Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s April 1993 Atlantic Monthly cover story, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” was one of the most widely discussed articles in the past decade. With that provocative polemic, Whitehead, who holds a Ph.D. in American social history from the University of Chicago, initiated a profound shift in the “family values” debate. While bitter argument continues, there is a growing recognition of the negative consequences of divorce, whether in affluent suburbia or the poverty of the inner city.
In her new book, The Divorce Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pp.; $24), from which the following essay is adapted, Whitehead extends and deepens her analysis, tracing the growing acceptance of divorce in America and showing how, “as the sense of divorce as an individual freedom and entitlement grew, the sense of concern about divorce as a social problem diminished.”
There has been only one sustained effort to chronicle and attend to children’s experience of divorce, and that effort has been undertaken by the writers of children’s books. Few scholars have paid close attention to the emergence of a children’s literature devoted to divorce, much less credited it as an important source of evidence. Yet this literature provides a remarkable account of children’s experience of divorce, a story radically at odds with the story told in the scores of books on divorce for adults.
Children’s literature was innocent of the theme of divorce until the last third of the twentieth century. But as divorces with children became commonplace, as more and more American youngsters were summoned by their parents to hear a speech that began with some version of “Mommy and Daddy are so unhappy they cannot live together anymore,” divorce started to invade the world of children’s storybooks.
Divorce books for children began pouring from the nation’s presses in the 1970s. The books came in all sizes and shapes and genres. There was a divorce book for every age group. For the youngest children, there were picture books with divorcing dinosaurs and Muppet kids “worried about divorce.” For preschool children, there were workbooks and coloring books to help children express their feelings through drawing. For older children, there were divorce dictionaries and advice manuals offering information and counsel on how to deal with judges, therapists, and lawyers. For teenagers, there were divorce novels, suggesting It’s Not What You Expect or, more hopefully, It’s Not the End of the World.
At the same time, children’s books on illegitimacy and parental abandonment began to appear. There was resurgent interest in stepparents as well. A new figure, the violent and sexually abusive stepfather, joined a more familiar character, the cruel and calculating stepmother, in the pages of these children’s books. During the 1970s and 1980s, the fascination with these dark themes grew. In 1977 a comprehensive bibliography listed more than 200 pages’ worth of children’s books dealing with loss and separation. By 1989 the list had grown to more than 500 pages.
The inspiration for some of these books came from children themselves. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, while the experts were confidently predicting that children would benefit from the divorce experience, children themselves were furiously scribbling letters to their favorite authors, seeking information, advice, and solace about what was happening to their families.
“My parents are devvorst,” one child writes to Beverly Cleary, the author of many popular children’s books. “My dad is the kind of person who never wants to be around kids.” In another letter, a girl confides: “I wish I could sue my parents for malpractice but I know I can’t so I just try to forget what they do.”
Author Richard Peck wrote his 1991 novel Unfinished Portrait of Jessica after reading one young correspondent’s account of her parents’ breakup. She writes first of her father’s departure and then of his eventual remarriage:
The day he left, I had been listening to them argue. I guess my dad was stressed out and my mom was just a bitch. . . . I was crying and screaming, “Daddy, please don’t go,” when he walked out the door. I followed him out and clung to his leg until he got to the car. This was when he pried me off his leg, jumped in the car and sped off. He wouldn’t even look me in the eye, and he didn’t say goodbye.
Her letter continues:
At nine is when I moved in with my dad. Everything was perfect until my dad met my stepmother. . . . She was the type of stepmother to be in Cinderella. She still is. . . . She’s a psychologist, and therefore she feels like she can solve all the problems of the world. She and my father have a booklet on how to parent and everything.
. . . Well, now they’ve more or less run me out of the house with their rules and booklets and insincerity. I’m not living with them now. . . . I’ve left my dad, just like he left me, but at least I said goodbye.
For some unhappily married writers, the kids’ interest in divorce coincided with their own. Judy Blume wrote a best-selling divorce novel for kids to “try to answer some of my children’s questions about divorce, to let other kids know they were not alone and, perhaps, because I was not happy in my marriage.” After her third marriage failed, Erica Jong wrote Molly’s Book of Divorce to help her preschool daughter “deal with a life in which she is always leaving socks, underpants, Teddy bears at another house.” But, as Jong acknowledges, “I also wrote it for myself. It ends with a party in which the divorced spouses and their new partners all kiss and make up.”
While liberation is the dominant theme in the adult literature on divorce, loss is the common theme that unites this large and various children’s literature. Indeed, not since the Puritans invented a juvenile literature devoted to death has a children’s literature been so preoccupied with themes of loss and bereavement. Most often, the pain of loss is caused by the absence or separation from the father, a theme reflected again and again in the titles: Daddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; I Won’t Go Without a Father; Where Is Daddy?; At Daddy’s on Saturday; Daddy’s New Baby; My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel; Who Will Lead Kiddush?; Will Dad Ever Move Back Home?
In a smaller number of stories, it is the mother who is absent. More often, however, the mother is present but distracted and sad. The child grieves for the “old mother” who used to cook better meals, laugh more, and work less. Children mourn the loss of other beloved adults as well. In Grandma Without Me, a little boy is no longer able to celebrate Thanksgiving with his paternal grandmother. “I don’t think Mommy wants to see Daddy and Grandma any more. She acts like they died.” In another story, a child suffers the loss of her father and then her mother’s boyfriend. First there was Daddy. “Daddy divorced us when I was little. He never comes to see me.” Then there was the boyfriend, Gary. “I wished Gary would stay with us forever and never go away like Daddy did.” The child worries: Could Mommy be next? “Sometimes I’m scared that Mommy will leave me too.” Pets also go away in these stories, or become the focus of custody fights between the parents. In Anne Fine’s Alias Madame Doubtfire, the kids stand mutely aside while their parents squabble over custody and care of the guinea pigs.
Loss is not a new theme in children’s literature, of course. Countless children’s stories deal with the death or loss of a parent. But in earlier children’s books parental absence is fated, not chosen. A mother or father dies from illness or accident or goes away because of war or work. Moreover, in the classic tradition, children stand at a distance from the experience of loss. The burdens of grief are borne by the adults. As one example among many, consider Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children, a book published in 1906 and widely read ever since in both Britain and America.
The Railway Children’s father is taken from the house in the middle of the night by mysterious visitors. After his disappearance, the children and their mother are obliged to leave their city home and move to a modest cottage in the country where she struggles to make a living as a writer. She is no longer as available to them as she once was. Instead of reading to her children at teatime, she must withdraw from the family circle and spend “almost all day shut up in her upstairs room, writing, writing, writing.” Over the household there hangs continually the mystery of the father’s abrupt departure and absence.
But the three children–Peter, Phyllis, and Bobbie–are remarkably unscathed by these domestic upheavals. Such events remain matters of concern purely for adults. “Mother told them they were quite poor now, but this did not seem to be anything but a way of speaking. Grownup people, even mothers, often make remarks that don’t seem to mean anything in particular, just for the sake of saying something, seemingly. There was always enough to eat and they wore the same kind of nice clothes they had always worn.”
Even their father’s disappearance, while disturbing, remains a problem for grownups. (Toward the end of the book, it is revealed that the father has been arrested and convicted–falsely–on a charge of espionage for the Russians [!], but his innocence is finally established and he is released.) Their mother conceals her sadness and refuses to give the children any information on the subject: “I want you not to ask me any questions about this trouble; and not to ask anybody else any questions.” Thus, in The Railway Children loss is something adults endure separately and privately. And because the grownups carry the burdens and privations associated with loss, the children are free to have adventures, to explore and engage the world.
By contrast, in the modern literature, it is children who are consumed with anxiety and grief. The little girl in Two Homes to Live In worries when her father is not on time: “Sometimes I had scary thoughts. One time when Daddy was late, I thought what if he doesn’t come at all?” Other times the child is not worried or sad but wistful: “Dad, I wish you lived in the apartment across the hall so I could see you every day.”
In Ken Rush’s subliminal and haunting picture book Friday’s Journey, the story centers on the loss of the intact family. As a boy and his father hop the subway for the regular weekend trip back to the dad’s apartment, the subway itself becomes a memory train, triggering remembrances of earlier family outings. Like station stops, a single image of a trip shared with both parents flashes by on each page of the picture book: father and mother and son on a picnic together, father and mother and son visiting a museum, father and mother and son watching boats from a bench on the pier. On the last page, father and son get off at the Spring Street stop and watch as the train disappears into the tunnel. The boy sees the faint image of his mother standing alone at the window in the last car. Like the subway itself, his feelings of sadness rattle underneath the surface pleasures of the weekend visitation with his dad.
Not all the stories are so subtly evocative of children’s feelings. In some, children express their explosive resentments. “Sometimes I feel sorry for my mother and other times I hate her!” says the girl in Judy Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World. In I Wish I Had My Father, a boy who has never known his father dreads Father’s Day. “I hate Father’s Day and here it comes again. . . . I wish I had a father I could know.” In Maria Gripe’s The Night Daddy, a girl who has never known her father is sullenly defensive: “My mommy isn’t married, and I’m just as glad. . . . I never cared for father much.” A book collectively written by young teens tells of other resentments: “[A] girl in our class sometimes feels like introducing her father’s girlfriend as ‘that asshole who sleeps over once in a while.’ ”
In books for younger children, gently understanding parents deflect the angry outbursts, but in the teen fiction, the parents reciprocate; as often as adolescents give vent to their resentments, their parents strike back. A 14-year-old boy who says his mother’s “hobby” is marrying remarks: “Mother doesn’t like me. She never has.” Another story recounts a conversation between a divorced mother and her son: “I was the one that was stuck with you . . . and you are quite a hateful child, Roger.”
The literary children of divorce suffer other forms of loss as well: The geography of household and neighborhood becomes more unstable as parents split up. Living in divided households, the children are on the move, constantly changing venues and schedules. The illustrations show children packing and unpacking, getting in and out of cars, coming and going, saying hello and good-bye. The suitcase is the only secure fixture of this peripatetic childhood.
In what is probably the most common motif, the bedroom itself is lost. Divorce evicts children from their own bedrooms. Now they have two places to sleep or a shared sleeping space or a new bedroom. In departure from domestic tradition, the child’s bedroom is no longer a fixed place. It is portable: a sleeping bag, a pullout couch, “two places to sleep.”
Viewed in broad cultural terms, the loss of the child’s bedroom as a fixed and dedicated space is an important development. Until the seventeenth century, bedrooms were public and portable; houses had rooms with beds but not bedrooms. The idea of placing a stationary bed in a separate space was a social innovation. It provided a place of retreat from the public activities of the household and created a zone of privacy for the family, thus reinforcing the distinction between family members and nonfamily members–servants, guests, tradespeople, and others having contact with the household. At the same time, the private bedroom segregated adults from children and contributed to the growing recognition of children as special and separate members of the household. Along with children’s nurseries and classrooms, the child’s bedroom began to appear in eighteenth-century English houses, ending the promiscuous mingling of children and servants and parents in a single bed and the casual jumbling together of youth that had once typified household sleeping arrangements. Increasingly, children were segregated by sex as well as by age, part of an effort to protect girls from sexual contact with brothers or other males in the household.
In Children in the House, Karen Calvert tells us that nineteenth-century Americans were especially concerned with the child’s bedroom as a protected and separate domain. By the middle of the century, experts were advising that even newborns, who had traditionally slept in a cradle at the mother’s bedside, should be placed in another room. Bed-sharing was discouraged, even among siblings. One nineteenth-century physician grudgingly permitted “not more than two older children to share a bed, so long as they had sufficient room so that they would not touch each other.” But the ideal was a separate bedroom and an individual bed for each child.
The same protective impulse prompted reform of children’s nightdresses. Earlier in the century, children commonly wore loose nightdresses and nightshirts to bed, but this sleepwear could hike up, leaving children’s bodies exposed and unprotected. Dr. Denton’s pajamas, first introduced around 1850, solved that problem by encasing the child in fabric from neck to toe. The new pajamas also included covering for the child’s hands, which prevented thumb sucking as well as masturbatory exploration.
From the nineteenth century on, therefore, children’s sleeping costumes and arrangements were designed to preserve children’s sexual innocence. Practically as well as symbolically, the bedroom became a place secure from sexual knowledge or experience. All the familiar bedtime rituals–reading stories, saying prayers, and kissing goodnight–were now expected to take place in the child’s bedroom rather than in that of the parents, with its erotic associations. But even beyond its significance as a place of safety and privacy, the child’s bedroom is a sign and symbol of the growing child-centeredness in family and household arrangements.
In light of this tradition, it is significant that so many of these stories dwell obsessively on the bedroom as the place of loss and on the bedroom as a lost place. It is here that the child has early intimations that her family is about to fall apart. The bedroom is the place of first knowing, the place where the child’s sleep is disrupted by the sounds of fighting. In the award-winning storybook Where Is Daddy?, Janey listens to “her mommy and daddy’s voices going up and down, sometimes soft, sometimes shouty. The anger between them made a pain inside her, and she cried and cried.”
The bedroom is the place where children lose physical as well as emotional control. In one story, a little girl named Katie begins wetting the bed. Her mother consoles her: “You’re sad, Katie. So am I. It’s okay.”
Innocence is also lost when children must confront the evidence of parents’ sexuality as well as their own confusions over love and sex. In The Night Daddy, one of the early children’s novels about an unwed mother and her child, the erotic undercurrents are unmistakable. The mother hires a young man to care for her daughter while the mother works nights as a nurse. The girl is determined to resist the babysitter’s friendly overtures. She bars the bedroom door and hangs out a sign: private property! do not disturb! trespassing forbidden! The young man, an aspiring writer, seduces her with nighttime snacks and bedtime stories until the fatherless child admits him to her bedroom and adopts him as her “night daddy.” In turn, he invites her to his house. The relationship develops like a courtship, the pair drawing closer by sharing confidences and playing make-believe until they become intimates, as comfortable and familiar as an old married couple.
The problem of parents’ sexuality is explicitly addressed in the advice literature for older children. Judy Blume’s popular Letters to Judy devotes a chapter to “Confronting Your Parents’ Sexuality.” A 12-year-old girl writes: “I feel weird . . . finding my mother in bed with someone who she’s not even married to. And I feel yucky knowing that he has his pants off too.” Child psychiatrist Richard Gardner tells boys that some mothers want their sons to behave like husbands: “Such a mother may hold hands with her son and kiss him a lot. She may even want him to sleep in the same bed she does. . . . It’s a very bad idea for a boy to do all these things with his mother.” Thus, the bedroom motif hints at a larger transformation in the climate of the postdivorce household, from warm and affectionate to overheated and eroticized.
Finally, and importantly, the preoccupation with bedrooms tells us that this literature is concerned with interiors. Classic children’s literature occupied spacious physical and imaginative terrain. Until the 1970s, the children in books were out-of-doors children; their landscape was the backyard or the neighborhood or the railway yard or the great Mississippi or the South Seas or the Milky Way. Psychologically, the child’s direction was outward as well. A child left the household to explore the larger world, to move beyond the family circle. The adventures might be child-sized, but the direction was from the family to the larger world. Personal growth and character development involved the conquest of egocentricity, and a child’s maturity came about through ever-widening sociability.
By contrast, the landscape of the divorce literature is an interior landscape. The geography is that of the house or apartment. In a large number of these stories, the child’s entire world has shrunk to the size of a small bedroom. All the action unfolds in close domestic quarters. But the inwardness of this literature is not only spatial but also psychological. This literature is confined and limited to the workings of the child’s inner world; the dramatic interest no longer revolves around the child’s efforts to master the social world outside the family but instead focuses on the conquest of the confusing feelings unleashed by family breakup. This may explain why there is so much diary writing and journal keeping in these stories and why, in comparison with popular children’s books of the 1960s, even the very best of these divorce books feels claustrophobic.
Traditionally, one major impediment to divorce was the presence of children in the family. According to well-established popular belief, dependent children had a stake in their parents’ marriage and suffered hardship as a result of the dissolution of the marriage. Because children were vulnerable and dependent, parents had a moral obligation to place their children’s interests in the marital partnership above their own individual satisfactions. This notion was swiftly abandoned after the 1960s. Influential voices in the society, including child-welfare professionals, claimed that the happiness of the individual parents, rather than an intact marriage, was the key determinant of children’s family well-being. If divorce could make one or both parents happier, then it was likely that it could improve the well-being of children as well.
We now have substantial empirical evidence that this blithe confidence in the therapeutic benefits of divorce was misplaced. Such research is important in assessing the impact of divorce. But we should not neglect another source of insight: the children’s own story. In that literature, more than in any table of statistics, we can begin to grasp the real cost of the divorce revolution.
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has published extensively on issues of family and child well-being. Most recently she has been a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. This essay is adapted from The Divorce Culture, by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. Copyright 1996 by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 3
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