Imagining Better

“I suppose the world of Milly-Molly-Mandy is what we call an ideal one, where grown-ups are never cross or children naughty and quarrelsome. But when things in our own lives are sometimes difficult, reading these stories is like being wrapped up in a warm, reassuring blanket. Something we all need, now and again.”

Shirley Hughes, Foreword to Joyce Lankester Brisley, Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories (2001 edition of 1928 original)

One of the charming original illustrations from Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories, with colours added by some younger version of myself.

Sometimes when I tell people how much I love reading, they seem to end up under the impression that I read important and intelligent books, classics and modern classics of the sort that are compiled into lists of must-reads by pretentious newspaper editors and worm their way onto academic syllabi. This is not so. My taste in reading material has always been rather more … shall we say juvenile than people expect. When I was at primary school, I used to be chastised for reading books that were ‘too easy’ for me. The replacements I was given, however, though I grasped the basic sense of the words on the page easily enough, always rather went over my head in terms of the point of the story and why I was supposed to care about it.¹ Little has changed. You’ll still find me perusing the Young Adult section of the library more often than not.²

Children’s fiction is amazing. And because I read a lot of it, I’ve been able to spot what I think is a very interesting trend in how it’s changed over time.

Quick history lesson: children’s fiction basically emerged in the Victorian era. Childhood as a concept wasn’t really a thing until a couple of centuries before that, and the earliest stuff written for children was highly didactic, so it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that proper fun children’s stories began to emerge. It was in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, however, that I think children’s fiction really hit its stride. A few of my favourites by British authors from this era:

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902)

The Just William series by Richmal Crompton (from 1922)

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne (1926)

The Milly-Molly-Mandy series by Joyce Lankester Brisley (from 1928)

The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett (1937)

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (1937)

The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (1938)

Anything and everything by Enid Blyton (fl. 1940s-50s)

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (from 1950)

The Paddington series by Michael Bond (from 1958)

There’s a fair range of subgenres covered by that lot, but certain noteworthy characteristics transcend such differences, popping up again and again within the group. Here are the ones I’ve spotted.

1) A strong emphasis on food.

More specifically, an awareness of what a nice thing it is to have nice food. Winnie-the-Pooh has an obsession with honey, Paddington Bear with marmalade. William Brown has the comparative values of various confectionery items down to an exact science. Enid Blyton’s heroes always seem to be having splendid picnics, although, disappointingly enough, she apparently never wrote the phrase “lashings of ginger beer”.³ And of course, we all know of Bilbo Baggins’ fondness for his well-stocked larder.

There’s a great appreciation in these books both for the fact that the characters need food, and that it’s really nice when they get it. Descriptions of food indulge in excited, almost awed tones. They make you really happy that food is a thing. (As I like to remark, God could have designed us to photosynthesise, but instead he gave us the pleasure – as well as the instructive dependency – of deriving our energy from food. Nice one.)

2) Inclusion of practical explanations and analogies.

These authors are constantly working to make sure that their readers properly understand the world they’re describing. When Wart – that is, a young not-yet-King Arthur – participates in some new squirely activity, like falconry or boar-hunting, the principles of said squirely activity are detailed for the readers’ benefit – non-fictional digressions within the fictional narrative. Milly-Molly-Mandy’s rather less squirely activities are sometimes described so specifically that the reader is enabled to recreate them: a recipe for lid-potatoes, or a diagram of the method for making paper dolls. C. S. Lewis makes frequent apostrophes to his reader in order to explain some aspect of what he’s describing in a heterodiegetic way, relating it to something the reader is more likely to be familiar with him- or herself. On which point…

3) Heterodiegetic narration.

The way these books are written makes it clear that the storytellers are exactly that: tellers of the story, not participants in it. Apostrophes to the reader are one way of doing this: Kipling’s favoured appellative of ‘O Best Beloved’ constitutes an especially famous example. The narrative voice is virtually always third-person and omniscient, or omniscient regarding the world of the story at least: even where it is not, as in Winnie-the-Pooh, for example, the narrator still clearly observes and relates the drama rather than playing any real role in it himself.

4) The imagining of a better world.

This is the big one. These books, be they high fantasy, pastoral, semi-historical, mythical, mystery, or anything in between, are not designed to represent the real world: they deal in romantic alternatives and they know it. They imagine better. Their worlds are safer and more beautiful and more filled with good things; or if they are not, good triumphs over evil to make them so. Their worlds tend to be smaller, also: the action is often confined to one village, one forest, or one boarding school, the harmony of which is never disrupted from without. In this way, the problems that drive the plot are kept small and confined too. Peril from whatever source is not emphasised. In The Family From One End Street, we know that the Ruggles family is very poor, but that poverty never actually threatens their overall wellbeing or security; Enid Blyton’s villains are always easily dealt with by a few meddling kids, and nobody ever gets seriously hurt; the recent film adaptation of Paddington, as thoroughly enjoyable as it is, pitches the threat faced by our ursine hero on a completely different level to the books, where he never really has to deal with anything more serious than an elaborate misunderstanding.⁴ And where the protagonists do face a serious threat of injury or death – Bilbo in Smaug’s lair, the Pevensies facing the White Witch, Wart captured by Madam Mim – we never doubt their ultimate rescue or victory. The peril is never the point; it isn’t the thing that’s valued. It’s peace and plenty and general good times that are valued. The glories of the natural world and the simple pleasures it affords are exulted in. Beautiful places and happy moments are described in detail. These authors in the first part of the last century dreamed of good – sheer, bright, uplifting, heartwarming, sure, safe goodness – and built their stories on that foundation.

 

A cool-looking dragon. Not necessarily Smaug specifically.

These days, on the other hand, children’s fiction looks very different indeed. Better worlds have given way to dystopia. The threats of injury and death that our heroes face have become very real. The triumph of good over evil is often not nearly so clean cut as it used to be. I’m going to mention the film adaptation of Paddington again because it illustrates this point very well indeed, but of course, there’s no need to move outside the medium of the novel to find telling examples. I love Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, for example, but it builds itself on badness in a way that couldn’t be more contrary to the earlier trend I describe above. Also worth mentioning is real-life fiction of the Jacqueline Wilson type that doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of issues like poverty, bullying, mental health, and family breakdown. And, of course, there are the endless dystopia stories.

Granted, much dystopia fiction styles itself as young-adult rather than children’s, and indeed, the rise of young-adult fiction certainly seems to be one contributing factor behind the shift I’ve described. If children’s fiction hit its golden age in the first half of the last century, young-adult fiction is enjoying its in the first half of this one, and is pulling the whole genre of stories aimed at younger readers along with it. It’s hardly surprising that fiction written for teenagers should deal with darker themes than that written for their younger siblings, and I certainly don’t mean to condemn the shift out of hand, either: it’s actually a really excellent thing that novels for young people are dealing with grim and scary and complex issues.⁵ Engaging with such issues through fiction allows for the building of real understanding and empathy, with the safety net that it’s just a story and you can lift your head from the book and breathe if it all gets a bit much.

But in the midst of all that may be commendable about the consideration of darker themes, we somehow left the will to imagine a better world behind us. And I think there’s more to that than just the rise of the young-adult genre. I think the heart of the issue is that life is so blooming good already for most of us in the modern west that we’re not interested in imagining better any more.

My beloved early-to-mid-twentieth-century authors, and their young readers, were living through the two most destructive periods of warfare the world had ever seen. Their world was too big and too scary. They had family members fighting overseas for the uncertain hope of peace and freedom; danger of death or injury, far from constituting anything exciting, was just a horrible part of everyday life; even small treats and luxuries were in short supply and strictly rationed. So, as they watched the machines of war churn ever destructively onward, no wonder they romanticised the pastoral and the natural world. As they read news about far-off events with terrifyingly major implications for their own lives, no wonder they longed for smaller, safer worlds immune from any outside threat. As they wondered what the outcome of all the blood, toil, tears, and sweat would be,⁶ no wonder they told stories of good triumphing decisively over evil. No wonder they told stories of better worlds, where peril was limited and good things were plentiful. No wonder they imagined better.

We, on the other hand, too many generations removed from the war era to be much shaped by it at all, take safety and plenty for granted. They are boring to us. Small, safe worlds won’t give us our thrills. We prefer the dark and the grim and the edgy, on the grounds that it provides an interesting contrast with our mundane, safe, plentiful, everyday lives. Life is too good already for imagining better to be any fun.

Well, that’s my theory, anyway. And, much as I think there’s room for the dark and the grim and the edgy at least in young-adult fiction, I hope that the will to imagine better when writing stories for young people doesn’t disappear altogether. I’m really very fond of those small, safe worlds of heartwarming goodness.

Footnotes

¹ For example, all I remember about The Railway Children, which I was instructed to read aged seven, was that there was one bit where each child was written a poem about his or her lessons, which I noticed because, you know, it was in poetry.

² If you don’t have a public library card, you’re doing it wrong. Public libraries are the best. Here’s the relevant link for Devon: https://www.devonlibraries.org.uk/web/arena/join-us.

³ As liberally repeated in Comic Strip’s well-known parodical Famous Five story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRQtV6tNOEE.

⁴ Misunderstandings like this one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2jA265cUY4, which are relegated to very minor plot points in the films.

⁵ For instance, I recently read a story called ‘I Am Thunder’, about a British Muslim girl who nearly ends up getting radicalised, and it was phenomenal. Five stars. I highly recommend: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Muhammad-Khan/I-Am-Thunder/21173952.

⁶ And yes, that was how Winston Churchill originally phrased it. Check it out: https://www.thoughtco.com/blood-toil-tears-and-sweat-winston-churchill-1779309.  

On Being a Woman in the Church

Shang: She’s a hero!

Chi Fu: She’s a woman! She’ll never be worth anything!

Mulan (1998)

“Does it kind of suck to be a woman in the church?” my supervisor asked me one day.

 

A woman presumably praying. Seemed as relevant as anything.

Well, that was a little bit out of the blue, so it was after a startled blink and a brief pause to consider that I replied to the effect that I didn’t really know; I’d never particularly noticed it sucking, but then again, seeing as I’d obviously only ever been in the church as a woman, I didn’t really have any other scenario to compare to. In which ways, I wondered aloud, did my supervisor imagine it might suck?

Rather than replying to that directly, he asked me what I thought the grace I’d been given for ministry was.¹

Even my oblivious self could see where this was going. I looked at the floor and replied, “I can teach, can’t I?”

“And do you?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

The conversation was interrupted pretty soon after that, but I hasten to stress that the correct answer wasn’t, Because all these dreadful self-important men keep barging in and wresting anything resembling a teaching role out of my unfit womanly hands. In actual fact, more than one of the people who have suggested, more or less explicitly, that I might be gifted to teach, have been complementarian men.² And even my assertion that I don’t really teach was arguably not a totally fair one: I’ve led regular one-to-one Bible studies with a couple of different younger students over the past four years; it’s maybe once or twice a term that I tend to be charged with guiding the discussion in my Wednesday-morning women’s Bible study group; and I have been told that, if my Thursday evenings should ever miraculously empty of the commitments that currently occupy them, I would be welcome to do the same for one of the girls’ groups at my church’s student Bible study. (It means a lot that that offer has apparently remained open despite certain Strange Ecclesiological Views I have recently developed.) So yeah, I do teach a bit. More, I expect, than most Christians do.

And yeah, granted, I wouldn’t, at my current church, be allowed to teach a group that contained any men about my age or older. And yeah, granted, it has been said to me by more than one member of that church that Christian gatherings which contain only women, or only young people, don’t count as Church Proper. And yeah, granted, the unavoidable implication of that is that the ministry God has gifted me is not fit to be carried out in Church Proper. But equally, I get that some of y’all have searched the scriptures in serious depth and have honestly concluded that it contravenes God’s instructions for women to teach men in a church context. I mean, I think you’re wrong, but I know you're really trying to stick to what you believe God commands, and I don’t want to be infringing your consciences, and I realise that your view is a difficult one to hold in the current cultural climate, and it’s not a salvation issue or anything. So, you know, what can I do?

And I know too that it sucks to be a woman in the church so much more for other women in other churches. A YouTuber I like very much, called Katie Emmerson, recently released a video response to an article you may have come across which claims that ‘godly men prefer debt-free virgins without tattoos’.³ A selection of extracts to give you a flavour:

She literally says that women can’t read the Bible and understand them [sic] without a man explaining them to her … Why now in the church is there such this message that you have no value, as a woman, to even be able to teach on scripture? Did you know how many comments I’ve gotten over the years from Christians telling me I’m going to hell because I am a woman who is somehow teaching a man by making these videos on Christian topics? … Some of you hearing this might laugh and think no one actually believes that; I can assure you they do. My mom has been in Christian marriage ministry for almost ten years now and this is a fight that she deals with every day on her blog: there is a message being widespread in the church that it is a husband’s job to teach his wife how to act, think, and live - that without his teaching, a woman would inevitably stumble and live a life of sin and ruin, because she couldn’t do it without a husband telling her what to do every step of the way. I kid you not! You’re laughing at me, because you honestly don't think people believe that; they do!

And heck, that’s just in the western church. Looking more widely, I read a book a while ago which mentioned some male converts to Christianity in one country who, though by all accounts born again, hadn’t yet twigged that God probably wasn’t too keen on them beating their wives.⁴ Let me say that again: they were still beating their wives. In sum, it’s depressingly clear that being a woman is vastly, vastly suckier for many, surely most, of my sisters in Christ around the world than for me. And that’s not to mention how much things have historically sucked for many female Christians in the two thousand odd years since the church began.

And so I shouldn’t complain - should I? - about the comparably miniscule bits of suckiness belonging to this category that I encounter myself.

I shouldn’t complain that Elyse M. Fitzpatrick’s Because He Loves Me comes decked, courtesy of Crossway publishing house, in stereotypically feminine flowers and butterflies, despite the fact that it’s quite clearly a book of value to all demographics within the church, not just women.⁵ I mean, men can still read it if they want to: in the grand scheme of things, it’s surely not that big of a deal that Christian books written by women only ever seem to be marketed towards women. After all, as I understand it, some complementarian men see reading theological works written by women as an extension of being taught by women, and so as unacceptable. Hardly surprising, then, that so little theology is written by women: as one example, the huge tome on the authority of scripture that I was given to read my first summer working at Tyndale House contains, of a total of thirty-seven chapters, only two written by women.⁶

 

Flowers and butterflies.

I shouldn’t complain that the assumption is always that complementarians respect scripture and egalitarians disregard it, even though I’ve seen gross eisegesis on both sides. For example, a while ago, I started reading Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a collection of essays edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem,⁷ but I slightly cast it down in disgust after I came across this in the first chapter of a substantive rather than introductory nature:

God cuts right across the grain of our peculiar sensitivities when he names the human race, both man and woman, 'man’ … God did not call the human race 'woman’ … He does not even devise a neutral term like 'persons’.

Except that - bro, do you even Hebrew? - he literally does. The Hebrew אָדָם (ādām), rendered ‘man’ in many translations, may be grammatically masculine, but it designates a human being of either sex. In fact, if, for straightforwardness, we leave aside the creation accounts, the first time in scripture that the word is used to refer to a specifically single-sex group, it’s one of women, in Numbers 31:35. But, you know, that is only one example, and all things considered, perhaps it’s fair enough to suggest that, overall, more mishandling of scripture does occur on the other side of the debate.

I shouldn't complain that the ESV calls Tychicus a ‘minister’ but Phoebe a ‘servant’, even though the exact same word is used in both contexts (as I’ve mentioned in a previous post⁸); and renders a plural form of ἄνθρωπος (ánthrōpos), the Greek equivalent of אָדָם, as ‘men’ in 1 Timothy 2:2 (about entrusting the gospel to faithful people who will be able to teach it), but ‘people’ in the same verse of the following chapter (about how appallingly people will behave in the last days); and opts to state, in Romans 16:7, that Andronicus and Junia were well-known to the apostles, rather than among them, just to remove any possibility at all of construing that a woman might have been an apostle;⁹ and so on. There are other translations out there, after all, and I’m pretty sure the ESV was deliberately designed as reactionary against the growing trend among new revisions of Bible translations towards using gender-neutral language, so really it’s my own fault for most often using it rather than another version.

I shouldn't complain that women’s conferences always seem to contain more about ‘doing life’ than they do in-depth exegetical study; the former is also valuable, after all. I shouldn't complain that Wrath and Grace, who offer a rather snazzy range of theologically-inspired T-shirts, only stock nine designs in a ladies’ fit, three of which are reworkings of their popular ‘5 Solas’ print in varying shades of pink:¹⁰ maybe it’s just me who feels a bit as if I’m being told, like a child at one of those hands-on educational attractions, look, you can join in the theology too; we’ve made some of it pretty for you specially! I shouldn’t complain (and I learned this one through hearsay, so apologies for any inaccuracy) that a bunch of members of my university’s CU got together to express ‘concern’ that a female speaker had been booked for the annual Carol Service; I mean, I wouldn’t personally have said she was really assuming a role equivalent to teaching in church, given the heavily evangelistic nature of the event, but I guess some people understand these things differently.

I shouldn't complain - should I? - that midway through a prayer-and-meditation session the other week, I realised that I believed, really believed so deep in my subconscious I hadn’t noticed it, that my ministry is automatically rendered less valuable by the fact that I am a woman. I shouldn’t immediately seek to blame that belief on the steady cumulative effect of the kinds of things I've mentioned above: after all, the idea might have come from all sorts of sinful sources entirely unrelated to such things, or, equally, from my own victim-complex-driven misconstruings of them. I mean, granted, I did feel as if it kind of sucked when I reminded myself of the objective fact that God wouldn’t think any more highly of me and my attempts to serve him if I were a man, and I found that the concept felt alien or even almost illicit. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I certainly remember I had to work blooming hard to convince myself that said objective fact was indeed a fact.

Actually, I still do.

So yeah, that kind of sucked, and like, I cried quite a lot and all, but you know, looking at the bigger picture, all this kind of jazz is frankly negligible, and I really shouldn’t complain.

Should I?

Footnotes

¹ He was alluding to Ephesians 4, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=eph+4&version=ESVUK, which we’d done a study on earlier on in the year. Some of my thoughts on that one may be found in my post ‘Mere Muggles’, under ‘March’ in the box on the right.

² In this post, I’m using ‘complementarian’ to refer to the view that men and women have different roles in the Church, and ‘egalitarian’ to refer to the view that they don’t. (The question of the roles of the sexes in marriage and the family isn’t really relevant for the thrust of this post.)

³  Here’s Katie’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci3_R1uHIXw&t. You should totally watch it. She’s brilliant.

⁴ The book in question was A Wind in the House of Islam by David Garrison. It’s an illuminating read and even has its own website to boot: http://windinthehouse.org/.

⁵ Please don’t let the cover art put you off; it’s a phenomenal book. I’ve not finished it yet, but of the chapters I’ve read, I don’t think there’s a single one that hasn’t moved me to tears. So yes, call that a recommendation: https://www.10ofthose.com/products/13788/because-he-loves-me.

⁶ The tome in question was The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, edited by D. A. Carson. There’s some useful stuff in there, so I’ll give you a link in case you’d like to get hold of it, https://www.10ofthose.com/products/20926/the-enduring-authority-of-the, but be warned, it’s pretty heavy going. (If you know me and you’d like to read any of it, just ask to borrow my copy.)

⁷ A free PDF of the whole thing is available from Desiring God, https://document.desiringgod.org/recovering-biblical-manhood-and-womanhood-en.pdf?ts=1471470614. I’m not sure I can bring myself to read any more of it, so if you have a look yourself, do let me know how you get on.

⁸ ‘And Servant of All’, under April this year, if you’d like to check it out.

⁹ I’d like to point out that not only is the English ‘well-known among the apostles’ definitely a more accurate rendering of the Greek (the preposition in question is ἐν (en), whose most basic meaning is ‘in’), but that it could be construed as ‘well-known to, i.e. in the opinion of, the apostles’ just as easily as ‘well-known from the number of the apostles’. What the ESV has done here is not merely plump for one possible rendering over another, but deliberately sacrifice accuracy of translation for the sake of indicating the committee’s preferred meaning. I am still using the ESV, by the way, because I still think it’s the best of the mainstream translations, but I don’t trust it the way I used to.

¹⁰ Behold: https://www.wrathandgrace.com/women. Their range of babygros is nearly as substantial and about as varied. Their men’s range, meanwhile, consists of no fewer than fifty-six items. It’s still very cool and snazzy stuff, mind you, and I don’t mean to imply that this company in particular is especially worthy of chastisement on this front; on the contrary, I mean to imply that it represents a clear example of a more broadly discernible pattern.