Goodnight Moon, Good Morning Gertrude Stein

If you've ever wondered why you're intrigued by both Gertrude Stein and the beloved children's book Goodnight Moon, the mystery is solved for you this morning, thanks to Anne E. Fernald at Slate. Fernald begins:

When my children were still little, I went from reading Goodnight Moon at night to teaching Gertrude Stein to my college students in the morning. In the midst of talking with them about Stein’s radical experiments, I was struck by how familiar they seemed. Instead of noticing Stein’s break with tradition, I noticed how much her work had in common with the books I was reading at bedtime: a love of color, joy in ordinary objects, repetition with unexpected variation. This dovetailed with another observation: My students are not as puzzled by Stein as I expect them to be. Stein writes: “Glazed Glitter. Nickel, what is nickel,” and my students recognize the moment of wondering. This habit of wonder is familiar in part because we have been raised on the lists of Goodnight Moon.

That similarity is no accident: Gertrude Stein was Margaret Wise Brown’s favorite writer. Born into an affluent manufacturing family, Brown studied writing and early childhood education—conventional pursuits for a young woman awaiting marriage—but she became neither a teacher nor a wife and mother. Instead, she combined her love of modernism and education to become a pioneer in the emerging field of children’s literature.

At the heart of the connect between Stein and Brown is a fascination with objects. More:

Brown wrote Goodnight Moon as a celebration of the objects in a wonderful, enormous nursery, including some features of her own childhood nursery. She asked Hurd, back from World War II and looking for work, to illustrate it. In Goodnight Moon, objects are celebrated for themselves. The book’s list is so perfect because it is so wholly from the child’s perspective. Brown gestures toward an overwhelming feeling of smallness—“Goodnight stars/Goodnight air”—even the void—“Goodnight nobody”—but ultimately offers reassurance, in the final lines that cocoon our little sleeper in “noises everywhere.” These noises, if not understood, are acknowledged. After all, misunderstood noises often keep us from sleep, and that final line seems to anticipate them, incorporating them into its lulling rhythm as if to reassure the youngest listener that the complaint she is about to make is unnecessary, that those noises are just another thing to placidly bid goodnight.

There you have it! But there's much more to consider at Slate.