Mitzi Meyer’s “Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form”

Categorizing children’s literature often creates rifts in the way that literature is viewed, especially within the academic community. The three articles this week all deal with a different version of categorizing children’s literature, from its origins, to genres, to what part of children’s texts can be studied as true literature. Mitzi Meyer’s “Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form” does not trying to categorizing children’s literature, instead, she makes a plea to the academic community for the inclusion of a type of children’s literature into revisionist (similar to the new historical/cultural criticism of literary studies) scholarship.

Normally, revisionists have previously concentrated on “fantasy” texts in children’s literature, but Meyers defends the use of more “historical mimetic tales” (Meyers 56). While her article leaves room for a broader interpretation of what historical mimetic tales might mean, her study seems to focus on women writers and educational tales. Often in the article, these educational tales translate into the overarching genre of didactic literature, especially since the primary text Meyers focuses on is Maria Edgeworth’s “The Purple Jar,” a classic (and more well-known) example of didactic children’s fiction.

“The Purple Jar” provides an ideal case-study for Meyers due to Edgeworth’s notable pedagogical background. Edgeworth’s Practical Educataion, a collaboration with her father, was one of the most well received texts on pedagogy “between Locke and the mid-Victorian period,” a time line of over one hundred and thirty years (53). One of the main points of the Edgeworths educational theory was that education was a lifelong journey, and that the texts being used could be informative and entertaining.   This emphasis on didacticism was well-received during Edgeworth’s time, as Meyers notes through various reviews from the period. This praise only highlights the shift to contemporary critics’ dismissal of didactic literature because “[they] usually assume, it must be intellectually unproblematic and literarily uninteresting, especially if it is rationale, realistic, and domestic.” However, Meyers is swift to point out that fault in this statement: “a strong case can be made for the position that juvenile literature is inevitably and rightly ‘didactic’—that adults do, must, and should teach values to their child audience. But we moderns like our teaching camouflaged.” In this, Meyers claims that even the fantasy literature that revisionist scholars favor is didactic in some way.

While I am not going to go in-depth into Meyer’s justification didactic literatures’ historical mimetic nature, I believe she successfully proves her point through aligning points in “The Purple Jar” to the historical and cultural context of the tale. Through this example, Meyers is able to prove that women writers’ educational tales can be used in revisionist studies. However, I think it is wrong to limit “The Purple Jar,” and Meyers study, just to women’s educational tales. By broadening her argument to all of didactic children’s literature, Meyers would provide a vast number of texts to reference in future studies, without the limitation of women writers. Part of her point is that women wrote the majority of educational texts, but there was didactic literature beyond this small sampling.

She also uses an extremely small sample to defend her argument: only one text. While this is an article, it is very short, and there is still plenty of room to include two or three different works that would have aided Meyers in her argument, further validating a revisionist analysis of women’s educational texts.

As much as I wish she had expanded her own call for inclusion, I do appreciate the structure in which Meyers goes about demonstrating her argument.   While my own area of interest is not primarily aligned with the texts Meyers works with, I appreciate the flow of her argument and possibly even go as far as to suggest it as an example for how people can go about arguing for inclusions of genres/subgenres/ /authors/texts/etcetera into their specific literary canon. For someone actually in her specific field of study, this article would serve as an inspiration to expand past fantasy and didactic and possible include even more categories of children’s literature in revisionist studies.

–Kristi Fleetwood