Little Miss Sunshine: A Biting Satirical Critique of the Dismissal of Mental Illness and its Sufferers

It's been a long time since my last blog post (February 2020!). Fortunately, absolutely nothing has occurred since then that would require my comment.

What has stirred me to action once more is another children's book. My son is now three, and still requires an awful lot of reading to. Amongst the many books on his bookshelf are several Mr Men books, including Little Miss Sunshine. I do not especially care for this book as it appears on the surface (although it must be admitted that it has aged considerably better than Mr. Tickle). However, a deeper and fuller literary analysis, such as that to which I exposed The Elephant and the Bad Baby reveals a considerable subtext and reveals the full strength of Roger Hargreaves' satirical skill.

Little Miss Sunshine: A Biting Satirical Critique of the Dismissal of Mental Illness and its Sufferers

Little Miss Sunshine (Hargreaves, 1981) is an excellent book, replete with a dry, ironic humour that is very easy to miss. Typical of Hargreaves' subtle, sarcastic wit, on the surface it's the straightforward tale of how Little Miss Sunshine helps to cheer up the King of Miseryland. Indeed, some people even seem to take this story at face value. However, in this essay, I will demonstrate that it is in fact a detailed and compassionate study of the way mental illness is dismissed and disregarded, and a cutting critique of the way sufferers are patronised and ignored.

 

ATTENTION, IF YOU HAVE NOT READ LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS BELOW

 

To summarise the plot, we are first introduced to Miseryland, where everyone is miserable all the time. Even the birds and earthworms are miserable. The king of Miseryland is worst of all, sitting on his throne all day long and crying his eyes out.

 

Little Miss Sunshine sees a road sign for Miseryland, and on a whim decides to visit, passing a sign which warns that smiling, laughing, giggling and all other displays of happiness are forbidden by royal decree. She drives on and arrives at the royal castle where she carelessly smiles at a guard and is promptly arrested.

 

She is marched through the castle to the throne room, where she is denounced to the king, who is now even more miserable than before. Little Miss Sunshine asks if he would like to be happy. He replies that he would, but he can’t, because they’re in Miseryland. Little Miss Sunshine drives him back out to the sign, and uses a marker pen to re-write it, making happiness legal and renaming the country Laughter Land. The king (and presumably everyone else) can now be happy, and Little Miss Sunshine goes home.

 

That’s the plot as it is presented, but I believe that Hargreaves’ true intention with this piece was otherwise than might first appear. I would suggest that the true focus of this work, indeed the true protagonist is not, as first appears, Little Miss Sunshine, but the king.

 

When we are first introduced to him, we are told that he sits on his throne all day long, crying. Now one might think that the most important piece of information here is that he is crying. I would contend that the most important thing is that he is on his throne. This is clearly a man struggling with the most severe clinical depression, and yet every single day, he gets out of bed, he gets dressed, he goes out and HE DOES HIS JOB. He might be sitting there with the tears streaming down his face, but he IS sitting there. Anyone who has themselves struggled with depression, or who knows someone who has, will know what a heroic effort this can sometimes be.

 

Then Little Miss Sunshine arrives. She enters Miseryland, and is immediately informed of the laws and customs of the country she has come to. She heads for the seat of government, and in a staggering display of cultural insensitivity immediately breeches these laws, to the shock and upset of the member of the local law enforcement who has come to welcome her. She is rightly arrested, and taken straight to the king to receive justice (displaying the efficiency of the Miserian legal system).

 

She is presented to the king, and her list of crimes recited, to the king’s significant distress. Rather than take the time to try and learn the history of the country, and discover why Miseryland is so miserable, so that she can actually try and help, Little Miss Sunshine pours scorn on the country’s long-held customs. Then she says something that will surely stick in the craw of anyone who has ever suffered from depression. ‘Well, have you just tried being happy?’

 

Of course! Why hadn’t the king thought of that? Why didn’t he just stop being depressed? Genius. Little Miss Sunshine is presented as one of those obnoxious people who thinks that the best way to cure someone of depression is to be gratuitously, pointedly happy at them. I do not know whether Roger Hargreaves ever suffered from depression himself and received this ‘helpful’ advice, but this section is certainly pointed, his ironic wit skewering the grinning would-be helper with rapier precision.

 

Overbearing the king’s objections, Little Miss Sunshine marches him back through his own castle, bundles him into her car and drives back to the sign. Here, without so much as a ‘by your leave’, she vandalises it, rewriting the time-honoured traditions of Miseryland, and even renaming the country entirely. The paternalistic and colonialist overtones of this are clear, Hargreaves imbuing Little Miss Sunshine with an impenetrable certainty that her ways of doing things are inherently and manifestly better than those of the country she has stumbled in to, without even pausing to ask why things might be the way they are in the first place.

 

Rather than have her executed on the spot, the king capitulates (or at least pretends to). He forces a smile, a laugh even, presenting an outwardly happy exterior despite the fact that nothing has been done to actually treat the crippling depression that must surely still be consuming him from within. This at least has the intended effect of making Little Miss Sunshine leave, convinced that she has helped. When she gets home, she brags to Mr Happy that she has wiped Miseryland from the map, having committed cultural genocide and ridden roughshod over the true feelings of the inhabitants without having to put in the effort of actually helping at all.

 

Roger Hargreaves’ dry, sarcastic, needle-sharp critique of the way mental illness is so often dismissed, and its sufferers patronised and infantilised, is just as relevant now as when it was first published. It is a rebuke to those who would dismiss mental illness as (pardon the expression) a figment of the mind, and reading it, and understanding the message concealed within makes me very happy indeed.

The Nature of the Debate

Recently, one of my friends on Facebook shared a picture, showing a copy of the Bible, the Koran and Mr Tickle.  Next to each one respectively, it said ‘Proof that God exists’, ‘Proof that Allah exists’, and ‘Proof that Mr. Tickle exists’.  At the bottom, in large letters was the caption ‘Religious Logic’.

Even ignoring the obvious theological inaccuracy, I took issue with this, and commented on the picture saying “Replace the word ‘Religious’ with ‘Fundamentalist’ and I might agree.  Assuming or implying that fundamentalism and extremism are representative of religion as a whole, or that ‘religion’ is at all homogenous’ is helpful to no-one.”

However, this does indeed seem to be the primary tactic that evangelical atheists (not that the friend in question is one of these) are using.  Another (particularly objectionable) image I’ve seen online, and which I’ve seen quoted elsewhere reads ‘Science flies men to the moon.  Religion flies them into buildings’.  In this case ‘religion’ is equated with hyper-extremist Islam.  In this case not even ‘Fundamentalism flies them into buildings’ would be even slightly accurate.  One may as well say ‘Religion builds homeless shelters.  Science builds gas-chambers’. 

However, it is very important to remember that the opposite is also true, and something like the above may well be floating around the internet somewhere.  Many theists hear the word ‘atheist’ and instantly assume Dawkinsian ranting, ignorance and offensiveness.  I have no doubt that some people hear the word ‘Muslim’ and instantly think ‘Al-Quaeda’.

Increasingly everybody is being persuaded that there are ‘Them’ and there are ‘Us’, and all of Them are at the uttermost extreme end of the Them spectrum.  These are deeply harmful assumptions that make what should be an intelligent and earnest debate into a scornful and dismissive slanging match.

I have been spoiled somewhat by being fortunate enough to have been able to mix with pleasant, deeply intelligent people with a wide spectrum of well thought-out, sincerely held beliefs, and who were capable of discussing these beliefs with others who strongly disagreed with them in a spirit of amiable, intelligent debate.  At university, I mixed with Christians of various denominations, agnostics of every shade, atheists, Buddhists, pagans and occultists.  It was during these discussions that I fully came to grips with exactly what it is that I myself believe, and why.  My beliefs were proofed and tested.  Some were found wanting, and modified or discarded.  Others were refined, tempered and polished.  I hope that I provided the same service for the people that I was discussing with.

I left university expecting to be able to have the same level of discussion about things like religion that I enjoyed previously, and it was something of a shock to discover that not only are many people apparently incapable of holding such discussions, they do not seem to even want to.  They would prefer to pour scorn and vitriol on their opponents, and willingly generalise them as all being like the most extreme and unpleasant aspects of their chosen groups, and completely refuse to acknowledge that any of their beliefs could possibly require modification or re-thinking, on any level at all.

Unhappily, it is also often these extremes that are the most visible and shout the loudest, and which are the most unpleasant to any dissenters, discouraging the more moderate, tolerant people from becoming involved at all.

Thus, rather than each debate being a bridge over a wide chasm, leading to deeper understanding and a mutual respect of the positions held, and an appreciation of a different point of view, each one serves to widen the gap, hurt feelings and make the discussions I enjoyed at university ever less likely, and that saddens me deeply.