The ‘morally grey’ approach can be interesting if the author is writing a story of ideas [...]. Usually they’re writing a simple plot-driven story [...]. In this type of story trying to introduce sympathy for the villains just ruins the reader’s enjoyment to no purpose.
This is probably just a matter of taste, but I get enough simplified morality from people who believe that it applies in real life; I don’t want it any more in stories, even simple plot-driven ones.
[...] morally grey stories [...] Most genres are inundated with the stuff, some to the point where it’s hard to find anything else.
Not children’s literature. The children of today are the closed-minded partisans of tomorrow.
How would people characterize A Wrinkle in Time? It’s been ages since I’ve read it, but it’s another indisputably (?) classic children’s book. IT and a lot of the good/evil shadow imagery seem somewhat morally simplistic in my memory, but I seem to recall other moral complexity, e.g., with the Mrs. Ws.
I’m also having trouble characterizing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in terms of moral complexity, but it also doesn’t fit in with the other examples in that it lacks a high-stakes struggle. Alice in Wonderland is the other major children’s classic fantasy I can think of, but I can’t recall what, if any, type of morality it presented.
Good question. As I recall, I found the first half much more interesting than the last half. In retrospect, I think that one reason was that the Ws required thought to understand but It did not. (But I don’t recall thinking this at the time, so take that with a grain of salt.)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory […] Alice in Wonderland
The morality in these is farcical, so it’s easier to be grey, or just meaningless. (In Tim Burton’s recent adaptation of Alice, which has a coherent plot unlike the original, the morality was very black and white.)
Now I remember the famous debate in The Horn Book Magazine about the morality in Charlie. I found most of that debate pointless becauseCharlie’s morality is farcical, so why would you expect it to make sense? (Well, the debate wasn’t only about morality.)
And that reminds me of Ursula Le Guin (who took the anti-Charlie position in the first April 1973 Letter to the Editor at the above link); she wrote the children’s fantasy trilogy Earthsea. This has a fairly grey morality, especially the middle book, which is told from the perspective of an antagonist (at first) of the trilogy’s main protagonist. Years later, Le Guin wrote a sequel trilogy, which (while earning a mixed reaction from the fans) addressed some of the problems that she saw in the original trilogy; it was even greyer, but it was not marketed to children anymore. In any case, Earthsea is not a counterexample to ewbrownv’s claims, because the story does explore ‘unconventional morality, novel social forms, etc’ (and does it well, IMO).
Ob MoR: Earthsea has an anti-lifeist moral, but because it is grey, it treats the lifeist position with some respect; the villains are more misguided than evil, and you can sympathise with them. Lifeists still won’t be happy with it, especially in the sequels, where gur urebrf qrfgebl gur nsgreyvsr (although once you get to that point, this is pretty well justified). But at least the lifeist position is not dismissed out of hand.
Are you asking for children’s literature, or YA? There are quite a few YA, morally grey, literature available; not incredibly popular, but existing. I would argue that it’s difficult to really develop grey morality in a ‘child″s worldview, since what a child is is more difficult to define. That said, I would say The Demon’s Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan, is quite morally in the grey area; the protagonists are really not very ‘good’, nor are they very ‘evil’ as in the case of an anti-hero.
...I believe that it would also be wise to introduce grey morality age-appropriately—because if someone is young enough, they might go off humanizing the villains, and humanizing a villain that would predate on someone that young would not be wise.
The younger the better, I suppose. Although library and bookseller classifications have to draw the line somewhere, there’s really a continuum of target audience ages. Anything that is widely read by children should count, regardless of how it’s classified (although how it’s classified may give a reasonable estimate of whether children read it, in the absence of real data).
Eliezer has referred to HP as ‘for children’ when explaining some of the changes that MoR (which is not for children) has to the background universe. But HP is often classified as YA. I would not want to be picky.
humanizing a villain that would predate on someone that young would not be wise.
That’s an interesting argument. I definitely believe that children must learn that villains are humans too by the time they are old enough to commit acts of revenge that can cause significant harm. So certainly tweens (who will soon be old enough to join gangs, plan for future careers, etc) should read about humanized villains, while still reading about heroes who resist them. But very young children may need to classify people strictly into good and evil to successfully avoid harmful people. That’s an uncomfortable idea to me, but I don’t know enough about child psychology to rationally evaluate it.
This is probably just a matter of taste, but I get enough simplified morality from people who believe that it applies in real life; I don’t want it any more in stories, even simple plot-driven ones.
Not children’s literature. The children of today are the closed-minded partisans of tomorrow.
How would people characterize A Wrinkle in Time? It’s been ages since I’ve read it, but it’s another indisputably (?) classic children’s book. IT and a lot of the good/evil shadow imagery seem somewhat morally simplistic in my memory, but I seem to recall other moral complexity, e.g., with the Mrs. Ws.
I’m also having trouble characterizing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in terms of moral complexity, but it also doesn’t fit in with the other examples in that it lacks a high-stakes struggle. Alice in Wonderland is the other major children’s classic fantasy I can think of, but I can’t recall what, if any, type of morality it presented.
Good question. As I recall, I found the first half much more interesting than the last half. In retrospect, I think that one reason was that the Ws required thought to understand but It did not. (But I don’t recall thinking this at the time, so take that with a grain of salt.)
The morality in these is farcical, so it’s easier to be grey, or just meaningless. (In Tim Burton’s recent adaptation of Alice, which has a coherent plot unlike the original, the morality was very black and white.)
Now I remember the famous debate in The Horn Book Magazine about the morality in Charlie. I found most of that debate pointless because Charlie’s morality is farcical, so why would you expect it to make sense? (Well, the debate wasn’t only about morality.)
And that reminds me of Ursula Le Guin (who took the anti-Charlie position in the first April 1973 Letter to the Editor at the above link); she wrote the children’s fantasy trilogy Earthsea. This has a fairly grey morality, especially the middle book, which is told from the perspective of an antagonist (at first) of the trilogy’s main protagonist. Years later, Le Guin wrote a sequel trilogy, which (while earning a mixed reaction from the fans) addressed some of the problems that she saw in the original trilogy; it was even greyer, but it was not marketed to children anymore. In any case, Earthsea is not a counterexample to ewbrownv’s claims, because the story does explore ‘unconventional morality, novel social forms, etc’ (and does it well, IMO).
Ob MoR: Earthsea has an anti-lifeist moral, but because it is grey, it treats the lifeist position with some respect; the villains are more misguided than evil, and you can sympathise with them. Lifeists still won’t be happy with it, especially in the sequels, where gur urebrf qrfgebl gur nsgreyvsr (although once you get to that point, this is pretty well justified). But at least the lifeist position is not dismissed out of hand.
Are you asking for children’s literature, or YA? There are quite a few YA, morally grey, literature available; not incredibly popular, but existing. I would argue that it’s difficult to really develop grey morality in a ‘child″s worldview, since what a child is is more difficult to define. That said, I would say The Demon’s Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan, is quite morally in the grey area; the protagonists are really not very ‘good’, nor are they very ‘evil’ as in the case of an anti-hero.
...I believe that it would also be wise to introduce grey morality age-appropriately—because if someone is young enough, they might go off humanizing the villains, and humanizing a villain that would predate on someone that young would not be wise.
The younger the better, I suppose. Although library and bookseller classifications have to draw the line somewhere, there’s really a continuum of target audience ages. Anything that is widely read by children should count, regardless of how it’s classified (although how it’s classified may give a reasonable estimate of whether children read it, in the absence of real data).
Eliezer has referred to HP as ‘for children’ when explaining some of the changes that MoR (which is not for children) has to the background universe. But HP is often classified as YA. I would not want to be picky.
That’s an interesting argument. I definitely believe that children must learn that villains are humans too by the time they are old enough to commit acts of revenge that can cause significant harm. So certainly tweens (who will soon be old enough to join gangs, plan for future careers, etc) should read about humanized villains, while still reading about heroes who resist them. But very young children may need to classify people strictly into good and evil to successfully avoid harmful people. That’s an uncomfortable idea to me, but I don’t know enough about child psychology to rationally evaluate it.