All These Orphans

A dog is so much better than a parent.

My daughter’s elementary school is putting on a production of Annie this year. Several of her classmates are going to be in it. They’re excited.

I like the catchy tunes as much as the next person, but I don’t care for all the stereotypes about adoption. In general, adoptive parents (and I am one) don’t want their kids to get the idea that “nobody cares for you a smidge / when you’re in an orphanage.” My daughter and I watched the film a few weeks ago so she’d be prepared. She didn’t mind Mrs. Hannigan as much as I do, although she wasn’t a fan of Punjab the Indian manservant.

It made me think a bit more about all the orphans of children’s literature.

Annie, of course. Anne of Green Gables. (Don’t name your daughter Ann or Anne, folks–there’s some kind of bad cosmic influence there.) James (of Giant Peach fame). Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella (okay, their fathers aren’t dead but they might as well be.) Harry Potter, of course. Of course. Gilly Hopkins. Dicey Tillerman.

Part of it is simple–if you don’t kill the parents or otherwise remove them from the picture, the action of the book takes a severe hit. Generally, parents are supposed to keep their kids safe, and safe is the opposite of dramatic. If you don’t want to kill the parents off, another good trick is to send the kids away from them–to boarding school (see anything by Enid Blyton) or summer camp (hello, Percy Jackson) or away from London during the Blitz (Peter, Susan Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie). Or just make the parents useless, of course–that worked for Jane and Michael Banks. Or have the mother dead and the father lost at sea or ruling a cannibal island (hi, Pippi Longstocking). But whatever you do, just don’t let the parents be around.

(In my own books, I’ve got two orphans–Kata of Deadly Flowers and Deadly Wish and Rosalind of The Secret of the Rose. Plus, Mella of Dragon’s Egg ditches her parents early on.)

But even allowing for the fact that it’s a very useful plot device, there are an awful lot of orphans.

I think parents don’t really belong in kids’ books at all. Books are the places kids go to be free. To be independent. To become themselves. To shake off their parents and all our rules and plans for our lives and become who they really are. Maybe every book is a rehearsal for the day they’re off to college or a road trip or the army or their first jobs and their very own apartments, when they can finally stay up as late as they want and eat ice cream for dinner. And we can’t stop them.

They want us to go away–not to die, not really, but to vanish for a while. To rule a cannibal island or stay home while bombs rain down upon us while they explore magical wardrobes or float away on balloons under the eye of magnificently indifferent nannies. We want to take care of them forever. They want to stop being taken care of at all.

What a good thing we’ve got literature, to let them be free of us while still safe and cozy on the couch. Frankly, it makes me feel a little better about Annie.