‘I have a Secret’: Questioning the Adult World in Picture Books

Abstract

‘I have a secret.’ ‘One night some awful noise woke me.’ These statements are the origins of two classic works by author-illustrators Isol [Secreto de Familia] and Anthony Browne [In the Forest]; in both cases, the leading narrator characters show themselves as observers of and actors in familiar situations that baffle them and cause them pain, a pain that could be one more expression of the processes through which characters go in children’s literature, inclined to subject children and youths to paths of growth, losses, and findings. However, in these adaptations it is usual to find children ‘accompanied,’ ‘protected,’ ‘oriented’ or ‘consoled’ by referential grownups. The novelty, in these and other cases analyzed in this paper, lies in the position the child characters assume regarding the adult world, which they observe, analyze, criticize and, more often than not, bring to real trial. The purpose of this article is analyze the modalities in which questioning the adult world is presented in picture books by two renown author-illustrators, geographically and polysistemically located in very different sites and, from this analysis, reflect from the logic of the reversed world, suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin, about a topic that finds a prominent place in current publications geared to children and young people, avoiding touches of morals and remembrances of books that communicate images of protective adults and stable family relationships quite unrelated, as is known, to the reality children today face.