nightmares, idylls, mystery, and hope: walk two moons and the artifice of realism in children’s...

Nightmares, Idylls, Mystery, and Hope: Walk TwoMoons and the Artifice of Realism in Children’s Fiction

Lewis Roberts

Published online: 26 June 2007� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons is a defining example of contemporaryrealistic fiction for children. This article argues that Walk Two Moons modelsstorytelling as a tool which children need to understand their own relationship toreality and to literature. Rather than employing a grim verisimilitude, as some criticshave charged, Creech has created a novel of realistic character development which alsochallenges any simplistic understanding of children’s realistic fiction through its complexand self-referential narrative structure and use of literary language. The result is anarrative which, in the face of painful and tragic circumstances, empowers readerstoward a hopeful and optimistic view of life’s mysteries.

Keywords Realism � Storytelling � Quest narrative �Family story � Bibliotherapy

I often place Sharon Creech’s 1995 Newbery winner, Walk Two Moons, at the end of myChildren’s Literature course as the concluding and defining example of contemporarychildren’s realism. In Walk Two Moons, Salamanca Tree Hiddle tells her grandparentsthe story of her friend Phoebe Winterbottom, whose mother has recently andmysteriously disappeared. Sal narrates this tale in lieu of talking about the loss of herown mother. Although Sal cannot acknowledge her mother’s fate, to the reader or toherself, we gradually learn that Chanhassen ‘‘Sugar’’ Hiddle had left her family inKentucky after suffering a miscarriage and was killed in a bus accident in Idaho. Bit bybit, Sal is enabled to voice this tragedy through the story of Phoebe, told during a carride from Ohio to Idaho with her Gram and Gramps. This trip, she comes to realize, isher grandparents’ gift to her, allowing her to visit her mother’s grave and make peacewith her own sense of loss. As they trace the path that her mother followed, walking in

L. Roberts (&)English Department CM 145, Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne,2101 E. Coliseum Blvd, Fort Wayne, IN 46805-1499, USAe-mail: [email protected]

Children’s Literature in Education (2008) 39:121–134DOI 10.1007/s10583-007-9046-4

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her mother’s moccasins helps Sal to understand her mother’s story and to create a newstory of her own.

This book brings together a number of concepts and themes that my students and Ihave discussed throughout the semester, such as issues of identity, realism vs. fantasy,the family story, quest narratives, and themes of hope and survival. Moreover, the bookprovides insight into two central concerns in the study of modern children’s literature:the efficacy of realism and the role of storytelling in the lives of child readers who arethemselves on a quest for identity. In her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, Creechannounced such themes as integral to the context in which she created her story:

When I was writing Walk Two Moons the newspapers and the BBC were filledwith images of war and disaster: of bombings, riots, floods, earthquakes, famine,torture. Every day my students stared into Pandora’s box, rifled with all the evils ofthe world. Every day there was something difficult to face. Maybe I wrote thisbook because my students and I, like Salamanca, had stared those horrors in theeye as best we could, and then needed, for a time, to clutch the hope that was downin the bottom of Pandora’s box, and with that hope turn to the other box, the onewith the mysteries and ‘‘smooth beautiful folds’’ inside. Salamanca and I need toface the evils, but we also need mystery, and we need hope. (425)

Creech’s claim here is two-fold. First, Walk Two Moons is a novel that emerged out of aview of reality filled with ‘‘all the evils of the world,’’ and indeed it is therefore a novelthat deals candidly with the evils that can arise in a child’s life, including abandonment,death, and grieving. Secondly, her writing employs realism as a means to face those evilsby providing a hopeful and mysterious view of life.

If these two claims seem in some sense contradictory, that speaks to a more generalmisapprehension about children’s literature and specifically about realistic fiction forchildren. Such misconceptions can be found in Hal Piper’s now infamous critique of thenovel in the Chicago Tribune, ‘‘Are the Plots of Kids’ Books Too Realistic?’’ Piper’sanswer to his titular question reveals an assumption about children’s realism that hasmore to do with sentimental nostalgia than with the realities of children’s lives. Reactingto the death of Salamanca’s mother in Walk Two Moons, Piper bemoans, ‘‘This is thenew realism in children’s books. No more happy families.’’ Today’s realistic fiction forchildren, he charges, depicts ‘‘hellish childhood nightmares instead of blissful childhoodidylls.’’

Likewise, Marcia Baghban argued at the 2000 NCTE conference that reality-basedstories too often make children into victims who must await rescue by adults. Baghbanclaimed that fantasy, which shows characters dealing with realistic problems in new andfanciful contexts, is a preferable genre for children because it enables ‘‘identification at adistance [which] makes readers feel safe.’’ This distancing effect of fantasy, then, isbetter able to create ‘‘hope,’’ whereas realistic stories place readers ‘‘too close to what isreal’’ and thereby ‘‘unnerve readers of any age with their dreariness and despair’’(Baghban 11).

A more pragmatically pedagogical view of children’s realism is announced byCharlotte S. Huck. ‘‘Books that honestly portray the realities of life,’’ Huck writes,‘‘help children toward a fuller understanding of human problems and humanrelationships and, thus, toward a fuller understanding of themselves and their ownpotential’’ (528). Huck’s understanding of children’s realism stands in stark contrast toPiper’s assessment of Walk Two Moons. Piper’s claim is idealistic in its absolute contrastbetween ‘‘nightmares’’ and ‘‘idylls,’’ for it assumes that children must dwell in a perfect

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world, either perfectly horrible or perfectly idyllic. This, of course, is not an observationof children’s lives, but rather an imposition of adult desires onto the landscape ofchildhood.1 Huck, on the other hand, suggests that children’s literature can play a moreprofoundly nuanced role in the lives of its readers by promoting empathy as a meanstoward the construction of identity. Rather than horrifying its readers by presenting‘‘hellish’’ depictions of reality, Walk Two Moons works to create understanding of theevils of the world that children must face. Baghban’s concern that realism cannotproduce the hope necessary for child readers suggests that realistic fiction is itselfincapable of providing the tools that children need to understand their own struggles. Ifrealism merely worked by creating a one-to-one identification between actual childreader and fictional child victim, this might be true, but such an understanding ofidentification ignores the role of empathy that Huck underscores. Truly empathizingwith a fictional character’s plight leads the reader to see causes and consequences, notmerely to feel a sympathetic and helpless sense of victimization.

In addition, the best realistic fiction for children, rather than simply asking for suchidentification, models the tools that children need to begin understanding their ownrelationship to reality and to literature. As Lawrence Sipe has noted, narrative has longbeen recognized by many scholars in both psychology and the humanities as ‘‘a crucialfactor in the formation of identity’’:

the human mind may be seen as a mechanism for turning the ‘raw data’ of day-to-day experience . . . into narratives, thereby rendering reality understandable andmeaningful. . . . [O]ne of the main ways we understand an event or situation is byturning it into a story. To understand stories and how they work is thus to possess acognitive tool that not only allows children to become comprehensively literate,but also to achieve their full human potential. (63)

Walk Two Moons accomplishes this by showing how storytelling itself can function assuch a tool, both through the creation of empathy and through the same kind ofdistancing that Baghban claims only for fantasy. Rather than employing a strictverisimilitude, Sharon Creech has created a novel of realistic character developmentthat also challenges any simplistic understanding of realism in children’s fiction throughits complex and self-referential use of narrative structure and literary language.

‘‘I, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, was afraid of lots and lots of things’’: The Fears andFantasies of Realism

Creech’s assertion that the writing of her novel was born out of images of horror anddisaster is neither a call for escapism nor a justification for the kind of ‘‘dreariness anddespair’’ that Baghban sees at the center of realistic fiction. As challengers such as SusanSmith point out, realism can be seen as the opposite of fantasy, as a story about thepossible rather than the impossible that uncompromisingly presents the fears associatedwith everyday reality. Smith decries this: ‘‘Perhaps it is asking too much to dish up

1 Both Jacqueline Rose and Karen Coats, among others, have noted that children’s literature often hasmore to do with adult desires than with depicting the realities of children’s lives. Rose discusses suchdesires as ‘‘a form of investment by the adult in the child . . . which fixes the child and then holds it inplace’’ (3–4). Likewise, Coats writes that figures such as Alice and Peter Pan ‘‘hold a more or lesspermanent place as signifiers of the modernist desire to preserve the notion of a pristine childhood’’ (78).

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reality in all its harshness as bedtime reading’’ (354). However, Walk Two Moonsemploys a more postmodern, self-consciously constructed realism in its treatment ofdeath, abandonment, and grief. When Phoebe admires what she takes to be Sal’sbravery in rescuing a black spider from her desk and releasing it out of the classroomwindow, Sal is forced to confront her own fears:

I, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, was afraid of lots and lots of things. For example, I wasterrified of car accidents, death, cancer, brain tumors, nuclear war, pregnantwomen, loud noises, strict teachers, elevators, and scads of other things. (13–14)

We should note the reality of these fears as well as their variety and disorder. Sal is notterrified by the stuff of fantasy, witches and ghosts and monsters that can be easilydismissed with an appeal to their status as only make believe. She should fear suchthings as car accidents and cancer. Moreover, her realization that she holds these fearsleads her not to despair that the world is indeed a fearful and frightening place butrather to a hopeful lesson about identity: ‘‘What I have since realized is that if peopleexpect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you arefrightened down to your very bones’’ (14).

Just as with fantasy, realism often contains a didactic impulse, and in this case asubversive one as well, which suggests that bravery is neither the opposite of fear nor itsabsence but rather the ability to act in the face of one’s fears, despite them, and becauseof them.2 Sal’s fears appear logical but largely arbitrary and disordered to the first-timereader: while surely it is understandable to be afraid of nuclear war and strict teachers, itis hardly to the same degree. Likewise, whereas the fear and reality of death is certainlysomething that all adolescents must learn to face, Sal’s fear of pregnant women seemsout of place. As the story progresses, we learn that many of these seemingly arbitraryfears are grounded in Sal’s history, specifically in the loss of her mother and Sal’sfeelings of responsibility for that loss. Others, however, remain unexplained, just asmany of our own fears are both real and inexplicable. Sal’s lesson, that sometimes wemust act brave even when most frightened, grows out of this history as well, and ithighlights Sal’s most enduring problem. In dealing with the loss of her mother, Sal mustalso confront others’ expectations of herself. It is this that places her in the paradoxicalposition of simultaneously expressing and hiding her fears, telling us the story about hermother’s absence without once acknowledging, even to herself, that her mother is dead.This didactic impulse of realism, unlike the more plot-based fantasy or fairy tale moral,relies on the complexities of characterizations and the potential that realism brings toexamine motives, social pressures, and cause and effect relationships. As youngcharacters are compelled to confront reality-based fears and disasters within the contextof their everyday lives realism shows not the horrors of their lives, but their resiliency,their ability to continue living and growing.

Nevertheless, realism does not necessarily preclude an author from utilizing othernarrative techniques and borrowing from other literary genres, such as nonsenseliterature, symbolism and metaphor, and even fantasy. A number of realistic stories forchildren and adolescents employ magical realism by introducing a single element of the

2 Sal’s ultimate act of bravery is to tell her story, and so it is perhaps appropriate that this lesson onbravery is precipitated by Sal’s interaction with a ‘‘dignified black spider’’ (14). In the Greek myth ofArachne, the weaver transformed into a spider by Athena, weaving and storytelling are explicitly linked,just as Sal’s role as storyteller is initiated at her grandfather’s request: ‘‘How about a story? Spin us ayarn’’ (8).

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impossible into otherwise realistic settings in order to highlight or comment upon thereality that the story describes and the characters inhabit. Creech makes use of thisblurring of genres by introducing trees as symbols of Sal’s faith in life. Sal tells us thather ‘‘middle name, Tree, comes from your basic tree, a thing of such beauty to mymother that she made it part of my name’’ (8). This connection between Sal’s identityand her mother’s love for trees becomes central to Sal’s journey toward anunderstanding of her mother’s death and her own separate need to discover anindependent sense of self. As she begins her journey from Ohio to Idaho with hergrandparents, Sal tries initially to deal with her fear of car accidents by praying to trees:‘‘This was easier than praying to directly to God. There was nearly always a treenearby’’ (7). The nearness of trees comforts Sal precisely because they fill the emptyspace left by her mother’s absence, and this symbolic importance of trees takes on amagical quality in Sal’s memory of her mother and the incident of a blackberry kiss.

One morning, Sal writes in her journal, she awoke to her mother’s singing, and,looking out her bedroom window, witnessed her pregnant mother eating blackberriesfrom a bush and then, in a moment of spontaneous joy, kissing a sugar maple tree. Salwas so intrigued and inspired by her mother’s actions that she investigated the tree forevidence of her mother’s kiss:

I looked up at where her mouth must have touched the trunk. I probably imaginedthis, but I thought I could detect a small dark stain, as from a blackberry kiss. . . . Ihad since kissed all different kinds of trees. . . . Mixed in with each tree’s own tastewas the slight taste of blackberries, and why this was so, I could not explain. (122–123)

The mysterious and magical quality of the taste is the essence of memory, a way Salcan reconnect with something her mother loved. But if trees mark a comfortingpresence in Sal’s life, they also signify a painful absence as Sal seeks one last kiss fromher mother. The introduction of fantasy here highlights the emotional reality of Sal’sfeelings of loss.

‘‘I felt betrayed, but I didn’t know why’’: Three Models of Family Life

The potential sentimentality of these emotions is disrupted, however, as Creech situatesSal’s struggles with grief within the larger context of the three contrasting family modelsin Walk Two Moons. The efficacy of realism in children’s fiction depends on realitystanding not merely in contrast to fantasy but more especially in opposition tosentimentalism and idealism. Realism is thus most effective in providing both frankimages of life’s difficulties and practical models of hope when it presents stories aboutlife as it really is rather than as we would like it to be. Walk Two Moons enacts thisfunction of realism through its presentations of three families: Sal’s family (the Hiddles),Phoebe’s family (the Winterbottoms), and Ben’s family (the Finneys). Peter Hunt hasnoted that the ‘‘family-centered tale . . . has been replaced for adolescents by books thatacknowledge the difficulties of late twentieth-century life’’ (149–150). This is certainlytrue of family-centered books such as Little Women or Little House on the Prairie, whichidealize the family as a sanctuary from the evils of the world. These books recount theair of ‘‘security and harmony that . . . underpins the view of family life’’ in the familyromance, as Kimberley Reynolds describes: such a ‘‘fantasy of a perfect childhood’’involves ‘‘the construction of the family as a self-sufficient, loving and successful unit in

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a stress-free . . . environment’’ (30, 31). However, in late twentieth-century children’sfiction, it would be more accurate to say that family difficulties are now seen as part of achild’s life, and that contemporary realism candidly provides models for children toacknowledge and deal with difficult family issues without resorting to sentimentality orescapism.

Creech gradually allows Sal, and her readers, to see that such idealizations of familylife only serve to impede Sal’s ability to understand her mother’s death and her ownfeelings of guilt. By taking us through a series of memories and observations aboutfamily life, most of which are centered around the family table, Creech leads Sal toconfront the truth of her family’s problems and losses. While sitting down to dinner withher father at the house of Margaret Cadaver, a woman whom Sal mistakenly believes istaking her mother’s place in her father’s affections, Sal yearns for ‘‘everything to be likeit was’’:

I wanted to be back in Bybanks, Kentucky, in the hills and the trees, near the cowsand chickens and pigs. I wanted to run down the hill from the barn and through thekitchen door that banged behind me and see my mother and my father sitting atthe table peeling apples. (17)

Sal’s memory of family unity, mother and father together preparing food in a bucolicsetting, becomes nostalgic both for what it ignores and for why it is invoked, as anescape from Sal’s present reality. Creech, however, does not permit Sal to find refuge insuch a highly sentimental and overtly nostalgic wish for long.

Soon afterwards, Sal is invited to Phoebe’s house for dinner, and there she observes afamily that is working very hard to present an image of ideal domestic life as a means todisguise and deny their own family difficulties. The Winterbottoms are stiff and properaround their dinner table, speaking ‘‘quietly, in short sentences’’ with extremepoliteness (29). Even though they are ‘‘picky about their food,’’ not eating meat orusing butter, Sal observes that Mrs. Winterbottom strives to sound like ‘‘Mrs. SupremeHousewife’’ in detailing all of the pies she has baked in the last week. However, all ofher remarks are met with silence from her family, and her attempts to engage thememotionally, calling her husband ‘‘sweetie pie’’ and ‘‘honey bun,’’ surprise Sal in theircontrast to Mrs. Winterbottom’s ‘‘plain and ordinary’’ appearance (31). Gradually Salrealizes that the Winterbottoms are trying to maintain a false ideal of family life, andMrs. Winterbottom, clearly unsustained and uncomforted, abandoned by her family, isvainly attempting to sweeten her life through her unappreciated and unacknowledgedbaking and pet names.

By observing Phoebe’s family, Sal is able to begin facing her own family’simperfections. Soon after her meal with the Winterbottoms, Sal recalls another scenefrom her past, this one in stark contrast to her apple-pealing memory in its perceptionsof underlying tensions and betrayal. One morning, Sal and her mother awake todiscover that her father has left them flowers on the kitchen table. Sal gleefully joins hermother as they go out to thank him, thinking that they will sneak up on him and surprisehim, but instead her mother starts to cry: ‘‘Oh, you’re too good, John . . . . You’re toogood. All you Hiddles are too good. I’ll never be so good. I’ll never be able to think ofall the things—’’ (34). The next morning, Sal and her father discover that her mother hasleft them small dishes of blackberries. Sal wishes to see this as a romantic gesture, buther mother’s actions undermine this idyll:

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My father put his arms around her and they smooched and it was all tremendouslyromantic, and I started to turn away, but my mother caught my arm. She pulled meto her and said to me—though it was meant for my father, I think—‘‘See? I’malmost as good as your father!’’ She said it in a shy way, laughing a little. I feltbetrayed, but I didn’t know why. (35)

In this memory, Sal is able to go beyond the previous, harmonious image of herparents and thus to confront honestly her own feelings of disappointment. Her senseof betrayal here is confusing and unwelcome: her mother’s actions have thwarted, boththen and now, Sal’s desire for a perfect family life. Furthermore, by unfairly using Salas a conduit between herself and her husband, Chanhassen has forced her daughter toparticipate in maintaining a falsehood. Her mother has invested her marriage with asense of competition and insecurity that places Sal in an untenable position betweenher parents, robbing her of her sense of security and destabilizing her understanding ofher parents’ relationship. Sal begins to acknowledge that her own parents, like theWinterbottoms, were unable or unwilling to confront their underlying fears andinsecurities.

Once Sal is able to take this honest view of her past, she begins to deal with and growfrom her mother’s absence. Sal has at first experienced the loss of her mother as a loss ofidentity:

When my mother had been there, I was like a mirror. If she was happy, I washappy. If she was sad, I was sad. For the first few days after she left, I felt numb,non-feeling. I didn’t know how to feel. I would find myself looking around for her,to see what I might want to feel. (38)

Sal’s likening herself to a mirror can be understood in terms of Jacques Lacan’s conceptof the mirror stage, that developmental moment when the child first perceives itself as aseparate being, different and distinct from what constitutes the other. The mirror-stagechild must learn to recognize that her reflection in the mirror is separate, an image of theworld outside her self, but Lacan contends that this creates an ambiguity of identity inwhich the reflected image paradoxically both constitutes the other and representsherself. This suggests that the self is not whole and thus prompts a desire for bothidentification with the image and recovery of what is presumed lacking. In Lacanianthought, that lack is the absence of the mother. As Karen Coats explains, the child’s‘‘general experience of loss or separation, a general experience of sensing one’s ownlack, takes on a specific signifier—that of the mother as the most profound lost object’’(47). Just as the infant must learn to differentiate herself from the mother, to establish asense of identity that literally recognizes her self as distinct from others, Sal must find away to feel, to establish her own emotional autonomy, in the face of the uncertaintycreated by her mother’s absence. Significantly, Creech allows her to begin this process inanother image of birth and autonomy, as Sal witnesses a newborn calf attempt to standon its own wobbling legs. The calf gives Sal ‘‘a sweet, loving look’’ (38), and Sal isovercome with a moment of happiness: ‘‘I said to myself, ‘Salamanca Tree Hiddle, youcan be happy without her.’ It seemed a mean thought and I was sorry for it, but it felttrue’’ (39). In seeing an image of herself reflected in the calf’s gaze, at once a substitutefor her mother’s gaze as well as a reflection of her own growing autonomy, Sal namesherself as happy. She now knows that survival and independence are possible, but this isa painful as well as a joyful discovery. In other words, rather than retreating into

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sentimentality or false ideals, we witness Sal’s ability to recognize the emotionalcomplexities and paradoxes of her reality and incorporate them into her growing senseof identity.

Only after Sal has gained a more complex and honest view of both her family andherself, does Creech introduce the third family model in Walk Two Moons. The Finneysare a family that seems to live in a perpetual state of chaos:

It was complete pandemonium at the Finneys’. . . . There were footballs andbasketballs lying all over the place, and boys sliding down the banister and leapingover tables and talking with their mouths full and interrupting everyone withendless questions. . . . Mr. Finney was lying in the bathtub, with all his clothes on,reading a book. . . . I saw Mrs. Finney lying on top of the garage with a pillowunder her head. (46–47)

At a school sports day, the contrast among these three families is highlighted. WhilePhoebe’s parents stand on the sidelines, Mr. and Mrs. Finney enthusiastically throwthemselves into the games. Phoebe remarks on how embarrassed the Finney childrenmust be by this behavior, and this brings Sal to a significant conclusion:

I didn’t think it was embarrassing, I thought it was nice. . . . I think that deep downPhoebe thought it was nice too, and she wished her own parents would act morelike the Finneys. She couldn’t admit this, though, and in a way, I liked this aboutPhoebe – that she tried to defend her family. (48)

Sal too is trying to defend her family in the face of its dissolution, and like Phoebe, sheat first does so by pretending that all had been well before her mother’s death. Thecontrast between the Winterbottoms and the Finneys shows Sal that there are deep-seated problems in her own Hiddle family: her father, she remarks circumspectly,‘‘could not come’’ to this school function (47). If Sal has been twice-abandoned by hermother, first through her having left the family and then irrevocably through death, herfather has likewise failed her, uprooting her from her Kentucky home and thenabsenting himself from her life and her grief.

The Finneys also provide an example of a positive family that models hope in theface of their own imperfections, giving Sal a way to confront and move beyond herfeelings of guilt over her mother’s death and her father’s remoteness. Sitting at thenoisy and chaotic Finney dinner table, witnessing a forlorn Phoebe refusing thenourishment that the Finneys offer, Sal imagines that the Finneys have achieved thekind of family that her mother might have desired: ‘‘It was a friendly sort of confusion.. . . Maybe this is what my mother had wanted, I thought. A house full of children andconfusion’’ (161). This realization highlights Chanhassen’s motives for leaving andreveals the chain of guilt that has frozen Sal’s ability to confront the reality of hermother’s death. Having fallen from a tree, Sal was found and carried home by herpregnant mother, who later that night miscarried. When Sal goes in to see her, shediscovers that her mother is bleeding, and that her blood has soaked into the whitecast on Sal’s broken leg. No longer able to have children and sunk into a deepdepression, Sal’s mother finally decides that she must get away from her family for atime, and that decision leads tragically to her death in a bus crash on her way toLewiston, Idaho. Sal is unable to move beyond the idea that her fall caused hermother’s miscarriage. If Chanhassen had wanted a ‘‘house full of children andconfusion,’’ Sal reasons, the miscarriage ended that hope. Just as Sal had been unable

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to scrub the stain of her mother’s blood from her cast, she had not been able to avoidimplicating herself in her mother’s death.3

The Finneys provide not merely the model for what Sal’s family might have been, butthey also provide her with a message of hope in the figure of Ben, whose own mother,Sal discovers, is hospitalized for depression. As Sal makes the connection between Ben’smother and her own mother’s rambling and restless postpartum behavior, Creechreintroduces the symbol of the blackberry kiss, this time delivered from Ben to Sal.After many shy and unsuccessful attempts, Ben finally manages to kiss her on the lips.Sal describes herself as feeling like a newborn horse ‘‘who knows nothing but feelseverything’’ (238). In this second moment of rebirth for Sal, Ben asks, ‘‘Did it taste alittle like blackberries to you?’’ and this symbol, formerly associated with Sal’smemories of her mother, is transferred to her feelings for Ben. The symbol of lossbecomes a sign of hope for the future. Sal describes this event as ‘‘a real kiss,’’ its realitysituated within her realization of the loss of her mother and her further realization ofher own continued need and capacity to look to the future (238).

‘‘... beneath Phoebe’s story was another one. Mine’’: Storytelling and the Constructionof Reality

Sal learns to deal with her mother’s death not only by seeing models of other familiesbut also by telling the stories of these families. Only in the telling can she makeconnections and learn to grow. Creech allows Sal to do this through Walk Two Moon’snarrative structure and first person point of view. Sal initially presents her narrative asthe story of Phoebe Winterbottom, ‘‘a girl who had a powerful imagination, whowould become my friend, and who would have many peculiar things happen to her’’(2). The act of telling Phoebe’s story to her grandparents leads Sal to a realizationabout storytelling itself: ‘‘the story of Phoebe,’’ Sal realizes, ‘‘was like the plaster wallin our old house in Bybanks, Kentucky,’’ behind which her father had discovered abrick fireplace on the night they received word of Chanhassen’s death: ‘‘The reasonthat Phoebe’s story reminds me of that plaster wall and the hidden fireplace is thatbeneath Phoebe’s story was another one. Mine’’ (3). Creech uses a double framingdevice: as Sal tells the reader about her car trip to Idaho, she also relates the storyabout Phoebe Winterbottom and Phoebe’s disappearing mother, originally told to hergrandparents during that trip. As that second narrative unfolds, Sal gradually realizesthe connections between Phoebe’s story and her own. Speaking another’s story leads

3 Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that the subject of death is one of the distinguishing factors betweenchildren’s and adolescent fiction:

In children’s literature, learning about death symbolizes a degree of separation from one’s parents.. . . But in adolescent literature, death is often depicted in terms of maturation when theprotagonist accepts the permanence of mortality, when s/he accepts herself as Being-towards-death. (118–19)

Walk Two Moons defies such classification because it seems to straddle the line betweenchildhood and adolescence. Sal certainly is able to use her mother’s death to separate from herparents, but she also approaches an awareness of her own mortality as she walks in her mother’sfootsteps: Sal drives the same road as her mother’s bus, imagines climbing into the wreck andwalking down the aisle to her mother’s seat, and voices the cry of her dead Grams.

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Sal to a deeper understanding of her own loss and to a more hopeful realization abouther own future.

Children’s fiction has developed within what Jacqueline Rose names ‘‘a ‘realist’aesthetic’’; that is, ‘‘the desire for a natural form of expression which seems to beproduced automatically and without mediation out of that to which it refers’’ (60).Creech’s novel shares this ‘‘realist aesthetic’’ in its presentation of Sal’s acts ofstorytelling as therapeutic and therefore as accurately engaging in the construction of arealistic and wholly familiar psychological development of character. We see this in theway that Sal’s grandparents encourage her to open up about her mother’s death bygently tweaking Sal’s story at certain psychologically significant moments. When Salsympathizes with Phoebe’s confusion and expresses a desire to call Phoebe and tell her‘‘maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about’’ her mother leaving, Sal’sgrandfather remarks, ‘‘You mean it had nothing to do with Peeby?’’ prompting Sal tosee the implicit connection between Phoebe’s story and her own: ‘‘For the first time, itoccurred to me that maybe my mother’s leaving had nothing to do with me. It wasseparate and apart. We couldn’t own our mothers’’ (176).

Likewise, we see this realistic development of character through storytelling in Sal’sgrowing understanding of Mrs. Cadaver. Rather than seeing this woman as a threat toher mother’s memory, Sal learns to place herself in Margaret Cadaver’s story, imaginingher reaction to the death of her husband: ‘‘I imagined Mrs. Cadaver touching herhusband’s face. It was as if I was walking in her moccasins, that’s how much my ownheart was pumping and my own hands were sweating’’ (220). Such a sympathetic act ofstorytelling not only brings Sal closer to Mrs. Cadaver but also allows her to imagine thepossibility of recovery for herself. ‘‘Walking in her moccasins’’ becomes Sal’s metaphorfor this kind of bibliotherapy4, most strikingly seen at the novel’s end as Sal and hergrandfather play the moccasin game, ‘‘a game we made up on our way back from Idaho.We take turns pretending we are walking in someone else’s moccasins . . . and we havediscovered some interesting things that way’’ (275–276). The moccasin game is astorytelling game which helps Sal to understand other people’s motivations and therebyto reach a new level of maturity and a more self-confident identity. In this way, Creechpresents Sal’s development as natural and realistic.

Nevertheless, realistic fiction, embedded as it is in language, must also deal with thearbitrary disorder inherent in language, the uncertain space and slippage betweensignifier and signified. Any narrative about telling stories as a natural and automaticfunction of human psychology must always work as the literary imposition of an artfulorder onto the chaotic ebb and flow of reality. Realistic narrative structures cannotsimply reflect or represent unmediated reality, but rather must be understood as thecreation of what we choose to recognize and name as ‘‘real.’’ In other words, children’srealistic fiction is not simply a matter of content, but rather a process of structuringcontent in the pursuit of literary verisimilitude. The tension is thus not between what isreal and what is artificial—a narrative is of course all artificial. Instead, realism is aboutstructuring narrative such that the question of its artifice is never raised.

Children’s fiction has tended to ignore this tension between reality and realism,favoring a nineteenth-century tradition of realistic fiction in the face of modern and

4 Lauren Myracle notes that bibliotherapy in the twentieth century evolved from didacticism andsentimentality to realism: ‘‘the focus of modern bibliotherapy,’’ she writes, does not ‘‘assum[e] thatadolescents can be ‘fixed’ by the proper application of just the right book,’’ precisely because in ‘‘therealism of modern young adult fiction . . . sometimes problems are not resolved’’ (39).

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postmodern literary challenges to the efficacy of realistic narratives. Realism is positedas ‘‘that form of writing which attempts to reduce to an absolute minimum ourawareness of the language in which a story is written in order that we will take it forreal’’ (Rose 65). Although Walk Two Moons appears to participate in such a realisticaesthetic, Creech complicates her use of realism by purposefully calling attention to itsartificiality through both the structure of her narrative and the literary employment oflanguage in names, metaphors, and in the therapeutic nature of storytelling itself.Character names such as Cadaver, Winterbottom, Sugar, and Prudence, and placenames such as Bybanks and Euclid, disrupt the novel’s representation of a real world bycalling our attention directly to the literary connections, metaphoric and symbolic,between signifier and signified.5 This is furthered by the recurring magical imagesthroughout the novel such as blackberry kisses and singing trees.

Creech’s layering of narratives one inside another likewise challenges a strictverisimilitude by asking readers to consider how Sal as narrator imposes meaningupon, or ignores the meaning of, the events that she chooses or refuses to relate. AsSal’s character matures and heals, she herself begins to speak about narrative structureas an act of will imposed upon the world: ‘‘. . . just as the fireplace was behind theplaster wall and my mother’s story was behind Phoebe’s, I think there was a thirdstory behind Phoebe’s and my mother’s, and that was about Gram and Gramps’’ (274).Furthermore, the moccasin game, because it is presented as a game, itself embodiesthis notion of realism as an artificial ordering of reality while also engaging thereader’s awareness of that artifice. Storytelling is serious business in Walk Two Moons,and so Sal and Gramps play at telling stories. It is in that playfulness that the bits andpieces that create verisimilitude are revealed to Sal and to us. When Sal finally allowsherself to tell Ms. Cadaver’s true story of loss—as opposed to Phoebe’s fantasy aboutMrs. Cadaver as a murderess—she realizes that Margaret Cadaver is not a rival toreplace her mother, but rather a model for Sal in confronting and surviving the loss ofa loved one. Sal pieces together Margaret’s story, in the process moving from ‘‘I couldsee her’’ to ‘‘I could feel her heart’’ to ‘‘I imagined,’’ filling in the unknown spaces inthe narrative with her own emotions and reactions: ‘‘It was as if I was walking in hermoccasins, that’s how much my own heart was pumping and my own hands weresweating’’ (220).

Finally, the therapeutic nature of storytelling itself participates in this deconstructionof the novel’s realism by showing how Sal’s motives, emotions, and characterdevelopment are inextricably wedded to and mediated by language. Sal as narratordemonstrates an uncanny ability to avoid the pain of her mother’s death through silencewhile never remaining silent, to tell the story of her grief by refusing to name its source,and both to lead and mislead readers through the artfulness of her language. The ‘‘realreasons’’ that Gram and Gramps were taking her on a car trip to Idaho, Sal tells us,‘‘were buried beneath piles and piles of unsaid things’’ (5). Sal then proceeds to voicethe unsaid, and in so doing she breaks from the narrative structure by providing anumbered list:

5 That ‘‘Euclid, Ohio’’ is a ‘‘real’’ place only serves to highlight further the instability of the novel’srealism. This is because the fact that the name ‘‘Euclid’’ signifies an actual city in Ohio is less significantthan the function that Euclid serves inside the novel in underscoring Sal’s displacement from Bybanksand thus from her mother. The confining and restricting Euclidean geometry of Sal’s new house, with its‘‘tiny living room,’’ ‘‘miniature kitchen,’’ pint-sized’’ and ‘‘pocket-sized’’ bedrooms, surrounded by‘‘identical fenced plots of land,’’ is measured by Sal in terms of absence: ‘‘No swimming hole, no barn, nocows, no chickens, no pigs’’ (11).

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Some of the real reasons were:

1. Gram and Gramps wanted to see Momma, who was resting peacefully in Lewiston,Idaho.

2. Gram and Gramps knew that I wanted to see Momma, but that I was afraid to.3. Dad wanted to be alone with the redheaded Margaret Cadaver. He had already

seen Momma, and he had not taken me. (5)

By labeling the reasons as ‘‘real’’ and then by separating them from her narrative bymeans of a list, Sal is underscoring their importance while avoiding incorporating theminto her story. Indeed, they reveal much about Sal’s feelings of isolation and loss, as inthe phrase ‘‘resting peacefully,’’ a linguistic play on ‘‘rest in peace,’’ which allows Sal tospeak and yet remain silent about her mother’s death. The careful reader issimultaneously convinced of Sal’s psychological reality while also attending to theliterary artifice of her character’s development through language.

Although we must read Walk Two Moons as the realistic story of Sal’s pursuit of astronger, more stable identity, this lesson is announced as and embedded within aform of storytelling much older than modern realistic fiction: the quest narrative. Thelesson that Sal draws from Phoebe’s story and applies to her own suggests that thetelling of stories involves not merely the passive representation of the past but theactive pursuit of the future. Sal’s story, both its lesson and its narrative form, leads herto affirm that ‘‘a person couldn’t stay all locked up in the house like Phoebe and hermother had tried to do. A person had to go out and do things and see things’’ (257).This lesson is further enacted in the moccasin game, a game that plays at tellingstories but also plays at taking journeys in quest of a new understanding of charactermotives and relationships. Quest narratives typically involve a character undertaking ajourney in order to find something or someone of great value but in the enddiscovering a new sense of self. As Sal and her story follow in her mother’s footsteps,Sal’s initial desire to reach Idaho so that she can bring her mother home, a hopelessand regressive quest, is transformed into a more hopeful and forward-looking sense ofherself as a storyteller.

Jack Zipes has defined the power of storytelling not as an escape from reality intofantasy but rather as the conversion of experience. The storyteller, he writes, ‘‘neverdiverts but converts experience’’ into wisdom: ‘‘The storyteller is transformer,enlightener, and liberator’’ (Happily Ever After 138). Sal’s journey has finally led herback to her farm in Bybanks, where she is able to realize the enlightening power offacing harsh realities through storytelling.6 At the end of her story and her quest, she hasrealized that she is still ‘‘jealous of three things’’ (278). Her first jealousy, ‘‘a foolishone,’’ is that her friend Ben might have some other love interest, and her second is thather mother ‘‘had wanted more children. Wasn’t I enough?’’ (278). Finally, Sal’s thirdjealousy ‘‘is not foolish, nor is it one that will go away just yet. I am still jealous that

6 According to Zipes:

Genuine storytelling is the frank presentation and articulation of experience and knowledgethrough different narrative modalities in order to provide a listener with strategies for survival andpleasure and to heighten one’s awareness of the sensual pleasures and dangers of life. (Sticks andStones 134)

This emphasis on both the pleasures and dangers of life is echoed in Creech’s Newbery acceptancespeech in her insistence that fiction can serve both the need to face evil and the need for mystery andhope.

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Phoebe’s mother came back and mine did not’’ (279). Creech’s conclusion shows thatthis is not something that can be fully resolved. Although Sal’s journey toward maturityis just beginning, it has indeed begun, as can be seen in Sal’s awareness that thedifficulties of her past remain with her, in both painful and healing ways.

We also see this because, in addition to these three jealousies, Sal harbors a hope.Having exchanged letters and love poems with Ben, she is now looking forward to a visitfrom him and from Phoebe and Mrs. Cadaver:

I can’t wait to show Phoebe and Ben the swimming hole and the fields, the hayloftand the cows and the chickens. Blackberry, the chicken that Ben gave me, is queenof the coop, and I’ll show Ben her, too. I am hoping, also, for some blackberrykisses. (280)

Once again invoking the symbol of the blackberry kiss, that memory of loss transformedinto love and hope for the future, Sharon Creech ends by enabling Sal to give voice toher Gram’s cry of triumph and joy, ‘‘Huzza, huzza’’ (280).

In her acceptance of the Newbery Medal, Creech explicitly notes that Walk TwoMoons encourages its readers to examine the role of storytelling in their own lives:

The portion of the proverb that became the title appealed to me on another level. .. . In Walk Two Moons, I saw an invitation, from characters to writer, and fromwriter to reader: come along and walk with us awhile, slip into our moccasins sothat you might see what we think and feel, and so that you might understand whywe do what we do, and so that you might glimpse the larger world outside yourown. . . . Every book implicitly offers this invitation, and every book offers ajourney, whether it is a literal one, a metaphorical one, or both. (424)

Sal’s journey and story convert her experiences, both good and bad, into an activeinvitation to her readers, not to despair at the harsh realities that Sal must face but tojoin her in this mysterious and hopeful narrative process of storytelling.

References

Baghban, Marcia. ‘‘Too Serious Too Soon: Where Is the Childishness in Children’s Fiction?’’ NationalCouncil of Teachers of English Spring Conference, New York, 2000.

Coats, Karen. Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature.Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2004.

Creech, Sharon. ‘‘Newbery Medal Acceptance.’’ Horn Book Magazine. 71:(1995) 418–425.Creech, Sharon. Walk Two Moons. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.Huck, Charlotte S., Susan Hepler and Janet Hickman. Children’s Literature in the Elementary School. 5th

ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1993.Hunt, Peter. An Introduction to Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.Myracle, Lauren. ‘‘Molding the Minds of the Young: The History of Bibliotherapy as Applied to

Children and Adolescents.’’ The Alan Review 22.2 (1995), 36–40. http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/winter95/Myracle.html.

Piper, Hal. ‘‘Are the Plots of Kids’ Books Too Realistic?’’ Chicago Tribune 21 Apr. 1995, North Sportsfinal ed., Perspective sec.: 19.

Reynolds, Kimberley. ‘‘Sociology, Politics, the Family: Children and Families in Anglo-AmericanChildren’s Fiction, 1920–60,’’ in Modern Children’s Literature: An Introduction. Ed. KimberleyReynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 23–41.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Philadelphia: U ofPhiladelphia P, 1993.

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Sipe, Lawrence. ‘‘First-and Second-Grade Literary Critics: Understanding Children’s Rich Responses toLiterature.’’ Literature-Based Instruction: Reshaping the Curriculum. Eds. Taffy Raphael andKathryn H. Au. Norwood: Christopher-Gordon, 1998.

Smith, Susan. ‘‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Drug Addict.’’ Only Connect: Readings on Children’sLiterature. Ed. Sheila Egoff et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 353–354.

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. IowaCity: U of Iowa P, 2000.

Zipes, Jack. Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry. New York: Routledge,1997.

Zipes, Jack. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter toHarry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2001.

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