K'uang Heng bores a hole in the wall
Sun Ching shuts his door

K'uang Heng of the Former Han, whose polite name was Chih-kuei, was a native of Ch'eng in Tung-hai. His father and his ancestors before him had been farmers, but K'uang took a great liking to learning. However, because his family was poor, he hired himself out as a day laborer in order to meet expenses. In diligence and energy he far surpassed others. The Confucian scholars used to say to each other, "Don't try to lecture on the Book of Odes – leave it to K'uang. When he expounds the Odes, he makes people laugh so hard they unhinge their jaws!" He passed the civil service examination in the first category and was selected for public office, and in the reign of Emperor Yüan [48-33 B.C.] was promoted to the post of chancellor.

The Hsi-ching tsa-chi or Random Notes on the Western Capital records that when K'uang Heng was hard at work on his studies, he had no lamp to read by. The house next door had a lamp, but its light did not reach to K'uang's house. K'uang thereupon bored a hole in the wall of his neighbor's house and read his books by the light that came through.

In the village there was a prominent man named Wen Pu-chih, who was very rich and owned many books. K'uang went to work for him, but refused any compensation, asking instead that he be allowed to read his way through the man's library. The master of the rich family, much impressed, kept K'uang provided with books to read, and in this way he was eventually able to become a great scholar.

According to the Ch'u-kuo hsien-shien-chuan or Biographies of Former Worthies of the State of Ch'u, Sun Ching, whose polite name was Wen-pao, always kept his door closed and spent all his time reading books. If he felt himself growing drowsy, he would tie a rope around his neck and loop it over the rafters so he would be sure to stay awake. One time when he went to the marketplace, the people in the market, seeing him, all called out, “Here comes Professor Closed Door!” He was invited to take public office but declined the summons.

Why I Taught the Source

Folktales and fairy tales are excellent resources for dealing with historical topics related to children and youth. In the first place, the genres themselves are often associated with children and childhood, especially since editors, writers, and pedagogues in 19th-century Europe began presenting folktales and fairy tales as tools to be utilized in the moral and cultural education of children. Secondly, the child characters in these traditional narratives also reveal how children and childhood were perceived by the societies that produced or adapted the tales.

In my course, Understanding the Fairy Tale, I use Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's canonical collection to demonstrate the development of the fairy tale as children's literature and to examine the construction of childhood and the experiences of children from a sociohistorical perspective. Two of the texts that I use appeared under the provocative title "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering" ("Wie Kinder Schlachtens miteinander gespielt haben") in the first edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (commonly translated as Children's and Household Tales) published in 1812. Because the two violent and disturbing stories were omitted from later editions, however, they are not well known to students. The first of the two stories tells of a childhood game that results in one boy being butchered by another who is then tried before the adult authorities. The second story involves the destruction of an entire family through a chain of tragic deaths that begins after one child kills another after witnessing his father slaughter a pig.

How I Introduce the Source

The students are given these stories on a handout at the end of the first class session and asked to read them before the next class meeting. This first, "cold" encounter with the texts is meant to stimulate the students' critical thinking about the Grimms' collection. Inevitably, in their first confrontation with these two stories, the students ask themselves the questions I will eventually ask in class: Why would these gruesome and disturbing tales be included in Grimms' collection? Are they really fairy tales? What are they about?

I identify the stories only as having been published in Grimms' collection of fairy tales, but I do not provide any further contextualization when making this initial assignment. Context is ultimately important in a sociohistorical approach; and during our subsequent discussion, I provide further historical background by pointing out that the Grimms' own sources allow us to trace the tales back to at least the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively. 1

Reading the Source

While students have come to expect that unexpurgated versions of Grimms' 19th-century tales can be more violent than the sanitized versions they remember from childhood, they are not prepared for the senseless violence involving children in these brief stories. Unlike other tales, where violent acts are justified as a form of moral punishment, "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering" depicts gruesome events that have no convincing justification.

The students' own question about the appropriateness of such tales within the Children's and Household Tales was one that contemporary readers also asked. Grimms' German contemporaries had deemed the two tales inappropriate for children as notions of childhood underwent a profound shift. Changing childhood ideals influenced the emergence of a new literature for children that imparted moral training. The Grimms responded to the historical changes they also furthered by reshaping the content of their canonical work.

After the publication of "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering" in the first edition of Grimms' collection in 1812, it was omitted from all subsequent editions. Students are able to discern from this example how canonical texts, which are often assumed to be universal and transcendent, develop in a historical context and are shaped by historically constituted conceptions of childhood.

The most compelling issue for students, however, comes from questions pertaining to the significance of the stories themselves. Since the tales have been disqualified as children's literature, the question arises why adults would compose such troubling stories about children in the first place. I attempt to demonstrate how traditional narratives about children give expression to adult anxieties about childhood and parenting.

I begin this discussion by pointing out that the second of these two stories is related to the legend known as "The Inept Mother." The legend that is still circulated by female friends, relatives, and others is familiar to women and students. "The Inept Mother" can be read as a story whose horrific chain of catastrophes expresses the anxiety of women who feel overwhelmed by the responsibility they bear for the lives of their children. 2 In summarizing this interpretation for students, I attempt to demonstrate how traditional narratives about children give expression to adult attitudes towards childhood and parenting.

Adults' efforts to define childhood and to demarcate it from adulthood finds expression in the first of the two stories, which begins with a fatal game of butchering among children and concludes with the town council's judgment that the boy who played the butcher is innocent of murder. My primary strategy in elucidating adults' understandings about children is to ask my students to explain the test of innocence devised by a member of the town council and to identify the assumptions and ambiguities in the test that requires the boy to choose between an apple and a coin.

Choosing the apple would suggest an innate affinity for the concrete and the natural, and thus signify the child's natural purity and inability to commit a crime with conscious intent. Selecting the coin would suggest that the boy has the ability to reason and to comprehend the value of the abstract, thus signifying a "higher" adult state of mind and the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Students recognize that the boy's choice of the apple is the cause for his being "set free without any punishment." Yet, pressed to search for ambiguities, they also conclude that the boy's laughter might express his witting pleasure in outfoxing the judge instead of his innocent delight in gaining the apple. Indeed, his choice of the all-too-obvious apple might suggest his criminal (sinful) nature instead of his natural purity.

At this point, the stage is set for a discussion of the problems that societies encounter in defining the difference between children and adults. In this context, the Grimms' text can be easily related to those widely covered news stories in contemporary America involving children who commit crimes and the decision that authorities must make whether to try them as juveniles or adults—stories that tell us about our own struggle to define childhood in the 21st century.

Reflections

The effectiveness of this assignment and the discussion it provokes stems in part from the surprises that await students in their encounter with these two texts. Because the Grimms removed "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering" from the editions of their collection that they published from 1819 onwards, the two tales have not been associated with the Grimms and have not become part of the classical fairy-tale canon. Students are excited to learn that two such unusual and, for some, disturbing stories were once published alongside nursery-friendly tales.

Once juxtaposed with these familiar tales of childhood, "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering" prompts students to reflect not only on the generic and moral issues that influenced Grimms' construction of the fairy-tale genre; it also gives them reason to question and examine more closely the tales that have taken up permanent residence in the nursery and become a part of nearly every child's literary experience. The violence depicted in these two tales now becomes a touchstone for reconsidering the otherwise clichéd questions about violence in fairy tales.

For example, how different is the violence in these two tales from the kind of violence inflicted on children in "Hansel and Gretel" or "The Juniper Tree"? Such questions and comparisons require students to think about the ways in which adults depict children and childhood, and how these depictions can be interpreted. They also demand that students be sensitive to context and ambiguity. Indeed, to make sense of "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering" and its literary reception, students must develop interpretive skills that take into account the editorial history of Grimms' tales, the history of childhood, and the moral ambiguities at play in the two stories.

These are big topics, of course, and teachers will find it necessary to adjust the assignment not only for the level of students in their classrooms but also for the focus of their particular course. A course on the image of children in literature and culture, for example, need not undertake a full-fledged review of Grimms' work as editors of fairy tales. Basic information of the kind offered above (and available in the introduction to Jack Zipes's translation of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm 3) can be easily presented by the instructor.

While I use lecture and discussion to pursue the questions and issues described in this case study, some instructors might consider other strategies for engaging students. For example, students might be asked to identify and collect news stories and editorials in the media that reflect the ongoing debate about the proper age at which a child becomes—or can be tried in the judicial systems as—an adult. Similarly, the tale of the childhood game of butcher could provide the basis for a mock trial in the classroom, in which students could prosecute, defend, and judge the actions of the accused boy butcher. This could serve as an effective exercise to get to the heart of the questions about childhood and about guilt and innocence at work in this intriguing tale.

I teach an undergraduate American Studies course on "Children's Literature and American Culture," which uses children's literature as a lens for examining the history of childhood (and American cultural history more generally). I use the Norton Critical Edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868-69), edited by Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein (2004) as the core text in a three-week unit on girlhood in the late 19th century.

Scholars often label the period between 1865 and 1920 the "Golden Age" of Anglo-American children's literature, as this is the period when many of the classics were written and published, including Alice in Wonderland (1865), Ragged Dick (1868), Tom Sawyer (1876), Treasure Island (1884), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), The Secret Garden (1911) to name just a few. This "golden age" came about because of changes in American childhood that produced the impetus to create and the market to consume books written primarily with the aim of entertaining children.

Why I Taught the Source

Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy stands at the threshold of changing notions about childhood (and consequent changes in children's literature), between the more didactic literature from earlier in the century that aimed to mold a moral, rational child, and the more purely amusing literature written decades later. The enormously popular and enduring book, focusing on four sisters in a middle-class New England family that has fallen into hard times financially, gives particular insight into the changing position of girls and women in American society. Moreover, the wealth of detail in the book reveals a great deal about the quotidian dimensions of children's daily lives in the late 19th century, from what they read, ate, wore, and played to their schooling, chores, and dating rituals. Finally, the moralizing dimensions of the book make explicit a set of ethical and moral assumptions that guided young people at this time in their thinking about class, gender, nationality, friendship, marriage, parenthood, and a range of other issues.

Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy was originally published in two volumes by Roberts Brothers: the first volume was published in 1868, the second in 1869. The two volumes were published as a set in 1870; this edition was republished several times over the next decade. A set of revisions between 1880 and 1881 resulted in what became known as the "regular edition," which was reprinted countless times. In the last several years, the original 1868-1869 work has received new critical attention, and it is this edition that is reprinted as the Norton Critical Edition.

The Norton Critical Edition of Little Women contains a wealth of materials that enhance one's ability to teach Little Women as both a literary and a historical document. Not only does the edition include biographical information, writings by Alcott, reviews of the book from the time, and recent literary criticism, it also reprints several earlier works that are key to understanding the form and content of Little Women, including relevant chapters from a 19th-century American edition of Pilgrim's Progress and Maria Edgeworth's short story, "The Purple Jar" (1801). The former is an excellent example of a religious and highly moralistic—yet exciting—text read by children from the Puritan era into the 19th century; the latter, read alongside material on the literary and historical context of the early 19th century, aptly represents a didactic tradition that emphasized moral lessons, yet portrayed children as capable of making and accepting responsibility for their own decisions.

How I Introduce the Source

These earlier literary works lay essential groundwork for a discussion of Little Women: Alcott uses Pilgrim's Progress as a central structuring and metaphorical device in her novel (chapter titles include "Burdens," "Beth finds the Palace Beautiful," "Amy's Valley of Humiliation," "Jo Meets Apollyon," and "Meg Goes to Vanity Fair") so that a reading of relevant chapters in Bunyan's tale greatly enhances students' understanding of Little Women. Alcott draws on the metaphors employed in Pilgrim's Progress to communicate moral lessons, but one can also find explicit and implicit debt to Edgeworth, whose work the girls' mother, Marmee, reads aloud to them after a particularly trying day. The central tension in Little Women is Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth's struggle to be good amidst all the temptations of vanity, self-indulgence, materialism, laziness, gluttony, selfishness, ambition, and, in Jo's case, willfulness. From Edgeworth Alcott seems to have borrowed the practice of teaching children moral lessons through example. Several vivid chapters in the book illustrate this, such as a the hilarious "Amy's Valley of Humiliation," in which Amy gets caught in school with pickled limes and must bear the humiliation of her punishment, and "Meg Goes to Vanity Fair," in which Meg attends a much anticipated society soiree and returns home feeling an uncomfortable combination of exhilaration and shame: shame about letting herself get so dolled up that she was unrecognizable, and about vicious gossip she overheard. In this instance, just in case Meg hasn't learned the lesson herself, Marmee, with quiet scorn, remarks upon that class of "worldly [but] ill-bred" people, "full of those vulgar ideas about young people" (83).

A chapter from Anne Scott MacLeod's American Childhood: Essays on Children's Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Georgia 1994) on "American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century: Caddie Woodlawn's Sisters," provides an extremely useful framework for thinking about Little Women. Using examples from several 19th-century stories with girl protagonists, MacLeod suggests that this literature (including Little Women) reveals, on the one hand, the relative freedom afforded young girls and their involvement in rough and tumble outdoor pursuits, and, on the other hand, that this freedom ended rather abruptly as girls reached womanhood and were expected not only to get married, but also to assume a "womanly" demeanor and a range of household duties. These themes are echoed in Steve Mintz's Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Belknap 2005): chapters on "Inventing the Middle-Class Child" and "Children Under the Magnifying Glass" likewise work well with Little Women, offering useful background on childhood during this era. Such themes as expressed by MacLeod and Mintz clearly play out in Alcott's autobiographical Little Women, which betrays nostalgia for the girls' relative freedom and their grand aspirations for the future, in contrast with the rather settled lives they will lead as women.

Reading the Source

Teaching Little Women, I start with background on the period and on Alcott, and then we move into a discussion of the book, reading, along with the text itself, relevant chapters in Mintz and MacLeod, as well as literary criticism included in the Norton Critical Edition.

We spend three weeks studying Little Women and related texts and approaches, with the book serving as the central case study in a more general discussion of childhood and the "Golden Age of Children's Literature." Earlier in the course, students read excepts from Pilgrim's Progress and Maria Edgeworth's "The Purple Jar" as part of their study of Puritan-era and early republican children's literature. This also prepares them to follow allusions to these sources as they come up in Little Women.

In the first class period of the "Golden Age" unit (my class meets twice a week, for 75 minutes each class period), we discuss the relevant historical, literary, and biographical backgrounds to the book, with students reading Anne Scott MacLeod's essay, "American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century: Caddie Woodlawn's Sisters," Alcott's own "Reflections of My Childhood" (collected in the Norton Critical Edition of LW), and a chapter of Steve Mintz's Huck's Raft that deals with childhood in the late 19th century. I give a mini-lecture on trends in childhood and in children's literature of this period, and briefly go over Alcott's biography; as a class we discuss the key ideas that came up in the readings, particularly in the MacLeod piece, as they help to illuminate the experience of American girlhood in the late 19th century. By the second class period in the unit, students need to have read the first 12 chapters of Little Women. Prior to this, I ask different students to read for specific issues: some focus on the development of particular characters (Jo, Beth, Amy, Marmee, Mr. Laurence, Laurie, etc.); others look for moral and/or religious messages; the image of childhood, home and family life; gendered messages and/or imagery; messages about class; and the way in which Pilgrim's Progress serves as a framing device for the book.

During the next class period we discuss these issues as they play out in the book, with students or groups of students reporting on what they found in the reading. In class I also ask students (in small groups) to find details in the text that describe clothing, food, play (there are wonderful examples of children's theatrics, a self-produced newspaper, and chores made into games); domestic furnishings; courting rituals; and gender roles. I also ask them to consider the book's take on religion and spirituality; attitudes about class; attitudes about immigrants and foreigners; and discourses around health and mortality. In preparation for the next class discussion, I ask students to post their own questions on blackboard (covering up through Book II, chapter V of the story). Students' questions have addressed romantic relationships in the book, patriotism, publishing, characterization, education, changes in tone from Book I to Book II, shifts away from the tone and style of earlier publications for children, religion, morality, marriage, and a range of other issues. These questions wind up taking more than one class period to discuss; I have students devote a portion of the time to small group discussions, but the class tends to be small enough that we can fruitfully discuss as a whole class. During the last two periods we begin to bring in other readings again: they read an essay by MacLeod on "American Boys" and use this to think about how Little Women fits into the "Bad Boy" tradition in American children's literature (think of Tom Sawyer and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy), and I also have students pose additional questions on blackboard once they have finished reading the book. The last day of our discussion is focused on literary criticism, using the criticism that is collected in the Norton Critical Edition. All students read Elizabeth Vincent's "Subversive Miss Alcott," and then each student chooses one other piece to read carefully and summarize: their choices include Catharine R. Stimpson, "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March," Barbara Sicherman, "Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text" and Elizabeth Keyser, "Portrait(s) of the Artist: Little Women." Students bring written summaries of their articles to class, discuss their articles in small groups, and then report on the articles to the rest of the class. We also have a more general discussion about how literary criticism can open up our understanding of texts.

The paper assigned as a culminating exercise for this unit asks students to use Little Women as the starting point for a discussion of childhood or girlhood in the late 19th century, using both historical frameworks provided by MacLeod, Mintz, or other background, as well as at least one piece of literary criticism from the Norton Critical edition. The ways in which the book both challenges and reinscribes gender roles in the late 19th century makes it an obvious text for students of American girlhood, but there are a wealth of other historical arenas that one could explore by starting with Little Women.

Reflections

What I really enjoy about teaching this book is that most students know about it, but few have read the original source, and they wind up enjoying it much more than they expect to, especially when given historical and literary backgrounds with which to frame their reading of the book. I also like the practice of pairing literary texts with historical ones. I have only taught this class once, but it was one of the more successful courses I've taught. I have never before devoted three weeks to a single book, but it worked very well, especially with assignments and related reading structured in.

Literary materials are somewhat complicated artifacts for use in the history of childhood, but they tell us a great deal about how children were imagined and addressed by adults and, in the case of a book with a long and devoted following among children, they can tell us about children's interests and reading habits. Moreover, the details of this particular book, while not a documentary record, do give students a rich portrait of life in a particular place, at a particular time, for middle-class, Anglo-American girls, a portrait far more textured than might be available in other kinds of historical documents.

Although I use Little Women in an upper-level, writing-intensive undergraduate American Studies course, I think the book could be used very fruitfully in a course on the history of childhood or the history of girlhood, with, perhaps, less emphasis on literary criticism and more emphasis on the ways in which various details (e.g. about chores, or the girls' reading, or religious mores, or games, etc.) can be corroborated through other historical sources.