Abstract
Written and published during World War II, Eleanor Estes’s Rufus M. (1943) is set during the time of American involvement in World War I, the war of the author’s own childhood. Despite the fact that the book was named a Newbery Honor title, many critics have found it unsatisfyingly unstructured and episodic. I argue, however, that the book is far more unified in its construction than these critics recognize and deserves study as a revelatory title about how the First World War was presented to young readers during the Second World War. In his dauntless determination to support the war effort, young Rufus shows himself to be an iconic home-front hero of precisely the sort encouraged by the United States propaganda machine. But read carefully, the book has such an air of pervasive melancholy and contains so many scenes of disappointed hopes and disillusioned dreams that it can be read as encoding doubts about the first war’s legacy. Despite Estes’s clearly intended attempt to provide hope for young readers, the reality of World War I’s ultimate failure haunts Rufus M. as a sort of pentimento, a darker set of images revealed beneath the text’s surface optimism.
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Notes
I am grateful for a Billy M. Levy Travel and Research Grant from the University of Connecticut, which allowed me to research Estes’s papers at the Archives & Special Collections, to Claudia Nelson and Anne Phillips for writing letters in support of my application, and to Helena Estes for her gracious permission to quote from these materials. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments, which strengthened the paper enormously. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Children’s Literature Association in Roanoke, Virginia, in June, 2011.
Smith’s confusion over the identity of the war is echoed by Sondra Gordon Langford in her “A Second Look: Rufus M.,” where she writes that, reading the book during her own World War II childhood, “I thought the war was our war” (1991, p. 716); she was surprised upon adult rereading to discover that it was “a historical novel.” And of course, Estes’s memories of the First World War were doubtless inflected by her being immersed in news of the Second World War as she wrote.
Estes had begun work on The Moffat Museum immediately following the success of the first three books, with her editor Margaret McElderry enthusing in November, 1949, “I somehow feel in my bones that THE MOFFAT MUSEUM will win the Newbery (McElderry, 1949). Estes abandoned work on the project, however, when illustrator Louis Slobodkin insisted on a prohibitively high royalty for his illustrations. Estes wrote to McElderry in December of 1949 that she wouldn’t even consider another Moffat title without Slobodkin’s collaboration: “Louis caught my concept completely and only a very great artist could have got the tenderness, humor, and emotions into the pictures that he did” (Estes, 1949). Instead, she created a new fictional family, the Pyes, and gave the dog she had intended for the Moffats to them instead.
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Claudia Mills is Associate Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a frequent visiting professor at the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University in Indiana. The author of over fifty books for young readers, she has published articles on Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Maud Hart Lovelace, Betty MacDonald, Rosamond du Jardin, and Eleanor Estes, as well as an edited collection, Ethics and Children’s Literature (2014, Ashgate).
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Mills, C. “Better Times Are Coming Now”: Wartime Dreams and Disenchantment in Rufus M. . Child Lit Educ 48, 103–118 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9288-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9288-0