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Performing Pooh Plays: Drama and Storytelling in the Children's Literature Classroom

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2021.0028

1080-6563

Jan Susina,

Child Development and Digital Technology

Performing Pooh Plays:Drama and Storytelling in the Children's Literature Classroom Jan Susina (bio) "Yes, dear, yes," said Kanga soothingly. "And imitating Piglet's voice too! So clever of him." —A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh I try to include a variety of literary genres in my children's literature courses, yet the category that is most frequently omitted is drama. I justify this absence by including children's films and film adaptations of the books read in class. However, recently I have been able to introduce drama and storytelling using Winnie-the-Pooh. The episodic chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh are based on the bedtime stories that the author created for his son, Christopher Robin Milne. In his Autobiography published in 1939, A. A. Milne only briefly mentions the creation of his most famous novel, writing: The animals in the stories came for the most part from the nursery. My collaborator [Daphne Milne] had already given them individual voices, their owner [Christopher Robin Milne] by constant affection had given them the twist in their features which denoted character, and [Ernest] Shepard drew them, as one might say, from the living model. (286) While Winnie-the-Pooh may seem to be "Silly stuff. Nothing to it" (159), as Eeyore complains of writing near the conclusion of A. A. Milne's 1926 novel, it remains one of the most popular children's books. Its protagonist was ranked the number one, best-loved children's literature character in a 2016 UK Poll as reported by Alison Flood in The Guardian. Milne and his son financially benefited from the success of the Pooh books, but over [End Page 320] time both came to resent the popularity of Winnie-the Pooh and how the Pooh books came to define their lives. Ironically it was the success of Winnie-the-Pooh and its sequel, The House at Pooh Corner (1928), that discouraged Milne from adapting them into plays since he came to resent being thought of as only a writer for children. The Pooh books over time became a wedge that estranged Milne from his son as Christopher Robin Milne matured. So, it is not surprising that Christopher Robin Milne in his autobiography, The Enchanted Places (1974), provides a slightly different origin story: It started in the nursery; it started with me. It could really start nowhere else, for the toys lived in the nursery and they were mine and I played with them. And I played with them and talked to them and gave them voices to answer with, so they began to breathe. But alone, I couldn't take them very far. I needed help. So my mother joined me and she and I and the toys played together, and gradually more life, more character flowed into them, until they reached a point where at which my father could take over. (77) It is reasonable to assume that Christopher Robin Milne in interacting with his stuffed animals was the first to assign them voices. This is consistent with the common play of many young children as they interact with their dolls or action figures in creating dialogues and dramatic scenes with their toys in order to make them come alive. The activity was initiated by Christopher Robin Milne and further developed in collaboration with his mother and then observed and eventually expanded by his father. Both father and son agree that Winnie-the-Pooh began with giving voice to the characters and that the stories were always performance-based, which is retained when Milne composed the stories. The framework of Winnie-the-Pooh features an adult narrator—presumably Milne—telling bedtime stories that feature Christopher Robin and his stuffed animals. Daphne Milne and her contributions to the creation of the stories is excluded from the text except for the dedication poem, "To Her." The absence of Daphne Milne's voice in the process of production of the stories may also account for the exclusion of female characters from Winnie-the-Pooh with the exception of Kanga, who is initially seen as "a Strange Animal'' and a threat to the other animals in the One Hundred Aker Wood (Milne 92). While Milne is...