At Arm's Length

A Rhetoric of Character in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Mike Cadden

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496834607
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary critics and authors have long argued about the importance or unimportance of an author's relationship to readers. What can be said about the rhetorical relationship that exists between author and reader? How do authors manipulate character, specifically, to modulate the emotional appeal of character so a reader will feel empathy, awe, even delight? In At Arm's Length: A Rhetoric of Character in Children's and Young Adult Literature, Mike Cadden takes a rhetorical approach that complements structural, affective, and cognitive readings. The study offers a detailed examination of the ways authorial choice results in emotional invitation. Cadden sounds the modulation of characters along a continuum from those larger than life and awe inspiring to the life sized and empathetic, down to the pitiable and ridiculous, and all those spaces between. Cadden examines how authors alternate between holding the young reader at arm's length from and drawing them into emotional intensity. This balance and modulation are key to a rhetorical understanding of character in literature, film, and television for the young. Written in accessible language and of interest and use to undergraduates and seasoned critics, At Arm's Length provides a broad analysis of stories for the young child and young adult, in book, film, and television. Throughout, Cadden touches on important topics in children's literature studies, including the role of safety in children's media, as well as character in multicultural and diverse literature. In addition to treating "traditional" works, he analyzes special cases—forms, including picture books, verse novels, and graphic novels, and modes like comedy, romance, and tragedy.

1

A Rhetoric of Character

There are obviously a great many literary elements and techniques that can be viewed rhetorically. Narrative point of view and plotting are useful contexts for considering the ways children’s writers communicate and manipulate distance between child reader and text, for instance, but I would like to consider characterization as a particularly important and useful communication technique in children’s literature. I would go so far as to say that as character goes, so goes the rhetorical relationship between author and reader. Mieke Bal argues that “character is intuitively the most crucial category of narrative, and also most subject to projection and fallacies” (115). Robert Scholes has it that “to suggest that one order of characterization is better than another is folly. To recognize that differences exist is the beginning of wisdom” (161); I hope to show more wisdom than folly.

As teachers, scholars, and readers, we need to be clear that realism as a setting (the usual definition of “realism”) doesn’t mean that all characters are to be regarded as representational by default.¹ This may seem like an obvious point, but it might well be news to writers of some children’s literature handbooks, who often imply, if not state outright, that character in children’s realism is automatically assumed to require or foster identification from the reader (and a bad form of it at that) because characters are assumed to be mimetic simply by being in text with a realistic setting. E. M. Forster counters that “[characters] are real not because they are like ourselves (though they may be like us) but because they are convincing” (62), and they can be convincing in a number of ways that have nothing to do with being like us or people we know. To be “convinced” might mean that we accept their function as well as (or in spite of) the degree to which they have dimension, and that function isn’t necessarily to be an object of identification.

When educators and publishers discuss diversity, there is sometimes the simple goal of having children “see themselves” represented in fiction, but different readers can be drawn in and pushed away for an array of reasons that go beyond the demographic similarity of characters. As I discussed earlier, the phenomenon of drawing in and pushing away for different readers can happen simultaneously, surely, but later I’ll say more about the risks of assuming something is being communicated simply through the choice of character demographics.²

As children’s books have become more about identification than sources for role models, identification has become a value in assessing children’s books’ success by teachers, parents, and publishers. “A child can relate” has become higher critical praise than “This character provides a good role model for readers.” Suzanne Keen has argued that “novels that succeed in invoking strong character identification are likelier to reach large numbers of readers” and that “Middlebrow readers tend to value novels offering opportunities for strong character identification” (11). Children’s Literature, Briefly, by Tunnell and Jacobs, asserts that “of all the genres in children’s literature, contemporary realistic fiction is the most popular [because] people are interested in their own lives, and this genre is about ‘my life. This is my world. This is how I live. This story is about a girl like me’” (128). They go on to claim that “the importance of identifying with one’s own life is a reason children’s books have children as protagonists” (129).³ Identification becomes associated not only with critical success but with the genre of realism as well, and this has helped make realism the more “literary” or serious genre. Genre is simply not a good measure for whether a character will invite closeness or distance to a reader. Any genre can create characters that draw us close or push us back.⁴ James Phelan reminds us of something that should be obvious: characters are constructs, and we should not limit their success at inspiring identification to certain genres (Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots 3).

There are, as alluded to above, quantitative and qualitative forms of representational character. Quantifiable forms of representation are often what could be called surface or visible descriptions, though that doesn’t at all make them unimportant. They tend to be demographic. The most important demographic in children’s literature is the child.⁵ Following that, other quantifiable elements include race, gender, ethnicity, religion, regional affiliation/location, culture, and other markers that have tangible, visible qualities that contribute to character dimension and description. When people call for diversity in children’s books, this is often what is focused on, and unfortunately often the only thing. Quantifiable representation obviously varies in the degree to which it is described and made important in the text. Franklin in the Peanuts series is quantifiably darker skinned than the other characters, but that is as far as his difference through representation goes. At its worst, quantifiable representation is used to check boxes; at its best it is a means for enabling child readers to recognize differences and the fullness of the world. Qualitative representation, in contrast, is less visible and deals with more subjective qualities, such as a character’s reported history or experience, personality, interests, and thoughts. While being an orphan would be fairly quantifiable, being lonely and misunderstood by family would be a bit more subjective and less “visible,” for instance. Being bookish (a popular form of representation for readers of books, after all), “dorky,” resilient, and loyal are identifiable qualities, but these qualities are not as easily quantified or seen immediately (granted, the presence of glasses on a character or a book in her hand is often a symbolic quantification meaning “nerd”). Quantifiable representations are more easily noted by potential purchasers or browsers looking through illustrations; qualitative features may need to be commented on in book blurbs or through recommendations and book reviews to be communicated to potential readers. You can’t know that you’ll identify with a character’s shyness from looking at the cover.

One form of representation, either the quantitative or qualitative, will almost always play a role in how the other develops. Being “different” can be quantified in a character, but it might lead to the significant qualitative marker of loneliness or “being misunderstood” that a reader might identify with even if the quantitative representation doesn’t match up with the reader; so, too, the reader might “see herself” in the quantitative representation of “being short” but finds nothing else in that character to connect to, perhaps because the character is brutish and nasty as well as short. The belief that simple, quantifiable representation is sufficient to connect with readers is as problematic as the assumption that realistic settings and circumstances necessitate that characterization will be realistic. In fact, in some cases, readers will simply disregard quantitative representation made clear by the texts. Two infamous examples of misreadings of the quantifiable include dark-skinned characters. Ursula K. Le Guin’s wizard Ged is described as “copper-brown” (19) in A Wizard of Earthsea but is often visually depicted in film and book covers as the generic white-skinned wizard. The dark-skinned character Rue in The Hunger Games, who was also depicted as dark skinned in the film version, was the subject of complaints by moviegoers who glossed the description of her on page 40 and inserted their own racial image of “cute, little girl” (aka, white). So when skin color is a brief description but not part of the qualitative characterization in the book—when it’s made (or perceived to be) incidental to character—it can not only be missed but actually overwritten by folks who create their own quantifiable objects of either preference or identification.

An author can use quantitative and qualitative characterization as a means to modulate the distance between the text and the reader. The author can communicate by offering up characterization that is meant to provide quantifiable distance (difference) or perhaps closeness (sameness). The author can also communicate that through qualitative descriptions that will invite sympathy or indifference. The author can rely on combinations of these things as well: a character quantifiably different from majority culture (which, in fantasy, might mean being an elf or troll) might have highly sympathetic or identifiable desires or qualities, for instance, like being afraid of the dark.

It’s important to recognize that it isn’t always (or maybe even usually) the most representational of characters that inspire emotional responses. Despite the author’s use of distance to create an identification barrier between text and reader, we often have the phenomenon of bathos at work. The most powerful version is found in fake or superficial realism. In recent years in the United States we have seen the development of a genre of video that could be called “military parent appears in a school.” The scene requires little to trigger an emotional response from a war-weary population appreciative of its soldiers and concerned for their children. A child is identified in a gym, a ball field, or a classroom, and then a uniformed (important detail) adult appears in a doorway or out of a crowd. The child recognizes the uniformed adult and runs to him or her. The scene climaxes with hugs and tears. The viewer experiences sudden allergies (red eyes, tears, sniffles). While there is nothing cheap, insincere, or wrong with the larger context of this scene (for the actual student and soldier, it is powerful stuff, of course), it merely works as symbols of emotion for the reader. Bathos, as a literary device, is a cheap trick, so to speak, to make us cry at undeveloped but highly symbolic representations. Any number of examples exist in generic form, though usually “realistic” and involving the vulnerable: a child dying of cancer; a deathbed forgiveness; an innocent child lead astray; a sacrificial death for a cause dear to the reader.

In my discussion below, I’ll be distinguishing between unreal characters that may, however, involve highly qualitative character representation (Hobbits that you come to love for their developed and individual natures) as well as characters set in realism who are quantitatively exaggerated, loveable, but not the objects of identification. In other words, within a system of characterization that charts spatial relationships between the real, unreal, and exaggerated in character, it is important to note how they work as distancing tools used by authors to modulate the distance between text and reader.

My focus in this project is on the rhetorical function of character for the authorial audience of children’s books rather than as rhetorical agents themselves within their stories. What do authorial choices regarding characterization, in particular, mean for how the reader is to position herself relative to the story? What can we make of a character’s change of function over the course of a story for young people or even over the course of a series as opposed to the questionable claims that characters “grow,” for instance? I want to propose a figure that represents something of a “dialing up” of character construction—a way to think about how an author writing to a young audience might modulate and manipulate character in any genre to move readers inward through empathy or distance them through either the funhouse mirror of exaggeration or larger-than-life unreality.

Diagram 1 offers a way to think of movement and modulation of character as rhetorical. The modulation of character over narrative and real time, as well as the positioning of characters in relation to others, is made in order to have an effect on the audience. The diagram represents how characters can be manipulated or modulated to balance indifference, pity, sympathy, and empathy in order to create the desired distance between reader and text, and it will do that by manipulating both quantitative as well as qualitative representation.

Let’s begin at the apex of “the dial,” so to speak. If realistic, lifelike characters are now to be considered measurable by reader identification, let’s say that the representational character is designed by the author to communicate to the reader the most opportunity for sympathy, or even empathy. So, it might be that the author wants the reader to come “closer” to character by creating one that is round, psychologically rich, developed in dimensions including idiosyncrasies and descriptions of behavior and appearance, and adds to that over the course of a story or series of stories. These characters are possible, probable, plausible, and aren’t modulated toward exaggerated or superhuman behavior, abilities, morality, or intelligence. They may be quantifiably representative in a number of ways, including race and gender that marks an attempt by the author either to draw in through identification or just not push away by making the character too unlikely or unusual. Sometimes, however, an author modulates (“turns the dial”) from the lifelike toward smaller than life or the larger than life by degree if they wish to make characters more memorable but less likely, and less sympathetic. Importantly, any rhetorical goals an author has regarding multiculturalism will be affected by dialing in one direction or another either in terms of physical depiction or quality of behavior. Characters can be made larger than life or smaller to achieve different rhetorical ends.

• • •

If we turn the dial from representationalism or “life sized” to the larger than life, we see a different effect and message to the reader. This modulation creates the character that is the prodigy, the genius, the spy kid, the one gifted beyond our comprehension. Here we have Encyclopedia Brown or secret agent Alex Rider in Anthony Horowitz’s popular Stormbreaker series. These are not characters exaggerated from some aspect of human behavior as much as simply unreal in their possession of abilities that aren’t available to children or even to most adults. Maria Nikolajeva asserts that such characters—“high mimetic” in Northrop Frye’s terms—“are supposed to serve as models not only for the other characters in the story but for the readers as well” (Rhetoric 33), and, of course, modeling doesn’t require empathy. In fantasy, these characters tend to be demigods, superheroes, wizards, or something new on the earth, like Charles Wallace in A Wrinkle in Time, Will Stanton in The Dark Is Rising, or Ender Wiggin in Ender’s Game. Stereotype isn’t as likely a concern here. They can be Good or Evil. Here, as with extreme exaggeration, our response is likely a broad choice between approbation and disdain, not recognition of ourselves. The extreme characters of exaggeration or superhumanity are not recognizable as us, and the closer to that position the character goes, the more clearly the author is communicating this to the child reader.

This all said, a consistently surprising response is offered up by both children and college students to these exaggerated and unreal characters in realism. If identification can be a projection as much as it can be recognition, and sympathy or empathy can follow projection, as Suzanne Keen explains in Empathy and the Novel, then there is some explanation for what some adults do with the exaggerated character and what some children do with the unreal, larger-than-life character. Keen wonders “whether mature readers feel differently about fictional characters as they grow up, or whether they learn to assess and present their responses differently” (111). I think they do both of these things, and in relation to children. In my experience discussing books with both children and adults, I have found that the adults are the ones most likely to mistake the extremely exaggerated child character as typical and representational: “Oh, that Junie B. Jones is just like the six-year-olds in my class. They are all so funny.” The adult accepts this exaggerated portrayal (which could stereotype children) and then projects identification on behalf of the child reader, which enables those adults to say that children can and will “relate” to Junie, which is, as handbooks reinforce, almost always also a claim of approval for children’s realism. Children, on the other hand, don’t typically claim Junie B. as “like them,” much less “good” for that reason, but simply note that she is silly and funny—a laughable and ridiculous creature. Children can approve of and like Junie while they laugh at her, but I don’t think they necessarily empathize with her. As fable morals are really for those other people who need them, exaggerated characters are not us.

The larger-than-life character in children’s fiction is, in contrast to the smaller-than-life character, not likely to inspire adults to project identification on behalf of a child reader. My adult students (many of whom are nontraditional by age) don’t assume that Alex Rider, boy secret agent, or the legendary Maniac Magee are going to be “relatable” to children. The unreal character will be deemed either implausible or accepted as the character necessarily implausible for the story. The child reader, however, may well be unsure of the actual implausibility or even impossibility of such a character and, in seeing its portrayal in a realistic setting and, well, its extreme coolness, project identification through desire and wish fulfillment and build empathy. A child reader is likely to play Alex Rider, not pretend to be Junie B. Jones. Halloween costumes, the ultimate wish-fulfillment-projected identification, are more likely to depict larger-than-life rather than exaggerated characters, and by wearing the costume, the child indicates her desire to inhabit that character. So, there is across two readerships a double dialectic in response to character distance.

Consider Marc Brown’s popular “Arthur” books. In this case, we see the main character begin literary existence closer to the “unreal” category given his anthropomorphism (he is an aardvark) though real in his attending human school. It is the realistic setting and context that creates the pull, the drawing in; it is the use of both cartoon and anthropomorphism that provides the push, the holding at arm’s length. As the years roll on, Marc Brown alters his rhetorical relationship with his perceived reader and slowly removes the anthropomorphism in the text by degree, making Arthur more and more representational a figure. His problems are no longer aardvark related, like having his long nose get in the way as it does in the first book. It’s almost as if Brown finds less and less need for keeping the reader at arm’s length, as though he tested a rhetorical relationship and has modulated it over time. He can’t convert Arthur into a real boy in Pinocchio fashion, but Arthur has gone from being an actual aardvark to a kid with weird ears who shares Voldemort’s rhinoplasty specialist. No new reader exposed to a recent Arthur book would ever guess his species.

Speaking of his lordship, he is another example of a character that over narrative and publication time travels from unreal toward representational (but never gets there). Voldemort begins as a rather unreal entity. He begins to mov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 • A Rhetoric of Character
• 2 • Between Life Sized and the Larger than Life
• 3 • Between Life Sized and the Smaller than Life
• 4 • No Man’s Land
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author