Dicey's Song

“There are no fantastical elements,” is the conclusion I settled on to justify my persistent uneasiness while reading Dicey’s Song. Every book we have read previous to Dicey’s Song has had at least a glimmer of fantasy to it that provided the reader with hope for a happy ending that eventually ensued. This was not the case for Dicey’s Song; Voigt bluntly sets a tone of realism without fantasy in the first sentences of the book when she says, “And they lived happily ever after. Not the Tillermans,” spurring the initial feeling of uneasiness for the reader.

A series of “why?” questions followed after I came to that conclusion: Why does the absence of fantasy make this novel uncomfortable to read? Why are such deep/dark issues addressed in this novel? Why are these kinds of serious issues addressed in any literature for children? Why does most children’s literature use fantastical elements when addressing these issues?

The last question didn’t stop prodding my mind, and eventually led me to think about Korney Chukovsky’s From Two to Five, a guidebook to the language of children. Something he addresses in this guidebook is the fact that literature intended for audiences as young as infancy (such as nursery rhymes) parallel child-made fantasy. (“Cute things” that kids say are considered child-made fantasy as they are creative but also have a specific meaning. Kids make statements that seem funny or fantastic, but those statements are actually showing their understanding of reality in addition to the extent that they are able to differentiate between what is accepted as real or not. An exaggerated example is a child might say that a serial killer is a person who kills someone with cereal, which as adults we know is false, but they believe it to be true as it is their understanding of the term).

It seems to me that the idea of mirroring child-made fantasy in literature carried on to a lot of children’s literature and matured along the way. What I mean by saying child-made fantasy “matured” is instead a child having a fantastical understanding of a specific phrase/term, an older child may now have a fantastical understanding of a specific issue/topic. (I know this probably sounds confusing, but stay with me!).

My theory that child-made fantasy has “matured” in a way that it is incorporated in children’s literature is seen extensively in our novels with the issue of growing up parentless. Pippi Longstocking and Peter Pan are probably the two best examples of this mature child-made fantasy about this topic as they display (for the most part) the consequences of growing up parentless in an innocent light. Pippi and Peter are happy-go-lucky characters that do just fine without parents and have elaborate adventures or experiences that a child with parents would never have (such as not attending school or flying to Neverland). As growing up parentless is a rather serious and deep topic, usually with devastating consequences, Dicey’s Song is the only novel that accurately portrayed it as such. Though the intended audience for this book was children, Voigt was blunt and did not include fantasy to sugar-coat growing up parentless. So while these novels all addressed the topic of growing up parentless, Voigt was the only author who did so without fantasy.

After these thoughts, I returned back to my question of why does most children’s literature use fantastical elements when addressing these issues, and I think the answer is because the authors want to address serious societal topics/issues in children’s literature in order to make children aware of them, and the inclusion of fantastical elements when addressing them allows that awareness, but it is innocent as it is not a full understanding yet.

I personally like the inclusion of fantastical elements when addressing serious topics in kid’s literature because I feel like a full understanding of the devastating reality these topics present is not necessarily appropriate (on some levels) for young readers in many cases.