Portrayals of clever children
May. 8th, 2018 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI've been meaning for a year to write a post about my frustration with clever child characters. And I was reminded of my intentions in this direction by seeing the film of A wrinkle in time.
So I've mentioned before that I was very much identified as clever when I was child. Which meant that I got quite a lot of adults around me pointing to book portrayals of clever children as being like me. Being compared to Roger Hargreaves' Mr Clever is one of my very scattered memories from before I was four, from around the time I moved from a cot to a proper bed. The fact that I was reading independently by that age probably contributed to my acquiring the 'clever' label.
Actually, Mr Clever himself is more or less coded as an adult, and clever adults in books for young children are nearly always hopelessly impractical, and in books for older children, often evil. There's a wonderful, though depressing, informal study of academics in children's books which concluded that
So, clever children. For me, the real problem has always been that children are never portrayed as actually using their intelligence to learn anything, to analyse information and come to a novel conclusion. Cleverness is just an inherent trait that some children possess, and being clever is directly equated to knowing things, particularly things you wouldn't expect a child of a given age to know. The worst example, and the one that started me on this train of thought, is Roald Dahl's Matilda; her intelligence is literally a magical power. I used to find this absolutely infuriating, particularly as a child, because it meant that people didn't see my intelligence as a skill. I would have had no problem admitting that there was luck involved in happening to be clever, but simply existing being clever doesn't actually get you anywhere, I had to apply my brain in order to learn things or work things out. So not only did I feel that the fictional examples I was always being compared to were completely unrelatable, but I felt that my own experience of the world, my own efforts, were being actively erased.
A secondary issue around conflating intelligence with knowledge is that it leads to precocious children being assumed to be just like adults, just because they know some of the same information that adults would be expected to know. Lots of adults writing about children are completely hopeless at portraying development and maturity realistically anyway, but this is particularly bad when children are characterized as being clever. One that stuck in my mind is a totally forgettable comic children's SF thing called Halfway across the galaxy and turn left (Robin Klein); there's a five-year-old genius boy who can't understand why his age-peers would bother playing on slides, because it's just gravity. Which I was really annoyed by, because I knew perfectly well at age 5 that it's gravity that causes you to slide down a slide (indeed I would have quite happily babbled on about the relationship between gravity and friction and how different forces are involved when you're on a swing that's attached to a fixed point or a seesaw with a fulcrum), but that was entirely irrelevant to the finding it enjoyable to play on them. Actually that brings up another issue: the evidence provided that a child is super-intelligent is often not that exceptional – really it's not that unusual to find a five-year-old who can tell you that gravity makes things fall down.
I personally was relatively socially and emotionally immature, while being academically advanced for my age. But that's not at all an unusual combination, and even aside from that, there was a clear gap in fiction for children with about typical development in most areas who happened to be intelligent. Also, if you're actually clever for your age, and using your brain to interpret things beyond your age-limited experience, you're going to get things wrong sometimes. I read a lot of books written for much older children or even adults (Jane Eyre is one I remember, because Jane is 10 at the start so I assumed it belonged with the usual run of books about 10-year-olds I enjoyed when I was 5 or 6), and yes, I learned stuff from them that people didn't expect a little kid to know, but sometimes I interpreted what I read wrongly, because I didn't magically know everything an adult knows just because I happened to be clever and hyperlexic. Actually, even an adult character who's supposed to be intelligent should be portrayed getting things wrong from time to time, if they're actually making deductions rather than having the right answer implanted directly in their brain by authorial fiat. Again, it comes down to not seeing characters actually employing their intelligence.
If I had to be compared to clever but unrealistic fictional children, a better option than Matilda was Dinah Glass in Gillian Cross' Demon Headmaster series. I always liked that Cross put realistic characters in ludicrously implausible situations; that's a combination I enjoyed as a child and still approve of in certain kinds of SF. Dinah isn't perfect, but you see her actually using her intelligence to figure out the antagonist's evil plots, sometimes going down the wrong path for a while before she realizes her mistake. The specific examples of her supernatural intelligence are a bit odd; she can do ~integral calculus~, which is pretty much just simple algebraic manipulation and a bit of memory, ok, it's not usually taught in primary schools but it doesn't take magical powers. And she knows some useful trivia facts about Orwell's 1984.
On the positive side, a lot of 'exceptionally clever' children's book protagonists are female. Indeed, sometimes clever boys are a bit suspect, their plot is very often that they need to learn from the protagonist who rejects book learning and over-thinking and acts from pure-hearted spontaneity. I was always fond of Kipling's Kim, because he's explicitly portrayed as intelligent, but not having access to a lot of formal schooling. He's smart, not just academically clever, he doesn't randomly know obscure facts or long words, but rather makes inferences (sometimes imperfectly) from his observations. And you see him practising and honing his skills; I used to imitate him by playing the memory game.
But then you get to Hermione Granger. She isn't the protagonist because Rowling wanted the book to have 'broad appeal' and obviously boys can't read books about girls. And she spends a lot of the series being the butt of jokes because she actually cares about getting good marks at school, and she does that forbidden thing of actually working for her success, rather than just naturally coming top of the class purely due to having the property of cleverness. Yes, the Harry Potter books are calling back to old-fashioned school stories, where the protagonist would be a jolly good sort who would triumph over the unlikeable clever girl, but in some ways it's worse when we move from an all-girls school to a co-ed one, because the likeable, impulsive, brave protagonist is also the boy. And even with all that nonsense, Hermione doesn't come across as realistically intelligent, she just knows stuff, or picks up Dumbledore's cryptic hints without any actual thought process.
Anyway, I recently went to see the film of A wrinkle in time. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and mostly felt that it conveyed the spirit of the book without being slavishly faithful. One element I liked was the portrayal of Charles Wallace. In the original books he's not just a clever child, he's literally supernaturally empathic; I wasn't as annoyed by him as by many clever child characters because it is so clearly telegraphed that what's going on isn't psychological realism. Nobody was ever going to say to me, you're so clever, just like Charles Wallace Murry! But Charles Wallace in the film fills just that niche that I was always disappointed not to find as a child, being precocious while still acting like an actual child.
siderea was much more negative towards the film than I was, and I think her criticisms are sound. I was annoyed by the film making Meg pretty, but having read siderea's review I can see that it's more of a problem making the Mrses pretty. And yeah, film Charles Wallace is a much much less interesting character than book Charles Wallace. But film Charles Wallace is someone I wouldn't have been offended by being compared to: he knows long words, he gets on better with adults than children, he has to use his intelligence to figure out interpersonal stuff, and he can sometimes be cruel to the people he loves, because being academically clever doesn't get you out of learning how to human like all children have to. Also, he doesn't win the day simply by existing and being declared by the author to be clever.
So I've mentioned before that I was very much identified as clever when I was child. Which meant that I got quite a lot of adults around me pointing to book portrayals of clever children as being like me. Being compared to Roger Hargreaves' Mr Clever is one of my very scattered memories from before I was four, from around the time I moved from a cot to a proper bed. The fact that I was reading independently by that age probably contributed to my acquiring the 'clever' label.
Actually, Mr Clever himself is more or less coded as an adult, and clever adults in books for young children are nearly always hopelessly impractical, and in books for older children, often evil. There's a wonderful, though depressing, informal study of academics in children's books which concluded that
If you are going to be a fictional human academic in a children's book, you are most likely to be an elderly, old man, with big white hair, who wears a lab coat, has facial hair, works in science, and is called Professor SomethingDumb or Dr CrazyPants, featuring in a story about how you bumble around causing some type of chaos.
So, clever children. For me, the real problem has always been that children are never portrayed as actually using their intelligence to learn anything, to analyse information and come to a novel conclusion. Cleverness is just an inherent trait that some children possess, and being clever is directly equated to knowing things, particularly things you wouldn't expect a child of a given age to know. The worst example, and the one that started me on this train of thought, is Roald Dahl's Matilda; her intelligence is literally a magical power. I used to find this absolutely infuriating, particularly as a child, because it meant that people didn't see my intelligence as a skill. I would have had no problem admitting that there was luck involved in happening to be clever, but simply existing being clever doesn't actually get you anywhere, I had to apply my brain in order to learn things or work things out. So not only did I feel that the fictional examples I was always being compared to were completely unrelatable, but I felt that my own experience of the world, my own efforts, were being actively erased.
A secondary issue around conflating intelligence with knowledge is that it leads to precocious children being assumed to be just like adults, just because they know some of the same information that adults would be expected to know. Lots of adults writing about children are completely hopeless at portraying development and maturity realistically anyway, but this is particularly bad when children are characterized as being clever. One that stuck in my mind is a totally forgettable comic children's SF thing called Halfway across the galaxy and turn left (Robin Klein); there's a five-year-old genius boy who can't understand why his age-peers would bother playing on slides, because it's just gravity. Which I was really annoyed by, because I knew perfectly well at age 5 that it's gravity that causes you to slide down a slide (indeed I would have quite happily babbled on about the relationship between gravity and friction and how different forces are involved when you're on a swing that's attached to a fixed point or a seesaw with a fulcrum), but that was entirely irrelevant to the finding it enjoyable to play on them. Actually that brings up another issue: the evidence provided that a child is super-intelligent is often not that exceptional – really it's not that unusual to find a five-year-old who can tell you that gravity makes things fall down.
I personally was relatively socially and emotionally immature, while being academically advanced for my age. But that's not at all an unusual combination, and even aside from that, there was a clear gap in fiction for children with about typical development in most areas who happened to be intelligent. Also, if you're actually clever for your age, and using your brain to interpret things beyond your age-limited experience, you're going to get things wrong sometimes. I read a lot of books written for much older children or even adults (Jane Eyre is one I remember, because Jane is 10 at the start so I assumed it belonged with the usual run of books about 10-year-olds I enjoyed when I was 5 or 6), and yes, I learned stuff from them that people didn't expect a little kid to know, but sometimes I interpreted what I read wrongly, because I didn't magically know everything an adult knows just because I happened to be clever and hyperlexic. Actually, even an adult character who's supposed to be intelligent should be portrayed getting things wrong from time to time, if they're actually making deductions rather than having the right answer implanted directly in their brain by authorial fiat. Again, it comes down to not seeing characters actually employing their intelligence.
If I had to be compared to clever but unrealistic fictional children, a better option than Matilda was Dinah Glass in Gillian Cross' Demon Headmaster series. I always liked that Cross put realistic characters in ludicrously implausible situations; that's a combination I enjoyed as a child and still approve of in certain kinds of SF. Dinah isn't perfect, but you see her actually using her intelligence to figure out the antagonist's evil plots, sometimes going down the wrong path for a while before she realizes her mistake. The specific examples of her supernatural intelligence are a bit odd; she can do ~integral calculus~, which is pretty much just simple algebraic manipulation and a bit of memory, ok, it's not usually taught in primary schools but it doesn't take magical powers. And she knows some useful trivia facts about Orwell's 1984.
On the positive side, a lot of 'exceptionally clever' children's book protagonists are female. Indeed, sometimes clever boys are a bit suspect, their plot is very often that they need to learn from the protagonist who rejects book learning and over-thinking and acts from pure-hearted spontaneity. I was always fond of Kipling's Kim, because he's explicitly portrayed as intelligent, but not having access to a lot of formal schooling. He's smart, not just academically clever, he doesn't randomly know obscure facts or long words, but rather makes inferences (sometimes imperfectly) from his observations. And you see him practising and honing his skills; I used to imitate him by playing the memory game.
But then you get to Hermione Granger. She isn't the protagonist because Rowling wanted the book to have 'broad appeal' and obviously boys can't read books about girls. And she spends a lot of the series being the butt of jokes because she actually cares about getting good marks at school, and she does that forbidden thing of actually working for her success, rather than just naturally coming top of the class purely due to having the property of cleverness. Yes, the Harry Potter books are calling back to old-fashioned school stories, where the protagonist would be a jolly good sort who would triumph over the unlikeable clever girl, but in some ways it's worse when we move from an all-girls school to a co-ed one, because the likeable, impulsive, brave protagonist is also the boy. And even with all that nonsense, Hermione doesn't come across as realistically intelligent, she just knows stuff, or picks up Dumbledore's cryptic hints without any actual thought process.
Anyway, I recently went to see the film of A wrinkle in time. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and mostly felt that it conveyed the spirit of the book without being slavishly faithful. One element I liked was the portrayal of Charles Wallace. In the original books he's not just a clever child, he's literally supernaturally empathic; I wasn't as annoyed by him as by many clever child characters because it is so clearly telegraphed that what's going on isn't psychological realism. Nobody was ever going to say to me, you're so clever, just like Charles Wallace Murry! But Charles Wallace in the film fills just that niche that I was always disappointed not to find as a child, being precocious while still acting like an actual child.
siderea was much more negative towards the film than I was, and I think her criticisms are sound. I was annoyed by the film making Meg pretty, but having read siderea's review I can see that it's more of a problem making the Mrses pretty. And yeah, film Charles Wallace is a much much less interesting character than book Charles Wallace. But film Charles Wallace is someone I wouldn't have been offended by being compared to: he knows long words, he gets on better with adults than children, he has to use his intelligence to figure out interpersonal stuff, and he can sometimes be cruel to the people he loves, because being academically clever doesn't get you out of learning how to human like all children have to. Also, he doesn't win the day simply by existing and being declared by the author to be clever.
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(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-08 09:34 pm (UTC)On the other hand, I felt that Hermione portrayed less as 'clever' than as a swot: she's really good at book learning, but lacks the creative part. (Then again, with the exception of Fred and George, *their whole generation* can't hold a candle to the Marauders' cohort.)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-08 10:43 pm (UTC)She uses her intelligence to solve, or try to solve, the problems caused her by those same abusive and neglectful adults, but because she's so young, she doesn't have the skills (the context, and especially the social skills) to fix anything or change it on any kind of permanent basis without literal magic. I've never seen the magic as specifically Matilda's intelligence-- it's the combination of being intelligent enough to see the problems and still being massively, horrifically stifled. She doesn't know she could go to social services, she doesn't know she could go to the police, because she's too young and no one has taught her that any adults can help her, ever. She's at an age-appropriate stage of thinking that the way things are is The Way Things Are.
So the magic is wish-fulfillment for an abused child, the wish that somehow, magically, The Way Things Are is changeable, and can be changed by your own actions. That you can make the adults around you treat you better, or even get rid of them.
And that resonated really strongly for me, as an abused and neglected child. I could wish that the book Matilda had taught me that there are supposed to be people you can go to about abusive parents, but the things it did teach me were useful: the library will always be your friend, and you don't have to wait to read 'adult' books; it is legitimately possible to be smarter than the adults around you, including your own family; if you find a sympathetic adult, cling to them, it's not 'disloyal' or 'unnatural' no matter what your parents say; this, too, shall pass. I've encountered many other books about abused children, but Matilda is the one that rings the truest about what it's like to be gifted, emotionally at your actual age level, and in a situation of chronic abuse. I refer people to it when they ask me about my childhood, if I don't want to go into the details.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-09 02:17 am (UTC)My 6 year old is reading lots of long books now and I know it's only a matter of time before that happens with her too.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-09 09:59 am (UTC)As a mathematician I have to quibble :-) Book 1 establishes that Dinah could do tensor calculus, which I don't think can be so easily dismissed as just a bit of algebra and memory – tensors are actually conceptually difficult by comparison to straightforward integration. I got out of the other end of a maths degree and still don't really have a good feel even for the basic notion of a tensor, let alone what happens when you try to use one to represent complicated multidimensionally varying things and do calculus on them.
(Whether Gillian Cross knew that or whether she was just picking difficult-sounding names out of a list of mathematical topics, I have no idea. A quick check of her biography says where she was educated but not in what subject.)
For me the really interesting thing about Dinah (at least in book 1) was the fact that she was the hero in spite of being the only one of the protagonists who didn't have superpowers!
and [Hermione] does that forbidden thing of actually working for her success, rather than just naturally coming top of the class purely due to having the property of cleverness
Hmm, I think I see that more or less the other way round. It's true that the kind of schoolchildren who are mostly focused on the traditional academic pastimes of farting about in lessons, smoking behind the bikesheds, beating each other up ect ect, don't have a great deal of respect for the ones who choose to work hard instead, but they even more hate the smartarse who effortlessly gives all the right answers in the classroom and makes them look bad without even trying.
(at least, going by my memories of being that smartarse)
I think depicting high intelligence in fiction is one of those unavoidably difficult things, though, because every clever thought the character has, the author is going to have to have it too in order to write it down. To some extent this is mitigated if the character lacks some advantage of the author (e.g. you can write a character with a lightning-fast razor wit without having to have one yourself, because you have time to think for hours over every quip the character tosses off on two fictional seconds' notice), and one of those advantages is if the character is a child and the author isn't – but I'm sure it's still quite tricky to remember exactly which of the things you know or can do now would have been plausible, or impressive, or outright impossible, for the child to have known or been able to do.
(And when the author doesn't have any advantage of that kind – when you get into the SFnal areas of trying to depict intelligence-enhanced super- or post-humans or well-beyond-human-equivalent AIs or that kind of thing – well, that's really tough, and often seems to go wrong one way or another...)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-09 08:22 pm (UTC)*not sure how the consonants should go, so put some spares in just in case.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-09 09:09 pm (UTC)(And apparently it still annoys me getting on for 30 years later.)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-12 11:34 pm (UTC)And I both liked Hermione and thought she was realistically written, as someone who was clever and works hard, has good friends, but is still often just a bit on the outside (e.g. not letting them copy homework), which wasn't unlike my experience.
As I say, I don't think it's a factual disagreement - I never found Matilda realistic - it's just that I still enjoyed it, as much as I did Dahl's more 'everyman/boy/girl' heroes such as Charlie or Sophie. I've actually been much more frustrated with depictions of clever adults in literature, particularly where the author seems to have no experience of academia, or alternatively assumes that intelligence equals the ability to manipulate and predict the world and other people in it perfectly over a multi-year timeframe.