Introduction
Children’s literature is inherently a dialogue between child and adult, or more broadly, those at different stages of the life course. Bringing age studies and studies of children’s literature together, this article considers how children’s literature depicts and explores age stages and intergenerationality, focusing on the role of the garden in this. Analysing the significance of the garden in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts, Shelley Saguano argues that “gardens and gardening are political” and used in very specific ways (xiii). In children’s literature, as we demonstrate, gardens function as a meeting place for the child and the older adult, a space that is associated with, and activates assumptions about, both childhood and older age. To explore this potential, we examine three contemporary picturebooks in English that depict an intergenerational relationship between a child(ren) and a grandparent, and include a garden central to the narrative: Roxane Marie Galliez and Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s Time for Bed, Miyuki (2017), Allan Ahlberg and Gillian Tyler’s The Snail House (2000) and Lizzy Stewart’s There’s a Tiger in the Garden (2016).1 Although typically designed for younger children than more text-led books, picturebooks, with their combination of text and image, produce nuanced meanings in highly complex ways (Nikolajeva and Scott; Nikolajeva, “Reading”). This is the case with the three books we have selected. As our analysis demonstrates, they represent the garden as a liminal space, where the associations with childhood and older age are mobilised in ways that both reinforce and challenge age norms and stereotypes as well as the dichotomous view of age stages.
Children’s Literature, Age and Generations
The power dynamic of child and adult is inherent in children’s literature, a genre which is normally produced for children by adults. It has generally been considered that it is adult power that is dominant in this dynamic. Maria Nikolajeva describes norm-setting by adults in the genre as “aetonormativity” (Power). Perry Nodelman similarly describes the adult control in the genre with the concept of the “hidden adult” (The Hidden Adult). He suggests that children’s books project, implicitly and explicitly, adults’ desires and hopes relating to children, feelings that are typically marked by ambivalence: the desire to teach children to grow up and the desire to preserve their assumed innocence.
This dichotomous view of child and adult has, however, been questioned. Clémentine Beauvais argues that power is not straightforwardly distributed between adult and child and describes their relationship as one of “temporal otherness” (4). Marah Gubar puts forward a model based on “kinship”, something which “indicates relatedness, connection, and similarity without implying homogeneity, uniformity, and equality” (453). The emergent interest in intergenerationality in children’s literature also draws attention to similarity and continuity between ages (see Deszcz-Tryhubczak 4). These approaches resonate with ageing studies’ interest in a life-course approach. Bringing together children’s literature studies and ageing studies, Vanessa Joosen insists on the need to move away from aetonormativity to the understanding that “the otherness between childhood and adulthood is temporary, and both phrases themselves are divided into further successive stages, which complicates this opposition” (Adulthood 10).
Consideration of the adult/child binarism becomes more complicated when we consider the relationship between the child and the older adult. Interestingly, Joosen notes that representations of an especially close relationship between child and older person are common in cultural discourses. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, she calls the “presumed semblance between children and the elderly” a “root metaphor” in media and literature, including texts for children (Connecting 5). She admits the potential dangers of this link (notably the trope of “second childhood” that infantilises older adults). More broadly, as ageing studies amply demonstrate, stereotypical and limited representations of older adults are prevalent in contemporary culture. One of the leading figures in the field, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, argues that contemporary Western cultures predominantly see ageing as decline and loss, producing “fatally flat” narratives of ageing (11). This also seems to be the case in children’s literature. In Anglophone children’s literature, grandparents have traditionally been represented in stereotypical, limited ways, as passive and frequently unwell. There have been changes in the depiction of grandparents in recent decades, with more diversity and a wider range of lifestyles and activities (Crawford and Bhattacharya; Janelli and Sorge; Beland and Mills). Despite this, depictions do remain to some extent stereotypical and limited in range (Crawford and Bhattacharya). Importantly, the marginality of old age contributes to placing an older adult in a unique and special relationship with the child in children’s literature. Joosen points out that children’s books typically represent grandparents who have “no other obligations” and “can fully focus on their grandchildren” and in whose lives the relationship with grandchildren is “crucial” (“What’s the Point of Grandpa?” 56). This representation may also be reinforced by the assumption that just as children, older adults are affected less by social norms than younger adults. Nonetheless, Joosen insists that representations may be more complex than this reading allows and should be understood in their respective contexts.
Adopting the need to consider relationships between children and older adults more closely, in this article we explore the role of the garden in the grandparent-grandchild relationship. Like Joosen, we assume that “the potential lessons that children’s books teach are not just limited to the child reader; in fact, they are sometimes even specifically targeted towards the adult reader” (Adulthood 29). Children’s literature therefore has much to contribute to ageing studies, helping us to re-think our assumptions about age stages, generation and the life course.
Gardens, Age and Intergenerationality
The way that the garden functions as an intergenerational space in children’s literature is connected to the common association of the human life stages with nature. The relationship between childhood and the natural world is, of course, a longstanding and complex one. Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd argue that the child/nature relationship in literature is “twofold.” The first instantiation of this is the child who has a naturalised and ideal relationship to the natural world. This draws from the pastoral tradition, linked to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and generally to “the legacy of romantic and Victorian literature” (Dobrin and Kidd 6). The second expression of the child/natural world relationship is through the child as a blank slate who needs to be educated about nature. As Dobrin puts it: “If children are understood to be inexperienced – and simultaneously innocent – their greenness has also been understood to provide a connection to nature that is lost as one loses innocence and gains experience” (15).
This idealised relationship between the child and nature in children’s literature is, as the above suggests, often part of the narrative of the child’s growth. In his discussion of environmental concerns in texts from the late nineteenth century onwards, Lawrence Buell identifies one key way in which this relationship between child and nature may be explored in writing for children: “the discovery or construction of special, often hidden outdoor places by children that are shown to have catalytic significance in bonding them to the natural environment” (2). This trope exploits the romantic association of childhood and nature, both in terms of the inherent link between child and natural world, and the learning undertaken by a child about the natural world. As Buell notes, this trope is often part of a text’s Bildungsroman, whereby the child is educated about nature as part of their development and incipient adulthood, a move that, ironically, will take them further away from the natural world. The irony of this trope seems to arise from the adult’s conflicting desires to preserve children as they are and at the same time to educate them into adulthood. Nature is where childhood belongs and adulthood does not.
While the child is in this way associated with nature through its assumed state of innocence, an older adult is often connected to nature through the cultural link between old age and the past. Drawing on Peter J. Khan’s notion of “generational environmental amnesia,” Buell notes that
this mordant diagnosis of generational slippage under the regime of industrial modernity–each generation starts with more diminished expectations of environmental salubrity that become the new “normal”–may be skewed by a certain nostalgia factor, such as Raymond Williams identifies at the start of The Country and the City, that is, the chronic assumption that the last generation lived closer to nature than the one before … (9)
So older generations may be seen, in a nostalgic way, as closer to the rural and the natural. This link is also related to the relationship between time and stability. Explaining the relationship between the urban and the rural in Europe since the nineteenth century, Joan Ramon Resina makes clear: “Permanence is un-modern and thus tends to be associated with the rural, that is to say, with a sphere of predictability in which relations are governed by memory rather than by history” (17). That association with memory and stability underpins the link between older age and the rural and natural worlds.
In many books for children, the special relationship between the grandparent and the child is situated in outdoor space. Joosen observes in relation to children’s literature that “[i]n stories that adopt a more romantic discourse, nature … proves to be the preferred setting where the old and the young connect” (Connecting 15). In these narratives, older adults are commonly represented as possessing wisdom related to the natural world and play the role of educators to their young charges, activating the discourse of child as a “blank slate” and the older adult as a person linked to the stability of the rural and natural environment. In Nodelman’s discussion of what he calls “utopian grandparents” in writing for children, a trend characterized by an emphasis on the development of a perfect relationship between grandparent and child, he argues that the grandparent may play the role of a wise teacher, passing on cultural traditions that are depicted as static rather than active and forward-looking (“Utopian”). In other words, the depiction of the relationship between older people and the natural world tends to rely on assumptions about generational identity, time and wisdom, and these assumptions shape literary narratives about grandparents and grandchildren in particular ways.
Gardens are, though, very specific ‘natural’ spaces and imbued with a strong sense of liminality. There is much debate about what exactly constitutes a garden. To some extent, we agree with David E. Cooper that, whilst we could debate exactly what a garden is, “we possess the knowledge that enables us to … distinguish gardens from those bits of the world that are not gardens” (12–3). And yet, this seemingly intuitive recognition is inflected by cultural context, as Cooper continues to observe that “nearly every English speaker knows what it [the garden] means” (13). One significant characteristic of gardens in Anglophone children’s literature is their liminality. In her study of landscape in children’s literature, Jane Carroll argues, “The garden, in truth, lies between the house and the wider world. It is a liminal space, open but restricted, poised between nature and culture, between private domestic space and public space, and, most importantly, between life and death” (52). Importantly the domestic garden is distinct from ‘wild’ space; wilderness “is not just unpopulated; it is hostile and resistant to human occupation” (76). As Carroll notes, to function as a liminal space, the garden must have a boundary (beyond which wilderness may lie) and, yet, this boundary can be transgressed (52). The domestic garden is situated, then, between the house and the wilderness. The long tradition of gardens in children’s literature sees the garden as trope used in multiple ways, very often as a site that holds together competing forces. Like Carroll, Melissa Li Sheung Ying notes the contrasting forces that are expressed in representations of the garden in children’s literature: “As one of the greenest and most recognized landscapes present in the field of children’s literature, the garden has always held a fine balance between delight and death” (153). Gardens in children’s literature exploit their liminality, the relationship between inside and outside, domestic and wild, nature and culture, real and fantastic, freedom and constraint, birth and death.
To this list we might add a more temporal dimension: youth and age; past and future. The liminality of the garden and its ability to contain tensions makes it a unique space where binaries that underpin the linear model of the life course (which separates childhood and adulthood) can be unsettled. The anthropology of rites of passage offers a way to articulate the kind of liminality gardens represent, both temporally and spatially, in these books. Drawing on the work of Arnold van Gennep, Victor W. Turner explains the liminal in terms of the three stages of the rite of passage in agrarian and tribal societies: “separation, transition, and incorporation” (24). Separation involves leaving everyday or quotidian space and time in the first stage to move into a transitional stage that Turner describes as “a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo” (24), where the usual social rules do not apply. In the third stage, incorporation, the subject returns to the order of the social world. In these books, and often in children’s literature more broadly, the garden is this sort of liminal space and time, where subjects temporarily step out of the social order and where imagination and fantasy dominate. Importantly, though, in all of the books we consider children do return to ‘real’ life and the everyday. The reading of liminality as part of a rite of passage also makes the garden part of the child’s development, reinforcing the sense that the child’s relationship with the natural world is inherently linked to their movement between childhood and adulthood. Spatially and temporally, then, the garden in children’s literature brings together what might be seen as competing ideas: the linear narrative of child development (child to adult); and the possibility of stepping out of this social and temporal order. In other words, the garden holds the adult ambivalence about childhood that is central in the genre: the desire for the child’s growth and for innocence (Nodelman).
The three texts we analyse here are examples of the way that picturebooks use the space and time of the garden to explore imagination, age and intergenerationality.2 The gardens in these books might be described as what Cooper calls “homely” gardens, “the gardens that more emphatically and intimately enter into our lives” (5). The “homely” garden, usually attached to and providing the setting for a house, is imbued with a particularly strong sense of liminality, as a borderland space between the domestic and the wild. In these gardens, children transgress the ‘real’ world, entering carnivalesque spaces where they seem to cross, temporarily at least, the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. In the garden, they are faced with challenges of the unknown, but they also gain freedom and agency, power that is connected to their assumed proximity to the natural world. In these narratives, grandparents are, like the gardens about which they seem to have knowledge, liminal figures. They are what Nodelman describes as “utopian grandparents,” stereotypical, wise and caring (“Utopian”). They also represent the adult authority that ultimately brings the children back to the real world and to their ‘reincorporation’ within the social order. As “utopian grandparents” and “enablers” (Joosen, Adulthood 44) of the child’s development, the grandparents can be seen as plot devices. Yet, in the absence of middle generations, the grandparents are those who provide access to the temporal and spatial possibilities of the garden, standing at the threshold of the competing forces associated with it. They represent the ongoing possibility of adult access to the garden and all that it offers, suggesting a continuity between and fluidity in age stages. These books, therefore, exploit the rich symbolism of the garden to bring into focus our often contradictory ideas about age stages, inviting us to re-think ageing across the life course.
The grandparents’ imaginative story-telling is central in the child’s initiation into the unknown world of the garden. In The Snail House, the grandmother tells the children a fantastical story about the children’s adventures in the garden, a story within the story. In There’s a Tiger in the Garden, the grandmother tells the granddaughter about the fantastical world of the garden, instigating her entry into that unknown world. There is a role reversal in Time for Bed, Miyuki, where Miyuki happily inhabits and seems to control the fantastic world of the garden, pulling in her not entirely willing grandfather in her effort to prolong her time of freedom, but ultimately, it appears to be the grandfather who is telling the story of the garden. In all three books, however, the narrative ends with the child’s (re-)assimilation into the real and the domestic, although this is accompanied by the lingering sense of the unknown, imaginative world. Though the books share the central trope of the garden as liminal and fantastic space in which the grandparent and grandchild relationship is explored, they differ in the extent to which they suggest the fluidity and possibilities of the relationships between human life stages and generations.
The Snail House
The Snail House is perhaps the most conservative of the three picturebooks in its exploration of intergenerational relations and life stages. Through dialogue, the grandmother narrates the story of the children’s fantastic adventures in a snail house in the garden. This story-telling provides the frame for the tale-within-a-tale in the book, creating a clear binary of ‘real’ world, in which she and the children are located, and the story world of the children’s adventure in the newly exciting garden. The spatial and temporal possibilities of the garden allow, perhaps paradoxically, for a reassertion of heteronormative familial structures and roles, anticipating a future for the children that looks very much like a nostalgic past. Though the grandmother in this book does play the kind of liminal role that suggests a porosity to the boundary between adulthood and childhood, the narrative tends towards the reassertion of familial, social and generational orders.
The grandmother combines very realist and more mythic elements. She is visually fairly typical of an older woman in children’s literature: dressed in conservative, slightly old-fashioned clothing (a plain white blouse tucked into a long flared, flower-printed skirt) and with bobbed hair (though brown rather than the usual grey). At the same time, she does display elements of the ‘mythic’ or larger than life, in the description of her “mighty arms,” for example. She fulfils the typical grandparental role of carer, but the way she gathers the children in her arms nevertheless nods again to a sense that she is larger than life, something emphasized through her story-telling role. Her immersion in her story-telling, during which she ignores the phone ringing inside the house, also distances her from the norms of the adult, domestic world. Though the grandmother does not enter the story world herself, she is positioned as a liminal figure, representing adult authority and care at the same time as constructing a fantastic and challenging imaginative world for the children.
The garden in The Snail House is key to the liminality of the grandmother and to the relationships between generations. Story-telling takes place on the veranda, on which children and grandmother sit, marking a clear and yet seemingly porous boundary between house and garden, real and imagined worlds. This is similar to the boundary marking in Victorian writing for children, where structures such as fences, gates and doors “serve[s] as the valve regulating the spatial flow between the two zones of (inner) safety and (outer) danger” (Smith 38). The garden is depicted in great detail, as an idyllic and yet (as the story goes on) exciting, even dangerous, space that is full of plants and insects, enlarged against the children who, in the embedded story, have shrunk. At the same time, the book draws visual links between the garden and domesticity, making this a “homely” garden: flowerbeds, pots and mature trees are combined with children’s toys. The family’s cat is also drawn in both the main story and the story-within-the story, connecting the real and the fantastic, just as does the grandmother’s story-telling.
Yet, the liminal possibilities of the garden are undercut by the nature of the story the grandmother tells. Time in the garden appears to operate differently from, or provide an alternative to, time in the domestic space. Unlike in the other texts, though, this is not clearly a form of temporal freedom linked to childhood (in opposition to an adult authority). The grandmother’s story is set in the past, as her answer to Hannah’s question about a TV in the snail house makes clear: “No, TV, sweetheart, not in those days. But a radio, yes.” This garden can be seen as an elegiac form of the pastoral (Garrard), activating associations with pastness and nostalgia (echoed in other aspects of the book, too, such as the style of illustrations and the clothes worn by the characters), elements further linked to older age and the grandmother herself. The story told is of the children—one male and one female child, plus a baby—recreating a (implicitly heterosexual) family unit, protecting this unit from external threats. The heteronormativity of this story is explicit in images which show the girl doing the caring for the baby and the housework. In this topsy-turvy garden world, then, children become adults (carers and protectors) in the past rather than the future. Unlike the other books, where the garden represents a kind of temporal freedom, in The Snail House, temporal flexibility binds the children into a narrative of development that is heteronormative, gendered and nostalgic. The grandmother here represents and disseminates, more clearly than in the other texts, ‘pastness’ and ‘traditional’ norms and values.
The main narrative of The Snail House is implicitly one of child development and underpinned by the Bildungsroman. In the story-within-the story, the children reach the riverbank that marks the boundary of the garden. The image suggests the expansive and ‘wild’ world beyond the river, something enhanced by the darkness of the night time. Yet, the children do not cross the river and instead return home, emphasizing the sense that the world beyond the river is “antithetical to home and safety” (Carroll 76). As the grandmother’s story-telling comes to an end, the children and grandmother move to re-enter the house, the domestic world in which the children take their place once more as children (and yet, also, as incipient adults). The children are quite literally at the threshold of garden/house for much of the story. And the grandmother’s role is keeper of that threshold, able to negotiate it and yet, ultimately, reimpose the rules of the domestic, and implicitly adult, world. The text’s last doublespread seems to make clear the gendered nature of that world. As the grandmother walks into the house carrying the baby, and the male child stands within the doorway, the young girl, Hannah, is depicted on the edge of the veranda, staring not towards the house, but back towards the garden. On the righthand page, the garden stretches out into the “muffled blackness” and “the invisible hedge.” The image suggests that the girl is reluctant to leave the adventurous world of the garden, the carnivalesque world of the imagination. Hannah stands at the threshold, in tension between the demands of social and gendered norms and the lure of the fantastic world of the garden. And, yet, there is an irony in that the story of the garden saw the girl already cast into a role that echoes that which may await her: that of carer and homemaker. Staying in the garden and being free is not an option for her.
There’s a Tiger in the Garden
The ambiguous role of the grandparent is common to all of these books: grandparents represent domesticity and the adult world, but at the same time provide access to and engage children in adventure. In There’s a Tiger in the Garden, the grandmother is not a story-teller in the sense found in the other two books, but she is the instigator of the adventure and, in this way, active creator of the child’s experience of the garden. The grandmother suggests that there are fantastic things in the garden (in the sense of things that should not be there, such as non-native creatures) and enumerates the creatures that Nora will go on to see in her adventure. Like the grandmother in The Snail House, she remains on the threshold between home and garden, not participating in the child’s adventures.3 And yet, this text shares with Time for Bed, Miyuki an insistence on the persistence of the temporal and imaginative freedoms that the garden invokes, finally bringing the fantastic world of the garden into the home and thereby stressing the fluidity of other binaries, including that between adult and child.
The book indicates the liminality of the garden in various ways. It is first seen from inside, framed by the window, evoking the sense of it being beyond the domestic and nevertheless part of it. That continues in the next doublespread as Nora and the grandmother are seen standing on the threshold, at the doorway of the house, looking into the garden. The lefthand page primarily depicts the house and a domestic world, whilst the righthand page is the garden itself, looking wilder, with some tall plants and what appears to be the tail of the tiger visible. The page design enhances that juxtaposition of domestic and wild, known and unknown, combined in the ambiguity of the garden. The structure of the text also emphasises that sense of parallel worlds: just as in The Snail House, the book begins and ends within the home. As Nora ventures further into the garden and away from ‘home,’ the garden becomes a wilder and a more threatening place. Plants have teeth, vines trap the unwary and changes in scale make Nora appear smaller against the background of large plants. The landscape changes with mountains visible just prior to Nora’s meeting with the polar bear, suggesting that Nora has moved beyond the domestic and transgressed into ‘wild’ space. Yet, Nora is very clearly still in the garden. The liminal territory of the garden here combines safety and danger, known and unknown, domestic and wild, and in that ambiguous terrain, Nora is both child and independent adventurer.
Nora’s experience in the garden is also marked by a temporality that differs from linear, mundane time. At the beginning of the book, Nora is bored, having exhausted the playthings that are depicted within the domestic environment in the first doublespread of the book. Boredom is explicitly linked to the indoor space of the home: “There’s nothing to do here, Grandma” [emphasis added]. Boredom is here constructed as lack of imagination (as it often is in didactic messages to children). But boredom is also something that makes time move slowly. When Nora enters the garden, the narrative becomes more active (as dragonflies ‘whizz’ past her and she clambers through plants), with the page layout contributing to the increase in pace for the reader: as seen on the page where Nora rescues her toy giraffe Jeff in a series of illustrations akin to a comic strip, invoking movement on the page. As the garden becomes more ‘wild’ and less knowable, Nora’s boredom (slow time) is replaced by a sense of speed and urgency that represents her immersion in the world of the imagination.
The narrative of child’s growth in this book exhibits a stronger sense of tension between innocence and development than in The Snail House, in ways that refuse the simple binarism between adult/child and the real/the fantastic. When Nora finally meets the tiger, they engage in a conversation about the nature of reality, with the tiger representing the world of the imagination, at odds with the world governed by a reality principle. Nora posits the question that the child reader may ask: “Are you real?” At the end of their meeting, the tiger insists that “Whenever you want me, I’ll be here.” This message is echoed in the way that the book brings the narrative to an end. As in The Snail House, the child eventually returns home and to the ‘real’ world. Nora is seen back in the same room as in the first doublespread of the book, with the garden visible through the window. The grandmother, who has inducted Nora into imaginative time and space, now represents the domestic world, and has presumably cleared into a box the toys abandoned by a bored Nora at the beginning of the narrative. Nonetheless, the text insists on the ongoing presence of the imaginative world, as Nora spreads her arms wide and insists that there really is a tiger in the garden. The grandmother also affirms that possibility and the importance of uncertainty: “I’m not sure… Perhaps it’s only a ginger cat. It’s hard to tell sometimes.” The final doublespread insists on the porous boundary between the real and the imaginative/fantastic as Nora says that “[t]here’s a mermaid in the bath.” The grandparent, who earlier inducted the child into imaginative time and space, is now inducted into that world by the child. Both peer into the bathroom to see the mermaid, but the image only shows its tail above the bathtub, suggesting its elusive, fantastic nature. Bringing the fantastic into the space of the home, this book places a stronger emphasis than The Snail House on the importance of imagination for both the child and the adult. They are connected by their capacity to transgress the limits of the mundane world and embrace creativity and imagination, emphasizing similarity rather than difference between age stages. At the same time, the text utilizes space to suggest a distinction between the fantastic and the real, with the two standing at the door on the righthand page and the bathtub and mermaid on the lefthand page. Ultimately, while emphasizing the importance of imagination for adults, the book leaves intact the boundary between adulthood and childhood and the real and the fantastic.
Time for Bed, Miyuki
Time for Bed, Miyuki similarly draws on the trope of the garden, invoking its liminality to explore intergenerationality and life stages, but it unsettles the adult/child hierarchy to a much greater extent than the other two books, depicting generational identity and the intergenerational relationship in more fluid terms. This is clear in the representation of the grandfather in the book. Just like the grandmother in the other books, he is identified as the carer for the child, with his primary role seemingly to make sure that she goes to bed. Nonetheless, the book variously suggests his proximity to childhood. The grandfather is depicted with grey hair, a short beard and glasses, but he is dressed in a short happi (a traditional Japanese coat), rather than a formal kimono, and represented as roughly the same size as his granddaughter, lending a sense of equality to their shared experience in the garden. More importantly, the grandfather himself is in the garden, whereas in the other two books, the grandparent remains at the threshold between house and garden.
The garden in Time for Bed, Miyuki is clearly a fantastic space, but also recognizably a garden: it is a mix of all sorts of flowers, seed heads and animals (including a white rabbit that may remind a reader of the rabbit figure in the Japanese zodiac and/or Alice in Wonderland).4 The garden is linked to domesticity: there are vegetables growing, pots and even an illustration of a lunch box containing vegetables from the garden. At the same time, scale is used to defamiliarize the garden space. Miyuki is the same size as a blue tit and much smaller than a cat; Miyuki and her grandfather ride snails. Carroll’s description of gardens in children’s literature may well be appropriate here: the garden is a “a ludic space where pleasure is physically and vocally expressed rather than quietly enjoyed” (54). The heavily stylized form of the illustrations also contributes to this sense of the fantastic and ludic. Illustrated using watercolours and coloured pencils, the style of the illustrations appears to draw on traditional Japanese designs for origami paper, as well as other visual signifiers of traditional Japanese culture (there are illustrations of chopsticks, rice bowls and a kimono). These work together with linguistic signifiers, such as Miyuki’s name. At the same time, other features of the book seem to signify a European context, such as Miyuki’s western-style dress, the nightingale in the opening passage and the blue tit in one of the illustrations. Furthermore, the blend of fantasy and domesticity in this garden is not framed, in either narrative or visual terms, by a clearly defined external world, as it is in the other texts. Whilst the pressure of the ‘real’ world is felt throughout by the insistence that Miyuki goes to bed and the liminality of the garden is exploited to suggest the meeting of the fantastic and the real, the boundaries between the two remain blurred throughout the text.
The premise of the narrative, a child refusing to go to bed, adds to the liminality of the garden. The deferral of bedtime is instigated by Miyuki as she imagines tasks she and her grandfather must undertake to avoid having to succumb to his wishes and go to bed. The usual adult/child hierarchy is, to some extent, reversed here as Miyuki imposes her will on her grandfather and he undertakes the tasks she sets. The repetitiveness and the deferral of conclusion at the heart of the procrastination turns it into a kind of play in which the social and temporal order of the real world is suspended. In this, the book might be said to offer a representation of the type of play identified by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Irene Barbara Kalla, depictions that “reveal unexpected commonalities and partnerships between younger and older generations, thereby destabilizing the child/adult binary” (10). The liminality of the garden is represented in specifically temporal terms in this book as the playful procrastination disrupts the order of the real, mundane world. Miyuki wants to extend her time in the garden, where she is able to reject the rules imposed by adults. As the text says: “Miyuki is busy playing and trying to push back time.” That sense of extending and pushing the boundaries of time is also there in the reading: the repetition (in the grandfather’s words) makes the process of reading one of delayed conclusion: we know she has to go to bed (as children know), but, like the grandfather, we are forced to wait to see this. This gives a sense of the carnivalesque—in the garden, the grandfather does what Miyuki says and she forces him to wait for her, delaying bedtime.5 At the same time, we know that bedtime is inevitable so the exchange of roles is temporary.
The bedtime, eventually, does arrive in the book but in ways that refuse the narrative resolution of the child’s reincorporation into the real world. Miyuki’s bed is a shoe in the garden so, unlike in the other texts, there is no clear return to a domestic space. The blending of the fantastic and the natural worlds within the garden continues, even if Miyuki has succumbed to her grandfather’s authority and temporal control. Nonetheless, the text then goes on to upset the clear boundary between the child and the adult, and between freedom and control. The grandfather opens a book to read Miyuki a bedtime story and, as the illustration shows a tree growing out of it, the words he reads out repeat those with which the picturebook opens. Grandfather appears to be telling the story all along, making him a co-creator of the storied world adventure, rather than an unwilling participant and a restrictive force in it. In other words, unlike the grandparents in the other books, the grandfather is not only a story-teller for the child but also inhabits, with the child, the story world. The pencils seen in the illustrations at various points (for example, being used as stilts by Miyuki) may then be metatextual references to the process of story-telling itself. The main story (of the garden) may be a story that the grandfather tells while Miyuki falls or is asleep. The story, like the garden, is then poised between the real and the fantastic. Like the grandmother in The Snail House, this grandfather polices the threshold between adult authority and childhood freedom, between linear time and repetitive delay, between the fantastic garden and the domestic world that shadows this. Yet, unlike The Snail House, Time for Bed, Miyuki leaves the reader with the image of grandfather and child as co-creators of and playful participants in the fantastic world, refraining from the kind of narrative closure that would see the child turn away from the possibilities of the garden to the order of the domestic, implicitly adult, world and the linear Bildungsroman that separates childhood and adulthood as distinct states.
Conclusion
In all three books discussed in this article, the garden is a key space in which relationships between grandparents and grandchildren are explored, drawing on age-based associations with the natural world, but also the garden’s liminal status. This liminality seems to serve not only as a key signifier of the child’s development from childhood to adulthood, but as a way of exploring the status of the older person. Of course, as we have made clear throughout this article, the representation of older adults as liminal figures can reinforce limiting stereotypes of grandparents and older people more generally, as marginal and associated with the past rather than the future. At the same time, the link between grandparent and garden in these texts may be used to suggest a continuity between age stages that insists upon fluidity and porosity rather than a clear binary between adulthood and childhood. In that, these garden-based intergenerational relationships may encourage a more radical rethinking of ageing across the life course.
Notes
[1] Time for Bed, Miyuki was originally published in France and in French. It is also illustrated by the French illustrator Seng Soun Ratanavanhan, whose style explicitly draws on Japanese art and culture (Shuit). Nonetheless, its translation into English suggests that the book is also intended for an English-speaking readership.
[2] In Time for Bed, Miyuki and There is a Tiger, the ‘garden’ space is explicitly referred to by the characters as a ‘garden’; the text in The Snail House refers to the ‘garden’ where the grandmother’s story-telling takes place, and although the grandmother does not explicitly refer to the setting of her story as a ‘garden,’ it is clear from the illustrations that it is set in the same garden.
[3] There may be a gendered element to this. See, for example, Janelli and Sorge on grandparents in children’s books.
[4] The English translation of Time for Bed, Miyuki was published by Princeton Architectural Press, which publishes in architecture, design, photography and visual culture. This choice of publisher may be related to the book’s visual appeal, notably its highly stylised illustrations.
[5] On the carnivalesque in children’s literature, see Nikolajeva (Power).
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.