us know your Mother Goose favorites!  And for our take on the Meg Gurden controversy, see Turn on the Light, The Lord Saves, and The Use and Abuse of Youth Literature.