Nostalgia thrives on a single perspective, a single story.
After moving into our new house, my parents and I spent those first few months unpacking and rearranging. I had a new bedroom with new furniture and new clothes to put in my new closet. Though I still lived in the same town and went to the same school with the same people, changing houses was my chance for a fresh start. Like a heroine in a novel, moving to the other side of town could be my inciting incident.
I got rid of all evidence that I lived anywhere or was anyone else. The Webkinz stuffed animals I saved up money to buy, the Camp Rock movie poster of Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas singing, and the Tigerbeat and People magazines that had cluttered my childhood bedroom were thrown in garbage bags or donated to Goodwill. I neglected to keep any pictures of that house or of that bedroom. A year or so later when the new owners gutted the house, I regretted that decision.
The only items I did keep were a few of my favorite childhood books which still occupy the bottom two shelves of my bookshelf. Even during that phase of reinvention, I kept my old, worn-out copies of Twilight, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Great Gatsby, the Junie B. Jones books, Dork Diaries, and a few others.
I reasoned that I would reread them at some point. That was a popular defense I made whenever my dad asked why I bought books when I could just borrow them from the library. I like to reread them, I’d say though it wasn’t true.
Then, I thought that I would pass them on to younger readers. Sharing the stories that I had loved and had shaped me seemed like a good idea. Yet whenever I was babysitting and the kid would ask to have one of my books, I would bargain with them. You can read this book whenever you come over. Or, how about this book/toy/item instead of that book? As the pages continued to yellow and the spines peeled away and dust collected from disuse, I had to admit that that wasn’t it either.
For a children’s literature class in college, I came back to those stories I had devoured as a kid. Rereading books such as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe during the spring semester of my senior year became a form of escapism. I remembered the way I read certain scenes and the voices I gave to certain characters when I read favorite passages aloud. I fell into that old behavior so naturally as if no time had passed.
For a brief moment, I would be enveloped in the memories of carefree, honeyed summers going to the public library and reading during long, relaxing car rides. I took the class for this reason. I needed a break from the stress that pollutes adulthood. I needed to remember why I loved reading in the first place because I was slowly losing interest in everything I had enjoyed pre-pandemic.
In a podcast interview with American Psychological Association, Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at LeMoyne College, explains how nostalgia is a social emotion that can connect each generation to the next. However, it also allows us to connect with our younger selves to compare who we were then with who we are now. It reminds us of times where we were loved and protected.
Moments of uncertainty and change can lead people to seek comfort in their memories of a past that no longer exists or never existed at all.
“If people are unhappy,” says Batcho, “for any reason with how things are today, they’re more likely then to experience this sense that things must have been better in the past.”
The response to Dr. Seuss Enterprises announcing that they would no longer be publishing six of Seuss’s books because of racist imagery illustrates how nostalgia operates within contemporary culture. The decision came after years of a growing awareness of racism and ideology in children’s literature. Other stories such as Peter Pan (1911), The Little House on the Prairie series (1935), and The Secret Garden (1911) have been called out for similar accusations. Right-wing media outlets and conservatives criticized the decision referring to it as a ramification of “cancel culture”.
Despite the tremendous global grief and loss happening during a pandemic that felt never-ending, the conversation shifted towards a company adjusting its products to reflect current cultural interests and preferences.
Nostalgia has been a tool used to resist the present and recapture the past. It can be used to capitalize on people’s general unhappiness with the current state of affairs in order to push a particular agenda.
In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym writes that nostalgia can be broken down into two parts: “Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.” Boym, who was a professor at Harvard, emphasizes how restorative nostalgia is centered around believed memories to be representations of absolute truths and how it is often demonstrated in national and religious movements. Engaging in it means to return to a previous time where life was “better”. Then, there is reflective nostalgia that recognizes that “affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection.”
Originally published in the 1930s, the Nancy Drew books were a beloved children’s classic because they depicted a young girl going on adventures and solving mysteries. Its longevity means that it was one of the few series that both my mom and I had read as a child.
Starting in 1959, the books were revised due to pressure from the publishers, Grosset & Dunlap, to make the books more modern and to address the racist stereotypes. The plot, length, and language changed to suit the newer audience of children reading them, and the racist stereotypes depicted were completely erased. This left the books telling stories solely involving white characters.
Alice Steinbach, a longtime reader of the Nancy Drew books felt that “this new Nancy just didn’t measure up to the one [she] remembered” with “its plot simplified to the point of dullness, its characters reduced to superficial description and its vocabulary demoted to ‘easier’ words”.
Her reaction was similar to how publisher Phil Zuckerman felt when he reread a Hardy Boys book to his son. With his publishing company known for reissuing original texts, Zuckerman decided that despite the racism present the original versions of the Nancy Drew books needed to be reprinted.
Grosset & Dunlap, similar to Dr. Seuss Entriprises, had their company and long-term brand in mind when they decided to address the problematic elements of their novels. The reaction in both instances was the same as well. Readers who drew upon their own warm memories advocated for stories from the past to stay the same despite the current reality.
Zuckerman’s attempt to recreate the past, to believe his own memories are the absolute truth of the quality of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books dismiss the perspective of other readers, especially readers of color whose experience with racism depicted in those original versions tell a completely different truth.
In the books I had access to growing up, I would sooner see a racist depiction of Black people or the erasure of Black people completely than see a Black heroine lead the adventure and solve her own mysteries. As a kid, I didn’t even think to look for stories about girls like me. It was inconceivable.
Every now and then, I wonder how much I’ve tried and failed to model my life after stories and characters that acted as if Black girls were nonexistent or undeserving of simple things such as love, adventure, and friendship.
It is possible to cherish favorite childhood novels and to critique them as well, to acknowledge that our memories may lack context and perspective. The desire to give the next generation the best stories of our childhoods does not mean we need to restore the past within our present. Or to negate the current reality we live in favor of an idealized past that hinges on the infallibility of memory because we’re scared that the future being shaped may no longer include us.
Figuring out what to do with problematic children’s literature can be as simple as what Phillip Nel suggests, “Put them in dialogue with works by authors of color”. This could mean pairing classics with books by authors of color or supporting an author of color reimagining a classic through the lens of a marginalized character (i.e. an African-American author writing Moby Dick from the perspective of Pip).
Erasing characters of color from reissues or reprinting the originals with “content warnings” is an inadequate response that fails to address the underlying problem: the danger of a single story.
Nostalgia thrives on a single perspective, a single story. It limits our understanding and ceaselessly keeps us in the past. It can connect us across generations or leave us isolated within our own memories.
I held onto my books because they brought me comfort at a time when I was unaware that I needed them. To this day, I browse through them attracted to those memories. I may never get rid of them or have the courage to reread any of the dicier stories, but I’m grateful for their presence. They’ll never be for me what they were when I was younger. As in, they’ll never be the sole stories on my bookshelf.
