Chapter 1’s discussion of the expectations adolescent women face intrigues me, but I question a couple of aspects of it. On page 11, she writes,

this version of adolescent womanhood has cultivated an expectation that young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships without facing the challenges that confront young people whose race, class, and/or sexuality sets them outside of this narrow definition. Largely free from the oppression, rejection, and other trials that mark many young people’s experiences, the adolescent women presented in popular culture generally concern themselves with the friendships and romances that are understood to be the foundations of social acceptance and markers of maturation into adulthood.

This is an important point; race, poverty, and sexualities other than the most heteronormative are minimized in many of the most popular YA novels. Clearly, there are exceptions, but I question Day’s claim that representations of adolescent women in popular culture have cultivated an expectation that “young women may focus almost exclusively on the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.” The fact that TV teenagers never do homework or study for the SATs would seem to contribute to this expectation also. When I was a teenager, the teachers, cultural messages, and social climate I experienced did not encourage adolescent women to cultivate interpersonal relationships—with social consciousness or otherwise. All that mattered was hard work, good grades, and performance, and emotion and intimacy were frowned upon as distractions. Books and TV shows offered refuge largely as a means of vicariously experiencing life as an adolescent girl without such pressures and discouragements.

This wasn’t just an authoritarian message; what I perceived to be mainstream social culture among adolescents also discouraged disclosure of emotions and intimacy. I’m curious if others had the same experience. After all, I came of age in the late 90s when grunge and macho “alternative” rock dominated the airwaves and unisex combat boots were all the rage. Compared to the present glittery era of Katy Perry and Twilight fandom, the 90s didn’t offer the adolescent woman (or anyone) much mainstream cultural material to validate or redeem her emotions or even longings for childish prettiness unless she could cast those emotions in terms of a particular flavor of angst. But has that indeed changed in the present era? My students seem willing to open up and tell me personal details about themselves in their writing; they’ll admit all the sappy romantic books and movies they like. Pop culture seems a thousand times more encouraging of intimate relationships and acceptance of one’s own tender emotions without embarrassment than it did in my day. Yet teenagers still seem to suffer the bad rap of being surly and difficult, and some pieces I’ve read recently about the concept of “underlife” in the classroom have suggested that fear of vulnerability and rejection continues to manifest as a kind of obligatory, cynical culture of coolness and stoicism among adolescents. I’m interested if anyone has any thoughts on this; a certain conception of adolescence seems fundamental to Day’s argument and I wonder how well it holds up otherwise.

I was slightly puzzled by Chapter 5. Day discusses several novels in diary form, observing each fictional diarist’s simultaneous insistence on total privacy and awareness (and construction) of a reader other than herself. While I enjoyed the chapter, I’m not sure I agree with Day’s conclusions (that may be too strong a word). Day contends that the seeming contradiction between a diarist’s longing for privacy and awareness of a reader is resolved by the narrative intimacy made possible by “Lamarque’s ‘logical gap’ between fictional narrator and real reader” (149). The diarist risks too much rejection in disclosing her true thoughts to the people in her life and/or culture discourages her from making such disclosures, but the distance between her and the real reader’s ontological realities insulates her from any rejection or disruption precipitated by the disclosure. As the diarist matures and develops her ability to make honest disclosures to those around her, she no longer needs to write to the reader in the other dimension.*

While I agree with Day’s analysis in general, she seems to deemphasize the fact that diary novels often feature a distinct narrator and implied author. Mia Thermopolis doesn’t describe New York City tourist destinations to convey that she, Mia, understands her diary is really quite public; she describes them because Meg Cabot is the author of Mia’s diary and Cabot can weave text written from Mia’s private perspective together with audience-pleasing detail. To the extent the reader doubts that the real Mia would include such information without expectation of an audience, she can overlook the lapse because the detail is, indeed, pleasing. There are often moments in epistolary and diary novels when the (implied) author winks at the reader through the narrator’s confessions; no young adult reader really believes that the diary novel she picks up is a real person’s diary written in secret. Readers can simultaneously observe certain transparencies and suspend disbelief. In the first chapter, Day presents Seymour Chatman’s 1978 diagram of the intermediary positions between real author and real reader, and I would have liked to see her return to these terms in this discussion, if only to tell us why they don’t apply here.

*Did Day’s book (especially Chapter 6) repeatedly remind anyone else of Bastian and Atreyu communicating and even moving between their respective ontological realities in The Neverending Story? I’m sure plenty has been written on this, but it never occurred to me to interpret The Neverending Story as a metaphor for fan fiction and now it seems clear. Fantasia nearly ceases to be, and Bastian saves it by essentially entering its ontological reality; he continues to write the story, not as the original author, but from the perspective of original narratee, reimagining his engagement with the text.

Abate persuaded me that Raising Your Kids Right is an important book, and for the most part I really enjoyed and learned from Abate’s methodology. This book is a fun read. Knowing nothing about it, I wasn’t sure what Abate’s politics would be, and it’s to her credit that I didn’t figure it out until halfway into the introduction.

That said, I question moments in the book when Abate seems to choose black-and-white characterizations of issues instead of engaging with their nuances in depth—which is exactly her critique of The Book of Virtues and The Truax. I loved her description, for example, of The Book of Virtues as offering “concrete and unquestioned moral certainties, which were arguably never really certain in the past and are surely no longer steadfast amid the complications, complexities, and upheavals of the postmodern world” and her use of Nussbaum’s quote that the book “‘prefers an easy unity of feeling to the hard puzzles of moral reflection’” (42). This is deft phrasing, and pages 35-45 are full of especially juicy nuggets like these. So I was a little disappointed when she occasionally dips into similar modes of thinking with different ideologies; sometimes it feels like she’s just fighting partisan conservative politics with partisan liberal politics. While conversations like that are necessary, I’d like to think there’s a better way (at least from the liberal point of view, since we have truth on our side, just kidding/not kidding/just kidding).

What do we want to teach our children and what don’t we want to teach them? That seems like a fair place to start, right? We want to teach children to stick up for themselves and each other, but not to be bullies; to have high self-esteem, but not be egomaniacs; to be kind, but not be pushovers; to be independent thinkers, but only if they express those independent thoughts in approved ways (e.g., show independence by running for office, not by doing drugs); to be adventurous, but not reckless (Be bold! Try new things! But don’t drink the fabric softener or stick a fork in the electrical outlet); to be creative and artistically free, but not flaky or exploitative or parasitic; to be responsible and take care of business, but not deadened corporate drones with crushed souls. We want children to listen to parents and teachers, and frankly, more or less do what they say (don’t play with doody; don’t bully the shy kid; do your homework), but we also want them to question authority and embrace their own agencies. We want them to be obedient in all the right ways for their own safety and positive development, but we don’t want them to feel helpless or insignificant, and we never want to think of ourselves as teaching them blind obedience.

These are all extremely fine lines, and I think it’s easy to criticize any piece of children’s literature for not getting the balance quite right—especially when children’s lit is also vulnerable to the valid critique of being excessively didactic. Abate calls for children’s lit to incorporate more subtlety, but at what point do extensive pains to tune a book’s message to a precise political key render it even more overtly didactic? We talked a bit about libraries and curation in class last week, and I wonder if the best solution is simply a multiplicity of texts. That’s easier said than done, of course. While I don’t intend to universalize my experience, I grew up in a house with a lot of books, including crusty old traditionalist tomes from the 50s that belonged to my mom and aunts when they were kids (hoarding isn’t all bad). As a kid, I found some of those books exotic and quaint and others stupid and lame, but I didn’t swallow any of their messages whole, and I could sniff them out as dated propaganda. Of course, no one insisted I read them and I was fortunate to have a lot of alternatives. In reading Abate’s discussion of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” I thought of Leo Leoni’s Frederick, a direct counterpoint to “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” Frederick the mouse appears to do nothing while the rest of the mice labor all summer, and then in deep winter when the mice are cold and their food stores are empty, Frederick brings them warmth and comfort with the poetry he brooded over all summer, and he saves the day. Would I have understood or appreciated Frederick if I never knew the story of “The Ant and the Grasshopper?” That’s hard to say, but I know I read Frederick thousands of times, and “The Ant and the Grasshopper” only once or twice. If kids can identify and avoid preachy messages in literature, maybe we don’t have to be too scared they’re being brainwashed in any direction.

With respect to the issue of safety, I question Abate’s characterization of Tootle the Train (1945) and Scuffy the Tugboat (1946) as conservative because they teach the respective lessons of staying on the rails and staying in the bathtub. Are these lessons motivated by politics or the desire to teach the child not to wander off in a crowd, stick her fingers in a light socket, or get into a stranger’s vehicle? As is the case with adults, some children are naturally cautious, but others are not, and parents of an incautious child might want to gently discourage her from exploring that abandoned mine shaft, and maybe to plant seeds of caution hoping that, 15 years later, she’ll make really sure that MDMA pill isn’t rat poison before she swallows it. Now, if Tootle and Scuffy were the only pieces of literature parents offered their children on how to balance boldness with caution, it would be problematic indeed. But consider how even The Polar Express suggests that kids should step beyond their “comfort zones,” take risks, and seize opportunity and adventure in defiance of parental authority. Think about the encouragement of bold adventure in many other pieces of children’s literature (including Harry Potter; recall the article we discussed in class last week about safety hazards at Hogwarts). I’ll plant my flag here and say that Tootle and Scuffy are reasonably gentle counterpoints to grand adventure stories for reminding young children that sometimes caution is a good idea—not to make them neurotic or to cultivate blind obedience, but to survive. Sure, explore the world fearlessly like Dora the Explorer, but…maybe don’t explore climbing that rusty old electrical tower, or explore grand adventures like these.

Abate acknowledges this problem at the end of the chapter on The Book of Virtues; quoting Jean Porter, she recognizes that “One person’s courage is another person’s rashness, and one person’s prudence is another person’s small-minded caution” (51). But Abate puts this statement at the end of the chapter and smooshes it between a reiteration of Bennett’s hypocrisy and a discussion of status politics, both of which make it feel like an afterthought. How would her argument change if she put this issue in the foreground?

It is also worth noting that current parenting practices’ (probably necessary) use of constant surveillance wasn’t the norm in the 1940s. Perhaps there’s less need for Tootle or Scuffy these days because kids don’t have as many opportunities for adventure and don’t make as many risk-benefit choices as kids in the 1940s who played in the street and the woods without adult supervision. But this also raises the question: should we really code safety-motivated messages to stay on the rails as politically conservative? Doesn’t that somehow imply that politically liberal parents are negligent about children’s safety? Is it more liberal or conservative to teach a child to be cautious in an adult world and then give him or her more freedom, versus teaching children to be adventurous but never giving them any opportunity? Trying to code these things politically makes my head spin, and I wonder what purpose such coding really serves.

Shifting gears to The Truax, I would have preferred that Abate discredit The Truax’s environmental claims with sources other than environmental groups. While I think the Wilderness Society is a great organization and I trust them, conservatives would argue that it’s no more neutral than is the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association is. How can we make these arguments without appearing to fight partisan politics with partisan politics? I also would have preferred a lot more detail about why The Truax’s claims are wrong, but I also recognize Abate doesn’t set out to convince us that logging is bad (that would require a much longer book). Even so, the fact that she just tosses off a few quotes as evidence of The Truax’s deception tells me that she intends to preach exclusively to the choir. On one level, that makes practical sense, on another, I’m a little uncomfortable being told to reject propaganda because its information is “not reliable” on the basis of rather superficial evidence, particularly since the crux of The Truax’s argument is that environmentalists are ill-informed and brainwashed by propaganda. Clearly, both sides of the logging debate feel the other side is plainly misinformed. But it seems to me that The Truax sends a useful message about how to advocate for the environment without projecting Guardbark’s presumption, impatience, and disinterest in evidence, and that a fairly superficial treatment of the evidence makes it so easy for conservatives to say, “See, you’re just like Guardbark.” I don’t want to make it easy for them to say that; my affinity for the cause motivates my critique. So the question becomes, am I asking too much of Abate, or might there be a better way?

Notwithstanding my disagreement with Galbraith’s reading of The Polar Express, I was fascinated by the rest of her article. Here are a few responses.

I admire and agree with Galbraith’s interest not in “an apocryphal ‘child reader’ but on different ‘children’ in the literary transaction who can be approached as individual beings who have left a verbal and artistic trail that can be studied: individual child characters, the unique childhood of the author, and the unique childhood of the critic” (200). I feel rather strongly that children are just as diverse in temperament and interests as adults. Is the child innocent or not-so-innocent, whatever that means? It depends on the child.

Gratefully accepting Galbraith’s license to reflect on my own childhood, I vividly recall my disdain for the philistine tastes and preferences of other children my age; I also remember frequently thinking that many of my classmates were jerks, prone to bizarre, obnoxious behavior that my mother explained as “negative attention-getting.” Nothing made me more indignant than an adult’s assumption that I shared the primitive tastes of others my age, or that I failed to notice and feel appalled at other children’s antisocial behavior. I guess I was an uptight kid. I cringed at adults’ presumptuous statements of “kids like this” and “kids think that,” statements that seemed to explicitly deny me individuality and subjectivity (though I didn’t know the word for it then). I felt that adults that insisted on such essentializing dogmas did so because they were philistines themselves as children and had somehow managed to reach adulthood without noticing anything beyond their hopelessly limited perspectives. Or perhaps they did know better, but nevertheless insisted that “kids are all the same” for the sake of convenience and the blissful intellectual laziness of categorical, black-and-white thinking.

My indignance must have abated when I was finally old enough to escape feeling personally implicated by such statements because I haven’t thought about these outrages for a long time. Until recently, in fact, I had tended to lump young people together in that noisy, messy, tedious category of kiddies—squalling, Raffi-listening, Barney-loving monsters—without allowing for outliers and for the diversity of temperament of which I was so keenly aware as a young person myself. It’s so easy to view children this way.

But while my own assumptions might have been intellectually lazy indeed, I may have judged the essentializing parents and teachers too harshly in light of the deeply-ingrained social orders that render authentically individualized treatment of children much easier said than done. Hopefully, sometime in the future we will enjoy a sufficiently safe society that children will not have to be incessantly guarded, supervised, and surveilled, and therefore constantly lumped together to facilitate such policing, but as it is, child-rearing resources are limited and efficiency is premium. Children who all like the same things and think the same way are much more efficiently managed, like an obedient hive, than a collective of distinct, individual young people. I say this not to defend conventional western child-rearing practices, but to direct the blame for them towards the socioeconomic structures that impede more individualized, emancipatory practices.

In other words, I agree with Galbraith, and I believe (yes, the bell rings for me!) in the potential of “adults transforming themselves and their own practices” (Galbraith’s emphasis) instead of trying “to mold children through training them” (188). But even though we and Galbraith are talking about methodological approaches to children’s literature rather than clinical, “real-world” applications of psychological methods, I feel compelled to point out the extraordinary impediments to attachment parenting in western culture. I’ve only recently noticed this phenomenon, and I’m so dismayed by it, I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment. Parents cannot take their young children to work (they really, really can’t, no matter what their jobs are), and—in the vast majority of cases—work they must, every day and all day. On-site child-care is a nonexistent unless you are one of the lucky few employed at an uber-progressive start-up or university, and even then, chances are very slim that the option will be available. The result is a widespread, daily routine of unpreventable, extended attachment breaks for the vast majority of young children. After reading Galbraith’s article and a bit of Alice Miller’s work, I find this state of affairs really alarming.

Social structures also frustrate parental attempts of “transforming themselves and their own practices” in even more subtle, insidious ways. I had terrible insomnia throughout my preschool to school-aged years, and I vividly recall the nightly despair of lying awake in the dark for hours, trying to remember movies I’d watched scene by scene and playing bizarre games in my head because, like all children, I wasn’t allowed to just turn the light on and read like normal adults do. Bedtime and child resistance to it is so ingrained and normalized that the bitter, one-note comedy of Go the Fuck to Sleep has made it a beloved bestseller. Go the Fuck to Sleep reinforces the hegemony of bedtime instead of questioning it, but it also offers sympathy for the problem of alternatives to enforced sleep habits, particularly when those parents must also “transform themselves and their own practices” to satisfy the demands of contemporary capitalist western society. In a better world, parents could decide to open their rag-and-bottle shops late if they’ve been up all night with the baby, but in this world, parents must clock into their jobs at an exact time without exception and must perform those jobs with such robotic consistency that the rest of their lives, including their children’s sleeping habits, must be arranged to enable parents’ capacities to satisfy the expectations of corporate employers (who are, in turn, legally obligated to arrange their companies to maximize shareholder profits, not employee well-being). In other words, the parents have to sleep so they can function well as employees, and therefore insomniac children must lie awake in the dark wondering why their individual, biological needs are so painfully ill-matched to their inescapable circumstances.

I have great parents, but childhood is hell even under the best of circumstances. Bad things—things we would find utterly intolerable and unfairly punitive as adults—are constantly happening to children to the point that this “badness” (to take a word from a certain special French child) can be understood as a fixed expectation in a child’s daily life. Frustration, disappointment, and a veritable carnival of irritations and harassments are constant in the lives of children. Children’s desires are routinely denied for many good reasons, but children also must constantly cope with conflicts between their natural urges and whatever they are being forced to do. I will venture to say that adults have a lot of little habits that contribute to their well-being which are forbidden to children. If we really need the cookie, and are going to lose our minds if we don’t eat the cookie, as adults, we can just eat the cookie and get on with our lives; kids can’t, and therefore lose their minds. If we are in some uncomfortable situation where we truly cannot stand the way people around us smell and look at us, we can usually make our excuses and flee, but children are trapped. If we’re hot, we, as adults, can take our jackets off, but babies cannot, and have no way to articulate their discomfort, and no guarantee that their needs would be met even if they could express them. My own memories of such childhood frustrations awaken my empathy in ways that otherwise stay dormant when I feel tormented by a screaming baby on the subway, for instance.

I grant that my current memory of these childhood experiences are probably contaminated by innumerable presentist distortions, but they might also be perfectly accurate, and I’m grateful to Galbraith for acknowledging the revelatory potential of considering one’s own first-person, subjective experience of childhood. If I automatically dismissed these kinds of personal reflections as distorted to the point of zero value, I would shut down consideration of a view of childhood with emancipatory potential. We can easily critique humanist disregard for categorical differences as its own form of oppression in its denial of real alterity, but attempts to identify with the Other’s first-person, subjective experience—empathy across categorical boundaries—can expedite movements in the direction of emancipation. Insisting that emancipation is only possible when the oppressed can speak for themselves dooms babies and young children, animals, and those without language to their present conditions. Insisting on the unknowable alterity of the very young and the universal fallibility of childhood memories entrenches the status quo and shuts down inquisitive, open dialogue between children and adults. I love Galbraith’s characterization of indirect approaches to formulating childhood experience, including episodic memory and revisiting one’s own subject position in childhood, as “fingers pointing to the moon,” but not “the moon itself.” That seems like a really good start.

I think I’ll stop here, but to summarize: I’m quite persuaded by Galbraith’s support of Miller and deMause (among others) and their psychohistorical analysis of the causative link between normalized early childhood parenting practices and adult atrocities. I also agree with the contention that children’s literature presents “SELVES [why does she capitalize this?] in predicaments from epistemological perspectives unavailable to ordinary interaction, but resonant with our own vulnerability as embodied creatures” and therefore that children’s literary criticism is a valuable indirect means of accessing childhood experience, particularly if the individualities of all involved (readers, authors, critics, characters) are taken into account (193). Legitimizing the attempt to access one’s own childhood experience seems to offer more emancipatory potential than the “’brashly accepted helplessness’” of foreclosing the possible accessibility of childhood memories. At the very least, validating such reflection offers more chance for empathy for the children’s suffering in the yoke of normalized child-rearing practices, and little risk of making things worse considering the inherently dependent relationship of children on adults. But actually preventing Hitlers and Bartsches from continuing to sprout up requires attention to the structural impediments to emancipatory practices, and these arise from western capitalist society’s deeply rooted ideas about professionalism and its belief in the need to sequester young children and parenting modes altogether from the world of professional work. Fortunately, such considerations are also a job for literary scholars, among (many) others.

I’m going to be a little sneaky here and double-post because I have so much to say about Galbraith’s article. This post is about her reading of The Polar Express; later on I’ll post some thoughts about her broader discussion of emancipatory child studies (which blew my mind).

I think Galbraith’s one misstep in this fabulous article is her reading of The Polar Express. I agree that the image of masses of identically-clothed elves gathered to greet Santa does resemble a Nazi rally, but it also resembles a rock concert, a royal wedding, and an Obama campaign rally. Galbraith might object that the fact that the elves are all dressed in one color resonates with uniformed Nazis and distinguishes them from these other kinds of democratic assemblies, but consider the popularity of matching event t-shirts distributed at fundraisers, or the wearing of pink at the Avon breast cancer walk. Or Santacon, for that matter. These communities aren’t perfect and suffer plenty of valid critique, but it seems like a stretch to accuse them—and the elves—of being Nazi-esque for assembling en monochromatic masse.

My second quibble with Galbraith is that Chris Van Allsburg was born in Michigan in 1949, so he certainly wasn’t attending any Nazi jubilees during his childhood or adolescence. But what about his family? Even if we humor Galbraith and hypothesize that Van Allsburg’s parents were German immigrants who raised him on a steady diet of their fond childhood memories of Nazi Youth rallies, what are the odds that these vicarious memories inspired Van Allsburg when he had direct access to the many powerful mass assemblies of 1960s America? Why can’t we point out Santa’s resonance with rock stars and civil rights leaders instead of Hitler? Moreover, would we say that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the performers at Woodstock were fŭher-like because huge crowds gathered to listen to and venerate them?

Galbraith claims that Polar Express resonates with “the imagery of a Nazi Youth rally” in part because “a lonely and yearning child travels by magical night train through a Northern European folktale/operatic landscape.” Doesn’t that also describe Harry Potter aboard the Hogwarts Express, complete with uniforms and the intention to see a Great Man, Dumbledore (and the hope to curry favor with him)? Yet Vauldemort, not Dumbledore, is the charismatic leader with genocidal interests. The Nazis simply cannot have the monopoly on magic train imagery. Magic trains are conducive to a liminal, otherworldly atmosphere; my personal favorite magic train might be the one Chihiro rides in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which also offers a very clear counterpoint to the argument that trains inherently serve as emblems of industrialization and its decay. There is something emancipatory about the notion of train travel, especially for a child; it has something to do with the fixedness of the stations and schedules, and comforting anonymity of getting on and off without one’s presence affecting the train’s movements or agendas. It also feels, subjectively, very safe and free of traffic and the possibility of collisions; there is none of the free-floating anxiety or unpredictability of air or motor travel. But perhaps above all there is something thrilling about an endless network of train tracks that can go far beyond the horizon of the unknown via a very familiar, safe-feeling, and comforting mode of transit. It would be a shame to write off magic trains as Nazi images.

I also do not accept that travelling through the “Northern European folktale/operatic landscape” must resonate with Nazi imagery. The train climbs “a mountain so high it seemed it would scrape the moon” and crosses a “polar desert of ice.” While that does indeed sound like the sort of fairy tale landscape that the Nazis coopted for their own propaganda, I’m reminded of Percy Shelley’s anxiety about the vulnerability of poetic images to perversion, and his injunction to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of retiring these images permanently for such contaminating associations, we should reclaim and rehabilitate them, perhaps as images of the Romantic sublime, for example. Whenever a particular aesthetic becomes firmly associated with a movement, the aesthetic and the movement risk damage to the other, and sometimes for no good reason. For example, until recent efforts to rehabilitate the aesthetics of the environmental movement, “going green” was so firmly associated with hippie aesthetics, people could hardly recycle without worrying their neighbors would see them as tie-dye wearing, unwashed stoners. On the flip side, the negative associations of so many kinds of aesthetics have left us with the whitewashed minimalism of modern design for the last sixty or seventy years, as though retaining the more ornamental aesthetics of the past would somehow perpetuate the social problems of earlier eras as well.

Next, there is the matter of Polar Express’s reference to the factories at the North Pole, which could be construed as glorification of industry, another Nazi red flag. But the factories also serve a greater, less political purpose as bridges between the impossible logistics of the highly figurative Santa Claus fantasy and the more literal fantasy of Santa’s functioning in accordance with the laws of physics. Obviously, even if Santa had the vastest army of elves and unlimited access to the most advanced technology, he still couldn’t distribute toys to all the boys and girls (leaving aside, for the moment, the also-obvious fact that the majority of children are not Santa-believers) in accordance with their personal wishes and surveillance intel as to naughtiness or niceness; on this, I believe, we can all agree. The industrialized version of the fantasy is still a fantasy; it’s just a different kind of fantasy—one that can perhaps temporarily stave off an older child’s skepticism about the logistics of a pre-industrial North Pole, but which also begins to introduce some of the problematic social realities that lie beneath the fantasy without ramming them down the child’s throat. The book doesn’t develop this much, but the inordinately creepy film adaptation of Polar Express portrays the North Pole’s toy factories as sinister and dangerous places where one clumsy slip could cost a child his life. Isn’t this a gentle but firm introduction to the reality that most toys are produced in sinister, dangerous third-world factories by oppressed workers? The elves aren’t Nazis so much as quasi-enslaved factory workers. Moreover, the children arriving on the Polar Express aren’t new recruits bound to join the ranks of the elves; the children are mere tourists on a temporary visit to the North Pole. The elves, on the other hand, are Santa’s permanent laborers; nothing suggests their ability to board the train back to civilization or the availability of any means of crossing the “polar desert” in which they are stranded in their labors. In the film adaptation, elves speak to the children in a particularly ominous way that suggests significant resentment against these privileged beneficiaries of their labor. It’s a far cry from a heavy-handed Marxist message, but still, the film and even the book plant the seeds of the ideas that toys are not made by happy elves in cozy pre-industrial workshops.

One last point about Galbraith and Polar Express: Galbraith presumably objects as anti-emancipatory to the narrative of a lonely child “chosen out of a crowd for a special gift from a powerful and charismatic adult,” and I agree with this to an extent. But the gift and its presentation are merely rewards for the story’s precipitating action: the boy’s choice to get on the train. The story is telling us that sometimes opportunities and adventures come along in life and yield their rewards only to those who actively choose to grab them. For the young, such opportunities often appear via those who are older and more financially, socially, or professionally established in the world of adults. The book (and the film) take care to emphasize the boy’s agency; the conductor tells him he doesn’t have to board the train. (Of course, if the train conductor turned out to be a molester luring the boy into his vehicle with promises of Santa Claus, we would have a very different story.) Perhaps that’s the other reason why the mode of transit must be a train, which always remains an open, public space and thus precludes the privacy required by contemporary predators (and yet another reason why the Nazis cannot have train imagery). But the point is that even if the reward is bestowed by a “great man,” the principle choice is still the boy’s. There is also some emancipatory potential in the fact that the opportunity does not arrive through any mainstream or normative channels; again, it’s a magic train, and the conductor is not an authority figure from the child’s life. The boy ventures outside of the familiar, normative, highly regulated environment in which he dwells, which strikes me as a grab at freedom.

Apologies for the late post, everyone. I’m very fond of Peter Pan, especially the 1911 novel version of Peter Pan and Wendy. An Omnibus review, quoted by Rose, of the 1982 RSC theatrical production states that “‘Peter Pan goes straight to your centre . . . to something about which you are defenceless’” (114). I feel this way about Peter Pan and Wendy. The novel goes straight to some soft underbelly that has to do with life, death, transcendence, liminality, and the secrets of the universe beyond the vault of the sky. Naturally, I wanted to get to the bottom of all that in this blog post.

First, down to business. In the interest of brevity, a few things that stand out to me from the readings are (i) Gubar’s “kinship model” of childhood, with which I agree; (ii) Perry Nodelman’s somewhat conservative review of The Case of Peter Pan, with which I partially agree (minus his Freudian and sexual readings); and (iii) Chapter 5 of The Case of Peter Pan, “Peter Pan, Language and the State,” which diverges from the book’s thrust but nonetheless offers a fascinating history of language in British schools that I had never encountered before.

Enough of business; back to soft underbellies. Rose and children aside, I love stories about long-lost, primitive truths that transcend the social and political present and cause the veil of mundane reality to shimmer. I read such stories reparatively, and I am not terribly interested in whether children or adults were Barrie’s primary audience, because Peter Pan and Wendy’s audience is me. In my forthcoming work on whimsy, I argue that works of whimsy communicate with a self-selecting audience without defining or insisting on the categorical nature of that audience. You either like it or you don’t; you either relate to an unapologetically idiosyncratic expression and the inexpressible, ineffable glob of ideas it signifies, or you stand there with your head cocked grasping for a Freudian explanation. I first read Peter Pan and Wendy as an adult, but every time I read it, I feel personally addressed by the narrator’s confidential tone and gleeful indifference to dissent. I was puzzled by Rose’s discussion of Barrie’s reluctance to convert the play into a novel because I think the narrative voice is so powerful; I can’t figure out where she was going with that, although it unsettles me.

Here are a few raw allegorical interpretations of Peter Pan (yes, I am going somewhere with this): Peter represents (i) childhood mortality (he’s like an airborne disease that blows into the nursery and takes/kills all the children one night); (ii) mortality in general, (iii) anything addictive but unhealthy and detrimental to progressing along a normalized bourgeois path (thumb-sucking, heroin, infatuation, etc.); (iv) irresistible, charismatic, unattainable objects of infatuation who perhaps tend towards the dangerous end of the sociopathic spectrum; and (v) refusal of a particularly beige script of conformance, monotony, sacrifice, aging, and death that constitutes “growing up” in the modern industrialized west. These are wildly different interpretations, and yet they all work. Peter is both good and bad; the Neverland is both good and bad. It’s wonderful to fly, but terrible to be cold, hungry, sleepy, or forgotten while flying. Peter is enchanting, but he’s also out of his mind and won’t fulfill your needs. Make believe is fun, but too much can get tedious or eclipse memories of relationships to which we assign meaning when not under make-believe’s influence, like getting lost among the lotus-eaters.

I offer this list because these matters pertain to young, medium, and old people alike, and because there is so much going on that a reading focused on sexuality or the adult-child relationship seems somewhat arbitrary. Balancing responsibility and desire, choosing objects to which we assign meaning, a longing to aestheticize our own mortality and make it somehow okay, feeling drawn to romantic things and people that aren’t sustainable in the long run without great sacrifice—these are the unresolved and unresolvable challenges of life in all stages. In the end, we just choose; the Darlings and the Lost Boys choose London and Peter chooses the Neverland. Even falling out of the pram as an infant is represented as a conscious and perfectly valid choice, not to be judged. All simply live (or die) with the consequences and the universe is essentially indifferent.

So how does this kind of absurd existentialism reach that soft underbelly and conjure up those lost secrets beyond the vault of the sky? Peter Pan validates our longing for transcendence amidst these unresolvable matters, and it renders the phenomenon of unresolvability its own source of wonder and transcendence instead of comedy and horror (a la Beckett). Peter’s absurd world offers a colorful, imaginative, aesthetic option, and even if we choose London in the end, traces and memories of the experience linger with us. The Neverland is also a resolution to—a reparation for?—the sense of loss of something precious and the longing to find it again, or at least to find some evidence that this lost pearl is “real” beyond the individual imagination, and therefore, though lost and forgotten, it will one day find us again. This kind of longing isn’t unique to adulthood and it need not idealize the child. I embrace Gubar’s “kinship model” of childhood in part because I remember vividly my own fascination with stories about long-lost, primitive truths when I was a child. What could be more compelling at any age than the idea that we glimpsed these as we came into being—and will therefore come to know them again someday?

I think the Oedipal complex and many of Freud’s ideas are twaddle, but I’m mildly obsessed with Freud’s description of the “oceanic feeling” in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” so I have to bring it up. Though Freud says that he, himself, has never experienced this “oceanic feeling,” he describes it as “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole,” and the sense that “we cannot fall out of this world.” He speculates that this oceanic feeling “may” [Freud’s emphasis] be a surviving trace of the infant that does not yet distinguish his ego from the external world. I am less interested in the origins of this oceanic feeling (early childhood for Freud and cultural myth for Jung, as Rose points out), as I am in Peter Pan’s ability to conjure it up. The novel’s acknowledgment of feelings of loss and longing for recovery/resurrection does something to conjure up that indissoluble bond beyond the self, unto itself; we can fall out of a pram or out of the sky, but we cannot fall out of the world. The infant who died of smallpox continues to be in the world as though Neverland is an afterlife without gods. Or, maybe Freud really was right, and the lost pearl is just the newborn infant’s inability to differentiate the ego from the outside world, and the Neverland is just that state of being.

Or… maybe I’ve just wandered off into Neverland with this post.