I also think it’s HOW said character dies – kitten strangled? Dog mauled by lion? Much, much more traumatic I think than Charlotte dying of what amounts to plain old age. (Well, more or less) Stories about animal abuse (as the first example would be) are pretty fucked up.
I think my first encounter with “fictional” death* was when Mr. Hooper died on Sesame Street. According to my mother, she had taken me to see Bambi years ago, but I didn’t remember it.
But I was about five or six when Big Bird had to deal with Mr. Hooper’s death, and the idea that “death was forever.” I think that really hit for me. So it wasn’t so much the death of an animal, but an actual human character.
There was a scene in “Extras” in which Kate Winslet (I think) talked about how if you want an Oscar, you gotta be in a Holocaust movie. Holocaust movie=instant Oscar. (She later went on in real life to earn an Oscar for her role in a Holocaust movie, IIRC, which I may not).
I kinda think something similar is in play with children’s books. Winners of Newbery awards have a disproportionate number of deaths in them, and so some authors think that you gotta have a death in a book if you want it to be taken seriously. Ideally, it should be a parent, a best friend, or a beloved pet that dies. It drives me up the wall.
Yeah, death is a part of life. Yeah, it evokes strong emotion. But it’s cheap as hell to make a kid cry by ganking a puppy or offing mommy. Cheap as hell, and award material.
I read complex books full of emotion to my second-grade students. Last year I read The Tale of Despereaux, which involves parental abandonment, child abuse, attempted regicide, a soul twisted to bitternesss and rage, and a remarkable redemption. This year I’m reading Holes, a book with injustice, child abuse, vicious government fraud, starvation, deathly illness, and racism. But neither book feels like it was written explicitly to win their Newbery awards. And neither one has a killed puppy dog.
Um, I’m 27, and I’m still freaked out by the concept of death.
A few months ago while one of my 92-year-old clients was on his deathbed, he kept calling out, ‘‘Please help me! I’m scared.’’ So he was pretty freaked out by the concept of death, too.
No amount of facing death, in life or fiction, really makes it less freaky. Being sheltered has nothing to do with it.
Art is a reflection of life, it’s how we come to terms with the bigger picture, it’s how we step back from ourselves and see through new eyes, it’s how we confront the harsh realities of being a person in the world. Childrens’ literature deals with these issues because children deal with these issues.
Animal killing? How about people, especially children-killing, in Newberry books? Bridge to Terabithia, On my Honor, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Island of the Blue Dolphins…seems like if you want a Newberry award, you kill off a kid.
(Every time I re-visit Island of the Blue Dolphins with a student, I realize again how seriously messed up that book is. She and her brother are abandoned by their tribe, her brother is mauled to death by dogs, she adopts a dog, that dog dies, she grows up completely alone. Geez.)
This is the impression I got when I read On My Honor. I remember being very disturbed and don’t remember there being anything else of substance in the book other than the kid’s best friend drowning. Maybe a lesson that you shouldn’t keep your friend’s death a secret just because you were doing something you weren’t supposed to??
E: I’m now enjoying how the wiki article is reading just like an elementary school book report
Don’t get me started on Sadako and her bloody paper cranes.
In the cases of both my daughter and my stepdaughter, their teachers have used this book as propaganda about how wrong it was for the Allies to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, without giving them any of the background about World War II.
This is just totally wrong, and I did tackle both teachers about it, but I don’t think they saw (or cared to see) how wrong it was. Seems to me that this book is one that “touchy feely” teachers like to use in the further pussification of our society.
I don’t think these books are considered great because of the deaths. There are great books without a death. I think we just remember the ones that have sad parts. And I do think it’s a good way of introducing children to death. Many of them are, like it or not, going to be exposed to deaths at a young age. Sometimes it’s not a death of an animal–sometimes it’s a parent or a sibling. Isn’t it better if it’s not really happening? I mean, I get wanting kids to be innocent–I just think that this time period when kids were innocent and knew nothing of “the world” is a bit of a fiction. I also think it’s more about the parent than about the child. Kids know a lot more than we give them credit for.
I also was (and am) a huge reader. I liked when I felt sad at a death or an event because it meant I was reading something worth reading. If a character died and I felt nothing, it just words, but if a character died and I felt a little pang, it meant the author had done something–created a meaningful work. Created a character who was like a friend, in some ways. But I also feel a little cold blooded whenever I read the "I was traumatized’ speeches. Yes, I was upset but maybe because I read so much, it wasn’t like every death freaked me out. I guess you get desensitized, but even as a young kid, when I was upset, it wasn’t really the end of the world. It was a sad book but it wasn’t real life.
Usually when their first goldfish dies. (I think that happened to me when I was three.) Or just in a conversation; I understood I was going to outlive my grandparents long before any of my relatives or friends had died. The odds are pretty good it will be before they are reading novels. The deaths in Where the Red Fern Grows are not traumatic. They’re sad. And maybe gross. But the OP’s daughter is eight. She knows it’s a book and she’ll be fine.
This is especially true in the case of rural kids, who often knew a lot more not only about death, but also about sex from what they witnessed around the farm.
The time period where kids are innocent and know nothing of the world is currently in the making, if a lot of teachers have their way.
The stepson once went to a volleyball tournament where no one kept score. Why? Because no one was supposed to “win” or “lose”, they were only supposed to “participate”.
When I found out about this, I told the gym teacher that this was stupid. Life is a competition whether they wanted to believe it or not.
Every children’s book I’ve read that both has a death in it and is considered a “classic” has one other thing in common. The ones left behind deal with the death and get on with life; because life continues.
I think there’s a difference between the latter statement and not allowing people to keep score. I mean, in gym class you can keep score and not feel like a loser necessarily. It’s just…I don’t know, part of the game. Not about making people feel like they’re losers for not winning.
And if you do feel bad, isn’t it better that it’s on this small scale? Like, if you never have a set back when you do have one it’ll be terrible. Same with these books. Yes, reading about the death of a fictional dog is sad. But maybe it’s a mini preparation for when real pain happens. Like when your real dog dies or someone you really know.
I never get people being upset at these genuinely well written works. I could understand if people were upset at kids reading inappropriate stuff with horribly graphic violence. I don’t believe in censorship but I can see the value in not showing a five year old the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But I’d read Charlotte’s Web to a young child–I was pretty young when I was exposed to it both through the book and film. It’s sad but not inappropriately so. The death is handled as something sad but as something that you ultimately recover from. Something that makes makes you feel bad but which marks you as a stronger person.
Now, there are obviously deaths that people don’t recover from. Really traumatic things beyond a dog being killed or an old person dying. War, or a parent losing a young child, or seeing a loved one ripped to pieces before your eyes. I think we’d have a fairly interesting debate on our hands if the question was about exposing a youngish child to a book with graphic death. But I think the stuff in Red Fern or Old Yeller or Charlotte’s Web or even Bridge to Terabinthia is very age appropriate for the 7 to 10 set. It’s not pleasant, no, but death isn’t supposed to be a bed of roses, you know?
You’re talking a lot of sense. But I remember from my own childhood that there were a lot of things adults just dumped on you, that you got no help at all with. I often think that there are people who want to return to that state of affairs for selfish reasons, ie: “this was my experience, so nobody deserves any better.”
I remember being pretty traumatized by a couple of animal deaths when I was a kid–they weren’t in books, they were in TV movies. One was a movie called “JT,” about a little inner city boy whose mom won’t let him have a pet, so he befriends a kitten and feeds it in an abandoned building. Some bullies find him and the kitten, and somehow it’s frightened and it runs out in the street and is killed by a car. This messed me up bigtime as a kid, and to this day I still shudder when I remember it.
The other one was a made for TV movie about an Ozark girl who had a pet crow, and she wanted so desperately to fit in with the other kids in her school that she ended up joining them as they threw rocks at the crow and killed it.
I don’t deal well with animal death brought on by bullies or tormentors. Charlotte’s Web made me sad, but not in the same way.
I’m really glad I never read the story one of the earlier posters mentioned about the strangled kitten. That would have put me right over the edge, I think (I love cats more than any other animal and always have).
So yeah, I don’t think kids should be completely sheltered from death, but I do think it should be handled carefully. Little kids remember things for a very long time, and sometimes they don’t even remember quite why something disturbed them so badly.
The story I remember being traumatized by involved a boy in Spain who was intimidated into hiding a dangerous criminal from the police. One of the cops who came by was a cousin, who gave him a watch in exchange for revealing the criminal’s hiding spot.
Later, his father found out what he had done, so he made the boy go outside, kneel down and pray. When the boy was finished, he shot him.
Seems like every other book they made us read at that age was another “dead dog book”, as my brothers and I called them. I hated the lot of them, and still do.
If I wanted to be depressed I’d watch the fucking news. Books are supposed to be fun.
I’ve never gotten this attitude. I mean, yes, books can be frivolous. But they’re not supposed to be any one way. They’re just another art form. Would you say that people shouldn’t create upsetting paintings or make serious films about death because films and pictures should be fun things to look at? It’s fine to only appreciate it on one level yourself but you don’t you see why someone else might want to use a medium to express deep emotions?
I’m rereading Brave New World and sometimes I can’t help getting the feeling that there are people out there who think that everything unpleasant like death and disease should just be sanitized or not talked about because it’s upsetting.
