I started writing about my wild girl, Atalanta—and about Bernadette, the scholar tasked with discovering and revealing Atalanta’s story in order to preserve the girl’s freedom—during the long months of the COVID-19 lockdown, when I was isolated with my own young son and daughter. Sometimes fiction comes so directly from life that all the usual mystery of creative inspiration falls away.
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Like Bernadette, part of what led me to Atalanta was curiosity and observation. At home with my children as those months burned on, I watched their spirits loosen. Children, I was reassured to find, even in periods of hardship, uncertainty, and instability, are inherently creative, curious, and inclined toward independent construction of learning.
As a K-12 teacher who believes deeply in the value of formal education, I watched this transformation in my kids with a mixture of fascination and surprise, and I began to question my conception of good guardianship. What, I reexamined, does it mean to raise children well? And more essentially, what do we all relinquish of the self to be in society with others?
The hidden curriculum of all childhood lessons is how to take up less space than you really need. But what happens when the curriculum falls away?
We who are parents and educators are trained to prepare our children for the world of adults that they will someday enter, and much of that training is about weeding from them their difference and teaching them to align, to normalize, to fit. There is necessity in this. How well can a child function, after all, if she cannot conform?
And yet, as the structures (and strictures) of school and sports and adult expectations fell away in that still time, an untethered freedom emerged.
What wildness was unfurling from the depths of my young people’s inner selves? What tender possibilities were rising in my kids as the leashes of our society’s constructs unkinked? And who would they be on the other side of the dark woods we had entered?
In fairy tales, when the heroine slips away into the forest, she always comes out transformed on the other side. Suffering and growth, these stories remind us, are not mutually exclusive. Sorrow and joy alike call us to an expansion of self that conflicts with social demand that we make our identities small and uniform—especially if we are among the marginalized (and children are very often among the marginalized). The hidden curriculum of all childhood lessons is how to take up less space than you really need. But what happens when the curriculum falls away? What happens when the child is entirely free?
In his 18th century treatise on the topic of childhood, Émile: or On Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “We know nothing of childhood; and with our mistaken notions the further we advance the further we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning.” As I watched my children transform into people of wider spirit and wilder vision, I asked myself Rousseau’s question: What is a child capable of learning?
And as I always do, I looked to literature to guide me. Here are five books I opened again to find the wild children I sought.
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Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss
Silvie—short for Sulevia, an ancient British goddess—is 17 and intellectually precocious but socially naïve. Moss’s short novel follows Silvie and her parents as they engage in a days-long reenactment of Iron Age life in northern England alongside a professor and his experimental archaeology class. What’s most compelling about this novel is not the setting—though Moss is a beautiful writer of landscape and the natural world—but the tension between the at times brutal and always patriarchal strictures of her typical life and the freedom, agency, and self-revelation she discovers while on the forced “holiday” of the reenactment. What does a girl relinquish of herself in submitting to the social constructs of the past, this book asks, or of the present? This question became central to me, too, as I wrote Atalanta and Bernadette.
Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
In another slim, powerhouse of a coming-of-age story, Kincaid’s Annie John narrates her life in Antigua, describing the details of her domestic routines with a sense of gravity and a clarity of attention rarely paid to homemaking in fiction. Home—and her mother as the physical embodiment of it—is at the center of Annie John’s conflict. Her mother’s love, which demands Annie’s full devotion and is so overwhelming as to suffocate Annie’s burgeoning selfhood, is itself the stricture here. Annie says, “if my mother died, I would have to die, too, and even less than I could imagine my mother dead could I imagine myself dead.” Like my Bernadette, Annie eventually determines that she must flee to survive the love that has shaped her vision of the woman she can only become on her own. But at what cost to her family is she willing to keep herself alive?
The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
I first read this novella when I was not much older than its protagonist, the whip-smart, headstrong, terribly lonely Frankie Addams, who at twelve already knows that she is a freak among her peers, unable to conform even though she desperately wishes to. When readers meet Frankie, it is the summer after her seventh-grade year, her older brother has announced his wedding and plans to move to Alaska, and Frankie is tormented by her own inherent isolation and—in her words—“queerness.” What spoke to me about this novella when I was a young reader, and again later when I taught it to my high school students, is the intensity of Frankie’s twin and equally ferocious desires to belong (somewhere and to someone) and to cling to the elements of her identity that keep her from truly belonging. In the “green sick dream” of her twelfth summer, Frankie does the awful/beautiful work of self-actualizing, and wonders how she can both hold onto the core of herself and find a place that will accept her as she is.
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
No account of the literature of the wild nature of the child is complete without Marilynne Robinson’s canonical masterpiece. Here, in a Pacific Northwest landscape as untameable as the novel’s characters, the reader sinks into the fog of orphaned narrator Ruth’s adolescence and the year her aunt Sylvie comes to care for her and her sister Lucille. Ruth and Lucille form perfect opposites—Lucille moved by the sisters’ impoverished and uncertain childhood to mold herself into a model of adult stability and social acceptance; while Ruth is towed as if by invisible undercurrent away from all that, toward the mountains and the lake that define their Idaho town, toward Sylvie’s strange reveries and feral tendencies. The house these three keep is a house of silent, creeping discord, as Sylvie abandons typical caretaking routines in favor of tending her wild mind instead, and Ruth—unable to resist all that is also wild in her—follows. In Housekeeping, the question that drives the story is not how to hold onto the self but rather how to let it go that one might become absorbed, like Sylvie (whose name alone connotes her essential belonging in the wild) and the fog itself, into the true freedom of the larger world.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
How can I end this list without Jane, for who is wilder than Jane? I found Jane Eyre on a library shelf when I was in middle school—the same age my students are now. I was in my own period of dark stillness then, and Jane presented a wholly new (to me) alternative to the girl-protagonists I had loved before her. Prickly and plain, blunt-spoken and too moody, Jane felt to me like a kind of soulmate, a literary mirror. She refuses capture again and again, unyielding in her need to understand herself above all else. My book takes its epigraph from Brontë, Atalanta’s and Bernadette’s story beginning with Jane’s call to freedom: “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.” When she eventually returns to Rochester at the close of the novel, it is not as a submission, but as a partner. She tells her reader that it is she who leads him, taking his hand to walk the first steps into their new life. “We entered the wood,” she tells her reader, “and wended homeward.” Home, Jane Eyre reminds the reader, is always and only where the self can be free—on the other side of the dark wood.
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Elita by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is available from Northwestern University Press.
