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This analysis of romantic archetypes in Wallace's Peppermints in the Parlor draws from Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, and Joseph Campbell while also reflecting upon the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, Aileen Pace Nilsen, and Kenneth L. Donelson. It argues that, although unaware of the origin of its metaphors, children enjoy mythologically based literature.
The romantic quest has long yielded figures, themes, and plots that authors may employ as literary archetypes in the construction of fiction for all ages. These archetypes serve children's literature particularly well, in that readers too young to categorize characters much beyond good and evil may easily follow plot lines containing clearly defined heroes and villains. The large majority of elementary-school-aged children would fall into this group. According to Jean Piaget's popular model, these children could be labelled "concrete operational thinkers," who can engage in classification and arrangement of a series of objects (Huck, Helper, and Hickman 65). Romantic quest archetypes may provide metaphors for such a straightforward classification of people and actions. As Northrop Frye notes, "Romance avoids the ambiguities of ordinary life, where everything is a mixture of good and bad, and where it is difficult to take sides or believe that people are consistent patterns of virtue or vice" (Secular 50). For Frye, the popularity of the various incarnations of romance in literature "has much to do with its simplifying of moral facts" (50). Barbara Brooks Wallace exhibits this simplification in creating her archetype-laden mystery for children between the ages of eight and twelve, Peppermints in the Parlor. Wallace offers readers a skillfully rendered update of the romantic quest with a female as hero; a quest that is replete with prototypical imagery and metaphor and that proves the applicability to children's literature of Frye's theory of the imagination as "the constructive power of the mind, the power of building unities out of units." Those "units are metaphors, [...] images connected primarily with each other rather than separately with the outer world" (Secular 36).
Such connections within a story eliminate challenges to understanding from the exterior "real world" at a time of life crucial to the development of self-identity and acculturation on the part of a young reader. Frye's concept of literary archetypes, of course, remains grounded in the...