Corruption Continues

I discovered some more useful children’s books in the 800s (Dewey Decimal). There were many kid versions of Shakespeare, but I did fid A Selection from the Canterbury Tales by Selina Hastings.

Hastings’ book includes part of the prologue, The Knight’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The Pardoner’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and the Franklin’s Tale. I read through a few before bringing them into camp. The stories were illustrated, but there were many pages that were text only. In opinion, what illustrations there were were not very good/interesting. The stories retained their original flavor, but were slightly toned down. In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for example, the Knight does not explicitly rape the woman, but he does attack her.

I brought the book I to my lunch group. I suspected the book might have been a little too old for them (my lunch group was K-2; I think the book was aimed at 3-5). I always presented a variety of books to my campers; in this case, The Canterbury Tales was continually passed over for the others. One day, I offered them CT, Lugalbanda by Kathy Henderson, based on a Sumerian tale, and an Egyptian story. The campers liked the other two books, so it didn’t seem to be an issue of historical stories – I think it came down to the illustrations. The illustrations for the other two books were lovely – the Egyptian book had a rather modern look, but Lugalbanda had gorgeous pictures reminiscent of Sumerian art.

Finally, the campers decided on CT. They argued over whether to read The Knight’s Tale or The Wife of Bath. We went with KT first. It was too complicated for them. Without a lot of pictures, they were easily distracted and continually asked me who the characters were. I can’t help but think a version with a lot of pictures, making clear who the different characters are, would be more successful. My campers love knights and such, and I think there is a way to make this store more accessible to younger kids.

The Wife of Bath’s tale was not very successful either; one camper was actually mad that the story was so similar to Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady. She said she didn’t like this one very much. This story was much easier to follow than KT; I think more illustrations would have helped – and if we hadn’t read the other book before hand.

I decided to give the book one more shot. That session of camp, I group led I the afternoon; that is, I helped get the kids from class to class, and helped the instructors. One of the classes was Storybooks, taught by a good friend. I liked this person a lot to begin with, but my admiration for her grew when, on the first day of class, she read a story book by bell hooks. I asked her if we could read a story or two from my book and she said yes.
Originally, I was going to read The Miller’s Tale, since it eve includes an illustration of Nicholas getting branded; my campers love anything to do with the buttock or bodily functions. But again, there were very few illustrations overall, so I decided to go with the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

I told the campers they would have to use their imaginations. But they really weren’t into the story. We only got part-way through, and then class ended. Later that day, we had some extra time, so I pulled out Lugalbanda and read part of that to the campers.

The next time in Storybooks, I pulled out CT. The campers objected and wanted me to finish Lugalbanda instead. So I did.

Again, I am intrigued that the age of the story doesn’t seem to matter – I think it was the illustrations. Well, and Lugalbanda is about a young boy involved in a war – perhaps a little easier for the campers to relate to. I do wish I could have repeated this experiment with older kids, since I think the CT is aimed at a slightly older age group than the ones with which I worked. For the last two weeks of camp, I actually have a lunch group of 3-5. However, they are not interested in books (they scoffed at the Roald Dahl I brought!); they prefer to talk and play card games.

But these experiments bring up a lot of questions, especially related to childhood. My thoughts are sort of swirling; I am trying to pull them apart. On the one hand – most books did have illustrations. That modern children – and modern people in general – like to mix their text with images does not seem that strange. But many books were meant to be read aloud – more to the point, there weren’t children’s books, such a thing didn’t exist. So children had to just listen (as did most adults). Did children/people have longer attention spans in the past? Many would argue yes. Maybe this is a matter of past and present being a little too far apart to accurately compare things. Kids books have really existed for about two hundred years, after all.

I also found one other storybook version of Chaucer – a book based on a Disney cartoon of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. It was awful; I did not bring it in to my campers. In the first place, I thought the drawings were hideous; I’m now curious what my campers would have thought, since the drawings were in the obvious Disney style. But – the story was completely different. Like most English majors, I get very angry about major changes – if they wanted to tell a story, great, but why name the characters Chanticleer, etc? Why not give them new names? I have a lot of issues with how Disney treats fairy tales, too. I think the theory that Disney is simply creating new fairy tales, or changing fairy tales, as has been happening for hundred of years is interesting – but I think with Disney it is more insidious then simply presenting re-workings of fairy tales (and there are certainly a lot of high quality re-workings and re-imaginings).