Since Matteus already already hit many high points of the book, I am going to try to focus on the intersections between the three pieces we read–including the review essay, which it looks like no one else is covering.

First, I did a lot of work on lesbian writers in the nineteenth century, particularly the poet and novelist, Amy Levy, for my undergraduate thesis, so I am familiar with the contexts of homosexuality and homosociality within which Eric Tribunella attempts to position Left to Themselves, but am not at all familiar with queer literature for children. Tribunella’s essay was therefore fascinating to me! The review essay “Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children” was also great, because it gave me some ideas for sources I might want to put on my annotated bib. Even though my annotated bib isn’t really about queerness right now, both No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive and Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children sound incredibly helpful for my project, and possibly even illustrative of a subtext or another implication to the project I hadn’t fully acknowledged. I describe my project (on days when I am feeling coherent) as aiming to revise Deborah Nord’s idea of the woman writer as flâneuse, whose writing constituted a “struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become a spectator” (Nord 12). I see Nord’s approach, which is based on close readings of individual autonomously-authored mostly canonical novels, as bound to a logic that sees women’s agency as dependent on their ability to commandeer male privilege—both the privilege that came from writing in the novel form and the privilege that came from existing outside of the urban environment as a masculine spectator. My project would ask what happens when we examine periodicals as a site for working out alternative models of female, urban identity. The archive I want to use for this project is that of girls’ periodicals—particularly more radical, and therefore perhaps shorter-running, girls’ periodicals.

Because of this, I appreciated the focus of both Tribunella’s analysis and that of some of the books reviewed in Michael Cobb’s essay on the adolescent boy as a culturally overdetermined site of meaning. Though it may seem a small part of his overall argument, Tribunella’s assertion that “as part boy and part man, Philip is able to claim or embody simultaneously the familiar boyhood privilege of same-sex romantic friendship and the emergent figure of the adult homosexual” (385) illuminates the secret of this novel’s ability to walk the fine line between homosexuality and homosociality. Because Philip embodies both types simultaneously, he acts similarly to the kind of optical illusion that, when looked at in one way, looks like a decorative table, and when looked at in another way, looks like a face in profile. The fact that the novel can be perceived as a gay novel by the boys for whom it was intended and as a novel about traditional homosociality by the men buying it for their male children—depends on the adolescent, and therefore, liminal status of its protagonist. This is interesting to me because the reason I turned to girls’ periodicals at all was because the figure of the girl was under a lot of political and ideological pressure in the nineteenth century (and today). I thought if one could see models of femininity being developed overtly and self-consciously, it might be in periodicals for girls, where this pressure often came directly to the surface in the form of didactic stories and articles.

Cobb’s review essay, “Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children,” also discusses several books which chronicle the ways in which adults still use the rhetorical figure of “the child” for political and ideological purposes. While in No Future, childhood is characterized as a political tool, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s essay in Curiouser documents how we can conceive of alternative models of “the child,” including those of “sideways growth” (127). I am interested in the idea of “sideways growth” brought forward in Stockton’s essay, and the idea of having “no future” as a group as, in some sense liberatory, because many of the examples of girls’ periodicals I have given (and many of the examples I know of) are very much focused on girls’ futures (whom they will marry, how or whether they will be educated, etc.). I would be interested to see whether or not stories of sideways growth could provide me with a model for looking at female urban identity as it manifested in periodicals, and if so, whether homosexuality or romantic friendship might have played a key role in the formation of such identity. Though the kind of homosociality Tribunella discusses was also a cardinal aspect of girls’ lives (as Sharon Marcus points out in her great book, Between Women) when such bonds were of primary significance to the women involved and maintained throughout life in romantic friendships or informal marriages, women were considered to have done something out of the ordinary (though certainly not as stigmatized as male homosexuality until the end of the century). Therefore, it seems like queer stories or stories with queer subtexts, because they were often understood as stories about the continuation of something (the bonds of romantic friendship or homosexual love) might provide one (or more) models of femininity that could serve as alternatives to that of the flanêuse. Such a model of identity would also be particularly suited to a medium like the periodical in which regardless of the ends of individual stories, growth is always to some extent sideways, additive, always contingent upon the next installment, but also on the ways in which the installment fits in a predictable, but still novel way within each issue, each whole (a cognate in formal terms to the way a marriage or long-term friendship might be narrated, as opposed to a story that ends with “happily ever after”).

Finally, this brings me to Barbie’s Queer Accessories, the book on which I was supposed to have blogged. Carrie first suggested that I read this book about a year ago, when I was working on an essay about the unorthodox way in which Rosamond Vincy (a character from George Eliot’s Middlemarch) interacts with the Keepsake, a beautiful book designed to win women’s hands in marriage, but that, in her hands, was transformed into a tool for manipulating the men in question. Therefore, what I expected was lots of stories where girls did interesting things with Barbie. This is, of course, what I got, and I thoroughly enjoyed it! I love seeing scholars talk about actual children (period!), and I also love seeing scholars discuss instances when actual children resist the scripts they are given. I guess I would have liked to see a bit more methodological rigor, though. I can’t help thinking as I write this post of Racial Innocence, and how much Bernstein’s concept of scriptive things would have given structure to Rand’s argument and a vocabulary with which to discuss the kinds of resistance she was discussing, though I appreciate the difficulties of what she is trying to do. In the words of her own disclaimer of sorts, deciding what constitutes resistance, and for what purposes one would want to classify it as such, is a major challenge (93). One thing I really appreciated about Barbie’s Queer Accessories was the method by which Rand classified her stories, using motifs she saw often enough to believe them themes of the way girls interact with Barbie (102). Just as Mattel’s proliferation of a line of Barbie items creates certain expectations and patterns of play in children (124), Rand’s classification system creates a sort of world of Barbie here, showing us the kind of stories people tell about Barbie. This method works because she herself is the first to say that we should not take her classification system in this way, highlighting in particular, the relative absence of femme stories from her archive (110). There is a certain humility about the way in which classifies the stories using her own entirely fabricated categories. It functions again, almost as a disclaimer, allowing her to acknowledge that from the very beginning, her categories of analysis were entirely dependent on the stories she found, and on her own perspective, through which they were all filtered (allowing her also to highlight aspects of her own identity that were not mirrored in the stories she found). Her self-created categories also put emphasis, as she says on the narratives people told, which again, leads her to make justifiable claims. As opposed to saying that children’s resistance actually means anything, she lends her powers to documenting the different ways that adult women understand their relation to Barbie. My big, big question after reading this chapter, though, is what was her methodology? I could probably read the first chapter or introduction to discover this, but right now, I am just going to think in hypotheticals and use the evidence I have to extrapolate if possible. Rand says at one point, that she observed children playing with Barbies in addition to asking adult women about their memories of Barbies. Certain evidence suggests that her sample was constructed at least partially from people she knows, which suggests it might hold an uncharacteristically high percentage of lesbians and politically left-leaning people, which might lead me to question certain of her assertions—particularly, the idea that most, if not all, Barbie narratives are merely “straight acting” (139). Given the sample she provides in this chapter, I certainly agree with her; I just wonder if her sample was large enough or random enough to say this with any accuracy. Looking forward to discussing the texts at greater length in class!

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.

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.