Essay by Francine ProsePretending is
how we find out what it is like to be ... to become. To be grown up,
older, wiser, braver, independent. Different. By putting on a costume -
our mothers' dresses and high heels, our fathers' roomy jackets, angel
wings and glitter wands - we step into another sin, and we hope that
skin will change us. Or at least that the game will let us experiment,
try on how it might feel to be changed. The adult world loses some of
its scary mystery when children pretend to be adults, and the secret
sources of their parents' power are rendered less intimidating, more
approachable, harmless - comical, in a way. Children pretend to be their
parents, at home or at work, long before they have any idea what exactly
their parents do.
As children, we pretend to be what we want to be,
or what we fear becoming, or to possess what we know we can never have
and still cannot stop wanting. Meanwhile, we enjoy the intoxicating
freedom to is our imagination, to exercise it the way we exercise our
fingers with piano scales, to reinvent the world and ourselves.
Playacting lets children step out of their families lives and enter into
another realm limited only by how much and how far they can imagine. By
pretending, they can escape from the most basic laws of science and
nature - they can travel in time and space, defy gravity, change shapes,
grow younger and older.
In Katherine Mansfiled's exquisite story
"Prelude," a group of girls (exiled to the margins of the world of
grown-ups too distracted by their own worries to pay much attention to
their small daughters) have a classic tea party. At each place, one of
the children sets out "two geranium leaf plates, a pine needle fork and
a twig knife. There were three daisy heads on a laurel leaf for poached
eggs, some slices of fuchsia petal cold beef, some lovely little
rissoles made of earth and water and dandelion seeds, and the chocolate
custard which she decided to serve in the paw shell she had cooked it
in."
What is it about tea party that so entrances
little girls, with its elaborate formal rituals of a bygone era? Even
girls who spend most of their leisure time scrambling on jungles gyms,
plummeting headfirst down slides, beating boys at races and games - even
they can nearly always be tempted by the chance to dress up, set out
little plates, and daintily decant homemade concoctions from one
container to another. It's a dream version of womanhood, all elegance,
friends, and bright chatter, a fantasy of our mothers glamorized,
elevated, and freed from the sobering, unromantic encumbrances of dirty
dishes and diapers.
With this magnificent miniature repast before
them, the girls in the Katherine Mansfield story act our their drama of
adults politely neglecting their children:
"Oh, good morning, Mrs. Smith. I'm so glad to see
you. Have you brought the children?"
"Yes, I've brought both my twins. I have had
another baby since I saw you last but she came so suddenly that I
haven't had time to make her any clothes yet. So I left her ... You
needn't trouble about my children," said Mrs. Smith graciously. "If
you'll just take this bottle and fill it at the tap - I mean at the
dairy."
Much of the pretending is about self-determination
- and about understanding. If we can only look like our mothers, speak
like our mothers, perhaps we can figure out where their authority comes
from and why they are the way they are.
Meanwhile, little boys seem to have their own
visions of power, not a few of which involve the ability - and the
freedom and permission - to chase down bad guys and shoot them dead.
(Many parents, including myself, who discouraged or even forbade their
sons to play with guns, have been chastened in realizing that a thumb
and forefinger, held at right angles, packs plenty of firepower.) Games
of pretend are also about magic and about the wish for transformation -
an expression of our instinctive sense that one like will not be nearly
enough for us - and of our desire to be as many different people as we
can, to lead as many different lives as we can. Pretend is also about
looking for whatever qualities we know or intuit, that we ourselves are
lacking. Solitary children are most often the ones who have imaginary
friends. The timid pretend to be warriors, lion tamers, and explorers.
When I was a little girl, one of my favorite games
of pretend involved the fantasy that I was a tightrope walker in the
circus. My high wire was a strip of cement, something like a curb,
perhaps three or four inches high, that marked the edge of our property
and divided our driveway from that of our neighbors. With my arms
outstretched, balancing precariously and theatrically, I'd walk the
length of the curb, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. I
could almost hear the cheers of the crowd below and their gasps of
horror when my foot slipped off the cement and, howling as if I were
falling, I plummeted down toward the imaginary net. In retrospect, I can
see precisely why this game delighted me so, I was a reticent, shy
child, a little more bit awkward, and troubled by many irrational fears
that miraculously disappeared as I confidently and gracefully walked
that wire suspended way up in the big top.
Some of the games that give children the most
pleasure involve pretending to be creature or things that no sensible
human would ever want to be, or pretending to suffer terrible fates that
no one would choose to endure. Let's pretend we're earthworms. Let's
pretend we're bugs. Let's pretend we're big nasty dogs and bite your
little sister. Let's pretend we're martyrs being burned at the stake.
Let's pretend we're spies and we're being tortured so that we'll give up
secrets. And of course there's that perennial children's favorite that
we loved to play and that I would have been very upset to catch my own
children playing. Let's pretend it's a funeral and we're dead - and see
how sorry everyone is.
When my brother and I were small, one of the games
that held the most enduring claim on our attention was the decidedly
undramatic and unromantic game of "grocer." What was it that fascinated
us? I assume it was partly the attraction of playing any kind of adult -
butcher, baker, candlestick maker. But beyond that it must have been the
sheer pleasure of buying everything - and only what we wanted. All the
candy, the cookies, the ice cream. We were in charge.
My all-time favorite game was "invisible," the
point of which was exactly what it sounds like. This game took some
complicity from whoever was around - the others had to agree to pretend
not to see me. Other kids didn't have patience for this - they wanted to
be the invisible one - but adults seemed fairly good at it and were
quite happy to do whatever they were doing (cooking, reading, mowing the
lawn) without having to notice that I was there. I remember a few times
becoming a little worried that I'd really done it, that no one could see
me. And I hadn't the fainted idea how to reverse what I'd done.
The hardest thing to remember about childhood
games of pretend is how real they can seem, how fine the line between
inside and outside game. I remember pretending that I had stepped inside
my favorite illustrations in my favorite fairy-tale books. I can
remember the fact that I felt as if I had left my house, my room, and
walked into the enticing, thrilling, faintly terrifying landscapes in
which Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm stories were being
enacted - East of the Sun and West of the Moon. But of course I cannot
recall the feeling of melting through the surface of the picture,
blending into that other place, that castle or meadow or forest form
which I would have to find my way back to the actual world.
Perhaps this is a talent that actors hold onto -
and go on to spend their adult professional lives pretending. Writers,
con artists, compulsive liars all must retain some of that ability to be
convinced, entirely convinced, by whatever story they happen to be about
children playing pretend, children who don't realize that never again in
their lives will they be able to slip so fluidly, so seamlessly from one
skin into another. Never again will it be quite so easy, so effortless
to cross that mysterious, radiant zone, to make that magical transition
between pretending and becoming.