The Story of a Hurt Little Girl
“I can’t stand fairy stories…if you’re very good and very beautiful..this prince comes along and you live happily ever after….But if you’re bad and ugly then you’ve got no chance whatsoever…”
Tracy Beaker (Wilson, 1991, p.14).
Once upon a time, there once was a beautiful little girl who was sweet and caring. She had a mummy and daddy who loved her very much and she lived in a beautiful big house. She had many friends to play with and was very, very happy…….If you are looking for a fairy tale story with a happily ever after, this is not one of them. This is the story of the harsh reality of Tracy Beaker.
The Story of Tracy Beaker (1991) is a confessional autobiography of a little girl in care. She is abandoned by her mother and bounced around from foster family to foster family only to return back to the children’s home, nicknamed, ‘The Dumping Ground’. Tracy Beaker, our protagonist is obsessed with telling her own story, on her own terms. In her ‘Book about Me’, she writes candidly about her daily life in care, her mum, her relationship with the other children in care and her care workers. She is extensively perceived by her care-givers as having “behavioural problems” which makes her particularly disobedient, cheeky, persistent and outspoken. She is prone to fantasy where she dreams of a better life with her disappointing, yet idealised mother, who can do no wrong in Tracy’s eyes.
No one ends up in a care home without accumulating a sad story, but The Story of Tracy Beaker (1991) is written and illustrated in such a way for children to understand difficult subject matters. I would say the ideal reader would be a similar age to Tracy’s, between 9-12 years of age. Children at around this age are able to construct complex stories as their cognitive abilities develop. Moreover, it is important to add, that between the ages of 6-8, children start to abandon the magical world of fairy tales and as they grow older, they are able to tolerate more unpleasant stories (Appleyard, 1991). According to Donald Maass (n.d), “Ideally, a great children’s novel leaves the reader stronger, wiser, and better to cope with whatever real-world challenges he may face”(Maass, n.d).
Compared with other children’s novels such as Peter Pan (Barrie, 1904), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865) and The Secret Garden (Hodgson Burnett, 1911), which all describe a magical children’s world, away from parents; for Tracy that world is very real. Beneath her sass and pertinence, lies a deep feeling of insecurity and sadness. Tracy gets through this by lying and concocting fantastical versions of her life and her mother to make herself feel better.
In our weekly class, we discussed Tracy as an unreliable narrator to her own story because of her young age and naivety but moreover, her compulsive lying and exaggerated stories. Researching a little deeper, Piaget’s first stage of Moral Judgment of the Child (1932) states that ‘a lie is wrong because it is an object of punishment’. At around ten years old, children know that lying is wrong and Tracy still believes this. From the onset of her diary, she begins with her first lie, ‘My hair is fair and very long and curly’ (Wilson, 1991, p.7), but then she confesses, ‘I’m telling fibs. It’s dark and difficult and sticks up in all the wrong places’ (Wilson, 1991, p.7). Piaget also states that if the punishment is removed and the lie remains undiscovered, then is it a lie? Tracy undergoes this, when she is suspected of breaking her ‘worst’ enemy’s, Mickey Mouse clock. She blatantly lies to her readers, that ‘clocks break all the time’ and when her care worker has no absolute proof Tracy is the culprit, in Tracy’s reasoning, she should be believed that she didn’t do it since even she does not ‘one hundred per cent know that [she] broke it’. (Day & Pearson, 2016).
Anna Freud (1965) distinguishes between a variety of types of lying. “Innocent” lying is when a child cannot clearly distinguish between reality and fantasy. On the other hand, “Fantasy” lying, is when children can make these distinctions but are coping with insufferable realities by means of wishful thinking (Wachtel, 2004). For Tracy who is abandoned by her mother and has no contact, her wishful thinking is that her mother is someplace unable to reach her, “..my mum’s probably too far away to come on a quick visit. Yeah, that’s it, she’s probably abroad somewhere…She’ll have gone to the States. Maybe Hollywood. My mum looks so great she’d easily get into the movies. You can’t hop on the bus and visit your daughter when you’re hundreds and thousands of miles away in Hollywood, now can you?” (Wilson, 1991, p.48).
From a mother’s perspective, I wanted to hug Tracy; adopt her even. I understood why she behaved the way she did and said the things she said. I felt sorry for her when she is ‘begging’ to be fostered and sad when everyday she thinks that this is the day her mother will collect her (and I, knowing full well she won’t). For Tracy, her every day is Hope-Disappointment-Hope, an ugly vicious circle.
Appleyard, J.A. (1991). Becoming a Reader. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press
Day, H., & Pearson, L. (2016). Jacqueline Wilson: A Collection of all new Critical Essays by Contemporary Authors. London, UK: Macmillan Education Publishers Limited.
Wachtel, E. (2004). Treating Troubled Children and Their Families. New York, United States: Guildford Press.
“What Makes a great Novel for Children” https://hubl.hu.nl/sites/hu.learn.mentorix.dk/files/userfiles/u2231/documents/what%20makes%20a%20great%20novel%20for%20children. pdf retrieved 11 March 2019.
Youth Literature by Irekni 
Very nice blog! You write in an entertaining style with use of very good diction. Mind the details though as punctuation errors occur every now and then – and indeed your use of references will have to be improved on (as you said yourself). You can also find improvement in making the connection with the target audience earlier on (e.g. when analysing the character of Tracey) as the theory discusses this and you have made good insights on the novel already (so this is a matter of making the connection). Your blog presents the class discussions and your reflections well, and you have used some of the sources well too (interesting you thought the novel shows a mix of innocence and darker themes – could that also be an argument for a particular age group?). The eventual age group you come up with is not entirely in line with the rest of the contents (and theory) as the novel includes so many elements children will not be able to appreciate and so this aspect you need to elaborate on and argue more convincingly. Good luck and thanks for sending it in!
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