Abstract
Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons is a defining example of contemporary realistic fiction for children. This article argues that Walk Two Moons models storytelling as a tool which children need to understand their own relationship to reality and to literature. Rather than employing a grim verisimilitude, as some critics have charged, Creech has created a novel of realistic character development which also challenges any simplistic understanding of children’s realistic fiction through its complex and self-referential narrative structure and use of literary language. The result is a narrative which, in the face of painful and tragic circumstances, empowers readers toward a hopeful and optimistic view of life’s mysteries.
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Notes
Both Jacqueline Rose and Karen Coats, among others, have noted that children’s literature often has more to do with adult desires than with depicting the realities of children’s lives. Rose discusses such desires as “a form of investment by the adult in the child . . . which fixes the child and then holds it in place” (3–4). Likewise, Coats writes that figures such as Alice and Peter Pan “hold a more or less permanent place as signifiers of the modernist desire to preserve the notion of a pristine childhood” (78).
Sal’s ultimate act of bravery is to tell her story, and so it is perhaps appropriate that this lesson on bravery is precipitated by Sal’s interaction with a “dignified black spider” (14). In the Greek myth of Arachne, the weaver transformed into a spider by Athena, weaving and storytelling are explicitly linked, just as Sal’s role as storyteller is initiated at her grandfather’s request: “How about a story? Spin us a yarn” (8).
Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that the subject of death is one of the distinguishing factors between children’s and adolescent fiction:
In children’s literature, learning about death symbolizes a degree of separation from one’s parents. . . . But in adolescent literature, death is often depicted in terms of maturation when the protagonist accepts the permanence of mortality, when s/he accepts herself as Being-towards-death. (118–19)
Walk Two Moons defies such classification because it seems to straddle the line between childhood and adolescence. Sal certainly is able to use her mother’s death to separate from her parents, but she also approaches an awareness of her own mortality as she walks in her mother’s footsteps: Sal drives the same road as her mother’s bus, imagines climbing into the wreck and walking down the aisle to her mother’s seat, and voices the cry of her dead Grams.
Lauren Myracle notes that bibliotherapy in the twentieth century evolved from didacticism and sentimentality to realism: “the focus of modern bibliotherapy,” she writes, does not “assum[e] that adolescents can be ‘fixed’ by the proper application of just the right book,” precisely because in “the realism of modern young adult fiction . . . sometimes problems are not resolved” (39).
That “Euclid, Ohio” is a “real” place only serves to highlight further the instability of the novel’s realism. This is because the fact that the name “Euclid” signifies an actual city in Ohio is less significant than the function that Euclid serves inside the novel in underscoring Sal’s displacement from Bybanks and thus from her mother. The confining and restricting Euclidean geometry of Sal’s new house, with its “tiny living room,” “miniature kitchen,” pint-sized” and “pocket-sized” bedrooms, surrounded by “identical fenced plots of land,” is measured by Sal in terms of absence: “No swimming hole, no barn, no cows, no chickens, no pigs” (11).
According to Zipes:
Genuine storytelling is the frank presentation and articulation of experience and knowledge through different narrative modalities in order to provide a listener with strategies for survival and pleasure and to heighten one’s awareness of the sensual pleasures and dangers of life. (Sticks and Stones 134)
This emphasis on both the pleasures and dangers of life is echoed in Creech’s Newbery acceptance speech in her insistence that fiction can serve both the need to face evil and the need for mystery and hope.
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Roberts, L. Nightmares, Idylls, Mystery, and Hope: Walk Two Moons and the Artifice of Realism in Children’s Fiction. Child Lit Educ 39, 121–134 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-007-9046-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-007-9046-4