Book Response #3: Winnie The Pooh

I struggled a bit with reading and interpreting Winnie The Pooh in the context of nostalgia for a bit.  It's been hard to separate my own personal attachment with the material with the aims and ties to the topic that are perhaps what I'm supposed to talk about and engage with.  For someone who views the television show of Winnie The Pooh as a formative part of her childhood, it's hard to talk about nostalgia with the book without referencing my own personal feelings of nostalgia for the characters and situations.  It's been interesting to read the stories for the first time, however, and to put them alongside the blurry remembrance of the show that I have.  I won't compare or contrast the two in any way, but I wanted to talk about my own tie to the bumbling little bear and his friends--if only to establish an already existing longing for something of the past.

The stories within Winnie and the Pooh are, at surface level, incredibly charming and clever.  Filled with surprising wit from seemingly idiotic characters, A.A. Milne handles the foolery of the woodland animals with grace and kindness and love.  I think much of the humor in the dialogue was lost on me as a kid, if the show was anything like the book.  There are themes present in each of the chapters and important life lessons about empathy and friendship that are being conveyed.  The book fulfills its purpose of serving as a piece of literature that a child could consume and inadvertently be entertained and educated.  But there is something else that sits under the surface of the book, and it's hard to completely pin down.

Taking into consideration what we talked about in class about nostalgia--mainly the ideas of yearning for something of the past and of homesickness--I am left wondering what it is about Winnie The Pooh that makes me feel a bit melancholic.  Perhaps it is just purely the memory of enjoying it in my own childhood, or perhaps it's something else.  While reading it, I found myself strangely longing for a part of someone else's life (a strange sensation).  I wonder if this is in any way tied to the strange obsession with the 90's in our current culture or the 80's or the 70's or any other era that we glorify with little to no interaction with the actual decade.  Winnie The Pooh leaves me wanting to return to Old English Times, to go to England, to go to Hyde Park, to eat tea and biscuits, to wear a frilly dress, etc.  This is a culture I did not interact with in my life, but still seems to have made an impression.  Aesthetic and the role it plays in nostalgia is important and possibly inseparable.  It's the walls of a room, and the color of the carpet.  Winnie the Pooh somehow seems to create a homesickness in me for a home I've never had.

Using the actual text as an example, though, there are things in the stories themselves that contribute to a different kind of nostalgia.  Christopher Robin is a young boy who starts in the book as someone asking their father for a story.  It is after that that he is transported into the story and begins to interact with the characters.  The narrator--the father--uses this storytelling technique to give his son something to interact with without the boy actually running off on adventures.  In a way, storytelling is an act that enables the child to leave home without ever having to.  And so, Christopher Robin does just that.  And coming from the perspective of the adult but told in a way that is simple enough for the child to understand and engage with, the adult is also imposing his own nostalgia and desires for simplicity by creating an idyllic and fantastical rag-tag family for his son to go on adventures with.  The nostalgia felt by him is then lived by his son as he recounts tales of friendship and fun.

I feel very satisfied by the collection of stories and have enjoyed the simplicity of it.  Though, with all the best children's media and literature, it's never really as simple as it may at first glance seem.  There's something more to the story of Eeyore on his birthday as he slowly takes his deflated balloon in and out of the honey jar.  It's a sadness and a happiness and that's the closest description to what nostalgia feels like as I can manage.