In this blog post, I will discuss what I see as Gubar’s main argument, contrast it briefly with Rose’s, and then go on to examine the implications that her theorization of kinship between children and adults might have for periodical scholars.

Gubar works to destabilize the binary opposition between the categories of child and adult, arguing that to some extent the two constructs are arbitrary. For instance, she says that “even as it reminds us not to underestimate the capacities of younger people, the kinship model also encourages us not to overestimate the power of older people (454). Though she does admit that we as a society still need the category of the child, Gubar is committed to demonstrating that the categories of adult and child overlap in the development of real children, and in their relationships with adults.

What interests me in particular in Gubar’s article is her discussion of development and her creation of a kinship model to destabilize the hierarchy between adults and children. She writes that “children, like adults, are human beings. It is dehumanizing and potentially disabling to say that a human being has no voice, or no agency” (453). She further describes what it might mean to be human later in the article, describing adults as

always immersed in multiple discourses not of our own making that influence who we are, how we think, what we do and say–and we never grow out of this compromised state…The work of wrangling all these competing discourses and influences–of forging a sense of self…changes as we age, but it never ends. (454)

Gubar thereby suggests that all humans share these characteristics, and defines humanity as a process that continues throughout one’s life, rather than a state one arrives at. Moreover, Gubar’s description of this process as one of “wrangling” discourses to create the self suggests that this process, to use an artistic analogy, is one more similar to mosaic or collage than to writing an allegedly “autonomous” work of art. Gubar’s point here is that the control humans actually have over the formation of their identities, while it is less than what we as adults might believe ourselves to have is still more than we often assume children have. Moreover, the ability children and adults have to form their identities is similar, if not exactly the same.

Gubar’s theory of identity formation builds on the foundation Rose sets up. Far from appearing to disagree with Rose’s argument that adults want to see children as wholly innocent and wholly separate from themselves (in part because of our Freudian desire not to confront the questions children raise about the unity of the adult psyche), Gubar similarly aims to deconstruct “adult claims to autonomy and originality (452). However, she parts ways with Rose in terms of method–in terms of how best to rectify the problem of adult misapprehension about the boundary between themselves and children. While Rose deconstructs this adult perception of children as it is found in literature, aiming at laying bare the means by which the power differential between them is created, Gubar suggests that by ignoring the children reading children’s literature, Rose creates a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that denies them any power they might have had in shaping the literature they read (452).

While Gubar’s use of words like “manifesto” (in her original essay at the Children’s Literature Association Conference),  leave no doubt that she is attempting to frame her essay as a huge intervention in the field, her use of such words is alternately tentative and (intentionally) humorously bold, thereby fending off the objection that she is being overly bold. She also mixes such language with modest, even humorously self-deprecating language, mocking what she calls the “absurdly grand ambition” of her essay (455), and characterizing her theorization about child readers as “outlandish, overambitious, and even dangerous” (454). At the end of her essay, Gubar limits the scope of her argument, and obviates critique even further, by describing her own kinship model as a rubric under which various theories could be said to fall. Gubar then goes on to argue that “they are also meant to remind us, however, that theories are just that: theories, which will probably turn out to be limited, reductive, or just plain wrong” (455). In calling her kinship model a rubric, Gubar distances it from theories that might later turn out to be limited or wrong. Her model is larger in scope, and therefore, aims for less precision than the future theories she imagines her work making possible. Moreover, her admission that theories often turn out to be wrong reduces her liability if her own kinship model is later surpassed by a new theory.

The second reason I am interested in Gubar’s ideas about child development is that some of the same fears about unity have troubled the history of the novel, and led many people to want to separate it completely from its context in and formal connections with periodicals. It is no coincidence that Gubar cites Anna Redcay’s article, “Live to Learn and Learn to Live: The Saint Nicholas League and the Vocation of Childhood” as a scholar doing work on “how children’s texts are received by young people, the creative play and conversations they inspire, how they circulate and get transformed” (452). In nineteenth-century periodicals, the whole created by the sum of its pages had to be coherent, but creating this whole often involved balancing very different genres and authorial personalities, not to mention the demands of a periodical’s audience. Though novelists also have to balance multiple plots, conflicting character arcs, and the demands of audience in their works, novels are often seen as produced by their authors alone, and less attention is given to the commercial and personal networks within which they were produced. Thus, it seems natural that periodicals scholars would be doing pioneering work that attempts to attribute more agency to children. For one, children’s voices are sometimes overt in this venue in the form of letter-box columns in which they wrote letters to periodicals’ editors, and educational essay contests. Even when their voices are not tangible, the acknowledged market-driven nature of periodicals makes the question of audience less confusing than it often is for novels like Peter Pan, for instance. However, as I suggested earlier, I think the dichotomy between novels and periodicals is to some extent, like that between adults and children, arbitrary, and certainly made too much of. Therefore, I think Gubar’s work could both increase the study of materials in which children served as co-creators, like children’s periodicals, and help periodicals scholars to retheorize the influence of periodicals on children’s literature, and perhaps, on the novel in general.

-Elissa Myers