The Diaries of Children and the Construction of Childhood

In a web search through the international news, I came across a story that initially stopped me in my electronic tracks, and then made me wonder why I found it so powerful. The story was a follow-up to the siege at No. 1 School, in Beslan, Russia, that took place from September 1st to 3rd. The outlines of the siege and its consequences are, by now, well known. Striking right after opening day ceremonies, heavily armed terrorists stormed into the school and held some 400 students, teachers, and parents hostage. The article, which appeared as a Chinese translation from the German newspaper Bild, described the diary a thirteen-year-old girl named Christina wrote during the time she, her sister, and her mother were held hostage in the school’s gymnasium. Christina calmly chronicles a rapidly deteriorating chain of events. The first day she notes that everyone was allotted only a small drink of water and complains of being limited to a ‘one minute’ trip to the bathroom. The second day she writes that all the adult men were taken out and killed and that rain poured down on the roof so hard that no one could sleep. The third day, she notes that her 10-year-old sister Sheila asked her mother when the president would come and save them and goes on to describe her sister crying for food and water, and then, because she could not be quieted, being killed by the terrorists.

This story reminded me of another thirteen-year-old girl who wrote a diary some sixty-two years ago. Anne Frank had two years to write about her life. Anne was forced into hiding from the Nazis when her sister was ordered to report to a labor camp during the Holocaust. She and her family spent 25 months during World War II secluded in an annex of rooms above her father’s office in Amsterdam. This seclusion did not protect Anne from the knowledge of what was happening around her. She wrote, “Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. … We assume most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed.” Another excerpt almost presages Christina’s situation; “Have you ever heard the term ‘hostages’? That’s the latest punishment for saboteurs. It’s the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading citizens – innocent people – are taken prisoner to await their execution. If the Gestapo can’t find the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and line them up against the wall” (October 9, 1942).

The experiences of these two girls are obviously vastly different. Christina survived the school siege and Anne died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp nine months after she and her family were arrested. Still, an important similarity is that they both left written records that provide a child’s eye view of events that defy description by adults. Another similarity is that both stories are powerful to us because they were written by children. Our reaction to a child’s diary of these horrific events is immediate and almost involuntary. Childhood is a social category that we consider qualitatively different from adulthood, a special and vulnerable stage that we seek to protect against the pain of adult life. Yet, it was not always this way. The French historian, Philippe Ariès, was among the first to demonstrate that while children are present in all cultures their presence has been and still is regarded very differently in different times and places. In the West, the image of children moved from small adults to creatures of innocence and weakness only some four hundred years ago. This particular vision of modern Western childhood is both historically and culturally specific, but the power of that vision is found in the extensive globalization of Western ideas of childhood. It is a power we do not fully understand but that, for better or worse, political factions around the world have used and still employ to further their own ends.

Childhood as a category imposed on children ignores the subtleties in the life of individuals on their road to adulthood. No matter how young, children are active participants in the courses of their own lives. Children themselves react to and actively affect the reality that faces them on a day-to-day basis. The experience of childhood is, of course, stratified by such things as class, age, gender, and ethnicity, by urban or rural backgrounds, and by particularized identities created for children through religious and cultural beliefs. We can see Anne’s urbane and intellectual family background in her writings. We can also see that Anne reflects on her role as a child: “Am I really only fourteen? Am I only just a silly school girl? Am I really so inexperienced in everything?” We do not see, however, the passages her father thought were mere teenage musings and inappropriate for public consumption. He deleted these, perhaps because he found them incompatible with his goals in releasing the diary. In these passages Anne probably described what it was like to be a child during a time where even the weak and vulnerable were exposed to the harsh realities of the adult world. What we know of Christina’s background suggests she is less urbane than Anne and her brief experience as a diarist allowed her no time to develop anything but the most superficial description of events. Her short text also contains drawings of fantastic animal shapes that suggest she was struggling with the surreal nature of events surrounding her. I do not question the horror of her experience, but it might be again that the international publication of her diary is meant as much to appeal to our emotions about the politics of the event as about her experience.

While the history of childhood has been explored by scholars for some forty years, and the political uses for far longer than that, we are only beginning to appreciate all the differences between childhood and adulthood. Some differences are artifacts of social and cultural ideas developed over the past four hundred years, others, like recent discoveries about the maturation of the brains of teenagers and their intense and often self-destructive behavior, are rooted in human biology.

These issues and the literature that has sprung up around them stretch across human experience. Washington University will offer opportunities for active participation in discussions of such topics through an interdisciplinary Children’s Studies Minor coordinated by the Center for the Humanities and involving the departments of English, African and Afro-American Studies, Education, History, and Psychology. Children are the living messages we send to the future, so it is important that we understand and appreciate the institutions that shape those messages.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director
The Center for the Humanities

I was an “orphan” for the first ten years of my publishing career. By that I mean that I lived in an area with no other writers of popular fiction. Ironically, I was surrounded by published authors including my own husband, Dr. James Henke, Ph.D. But their works were scholarly. Although I, too, was a university instructor for many years in the Ohio system, I published fourteen paperback novels before Jim took an early retirement so we could return home to St. Louis. This was where I found my “writing family”— Missouri Romance Writers of America (MORWA).

At last I had a local chapter of my national professional organization. I still remember the day I went to my first meeting in the spring of 1994. Back then we met in the Holiday Inn at Lindbergh and I-55. Being from North County, I became hopelessly lost and was late, but everyone welcomed me during the break between the business meeting and program, which was a very informative panel about mass market book buying by wholesalers and big chain stores. I had the opportunity to meet not only professionals in the book trade, booksellers and distributors, but also to form friendships with other published and yet-to-be published writers. No longer was I asked by my colleagues in the English and history departments, “When are you going to write a real book?” The readers and writers of MORWA believe paperbacks are not only real but loads of fun.

During the past ten years MORWA has been an invaluable place to learn and to share my own hard-won experiences with others who pursue the same dream—to be published in genre fiction. I stress all genres of popular fiction even though Romance Writers of America was formed to promote romance. Over the years many New York Times bestselling writers have moved from a strictly romance background to reach an even wider readership: Sandra Brown, Nora Roberts, J.D. Robb, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, LaVyrle Spencer and Tess Gerritsen, just to name a few. One of RWA’s “Hall of Fame” authors, Eileen Dreyer, is a MORWA member who now writes medical thrillers that regularly appear on USA Today bestseller lists.

Our programs cover a wide range of topics and several times a year we present all-day workshops. I’ve been co-chair of programs for the past year with my friend Karyn Witmer-Gow, who publishes as Elizabeth Grayson. We’ve had fascinating speakers entertain and inform us. Kathy Maxwell, a New York Times bestseller, gave a day-long workshop on career management and goal setting in today’s publishing industry. My husband, Dr. James Henke, a Wash U alumnus who has published numerous scholarly books and articles on Renaissance Drama and Young Adult fiction, spoke on “Kissin’ Frogs—Archetypes in Folk Fairy Tales.” Jim explained how these stories handed down through the ages undergird all varieties of popular fiction. Of course, it made me a bit nervous until he proved to be every bit as brilliant as he had assured me he’d be. A long-time friend and true veteran of popular fiction who began her writing career in the 1960s, Roberta Gellis gave a program on research. Since Robbie has published dozens of Medieval romances, sci-fi, fantasy, and mysteries and now has a historical mystery series in hardcover, she knows every trick to track down elusive information.

“A Crime Panel to Die For” was the title of our spring day-long workshop. Of all the projects I’ve worked on for MORWA in the past decade, I was most proud of this assignment. With considerable help from Eileen Dreyer and my co-chair Karyn, I assembled experts from various law enforcement and forensic fields: Dr. Mary Case, M.D., Chief Medical Examiner for St. Louis, St. Charles, and Jefferson Counties; Harry Spiller, now a criminology professor who served two terms as sheriff of Williamson County, Illinois; Sergeant Joseph Burgoon, who recently retired after a distinguished career as a St. Louis PD homicide detective; Dr. Reena Roy, DNA Technical Leader at the St. Louis County Police Crime Laboratory; Thomas E. Bush III, the Special Agent in Charge of the St. Louis Field Office of the FBI; and Lt. John P. Podolak, Scene Commander with the St. Louis PD’s Hostage Response Unit. We had everything but a corpse.

Our organization strives to offer educational opportunities to published and unpublished writers. I have enjoyed mentoring several people during my tenure with MORWA, critiquing their manuscripts, rejoicing when they make their first sales and offering consolation when they receive rejection letters. I remind them that I could paper the walls of my house with all the rejections I received before selling my first book. All our published authors give generously of their time to help others make that first sale, including judging several writing contests we run annually.

In November, MORWA is offering a program by Carmeline Utz, a licensed psychotherapist, entitled “Boys and Girls Together: A Therapist Looks at Male-Female Relationships.” We meet every third Saturday of the month at the Barnes & Noble, 9618 Watson Road. Programs begin at 11 a.m., and there is a five dollar visitor’s fee. If you write fiction or dream of writing fiction, please come for this program. I promise you won’t be an “orphan” any longer.

Under her own name USA bestselling author Shirl Henke has published twenty-six historical romances and romantic suspense paperbacks with Dorchester, Warners, Penguin and St. Martins Press. She is currently under contract with Tor Books for two hardcover political thrillers. Corrupts Absolutely will be out in April, 2005 under her pseudonym, Alexa Hunt.

The Center for the Humanities’ SmartSet Series: Where Great Writers Read continues on November 8-9 with Wil Haygood, one of the nation’s leading African American biographers. A staff writer for the Style section of the Washington Post, Haygood was a feature writer and national and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe for 17 years. As well as being a Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has been honored with the Sunday Magazine Editors Award, the New England Associated Press Award, the National Headliners Award and the National Association of Black Journalists Award, which he received three times. Haygood has served as writer-in-residence at Ohio State University and Visiting Writer at Colorado College and has received numerous distinguished literary fellowships. A graduate of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and a resident of Washington, D.C., Haygood has published four books: Two on the River; King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., (a New York Times Notable Book); The Haygoods of Columbus: A Family Memoir (awarded the Great Lakes Book Award); and In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr.

Wil Haygood will read and sign his work at 8 pm on Tuesday, November 9, in Room 204, Anheuser-Busch Hall (Law School). He will discuss his writing and the art of biography at 4 pm on Wednesday afternoon, November 10, in the McMillan Café (Room 115), Old McMillan Hall on the Hilltop WU Campus. Receptions follow both events, which are free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the events.