Because Suzanne has already summed up Marah Gubar’s argument very well, I will try to avoid repeating what she has already said, and instead point out some of the key terms and strategies Gubar uses, as well as some of the subtle distinctions she makes between her own argument and Rose’s.
Gubar’s most obvious key term, “artful dodgers,” is doing some important work both in setting up her stance with regard to Jacqueline Rose’s argument in The Case of Peter Pan, and in justifying the necessity of analyzing works for both adults and children.
Gubar uses the term “artful dodgers” to refer to a way in which Golden Age children’s authors often depict children as “artful collaborators,” who while they cannot completely escape adult influence, can escape becoming “passive parrots” (6) of adult narratives about them. This term also articulates Gubar’s stance with relation to Rose perfectly–it allows her to dodge Rose’s implication that works created by so-called childhood cultists like J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll were universally dis-empowering to children, without forcing her into the difficult position of saying that they did not fetishize innocence or desire children.
At times, however, Gubar sets up binary distinctions between her argument and Rose’s that like the boundary between child and adults, don’t always hold–namely, the distinction she makes between precocity and innocence, and between the acculturated child and the child as separate and other. This dichotomy doesn’t work in part because the terms in Rose’s book whose prevalence Gubar attempts to refute (innocence and separateness) already imply some of the ambiguity with which Gubar tries to endow them; in other words, the version of Rose’s argument she attacks is a bit of a straw-man.
For instance, the first half of her chapter on Lewis Carroll is devoted to discussing child photographs, which imply, among other things, that children have potential as amorous partners. For Gubar, this shows a preoccupation with child precocity, and demonstrates that children were often seen as enmeshed in culture, rather than separate from it, and capable of agency–in other words, that the line between child and adult was not solid. However, I am not sure Rose would have denied the existence of any of this evidence; she just would have spun it differently. In this case, for instance, Rose would have seen the belief that children could function as amorous partners as proof of the dangers of interaction across a boundary that Rose seems to be saying should be solid, even if it is not. When Gubar says that authors such as Carroll were interested in “blurring rather than policing” (7) the borders between child and adult, therefore, she is actually in wholehearted agreement with Rose, whose invocation of accounts of child sexual abuse in her preface, show that she sees these instances of inappropriately blurred boundaries between young people and their elders as somehow analogous to adult desires for children in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Another important concept to Gubar is that children’s authors often depicted child-adult “collaboration”–a term she uses to imply a variety of modes of child resistance to adult authority, not all of which imply exact creative reciprocity or a mutually-beneficial relationship. At times, I felt that this term, as opposed to the clear, indeed, sometimes overdetermined term “artful dodgers,” had a capciousness that made it almost meaningless. For instance, collaboration can mean becoming empowered to be an artist instead of a governess in Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Little Lychetts, being talked down to by an editor who publishes your poetry as a joke in The Treasure Seekers, or getting attacked by a pirate who pretends to flatter you in Treasure Island. Part of the reason Gubar uses “collaboration” so loosely is probably because, as she demonstrates in her introduction, the “cult of the child” has been described in so many different, and sometimes conflicting ways, that it is difficult to find a term that differentiates her from all of these models, while still remaining capacious enough not to reinscribe a reductive, dichotomous model of childhood opposed to the one she is taking down, another “totalizing metanarrative” (32).
Her use of the term collaboration is unique and interesting in the chapters on Carroll and Nesbit, when she discusses more specific terms underneath the umbrella of collaboration–mutual aggression and reciprocal exploitation–an amazing feat, considering how much work is out there on both of them. This brings me to a strategy of Gubar’s that I think works really well for her argument–that of surface reading. In the vein of Victorianist Sharon Marcus, Gubar reinterprets what is in plain sight, often attributing the most obvious significance to details other critics have tried to claim were not what they seemed to be. A good example of this is her interpretation of the precocity of Carroll’s portraits, which she says indicate simply that Carrolll saw children as capable of being amorous partners for adults, rather than seeing children as so innocent that they could not be compromised by photographing them in sexual poses. Likewise, in her Treasure Island chapter, she stays entirely on the level of plot, illustrating that Treasure Island has been misinterpreted in the past precisely because it has been over-interpreted.
I think one of the most important things I am taking from the Gubar book is a practical lesson –how to incorporate both children’s and adults’ literature into our arguments, and how to make arguments that position us in more than one sub-discipline. Gubar clearly articulates the unique role children’s literature play in the debate she outlines, arguing that while authors such as Dickens have construed precocity as dangerous, we have to turn to children’s literature to find the “artful dodgers” she is interested in discussing. Gubar thereby posits that we need to take a closer look at classics of children’s literature as well as texts that have been ignored (as Suzanne notes) in order to see that the “cult of the child” based on an uncomplicated fetishization of innocence and otherness was not the only way of thinking about children. Gubar also posits that the literature she examines is really about “how much agency one can have as an acculturated subject,” thereby reframing children’s literature as part of a cross-audience debate about human agency (35). I think Gubar’s book is therefore, a great model of a project that straddles the kind of intradisciplinary lines we talked about last class because her project not only includes both kinds of literature; it needs both kinds of literature in order to work. In fact, its entire premise is that the boundaries which we understood to be in place between children and adults, and therefore, also the boundaries between the two literatures, were not solid at this time. Gubar’s investigation of the formation of a boundary such as that between children’s and adult literatures provides one model for how all of us who attempt to balance more than one field can not only succeed within the institutional structures of English departments, but how we can draw attention to the constructedness of the structures within which we work.
