Essays

The Wild Spaces of Children’s Stories

The Wild Spaces of Children’s Stories
Willy Wonka “discovers” the exit from the black and white room.

The portal — a secret opening or entrance to a fantastical world, starkly different from the ordinary world that surrounds us — is found everywhere in children’s literature and film. It serves as an escape route from the mundane, and the magic of the world beyond the portal is often underscored by the drabness or unhappiness of the real world that precedes it. Examples abound: from the claustrophobic black-and-white patterned room (and, of course, Charlie’s life of poverty) that leads toward the candy-filled wonderland in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the colorless farm scenes and harrowing tornado that brings us to Oz, and of course the foreboding old mansion that the children evacuate to during World War II that houses the magical wardrobe/secret entrance to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Most children will instantly relate to the thrill of discovery that Charlie and Dorothy and Lucy feel when they first set foot in these wonderlands, despite the fact that this is something — entering a fantastical world through a magic passage — no one in real life can actually experience. So why is this feeling so recognizable?

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Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds

Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds


The air is toxic. Floating, ashy bits of debris swirl around 
like particles in a snow globe. They flicker through flashlight beams and gather on canvas bodysuits, yet never amass on the dark, uneven ground. Voices echo, stunted, through the murk: “Willllll!” The mix of sickly green and flat marine-blue hues lends an aquatic quality to the atmosphere, a quality made even more pronounced by the submerged, undead condition of the ubiquitous trees. It’s a place to look for and find the lost, dead or tucked away in an incubation chamber. A place to listen for the bipedal flower-headed beast that hunts, scenting blood across dimensions. Forever night, it’s a place on the other side of the routine, the normal, the safe. It’s the Upside Down. But what is the Upside Down? Where does it end? And what does it mean?

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