Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon Is Simple and Soothing

One of the most memorable components of family-friendly TV series The Waltons is the inevitable scene in which the lights go out and various members of the extremely large family call out goodnight to each other. It’s not as flashy as the farewell that Maria and the Von Trapp children prepare for the party guests in The Sound of Music; it’s just very basic, and a way of helping us remember all of those names. Kind of like Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon.

This is a book I’ve seen spoofed many times, most memorably on Animaniacs and The Simpsons. I knew there’s also at least one picture book parody of it as well. It’s easy to poke fun at because there’s really not much to it. This is simply a going-to-bed ritual, assessing one’s surroundings and, instead of counting sheep, drifting off into dreamland by bidding goodnight to all the assembled objects.

The main character, never mentioned by name, is a little bunny in striped pajamas who is tucked into a very cozy-looking bed. Clement Hurd is the illustrator of this book, and he must have really liked bunnies. He was also the illustrator of Brown’s The Runaway Bunny, which was published first, and these could almost be the same bunnies, except that Brown refers to the woman in the room with the youngster as “old,” leading me to suspect that this is his grandmother or perhaps a nanny. Could still be the same child, though. Unlike in Runaway Bunny, there is no mention in the text of the species of the characters, so I can’t help wondering whether Brown knew that this was going to be another bunny book when she started, or if the illustrations took it in an unexpected direction.

There’s not much of a story here. The child reading, or being read to, is meant to identify with the going-to-bed bunny, who tries to point out every object in his room and, lest anyone feel left out, say goodnight to each one. Hence, the story has a very circular feel, since the objects are first listed and then said goodnight to. The list is mostly the same at beginning and end, though broken up more in the goodbyes, so that the painting of three bears in chairs yields “Goodnight bears, goodnight chairs”. There are some exceptions; Little Rabbit does not say goodnight to the telephone, the first item mentioned in the book apart from the room itself, and he does say goodnight to socks and clocks, neither of which is mentioned before. Meanwhile, the final line, “Goodnight noises everywhere,” seems a little out of place, since every other “goodnight” is so visually-oriented.

Of course, there are things in the room that the bunny never mentions at all, since this is a rather fancy nook he has. He could, if he so chose, say goodnight to the rug, to the bookshelf, to the giraffe and elephant, to the fireplace. But then he’d have to find a way to make it rhyme. Children reading along might be inspired to catalog the objects in their own rooms, perhaps even arranging them in a rhyming pattern on paper so that they can undergo a similar ritual at bedtime. Mine might look something like, “Goodnight mirror, goodnight books, goodnight art on silver hooks. Goodnight Charlie, goodnight Pooh, goodnight elves and hobbits, too.” Well, I have a lot of stuff in my room, but you get the idea. Incidentally, I’m adding in commas here because it just feels weird without them, but the only punctuation marks to be found in this book are a dash at the beginning and quotation marks around the word “hush”.

Goodnight Moon is a classic book for the very young, a book from which I suspect most parents are all too eager to graduate. Oddly, I don’t think it’s one my parents ever read to me; maybe even as a two-year-old I craved books with a little more pizzazz. I like Runaway Bunny much better than this book, but I can’t deny it has a certain charm, and who am I to question the enthusiasm of generations of toddlers?