Blanchette
When I was a child at primary school, we had a set of standard readers, compiled by the Victorian Education Department. Whereas today they would probably be called something like 'The magic of reading', or 'Rainbow Serpent Reader', back then they were just called 'First Book', 'Second Book', and so on. Needless to say, these have been long since superseded, and have actually become quite collectible. They were even issued in a facsimile set for the nostalgia market in the mid-1980s.
I picked out the Sixth Book recently, to revisit a story that I have never forgotten since I first read it, back in the sixth year of primary school, at the age of 12. Looking through this book, two things strike you immediately. One is that almost every extract, in prose and verse, is something that was not originally written for children, but for an adult readership. The second is that there is no way in the world that any teacher today, at least in a government school, would dream of putting a book like this into a child's hands.
The particular story I recalled is a good example of this. It's a translation of a short tale by the nineteenth-century writer Alphonse Daudet, called 'The White Goat'. It tells the story of a young female goat, in a very anthropomorphized fashion: the goat has a name - Blanchette - and her thoughts and emotions are entirely human. She wanders away from her home farm, to explore the higher mountain pasture, and at first, she finds the freedom and the exotic herbage intoxicating, but as night falls, she decides to return to the farm. On the return track, she is met by a wolf. It's clear that she doesn't stand a chance, but she decides to try to hold out until the following dawn, and through the night, she manages to fight off the wolf, snatching a mouthful of the sweet mountain grass every time there is a pause. Eventually dawn breaks, and she stops resisting - she is immediately torn to pieces by the wolf.
The reasons why no modern teacher would give this story to a twelve-year-old are almost beyond counting. Firstly, it's an old story. Secondly, it has an unhappy ending. Thirdly, it depicts animals killing each other, and we all know that nature is harmony, and only meat-eating humans kill animals. The wolf is presumably male, and the goat is female, so it would also be seen as a story of violence against 'women'.
But above all, I can imagine modern teachers being suspicious of this story because of the complex psychology of Blanchette. I can still remember the strange feeling this story gave me when I read it as a child - strange because I couldn't describe or explain it. The goat accepts that she is going to die - a staggering idea for a child - but she insists on setting at least one condition of her death: to see the dawn one last time. I think part of that strange confused feeling I got was also because of the way this story equates dawn - normally a signal of hope - with death. As she fights the wolf, she keeps feeding on the mountain grass whenever she can. Why does she do this, when she will never even live to digest it? It's a gesture of defiance: the wolf can kill Blanchette, but he cannot make her change the way she chooses to live.
I might be over-remembering this experience, but I feel that this story was one of those literary signposts (as Di Lampedusa's The Leopard was in my teen years) which gives the young reader an early hint - both exciting and frightening - of just how compex adult life is going to be.
When I was a child at primary school, we had a set of standard readers, compiled by the Victorian Education Department. Whereas today they would probably be called something like 'The magic of reading', or 'Rainbow Serpent Reader', back then they were just called 'First Book', 'Second Book', and so on. Needless to say, these have been long since superseded, and have actually become quite collectible. They were even issued in a facsimile set for the nostalgia market in the mid-1980s.
I picked out the Sixth Book recently, to revisit a story that I have never forgotten since I first read it, back in the sixth year of primary school, at the age of 12. Looking through this book, two things strike you immediately. One is that almost every extract, in prose and verse, is something that was not originally written for children, but for an adult readership. The second is that there is no way in the world that any teacher today, at least in a government school, would dream of putting a book like this into a child's hands.
The particular story I recalled is a good example of this. It's a translation of a short tale by the nineteenth-century writer Alphonse Daudet, called 'The White Goat'. It tells the story of a young female goat, in a very anthropomorphized fashion: the goat has a name - Blanchette - and her thoughts and emotions are entirely human. She wanders away from her home farm, to explore the higher mountain pasture, and at first, she finds the freedom and the exotic herbage intoxicating, but as night falls, she decides to return to the farm. On the return track, she is met by a wolf. It's clear that she doesn't stand a chance, but she decides to try to hold out until the following dawn, and through the night, she manages to fight off the wolf, snatching a mouthful of the sweet mountain grass every time there is a pause. Eventually dawn breaks, and she stops resisting - she is immediately torn to pieces by the wolf.
The reasons why no modern teacher would give this story to a twelve-year-old are almost beyond counting. Firstly, it's an old story. Secondly, it has an unhappy ending. Thirdly, it depicts animals killing each other, and we all know that nature is harmony, and only meat-eating humans kill animals. The wolf is presumably male, and the goat is female, so it would also be seen as a story of violence against 'women'.
But above all, I can imagine modern teachers being suspicious of this story because of the complex psychology of Blanchette. I can still remember the strange feeling this story gave me when I read it as a child - strange because I couldn't describe or explain it. The goat accepts that she is going to die - a staggering idea for a child - but she insists on setting at least one condition of her death: to see the dawn one last time. I think part of that strange confused feeling I got was also because of the way this story equates dawn - normally a signal of hope - with death. As she fights the wolf, she keeps feeding on the mountain grass whenever she can. Why does she do this, when she will never even live to digest it? It's a gesture of defiance: the wolf can kill Blanchette, but he cannot make her change the way she chooses to live.
I might be over-remembering this experience, but I feel that this story was one of those literary signposts (as Di Lampedusa's The Leopard was in my teen years) which gives the young reader an early hint - both exciting and frightening - of just how compex adult life is going to be.
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