Bernstein’s central argument is that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white childhood was mobilized as a force of innocence that could make divergent political positions appear natural, while black childhood was made to appear durable and incapable of sustaining harm. This naturalization occurs by way of a quality she calls “racial innocence” (4). Bernstein thus cites instances in many visual and performed texts (such as the illustration of the arbor scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the frame story of Uncle Remus) in which a white child’s “innocence” is transferred symbolically to the people or institutions around him/her, furnishing arguments both for slavery and abolition.

Bernstein’s methodology is characterized by a focus on “scriptive things,” (dolls, in particular) which while they “allow(ed) for agency,” also “broadly structur[ed] play” (12). This methodology is particularly apt for her project because her aim is not only to expose the ways in which the kind of innocence typically ascribed to white children constructs and is constructed by racist performances of play and theatre, but to show how African-Americans resisted these scripts. As Bernstein notes, the dearth of information about African-American oral culture and everyday practices during the time of slavery makes it necessary for her to “coax the archive [objects of material culture] into divulging the repertoire [the way in which such objects might have been used]” (13).

This methodology also helps Bernstein get around a methodological problem that is far more general to the field of children’s literature–how to talk about actual children. I think this is easier for Bernstein to do than Gubar because she focuses on the largely self-evident characteristics of “scriptive things,” which by nature can be interacted with in a number of ways, rather than trying to prove that child collaboration with adults existed on a significant scale (as Gubar does). Bernstein uses the sources she draws on (an extensive range of primary sources such as memoirs, periodicals, advertisements, photographs) to provide examples of how individual children used the scriptive objects they were given–not in order to make generalizations about these forms of resistance, but in order to illuminate the contours of the system against which they were reacting. For instance, Bernstein uses Daisy Turner’s reaction to her teacher’s assignment as an example of the long-standing nature of African-American girls’ negative feelings about black dolls. Bernstein does not try to make generalizations about other girls’ resistances from Turner’s obviously exceptional instance; rather, she is interested in the obviousness Turner’s statement implies. As a child, Turner knew that her teacher’s assignment was degrading. By examining this instance, we understand one of Bernstein’s main points–that children were knowledgeable about the scripts of childhood–even if we cannot know hard facts about how many resisted those scripts and how many performed them exactly as written.

The physical characteristics of toys as opposed to verbal texts also helps Bernstein to make her argument. The determinateness of objects like toys, and the directness of the advertising material that often accompanies them, makes explicit how they are “supposed to” be used. This is likely because producers of toys are less concerned to hide their dependence on their child audience; indeed, making it as clear how a child audience would use such an object, makes it clearer in turn, why he or she would enjoy it, thereby increasing sales. Bernstein therefore, does not have to guess about the intentions of these objects “authors,” because they are shamelessly obvious.

Bernstein’s use of primary sources was thrilling for me, because I am becoming interested in authors’ ideas of their audiences–how they conceived of them and interacted with them. In children’s literature, the question of audience has of course been a pervasive one, so this is a fairly obvious question for most of us. In nineteenth-century literature in general, though, I think there has not been enough attention to popular novelists’ ideas of audience, and how these changed as they grew famous and had to rely less on periodical publication to make ends meet. My working hypothesis is that producing work in order to feed a public frenzy for their image and name, rather than fitting their work to the parameters of each individual periodical might have made some authors feel generically confined, which is counter to the popular idea that periodicals themselves made novelists feel confined. I think this is largely because scholars  often forget that nineteenth-century novels were as wound up in the material and economic networks of their day as periodicals were. Bernstein shows this with a force that is astounding. Her discussion of how such presumably literary characters as L. Frank Baum’s Scarecrow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy, were intricately intwined with icons of popular culture like Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann, and the blackface actor, Fred Stone, absolutely blew my mind.

It shows that all these works did not exist as autonomous products of individual authors, but that they actually went into the kind of folkloric sort of soup like J.R.R. Tolkien talks about in his essay on fairy tales, where the individual elements can sometimes be hard to distinguish, and it is not clear which came first.

Bernstein also talks about a lot about how scriptive things complicate the boundaries between people, creating intersubjectivity, and how slavery blurs the boundaries between people and things. In both cases, it is narrative that creates these blurred distinctions. An example of the first kind of blurred boundary is Stowe’s goal of producing “sentimental wounds” (102) in her readers as they experienced the pain of her characters. I am also interested in how narrative attempts to redefine the boundaries of the human, and how these narratives might be linked to authors’ senses of themselves as writers of autonomous or interconnected works.

Nesbit, for instance is a writer of famously intertextual works, frequently referencing periodicals, fairy tales, the work of contemporary writers for children and adults, and even her own work. I agree with Marah Gubar that Nesbit’s intertextuality was, at least in part, a strategy for improving children’s critical reading skills and making them into collaborators. However, I also see this strategy as a means of theorizing a more radical lack of separation between texts, which she then makes into an analogue for the mutual influence existing between (adult) writer and (child) reader. Moreover, she constructs the self as always both child and adult, both writer and reader, and therefore, as radically intersubjective. In Nesbit’s works, she frequently figures this intersubjectivity overtly via magic. In The Enchanted Castle, Nesbit has children, adults, and stone statues all share a moment of transcendence, and in The Story of the Amulet, Rekh-Mara and the scholar physically and psychically merge to become one person. Because issues of the relationship of writers to their audiences, and the boundaries between the two are so crucial to children’s literature, I am hoping that making this a piece of the larger project I am working on will give me some leverage with which to approach the issue in my other chapters.