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primeidealThe Wall Street Journal has some hot takes on literature and culture stuff on occasion. They're generally considered to lean "conservative" in the US sense, but sometimes, the takes aren't right-wing so much as...annoying. Excerpting significantly from a paywalled article:
"Adventures in Ambiguity" - Leonard Cassuto
When I first read E.B. White’s “Stuart Little” as a child, the ending disturbed me. The title character has left his New York City home in search of a bird, Margalo, whom he loves dearly. Does Stuart find her? We never find out. All we learn is that “he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.”
Children’s books don’t usually end in the middle of an adventure. I remember wondering, “Where’s the rest of this story?” Other children wondered the same thing, and so did some of their schoolteachers. White’s correspondence, housed at Cornell University, contains many packets from teachers who enclosed their students’ attempts to bring Stuart Little to a more definitive and conventional conclusion.
White was neither pleased nor amused by these efforts. He wanted to preserve the uncertainty of Stuart’s journey.
That final uncertainty made “Stuart Little” a pioneering children’s book. White’s departure from the predictable and tendentious moralism that prevailed in earlier children’s stories made “Stuart Little” an instant classic. The ambiguity of the novel begins with its opening lines. “When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son was born,” White wrote, “the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way.”
[Discussions of freak shows and anti-disabled prejudice. But:]
Freak shows dehumanize their participants, and White reveals Stuart as a fully human personality housed in an anomalous body.
Stuart’s ambitions and desires thoroughly humanize him. When Margalo arrives, Stuart falls in love with her beauty. The mock-heroic episode in which Stuart protects the sleeping Margalo by aiming a tiny arrow into the ear of the stalking family cat shows his dignity and courage. And when Margalo saves him from a garbage scow, Stuart displays stoic endurance under stress.
[more plot summary] he briefly courts Harriet Ames, a young woman of his own height. [more stuff]
A powerful children’s librarian, Anne Moore, read the galleys of “Stuart Little” in 1945, and tried hard to persuade White not to publish it on the grounds that it was “non-affirmative” and therefore inappropriate for children. The first television version of “Stuart Little,” in 1966, omitted the Harriet Ames episode, presumably for similar reasons. About the execrable 1999 movie, let it suffice to say that not only Harriet but also Margalo are written out of the story.
[cut] Stuart’s trust in his own course mirrors White’s trust in his young readers. “Life,” White wrote, “is essentially inconclusive.” He believed that children—of all ages—should be able to understand that.
Okay, so, there's a lot going on here. "Stuart Little" was written in 1945. I haven't seen the movie or TV show so I can't speak to whether or not they're that terrible, but I'll give Cassuto the benefit of the doubt.
-E.B. White apparently kept a bunch of the letters students and teachers sent to him, even though he didn't even like the efforts. Why?
-The students wrote their own conclusions to the story because they wanted more conclusive endings. Is this something the teacher assigned them for a class project, or did they themselves actually choose to write fix-it fanfic?
-If the genius of "Stuart Little" is that it's so much better than all those other neat endings, why didn't it completely revolutionize the field? Could it be that (some, many) children actually don't like that style?
-is falling in love one of the ambitions or desires that make Stuart "fully human"?
-What is Moore implying the story should have affirmed? Some Aesop lesson? But I would think there are children's books pre-1945 that don't really have obvious morals either...?
-I don't understand what Cassuto is saying about "similar reasons." They cut a scene about Harriet, where Stuart comes to terms with his own insecurities. That's bad because...? They should have had the romance plot? Something else? (Beyond "most adaptations aren't that good anyway.")
-Cassuto himself admitted that he didn't like the ending when he first read it. I'm assuming he does now? Did he go through some magical transformative Maturity thing where he stopped wanting resolutions and closure and became a Good Adult? Why doesn't he write about that, for the edification of the Dumb Kids?
-in conclusion, aaaaaaaaaargh
"Adventures in Ambiguity" - Leonard Cassuto
When I first read E.B. White’s “Stuart Little” as a child, the ending disturbed me. The title character has left his New York City home in search of a bird, Margalo, whom he loves dearly. Does Stuart find her? We never find out. All we learn is that “he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.”
Children’s books don’t usually end in the middle of an adventure. I remember wondering, “Where’s the rest of this story?” Other children wondered the same thing, and so did some of their schoolteachers. White’s correspondence, housed at Cornell University, contains many packets from teachers who enclosed their students’ attempts to bring Stuart Little to a more definitive and conventional conclusion.
White was neither pleased nor amused by these efforts. He wanted to preserve the uncertainty of Stuart’s journey.
That final uncertainty made “Stuart Little” a pioneering children’s book. White’s departure from the predictable and tendentious moralism that prevailed in earlier children’s stories made “Stuart Little” an instant classic. The ambiguity of the novel begins with its opening lines. “When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son was born,” White wrote, “the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way.”
[Discussions of freak shows and anti-disabled prejudice. But:]
Freak shows dehumanize their participants, and White reveals Stuart as a fully human personality housed in an anomalous body.
Stuart’s ambitions and desires thoroughly humanize him. When Margalo arrives, Stuart falls in love with her beauty. The mock-heroic episode in which Stuart protects the sleeping Margalo by aiming a tiny arrow into the ear of the stalking family cat shows his dignity and courage. And when Margalo saves him from a garbage scow, Stuart displays stoic endurance under stress.
[more plot summary] he briefly courts Harriet Ames, a young woman of his own height. [more stuff]
A powerful children’s librarian, Anne Moore, read the galleys of “Stuart Little” in 1945, and tried hard to persuade White not to publish it on the grounds that it was “non-affirmative” and therefore inappropriate for children. The first television version of “Stuart Little,” in 1966, omitted the Harriet Ames episode, presumably for similar reasons. About the execrable 1999 movie, let it suffice to say that not only Harriet but also Margalo are written out of the story.
[cut] Stuart’s trust in his own course mirrors White’s trust in his young readers. “Life,” White wrote, “is essentially inconclusive.” He believed that children—of all ages—should be able to understand that.
Okay, so, there's a lot going on here. "Stuart Little" was written in 1945. I haven't seen the movie or TV show so I can't speak to whether or not they're that terrible, but I'll give Cassuto the benefit of the doubt.
-E.B. White apparently kept a bunch of the letters students and teachers sent to him, even though he didn't even like the efforts. Why?
-The students wrote their own conclusions to the story because they wanted more conclusive endings. Is this something the teacher assigned them for a class project, or did they themselves actually choose to write fix-it fanfic?
-If the genius of "Stuart Little" is that it's so much better than all those other neat endings, why didn't it completely revolutionize the field? Could it be that (some, many) children actually don't like that style?
-is falling in love one of the ambitions or desires that make Stuart "fully human"?
-What is Moore implying the story should have affirmed? Some Aesop lesson? But I would think there are children's books pre-1945 that don't really have obvious morals either...?
-I don't understand what Cassuto is saying about "similar reasons." They cut a scene about Harriet, where Stuart comes to terms with his own insecurities. That's bad because...? They should have had the romance plot? Something else? (Beyond "most adaptations aren't that good anyway.")
-Cassuto himself admitted that he didn't like the ending when he first read it. I'm assuming he does now? Did he go through some magical transformative Maturity thing where he stopped wanting resolutions and closure and became a Good Adult? Why doesn't he write about that, for the edification of the Dumb Kids?
-in conclusion, aaaaaaaaaargh
