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Joan Aiken: Literary Dramatist

1984; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.0610

1553-1201

Marilyn Apseloff,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Joan Aiken:Literary Dramatist Marilyn Apseloff (bio) Three very good plays for children have been written by the novelist Joan Aiken. Speaking of Aiken's fiction in Twentieth Century Children's Writers, John Rowe Townsend wrote, "Miss Aiken goes in for wild exaggeration, staggering improbability, and riotous melodrama. She does so, of course, deliberately and shamelessly . . . and her use of language is not only masterly but masterful" (13). His comments can be applied to her plays also, especially when he adds, "one might well expect Miss Aiken's books to stretch the imagination spectacularly and to stimulate a delight in words for their own sake" (14). In her plays, Joan Aiken creates unusual characters and situations that have some origins in the work of others, but which she has transformed into material and words that are decidedly her own. Her first play was Winterthing, performed in 1970 and published in 1972. It contained much material from the folk tradition, evident in songs like "Tinker, Tailor" and "Hushaby Baby" as well as in the plot. In this play, Mrs. MacRoy has brought four children and their Auntie to live on Winter Island, which is supposedly haunted. Mrs. MacRoy tells them, "There is a legend. It is said that the island belongs to winter—that every seventh year, when a very hard winter comes, the island will vanish for six months, vanish clean away and not be visible at all" (11). The children learn that Winter Island is [End Page 116] "an outpost on the frontier betwixt winter and summer . . . . If there were not spots like this island about the globe, maybe winter would overflow entirely and flood the whole world with cold and dark" (13). When Mrs. MacRoy leaves, she asks, "So I will see you again before the gray wolves of winter come back to swallow the sun and the moon?" (14). During that conversation before her departure the language flows, has a cadence to it: Lem: Winter moves about—like a cloud, like a shadow. Mrs. MacRoy: Like a cloud, like a shadow, like a great space of cold and darkness. Like a tide creeping over the world. (12) Such cadences are common in folk tales. Ethel Heins, in her review of Winterthing for The Horn Book, wrote, "The author's great gift for writing tales of fantasy, horror, and suspense is wonderfully distilled . . . . Excitingly original, with sharp characterizations, the play should be received with relish by young actors and audiences" (April 1973, 149). Aiken's characters are unique. Auntie, for example, early revealed to be a kleptomaniac and a pyromaniac, turns out to be a child-stealer as well. In The Use of Drama, Harley Granville-Barker said that "a play . . . involves conflict, outward or inward; this keeps it alive. Its story will be told chiefly by the setting out of differences between the characters. The action develops these and will at last dispose of them" (386-7). This is precisely what Joan Aiken does; she presents the audience with distinctive characters, some dynamic and some static, who are placed in unusual circumstances and settings which help to precipitate the action and conflicts. Thus Jakin, one of the children who seems capable and reliant at the beginning of the play, becomes defeated by his situation, and attempts to leave the island and desert the others. When Mrs. MacRoy is asked why he and others are destroyed, she replies: "It was their own natures that led them to destruction" (68). That theme reappears in the later plays. An essential ingredient in Miss Aiken's plays is fantasy, often the element in drama for children that adults denigrate as being childish. Yet in American Dramatic Literature, Jordan Y. Miller notes, "Historically, fantasy has been an important dramatic ingredient. Ever since the fifth century B.C . . . . stage comedy has often been at its best in the imaginative flights of its author's fancy" (463). He further says that fantasy has its place in modern drama. There is absolutely nothing wrong in seeking theatrical entertainment in a full evening of unbridled make-believe. After all, it is the province of the theatre to be a place where man's ideas, fears, and...