Nicole LaReau: Text Proposal

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children seeks to examine the tragedies of the Holocaust, as well as the severity of death through fantastical lenses. Ransom Riggs’ approach to death and the Holocaust creates a safe space for children adolescents to grapple with both of these topics through a two-fold approach. First, he uses fantasy to depict the Holocaust. The Holocaust is depicted in it’s original historical elements and is backed up by actual events, however the fantasy world of the novel becomes a euphemistic backdrop. Inside of this backdrop exists another mechanism of defense: the halt of time. Riggs uses this fantasy world to postpone the eventual finality of death, providing yet another escape for adolescents from the realities of death and tragedy.

            I want to explore these aspects of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children to examine whether they help or hurt the seriousness of the content matter. At it’s core, this is a very dark novel. It depicts a tumultuous time in history, one that is usually a sensitive matter to talk about in fact, much less fiction. By including escape from death in this fantasy world, the author could easily slip into a cheapened discussion, one that could cheat adolescents from growth through immersing themselves in another literary world. However, if Riggs’ has simply created a safe space to delve deeper into these topics, then he has succeeded in helping adolescents contemplate death and the Holocaust.

            The Holocaust is framed by a fantasy world filled with dark monsters and underworld. The setup of this alternate world permeates even the very beginning of the book. The death of Jacob’s grandfather by monsters only the two of them can see sets the dark tone for the novel. The authorities brush his death off as an unfortunate tragedy by wild dogs, which creates the premise for an underworld not known to common mortals. This mimics the secret quality of some of the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as some of the feigned ignorance of some of the rest of the world that was not involved in the conflict. Jacob’s grandfather adheres to these euphemistic references to his childhood from the beginning of Jacob’s life, which Jacob originally believes to be fiction: “[t]he tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children’s home in Wales. When I would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them, he said” (Riggs 9). Grandpa Portman always tells Jacob stories of how he left the island in Wales to go fight the monsters in the war—this turns out to be true in both respects, as he goes to fight the mythical monsters of Riggs’ underworld as well as fight in World War II. This blurring of the two worlds and their wars correlates the monsters with the monstrosities that humans are capable of committing in war. The compromise allows adolescents to face the monsters of history with supernatural explanations to mitigate the shock factor of something as tragic as the Holocaust.

            This same underworld is also used to explain away death and preserve the mortality of the main characters. This magical world is filled with peculiar people-people with mythical powers (hence the name of the book).  A particular breed of these peculiar people are able to “…manipulate time fields consciously—and not only for [themselves], but for others…[and] create temporal loops in which peculiar folk can live indefinitely” (Riggs 151). This temporal loop is the site of Grandpa Portman’s home as a child, and serves as the most prominent setting in this book. It preserves the lives of peculiar people outside of mortal settings so they are not persecuted by a mortal world, essentially rendering them immortal. The rest of the village where Miss Peregrine’s home is located is under the impression that the home was smashed to smithereens during World War II, but it escapes this fate continually through it’s temporal time loop. This escape however is also a means of providing escape from the morbidity of death, especially in war time. Riggs creates an “out” for his characters, preventing adolescents reading this book from confronting the certainty of death during wartime. Especially in light of their supposed escape from German bombing, the children emerge as heroes of the war, when they are merely supernatural. Riggs also creates the illusion of thwarted death through his creation of wights and their predecessors, hollowgasts. These are the immortal counterparts to peculiars—the devils to the angels. They feed on the souls of peculiars to become stronger. Although this is a fantastical tragedy, the similarity of severity in gross murder as well as the innocent loss of life mirrors the rest of the holocaust very closely. The hollowgasts appear akin to the Nazis, especially in the respect of the consumption of human life feeding their power. Although the evil presence in Nazi Germany during World War II does not necessarily need a euphemistic counterpart to create validity of argument, Riggs helps adolescents create a construct of good and evil within his work using his imaginary underworld, its characters and escape from death.

            I will use works and topics that we have already discussed (such as death in adolescent literature from Disturbing the Universe) as well as new ones to create a scholarly argument for the effectiveness of Riggs’ method in using fantasy to explore death and the Holocaust. The deaths in the book, as well as the described and implied horrors of the Holocaust in this novel communicate the severity of such tragedy for adolescents, but the fantastical euphemisms utilized might create too safe of a space from which to understand the tragedy. Additionally, there is not much explicit explanation of what happened during the Holocaust and it is only through the eyes of Grandpa Portman who is a limited narrator given that he is influenced by the fantasy element. Riggs created a creepy yet relevant book for exposing adolescents to this topic.