Fearless Children – Within and out of Bounds
Fear is not a constant. It is mutable and subjective: it matters whether you are a man or a woman, which role and rank you have in society; it matters if you are young or old. If anything, it is culturally
determined – an accepted emotion in some, scorned in others. Typically, the representations of the Spartans of Ancient Greece and the Vikings in the Icelandic sagas show cultures where the display of fear is shunned. And in contemporary machismo culture a similar “fear-not “attitude is regularly flaunted. Other societies, groups and classes of people can be more accepting (expectant even) when it comes to demonstrations of fear. After all, it is only proper that the subaltern fear his or her master. And in religious cultures even the most exalted members of society does well to fear God.
In most contexts, however, to be frightened is a sign of childishness. An adult is not (or should not) be easily frightened. As the phrase, “don’t be such a baby,” indicates, the older child is expected to be braver than the younger. Indeed, part of the initiation into adulthood for both boys and girls in many societies is to master one’s childhood fears: pain, darkness, being alone, going hungry. Similarly, the readiness to display fear is gendered. Traditionally in western countries, older boys have been dissuaded from showing fears and tears on the grounds that such emotions are girlish.
Still, in the case of the small child fear is expected, it is part of what defines her and him as a child. Indeed the small child is expected to be afraid of a number of things. And not only is this a matter of definition; a child who is too bold and unsuspecting may pose a threat to itself – and others.
Consequently parents have scared their children from going near dangerous places like rivers and wells, tall trees and motorways, fire and machinery; they have scared their boys and girls of strangers and wild animals; they have scared them about eating unknown fruit and getting lost in the woods; they have scared them with ghosts and trolls and creatures of the night; they have made them wary of themselves and of grown-ups in general, and put the fear of God in them.
Accordingly, didactic children’s literature also frequently employs a pedagogy of fear. Puritan writers like James Janeway, in his Token for Children (1672) typically desigened their work to put the fear of hellfire into the soul of every child. Early children’s literature abound in accounts intended to scare children into adopting (or rejecting) a certain behavior. Although this is not the place to discuss, I believe that one could make a case that today too children’s fictions employ scare-mongering tactics for pedagogical reasons, albeit usually in more indirect and insidious ways.
Even when the aim has been to entertain rather than to instruct, scaring children is central in stories for children, from folk tales to the present day Pirates of the Carribbean to just give one example. The shock-effect of the wolf’s “all the better to eat you with” in “Red Riding Hood,” or the ogre’s “fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a Englishman” in Jack and the Beanstalk, are meant to give a frissonne, a sharp, delightful thrill of fear. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and of H. C. Andersen are other well-known examples of narratives that exploit children’s fears to a high degree. It can often be hard to determine whether a scary text for children was intended to inculcate a message or meant to entertain, and of course different audiences may see this in different ways. Satirical in its intention Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter (1845) exploits this genre of writing.
At this point, let me recoup. There are several reasons why children should not be intrepid. Firstly, because a fearless child could be seen as unnatural and transgressive – not a child, nor an adult – a monster, rather. Secondly, since readiness to learn depends on one’s capacity to fear, the fearless child is in some measure unteachable and in all probability doomed to perish. Thirdly, a fearless child is to be pitied because s/he is unable to experience the thrill and rush of fear.
Yet there are narratives about fearless children in children’s literature. What I am interested in here is how should one understand the presence of such figures in books and films for children?
This paper will examine some texts which feature dauntless children, specifically three Swedish literary fairy tales from the early 20th C and Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicäa” (1984). I will show how fearlessness is
defined and described, how fearlessness relates to other character traits, and how the transgressiveness and playfulness of the fearless child may on the one hand be subversive and liberating and yet run the risk of being harnessed and brought “within bounds.”
In the Swedish fairy tale “The boy who did not know what fear was,” a poor cottager, his wife and eight children are deprived of their only cow by the trolls who live in the deepest recesses of the forest. This spells disaster for the destitute family, except that in the flock of children there is a special boy, the “rosy-cheeked” Nisse, who neither fears the “wolves, bears, witches or trolls who inhabit Hulta-forest”; the reason is that he is “so kind-hearted that wild animals do not wish to harm him” (125). His parents do not stop him; they know that he can tread unmolested where anyone else would be attacked. So Nisse sets out. First he meets a witch. He addresses her courteously and asks directions to the
whereabouts of the trolls. But she jumps at him from the rock she is sitting on, only to get caught by her long hair in the tangled bushes. Regardless of her sneaky attack, Nisse helps her get loose. Grateful, she gives him an herb to put in his ear and which will enable him to understand the language of animals. Next he meets a wolf-hound. It has a thorn in one of its paws, and Nisse volunteers to take it out before the surprised wolf-hound has had time to bite Nisse. He offers to be Nisse’s guide. Then he meets a bear. Nisse thinks that the bear wants to greet him when in fact he is about to crush him. But the witch, who has been following Nisse intercedes and stuffs a stick into the bear’s jaws. This upsets Nisse. He reproaches the witch and helps the bear to get rid of the stick. At this show of trust and goodness the bear too is won to Nisse’s camp. Finally, the company reaches the trolls. Here Nisse’s goodness comes short, for “against trolls only brute strength can prevail” (130). Even Nisse realizes that they are bad, and that they are about to kill him, but he is not afraid and at this point Nisse can count on strong support: so the wolf, the bear and the witch beat up the trolls (although Nisse tells them not to be too hard on the trolls). Nisse can return home, riding on the cow Blomsterfina.
In the similarly themed fairy tale, “The Troll-man in Great Mountain” by Anna Wahlenberg, a troll-man has stolen the only two goats of a poor family living in the forest. Now the parents, who work elsewhere during the day, are afraid that the troll-man will return to take their only child, five-year old Olle. They admonish him to be careful and describe him in the following way: “hideously ugly,” “really bushy eyebrows,” “mouth that goes all the way to the ears,” “nose like a turnip,” and “a wolf’s paw in the
place of a left hand” (100). Olle, is to stay indoors, let no one in; in addition, Olle armours himself with a wooden spear and sword. When the troll-man shows up, however, Olle does not think that he looks dangerous, and as he says himself “he isn’t afraid anyhow.” So he goes out, and follows the troll-man, who says that he has a hunch where the troll might be keeping the goats. The troll-man is puzzled that Olle is not the least afraid, and eventually he asks Olle how he would react if he were the troll-man after all. But Olle says no, that’s not possible, because he thinks that “he looks like any human” and that he is kind. And then he pops a piece of bread into the mouth of the unsuspecting troll-man, who tries to cough it up, but swallows the crumb in the end. Having shared a meal, even if it is just a morsel, makes it impossible for the troll to harm the boy. Indeed he undergoes a change: “so you think I look human; then I’ll behave like one.” And he calls on the goats with a magic pipe. The goats have multiplied, and the boy returns in triumph to the cottage.
My third Swedish literary fairy tale from the early 20th C is “Innocent’s Wanderings” by Helena Nybom.
It recounts the wanderings of the child princess Bella. Her goodness and innocence – the Swedish word “oskuld” both means innocent and virgin – seems to provide her with protection against the wild animals that she meets. Bella is babes of the wood with a happy ending. She gets lost in the woods without knowing it and aimlessly wanders about encountering the one dangerous animal after the other, sacrificing items of clothing on the way, as offerings almost to the animals she meets. And as if by chance she returns to her home naked. She is unable to tell her parents what she has been doing, but she says that she has had “ever so much fun”. As with Nils and Olle Bella is innocent and good, expects no evil and helps potential adversaries.
In a recent study Maria Andersson (2011) has shown that Bella’s naïvete and fearlessness are related to her purported proximity to nature. She is represented as a natural child. Her striptease, where she rids herself of one clothes item after another can be seen as a symbolic process of naturalization. But, as Andersson shows, this was part of a middle class idea of what was seen as natural, and what was supposedly an ideal childhood, elaborated in contrast to what was regarded as the perverted childhood and youth of urban, (over)civilized society of the day. (And of the middle class readers of the publication in which it appeared, Bland Tomtar och Troll.) Therefore it is not “nature red in claw and tooth” that meets fearless children, but a benign, domesticated wilderness. One could also add that their
fearlessness is not the sullen intrepidity and brazenness of the street urchin, but the innocence of a child of the forest leading a charmed life.
The examples could be multiplied. There is Diamond in George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind – the naturally pious, “simple” boy, whose natural faith makes him fearless. And there is Pippi Longstocking – the indestructible child and/or “monster” according to Karen Coats; and that other feisty heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s, Ronia, who actively seeks risk: jumping across the abyss, playing near the waterfall etc.
But instead I will make an even bolder leap with regard to language, media and genre and turn to Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Nausicäa from 1984. The reason why I do this is that I believe that the literary fairy tales that I have looked at so far share some interesting points with Nausicäa.
Nausicäa exists in two versions: a manga series produced between 1982 and 1994 and an animated film version loosely based on the first episodes of the series. In this presentation I will base my argument on the film. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of human civilization fight it out, both against each other and against nature – represented by toxic forests and lethal insects, especially the giant Ohmu. The only who does not fear the Ohmu, nor the poisonous forest is Nausicäa, the teenage princess-hero of the narrative. In her presence the Ohmu calm down. As with Bella
confronted with the bear, she is unafraid, and the potential monsters turn out to be potent allies and providers of bounty instead.
The other major female figure in film, Kushana, provides an interesting counterpoint to Nausicäa. Kushana has been mutilated by the insects, and is set on the destruction of the forests (as well as all other enemies). As Nausicäa observes, Kushana acts with violence because she lives in fear, just like the little squirrel-fox, Teto, that bites Nausicäa before it understands that she means it no harm.
Despite more or less life-threatening things happening all the time, Nausicäa herself only once avows that she is capable of fear, and that is after she has killed a number of soldiers who in turn have just murdered her paralyzed father, and then surrendered herself to the enemy so as not to jeopardize her subjects. “I’m afraid of myself and what I can do,” she says, at that point.
Both Nausicäa and the Swedish fairy tales feature protagonists who by virtue of their fearlessness, selflessness, goodness and – let’s not forget! – their luck, avert the huge risks they are taking at every turn of their respective quests. What they also have in common is that culture heroes like Nausicäa and Bella show that human beings can coexist with the rest of creation without destroying it, or being destroyed by it.
The fear that it is civilization rather than nature that puts each and everyone of us in jeopardy, is, I believe, a fear that we share with the fairy tale writers of the early 20th C. However, where Smedberg,
Nybom and Wahlenberg reacted against the moral jungle of civilization and therefore championed the fearless child living in harmony in wild nature (cohabiting with both real and imagined creatures), Miyazaki taps into the anxieties we have today about global apocalypse, either caused by pollution or nuclear war.
We return to the question of the fearless child: how should one understand a Nausicäa, a Bella, a Nisse? The answers can only be tentative suggestions. Fear is not abolished because we hear about exceptional culture heroes. It is because certain situations and creatures and persons are extremely dangerous that the heroic becomes manifest. One could even say that the underlying structure is reinforced in
narratives that feature characters that cross the line. At the same time narratives such as these hold out a promise to all of us:
There is hope. Change is possible. We need not live in fear.
Works Cited
Miyazaki, Hayao. Nausicäa of the Valley of the Winds. 1984. Nybom, Helena. ”Oskuldens vandring” [Innocent’s wanderings].
Smedberg, Alfred. “Pojken som aldrig var rädd” [The who never was afraid]. Bland Tomtar och Troll. 1912. John Bauers Bästa.
