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Hey kids, let's read about poverty!
The Boxcar kids make dumpster diving and homelessness look so fun!While reading the last couple chapters of Grapes of Wrath, when the Joad family is given a boxcar to live in, but forced to share it with another family, struggling to get enough money to buy food and clothing, I was reminded of a childhood book series that I used to read, the Boxcar Children. Living in a boxcar is not exactly a fun experience, given the description of the Joad family's hardships, especially during heavy rains, when the most of the cars flood. Running out of food, building a dam, giving birth to a stillborn child, and watching it's homemade coffin float down the river do not exactly make for light reading.
Yet, the Boxcar Children represented made living in a boxcar seem like a children's paradise. I remember reading the book and wishing that I didn't have to live in a house, which suddenly seemed incredibly boring. I became jealous of families that got to live in abandoned box cars and even regular cars. The books, originally published in 1924 by Rand McNally, tell the story of four orphaned children who run away from the orphanage and move into an abandoned box car in the forrest, which they furnish from searching through an abandoned dump (fun!). The boys spend the day going out to hunt and search for food, while the girls stay in the box car, cook, and sew. And in the meantime, all the kids would team up to solve mysteries! It's interesting that these stories are so popular with children. I remember as a kid wanting so badly to be an orphan so that I could be just like Annie, and homeless so that I could be just like the boxcar kids.
Why are so many children's books written to make poverty seem so fun and glamorous? Is it to cheer up kids who actually live in destitute situations or is it a way to exoticize that lifestyle for the more privileged classes? I think it's most likely the latter, since orphaned children who actually live in boxcars unfortunately don't have too many people buying them popular book series. So why are middle class kids brought up reading these books? If it's to make them feel lucky to have parents with jobs and real homes to live in, that certainly did work with my friends and I, who proudly told our parents that we wished we were orphans. There must be something innately fascinating about living in poverty and hardship or there wouldn't be so many popular books about it. Many critics argue that Grapes of Wrath was written to make the upper classes more aware of what was really going on in America during the Depression, but maybe it was also made to appeal to our attraction to reading about struggling families. Maybe there is something that makes us want to imagine ourselves in these tight situations, where obtaining food and shelter is so immediately necessary to stay alive. Maybe that is part of the appeal of Great Depression literature in general, the real reason why so many writers and photographers took to the road to tell stories of being down and out...
Poverty in Children's Lit
I love this connection that you made to The Boxcar Children. Reading the portion of the novel when the family moves into their home in the boxcar, a part of me was surprised at how pleasant, by comparison, the Joads found the boxcar and how they felt privileged to at the very least have walls and a roof that were more solid than those of the tents all around them. But at the same time it seemed so fitting, and I could imagine vividly how homey a boxcar might be, a perfect stepping stone between a tent and a real house. Perhaps it was due to this myth I took in as a child, reading those books that conveyed such living as a romanticized adventure, one of freedom rather than desperation. It is odd that these children’s books idealize such impoverished living. I think perhaps it is to help children understand that those that are down and out are good, caring, people just like themselves. It shows that though they may be in worse circumstances, they care about the same things and are relatable. But they also create this odd dynamic you talk about where a privileged child will yearn for the adventure that seems to be involved in being down and out, without ever really conveying the hardship involved, or demonstrating how lucky the fortunate reader has it.
Authentic poverty
It also seems very tied in to the popular version of the American Dream espoused by Horatio Alger and the like: the authentic American experience has long been that of "rags to riches", going back to at least the 19th century. It's become something of a national myth since then, and in recent years it lives on especially in the narratives and concerns with authenticity that characterize hip hop culture.
Today, the majority of people who listen to hip hop are like the majority of people who read The Boxcar Children and other poverty-themed children's lit: kids who have (or whose parents have) disposable income. I don't know the origins or original motivation behind The Boxcar Children, but much of early hip hop music was extremely socially conscious and concerned with spreading awareness of poverty and the message of freedom from oppression.
Though most popular hip hop today could be called socially unconscious, it remains concerned largely with the authenticity that comes in American culture from pulling oneself up from poverty and suffering. Some of the function it seems to serve is to remind those that were born into a comfortable world that there is another, darker world that the one they know is built upon—and also maybe to put some shame into them.