The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics by Christopher Clausen

By Christopher Clausen

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Sample text

In each case the dream turns to nightmare, she rebels against the creatures that surround her, and she awakes—to find herself still safe on her side of the line that divides the humble childish world of play from the pompous adult world of work. " said the Queen, turning purple. " said Alice.  Nobody moved.  A clearer statement of the relative values of work and play, childhood and adulthood, would be hard to find. " She awakens, of course, to find herself shaking a kitten.  A bright­eyed, fearless gamin with short dark hair, she makes one doubt that she left many houses of cards standing; and one understands, as one cannot with earlier children in literature, precisely why her author thought her worthy to stand as the champion of play.

Whether Huck is quite so justified in escaping from religion, education, manners, and clothes into what can be only a temporary idyll is more debatable; those moralists who believe in good citizenship, strong families, and the work ethic will certainly say no.  Grahame chose instead to create an environment which is substantially free from the pressures of adult civilization—although those pressures are certainly felt in the story—and at the end of their adventures, his characters are as safe and happy as they were at the beginning, having learned anew to reject the Wide World of manmade laws, motor­cars, and jails.

The other enquired.  What they offer as a countervalue is play in the only form that was readily acceptable to nineteenth­century writers and readers, the play of children.  As Sennett puts it: The 19th Century bourgeois family attempted to preserve some distinction between the sense of private reality and the very different terms of the public world outside the home.  And large numbers of Victorian children visibly did not grow up, which made the image of childhood more poignant still.  Lessons as Alice experiences them are not merely tedious but utterly senseless.

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