Author Archives: Danny Dupont

Method: Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy

Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy in Children’s Literature does a fantastic job of making imperative arguments affecting a variety of disciplines including History, Literature, and Childhood Studies. I appreciate this text because it persists with its agenda, and the sheer amount of textual evidence only helps to magnify her persistence. They range from the early 19th century to the mid 20th century American textual depictions of Black people. Although I only had to read the introduction and Chapter 1 for this assignment, she makes great use of quite a few texts by various writers, particularly Lydia Maria Child in Chapter 1. Moreover, the introduction is, quite frankly, awesome and well-organized. I tend to judge a book by its introduction, and MacCann’s did not disappoint. She starts out her intro by making her focus plainly outlined and compelling, stating:

Literary, political, biographical, and institutional history[ies] are combined in these pages as a way to reveal the scope of the white supremacist ideology. The antislavery cause accelerated the momentum toward war, but then vanished in the regressive milieu of peace—in the romanticized plantation stories, ambivalent protest novels, and prejudiced adventure fiction. (xiii)

This part of her claim (the other part goes on to say similar claims about Postbellum texts) is compelling because I hear this type of white supremacist glamorization everyday. That special group of White people who are fierce in their work as an self-proclaimed ally . . . until someone tells them (or they tell themselves) that they can pat themselves on the back because I have Affirmative Action, a plethora of available “Black people scholarships” just saturating the scholarship market, and a ridiculous number of slave narrative films, all of which supposedly show “racism’s all in the past,” just sitting there, not doing much of anything, chilling on a stoop, drinking a Bud Light, getting up every now and then to tell me that there is something historically substandard about Black people. For one thing, Black identity was definitely “presented as of less value than European American identity. Black people were unequivocally “expected to accept a restricted status and role in the American civil community” (xiii). And you know what? We still are.

Also, she clearly separates her introduction into 7 parts labeled: “social/political focus;” “institutional “gatekeepers”;” “The Aesthetic Focus;” “Young People and Audience Response Theory;” “”White Supremacy” and Related Terms;” “”White Supremacy” and Intellectual History;” and “Applying and Eclectic Approach” (xiv, xviii, xx, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxx). All of these titles are relatively self-explanatory, but I may talk about the labels in class depending on how the class goes because they’re helpful for understanding her arguments throughout her book.

Chapter 1’s argument focuses on the “[a]mbivalent [a]bolitionism” of various Antebellum anti-slavery narratives that, according to MacCann, do push for the abolition of slavery, but aren’t consistent in the “potency” of their agendas/messages. She solidifies her claim by zooming in on the texts’ mixed signals, which often reveal a contradictory binary set up consisting of:

Magnanimous White slave owner/substandard Black slave versus The racial equality the narratives claim to be rooting for.

Ultimately, her close reading of certain texts in this chapter is spot on, particularly her use of Lydia Marie Child’s anti-slavery narratives. Her examination of Child’s works reveals stories that ranged from “vehement exhortations, to antiprejudice parables, to incidental remarks tacked on to narratives,” all of which are ambiguous in their dogmatic forcefulness (4). MacCann notes that Child’s “Jumbo and Zairee is ambiguous in its contradictions; Child notes that the slaves on the narrative’s plantation “were not abused,” but the narrative “is full of instances of abuse” (5). MacCann asserts, “Even though Child emphasizes that the principle of slavery is wrong, she depicts Mr. Harris, the slave owner, as a paragon of virtue” (6). And what’s great is that MacCann just keeps the criticism coming. ^_^

It’s an argument I love because it reminds me to remain vigilant in my own criticism, especially because half of the primary texts I study are as dated as Child’s narratives. Assumptions about abolitionists and Antebellum anti-slavery texts can gloss over hidden prejudices in the same way that children are marginalized by adjectives like “innocent,” “pure,” and inexperienced.” In terms of a criticism of this book, I would say that MacCann is a good close reader, but an even better implicit critic of people and texts who could be (and have been) overpraised. While reading her work, I could see the constant vigilance in her maintenance of her argument throughout her book. She seems to actively place her own vehement criticism against the marginalization of Black people conducted by sometimes-halfhearted White abolitionists movements. I don’t know about you, but I think her writing shows she’s pretty appalled.

MacCann keeps her argumentative fervor going throughout; I never question her objective, and I picture someone speaking while reading MacCann’s work, someone who comes off as invested. Could MacCann have also been more inclusive? Yeah. But I think that when a scholar choses to limit their scope, it means a number of things, one of which being that they don’t want to water down their argument, give readers too many perspectives to read at once, or take more time to “close the deal.” It sort of reminded me of Gubar’s Artful Dodgers. She seemed to try quite a few readings of various “texts;” as a result, she loses me during certain chapters (Carroll and Stevenson) and captivates me during others (the Nesbit). Gubar sort of closes the deal for me by slightly overstretching her arguments at times. MacCann closes the deal by not doing too much, only enough for the space she has given herself.

Method: Katie Trumpner’s Ten City Scenes: Commerce, Utopia, and the Birth of the Picture Book

Katie Trumpner’s “Ten City Scenes: Commerce, Utopia, and the Birth of the Picture Book” is great for a few reasons, but I’m going to stick to explaining a few nuts and bolts before going into my critique of it.

As one of ten book chapters from Richard Maxwell’s The Victorian Illustrated Book, Trumpner’s piece adds a wonderful amount of historical information detailing the rise of the “picture book.” Trumpner’s main argument does not seem to be that picture books existed in the Victorian period. What she does seem to push forward is the significance of the palpable rise in importance of the “picture book” in mid-seventeenth century and Victorian England. Trumpner explicates the “small size[d]” illustrations of Romantic era looking-glass books, moral dialogues, natural histories, and juvenile guidebooks that could and did “offer intense visual and sensory training,” but were also made up of “arbitrary text-picture juxtapositions” (333). Trumpner does slight mid-seventeenth and eighteenth century picture books, but does credit Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-94) and Jane Taylor’s City Scenes (1801, 1805) as pivotal works connected to the growth and potent ability of late Victorian picture books (334).

As far as 19th century urban picture books go, Trumpner claims that they were “transitional objects in several senses” because they “grant[ed] considerable autonomy” to both picture and words and “evoke a multisensory world” (334).

What really struck me was an equation that Trumpner uses to make a claim about the formation of a picture book.

She states, “Bookstall +Print Shop + Pickpocket = Picture Book” (335)

The parts of the equation show the importance of the print culture, the working-class citizens of England, and booksellers’ shops in the formation of the picture book during Romantic and Victorian England. Trumpner uses various nineteenth-century texts and shows that the depiction of London shops in children’s books was concurrently used as a didactic device displaying to children the “desire for consumption divorced from need” and prompting middle class parents to teach “shop-struck children to resist” the attraction of shops (336).

Trumpner moves from the nineteenth century childrens books to the early twentieth century children’s books and asserts the urban child’s budding “autonomous agency and curiosity” (366). Giving various examples such as Compton Mackenzie’s Kensington Rhymes, A.A. Milene’s When We Were Very Young, Trumpner makes a great case for the continuing influence of “earlier forms of city life [that] continue to hold a powerful, even magical allure. . .” (374).

I think that Trumpner gives great evidence for her argument of the rise of the picture book as a chronological and anachronistic relationship between children, parents, booksellers, printers, and illustrators. As for the stakes of such a book chapter, her exploration seems to be embedded in her ending sentiment that “children exist between the mundane, greedy, mercantile world, and that another, parallel utopian world that should be there instead” (379). Trumpner seems to want people to understand just how picture books come into being and what that production does for people and to them. I think that she cares for actual children and the figure of the child in the same refreshing breath, since her project deals with both the fictional and lived lives of 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th England’s children. But rather than posit a desire for a utopian world that seems to be all to fictional, maybe scholars from various fields can continue to do more interdisciplinary work and make positive changes for the existing world, the world to come, and the children in it.

Primary Post: Karin E. Westman’s “Beyond Periodization” and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays

Since Jennifer did a great job pinpointing the overall argument and bits of missing elaboration of Westman’s “Beyond Periodization,” I’m going to say a bit about the Westman article to set up my primary textual analysis and shift the focus of this post to the primary text that I’ve chosen, and how I feel it highlights some of Westman’s points and adds some food for thought.

For the past 3 years, I’ve read and written about Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays for various reasons, but I never thought about how this novel relates so well to Westman’s point about texts that speak to the way that children’s literature such as TBSD has the ability to do two things based on the idea of the “generic performance . . . of children’s literature” (466).

Westman asserts:

  1. It can shed the shackles of the chronological organization of history and the types of “periodization” Westman dislikes and consequently break free from stricter chronological notions of genre. In the same way that people can have multiple occupational titles (see Wikipedia) and have a name that doesn’t necessarily call attention to any of the occupational titles, children’s literature is “everywhere and nowhere” because it can act or “perform” as multiple genres that exist at the same time across periods, but the term children’s literature evokes questions about its own origins and defining traits separate from other genres (465).
  2. Because TBSD has been deemed children’s literature, it can simultaneously and seamlessly “perform” as multiple genres, specifically a schoolboy novel, a semi autobiography, and a bildungsroman while having an identity that is not as academically clear as the aforementioned genres nor necessarily invested in the other three generic identities. Westman’s questions about children’s literature (When did children’s literature begin? What text is worthy of an award? Is children’s literature its own genre or only the intersection of others? For whom is children’s literature written?) show that the criteria for all of these answers can vary in ways that have nothing to do with the genres I’ve chosen to categorize TBSD

Westman states that “children’s literature—more than any other literatures—eludes conventions of periodization” made sense to me at a glance (466). But I think that maybe Westman wanted to say (as I think she somewhat elaborates upon after the statement on 466) that children’s literature has the ability to elude certain conventions of types of periodization, in that children’s literature’s ability to perform generically gives it the ability to resonate with certain genres or elude them. In this way, periodization is not this all-encompassing sinister monster in an academic horror film that attempts to swallow children’s literature whole. Not all periodization is terrible, and there are other types of periodization that are useful.

Period-based criticism of a novel can be represented by intervals of growth (bildungsroman, autobiography, schoolboy narratives) rather than significant ‘history book’ dates colored by the events that occur within the date’s timeframes. TBSD is such a text that does not try to elude certain generic periodizations such as the bildungsroman, semi-autobiography, and schoolboy novel; it embraces them without losing its title as children’s literature. Whether I know what distinctly makes it children’s literature apropos to the questions posed by Westman is something I’ll discuss near the end of this post.

Hughes writes in the Preface of TBSD that he “fearlessly” infused the novel with “Dr. Arnold’s teaching and example,” which “creat[ed] “moral thoughtfulness” in every boy whom he came into personal contact” (xlii). Tom Brown’s Dr. Arnold, the schoolmaster of Rugby in the novel and the representation of Hughes’s schoolmaster, is similarly pivotal to Tom’s growth as a student and all-around young man. So when Tom is on vacation from Oxford at the end of the novel, a letter that tells of Dr. Arnold’s death is “the first great wrench of his life, the first gap which the angel Death ha[s] made in his circle[,]” a “dull sense of loss that could never be made up to him” (370, 374). While this could be read as the pain of loss, Hughes ends the novel by telling readers, “Let us not be hard on [Tom]. . . Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls who must win their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes” (376).

Whether Dr. Arnold’s 1842 death had the same effect on Hughes isn’t clear, but what’s important to note here is Hughes’s desire to portray some of his own beliefs, particularly a schoolboy’s hero-worship of a man as a path to God. And because of his own didactic desires, his novel is meant to speak to all schoolboys during his life and afterwards, in the hope that they will also learn from Dr. Arnold’s and Hughes’s teachings and maintain their ideologies. While it is easy to label TBSD as a bildungsroman or schoolboy novel because of the explicit growth of Tom from boy to adult, and the fact that most of the novel takes place during Tom’s time at Rugby, the novel’s semi-autobiographical status shows a bit more of the religious didacticism in Hughes’s novel. But even with TBSD performing as three genres, these simultaneous generic performances alone are not what definitively make it children’s literature.

I believe Westman’s claim that premier generic performance is a prerequisite for children’s literature because the unmatched ability to put on many generic faces is key to children’s literature’s elusiveness and encompassing ability. But I also think that children’s literature’s ability stems from power dynamics between children and adults, print culture, and a marginalizing need for shifting definitions of literature and childhood, all of which defined and still define children’s literature.

In short, TBSD is children’s literature because it is both an amalgamation of a didactic semi-autobiography/bildungsroman/schoolboy novel, but its ability to do so comes from using such genres for hegemonic agendas. We should “champion the generic performance and remediation of children’s literature,” but we should constantly question whether the performances are used to maintain oppressive ideologies or liberating ones (467). On top of the questions Westman poses in her article, we should ask: Who dictates the goals of children’s literature? Did children’s literature become a tool at the same time of its induction? And what role does children’s literature have in influencing dictums for other dogmatic ideological institutions?