Breaking out of the “muffin tins”: A Wrinkle in Time, Cosmopolitanism, and Children’s Literature

At its time of publication, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time challenged conventional understandings of “children’s literature” through its portrayal of the seductive powers of totalitarianism, conformity, and demagoguery. The story may focus on children, but the dangers the children confront are the dangers of an adult world. On one level, the novel appears deeply rooted in an American Cold War sensibility, which imagines that totalitarianism can only be defeated by a rugged individualism. And yet when we look more closely, we see that the novel offers a nascent cosmopolitanism: a communitarian ethos that reveals the short-comings of a world view based on self-reliance and individualism. This “children’s book” engages with key social questions that still resonate about the relationship between the self and the world, and about how (or if) we can extend empathy to those who are radically unlike ourselves.