In keeping with our seminar’s theme of movements in criticism as swings of a pendulum, we see Marah Gubar framing her project in Artful Dodgers as a counter to the popular critical idea that the victorian period – and victorian children’s literature in particular – created a complete separation between adults and children. The child, in this critical conception, was the primitive, Otherized “emblem of innocence,” and childhood was portrayed as a refuge from the “painful complexities of modern life” (Gubar 4). Gubar does not deny that such a cult of the child, or even of child innocence, existed; rather, she argues that victorian children’s fiction is characterized not by a total allegiance to childhood purity, but by competing – and sometimes clashing – visions of childhood, including the child as innocent, the child as a small adult, the child as a collaborator, the child as a highly literate interlocutor, and the child as an uneasy partner. In fact, for Gubar, children’s literature is the space that offers the “most serious and sustained resistance to the cult of childhood” (9). When authors like Dickens, who write children as victims in most of their adult novels, turn to children’s literature, suddenly their child protagonists turn into clever heroes, challenging the adult world (52).

According to Gubar, many victorian children’s literature authors did not portray children as untouched by adult influence:

“they generally conceive of child characters and child readers as socially saturated beings, profoundly shaped by the culture, manners, and morals of their time, precisely in order to explore the vexed issue of the child’s agency: given their status as dependent, acculturated beings, how much power and autonomy can young people actually have? In addressing this question, Golden Age authors often take a strikingly nuanced position, acknowledging the pervasive and potentially coercive power of adult influence while nevertheless entertaining the possibility that children can be enabled and inspired by their inevitable inheritance” (5).

Indeed, many of the authors Gubar reads, including Frances Burnett, E. Nesbitt, Lewis Caroll and Robert Louis Stevenson, invite their readers to be suspicious of the act of storytelling, to participate in, appropriate, steal and rework stories into creative works of their own, and to distrust adults telling stories to children. These authors’ view of culture, Gubar argues, is not that culture is inherently corrupting towards childhood innocence – she does not see them as advocating a Rousseau-style, book-free education – but that children may be capable of “reshaping” those same stories and cultural values into something of value to them – that they are not doomed to be passive receivers of the text. Nor was this view simply unbridled optimism: Lewis Caroll, in Alice in Wonderland, proved aware that asking children to participate in the endeavor of story-creation could itself be as oppressive and punitive as didactic storytelling.

One of the great strengths of Gubar’s argument is the breadth of her primary materials – both literary and historical. She uses both canonical and noncanonical children’s literature to advance her case about the complexity of victorian children’s literature. The noncanonical texts she reads, many of which were written by women like Hesba Stratton, Juliana Ewing and Dinah Craik, serve to counter popular critical narratives about the development of children’s literature in the victorian period. Gubar does not just rely on these lesser-known authors: she also reads canonical texts alongside their works, rereading Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland and The Little Princess (among others) in order to find their disruptive, subversive potential. By reading these many texts alongside one another, Gubar persuaded me that she had found an actual trend in victorian fiction – not just that she had found a few striking instances in canonical texts. Gubar’s second major strength in pushing back against the idea that victorian children’s fiction was obsessed with childhood innocence is her use of historical material – specifically of the original reception of the children’s literature she reads. As Gubar points out, many works by authors critics now identify as part of the “cult of the child” were received by critics as being too difficult for children to read, too erotic, too literate, and too allusive: these were not texts, in other words, that the authors’ contemporaries necessarily saw as upholding a division between children and adults, or as reifying childhood innocence (22). Gubar’s use of original reception is one possible answer to our question last class about how critics can responsible portray and understand the way literature was understood in the past (although original reception is probably easier to come by for the victorian period than for the medieval period!)

Since Gubar argues that victorian children’s authors encourage their readers to appropriate parts of their work, I’m going to do the same to Gubar and latch onto one specific moment in her argument. I was struck by Gubar’s fleeting reference to Felicia Hemans’ poem “Casabianca,” given our last few readings’ discussions of pedagological texts (137). In “Casabianca,” a young boy is trapped on a burning ship and will not leave until he receives his father’s permission; unknown to him, his father is already dead and the boy perishes. “Casabianca” is a highly appropriate intertext for Gubar’s work, because it’s traditionally been read by critics as a conservative, patriotic poem that celebrates a child’s innocent devotion. In recent years, however, scholars have started to read the piece as a critique of parental and national authority (most of my understanding of “Casabianca” comes from Catherine Robson’s article “Standing on the Burning Deck,” which I will upload to the dropbox in case anyone is interested). So in theory, “Casabianca” seems like a poetic version of the texts Gubar discusses – one that may teach children to question adult and parental authority. However, what complicates this reception of “Casabianca” is the fact that it was used as a recitation text – a text young victorian schoolchildren were meant to memorize and recite. They were meant to “parrot” the text. I bring the history of “Casabianca” up because I wonder how the existence of recitation texts and the victorian school system in general impacts Gubar’s argument. Recitation texts like “Casabianca”, to me, seem like a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they create the highly-literate child (including the E. Nesbit character who referenced Hemans) who can then shape and appropriate cultural texts to their own ends, but on the other hand, they also suggest that the texts Gubar examines can be appropriated by the education system and turned into works that children are just meant to parrot (and indeed, we know that some of them, like Peter Pan and Treasure Island, were turned into educational texts). Moreover, is the victorian school system necessary to creating the “highly literate child” who can enjoy some of these more allusive works? What kinds of children are then excluded from participation in these subversive texts? Since Gubar doesn’t touch on victorian education often, I’m wondering if a consideration of education would extend and build on her argument?