Eat up, Gemma: a change of view in Didacticism

By Bustingorri Guadalupe 

Eat up, Gemma is a short story written by Sarah Hayes and illustrated by Jan Ormerod.  Gemma is a baby girl who refuses to eat her food while everyone in her family asks her to do it. The story is specially designed for little children. However, adults may also enjoy it and reflect upon it.

The story seems to be innocent in its content but, at the same time, it hides an important change in the way in which stories are written for children. Different view changes were arising as regards Didacticism after the 70s. Certain issues such as social- class division, gender roles and racism were discussed and, to some extent, redefined. In concordance with these arguments Eat up, Gemma has a great ideological impact because it represents one of those changes.

It is for sure that ideology is present in almost every human act. Everything that people do is surrounded and shaped by ideology. That is why children literature can not escape from some of the ideas of a certain period in history. Before the 70s, children’s fiction was illustrated and written with white characters and other races were nearly denigrated.

The use of black characters in Eat up, Gemma represents a change of view as regards the negative representation that black people and other races used to have before the 70s. Perhaps the fact that black characters should be included in children’s stories is what really leads Jan Ormerod and Sarah Hayes to include them in Eat up, Gemma. Perhaps Eat up, Gemma is the perfect image of that revolutionary and important transformation in children’s literature. 

As it was mentioned before, Eat up, Gemma is an enjoyable and innocent story for children in its surface, but its content and illustrations are probably based on the different values and points of views that were revolutionizing Didacticism after the 70s. So, as far as I am concerned, Sarah Hayes’s story is a powerful and purposeful exemplifier of what was going to come next in relation to children’s literature and its didactic use.