An appreciation Final

Stuart Little is the kind of book that you love as a young child because of its adventure and plot and the kind of book that you can appreciate at an older age for it’s language, characters and real life connections

Stuart Little is the story of a mouse living in a world of people. That does not limit Stuart though. He makes sure that anything he wants to do gets done. Stuart Little is written in the early 40’s and emulates the time period through it’s language and ideas. The language flows and gives you the perfect picture of what is happening.
“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields. . . .” (Page 100). This part of the book has a quiet flow. Though it is not quite necessary to the plot,  it helps set the scene for a quiet, sunny morning. That is something amazing about E.B White’s description and dialect. He uses it to set a scene and get you into the appropriate frame of mind. It is not always the perfect setting though.
“Snowball, the cat, enjoyed nighttime more than daytime. Perhaps it was because his eyes liked the dark. But I think it was because there are always so many worth-while things going on in New York at night.”(Page 67).
This as opposed to the calm setting on page 100 sets the scene more for a dangerous, less peaceful scene.

A lot of societal problems are mirrored in the book, such as the way people are doubted because of physical problems and limitations. There are many scenes when you get nervous, biting your lip as Stuart sets out to do something. He is daring and in many parts of the story I don’t think Stuart can do what he sets out to do.
“When the bus came into view, all the men waved their canes and brief cases at the driver, Stuart waved his spyglass. Then, knowing that the step of the bus would be too high for him, Stuart seized hold of the cuff of a gentlemen’s pants and swung aboard without any trouble or inconvenience what ever.”(Page 28).
Every time I am proven wrong because Stuart manages to work his way out of sticky situations. My love for the book does not come from the language or plot but from Stuart himself. We like to think that so much has changed between periods of time such as when the book was written and now. But have many things really changed? I can still see many are doubted because of physical problems. Reading this book I thought of myself as a little girl in elementary school.  Back then, everything came down to physical strength. The boys usually won games because they were taller and could throw harder. Why was it that when we put almost double the heart into what we did the boys still won every time?  Reading Stuart Little was important to me. I could not look too deep but I could scrape just past the surface of the book. Stuart was the knight in shining armor that proved size did not matter.

Reading Stuart Little the second time, I saw problems that had made their way into the book that had slipped unnoticed by the six year old who had read this book so many years ago. There had been so much less worry when I read the book the first time. Now it seemed different, sad. I could feel so much more pain whenever something bad happened to Stuart. When Marglo left Stuart, my heart stopped for a second. You could feel how much Stuart hurt.
“For three days everybody hunted all over the house for Marglo without finding so much as a feather…. Stuart was heartbroken. He had no appetite, refused food, and lost weight. Finally he decided that he would run away from home without telling anyone, and go out into the world and look for Marglo.”- (Page 73).

 I now think I know why I loved Stuart Little as a little girl and wanted to read it again. I wanted to see if it still meant to me what it did seven years ago. It was different, not entirely in a bad way, but just not the same book. Maybe as we get older we lose the ability to read for only story and adventure. Maybe being trained to think more deeply takes away from the story when we read a child’s book. Maybe we will never be able to read a book the way we could at six and seven. Maybe opening up to a random page and reading the third sentence would be so, so, so much different then the first time. I hope that every child out there can read as many books before they lose the ability to read without over thinking and “deeply thinking”.