Author Archives: Sarah Hildebrand

Method: Ulanowicz’s Second-Generation Memory

In Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature, Anastasia Ulanowicz presents a compelling analysis of the theme and process of memory as demonstrated by several primary texts and numerous theoretical underpinnings. Her introduction sets up her working definition of “second-generation memory,” as well as situates her ideas within the field of memory studies, paying particular attention to the language of her label compared to other theorists who favor terms such as Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” (7).

For Ulanowicz, second-generation memory “is a form of collective memory that involves an individual’s conscious incorporation of her elders’ memories of a traumatic past within her own mnemonic repertoire” (4). A large component of this type of memory is how it becomes framed “by a profound self-awareness” (4). It isn’t a passive reception of memories, but an active integration of the past into one’s present life – a critical awareness of how the memories of past generations can affect one’s own interpretation of self. Ulanowicz presents Children’s Literature as a particularly rich field for this type of memory-study, noting: “It is especially important to consider how second-generation-themed children’s books imagine and construct their audiences because such texts often aim not only to represent such memory but to produce it as well. These books are often the first sources representing historical trauma that young people encounter; moreover, the images and stories these texts depict are potentially powerful enough to remain entrenched in readers’ memories and to shape their historical and ethical perspectives” (22). Children’s Literature texts have the ability to both document past memories, as well as shape new ones. And while Ulanowicz may present her child-readers as impressionable here – being molded by the memories they acquire – she is careful to also offer them agency by exploring the numerous ways they may choose to integrate these memories into their lives, from being agents of radical social change to using them to reflect on more personal problems.

In the following chapters, Ulanowicz offers insightful close readings of her primary texts in order to elaborate and expand her theoretical concepts. She uses The Giver to explore the “ethical dimension” of second-generation memory, whereby “such memory incorporates obligation to and responsibility for others” (16). She also uses this text to grapple with the process of second-generation memory acquisition. Based on an examination of the relationship between Jonas and the Giver, Ulanowicz claims that “second-generation memory develops within the context of physical and psychological intimacy” (42). While this is not always limited to familial relationships – such as in the case of Zlata’s Diary where the protagonist’s second-generation memory is mediated by the cultural artifact of Anne Frank’s own diary – there is a recurring idea of some form of “kinship” (91) that takes place between givers and receivers of memory.

One place where I wish Ulanowicz had gone further in her chapter on The Giver was her brief mentioning of the Giver’s daughter who “committed suicide after inheriting only a few sorrowful memories” (54). This offhand reference to a rather poignant plot point would seem to open up interesting questions about the parameters necessary for successful transference of second-generation memory. His daughter’s suicide seems to beg for analysis, especially as Ulanowicz posits that the Giver increasingly takes on the father-role for Jonas. Although we may assume the Giver and his daughter had the “the trust, intimacy, and affection that make possible the transfer of one generation’s memory to the next” (45), it was still unsuccessful. What is the difference between Jonas and the Giver’s daughter in terms of their ability to assume the role of memory-bearer? While Ulanowicz notes earlier in the chapter that the position of the second-generation memory bearer is not that of the “exceptional” individual, but instead is available to anyone who is willing and ready to critically engage with their surroundings, the daughter’s suicide perhaps serves as a warning or reminder that past trauma can be equally jarring even in the present moment, even when experienced through storytelling as opposed to direct witnessing.

One of the strengths of Ulanowicz’s work is how it allows for a plurality of meaning by looking at texts that treat second-generation memory quite differently. She explicitly refers to works that she knows go against the grain, or lead to a more complex definition of her theme, perhaps beating some of her critics to the punch. However, while I appreciate this move, I also believe her arguments are strongest when they stayed tied to explicit, as opposed to implicit, interpretations of those texts. For example, in her final chapter, she argues that in The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, “The reader is prompted, in other words, to recognize the vulnerability embodied by Petit and his impromptu audience – and in turn, to acknowledge the much more radical vulnerability felt by the U.S. at the moment of the September 11th attacks” (178). And while she does make a case for this type of reading, referring to graphic connections between the text’s images and photographs from the actual event, she also admits: “Of course, it may be readily argued that the political implications of Gerstein’s text will be missed by his targeted audience: after all, the intended readers of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers are presumably children with little to no memory of the tragic event which the book subtly commemorates, let alone the still earlier (inter)national conflicts his text implies. Indeed, one could hardly argue that most adults…would immediately grasp the correspondences implicit within Gerstein’s text. And yet, it is important to recognize that such correspondences are still there, as it were, for the taking. Their recognition, however, ultimately depends upon a mode of perception that is associative rather than strictly rational – a mode of perception that, as I have argued in the preceding chapters, is inherent in the most naive, and least mediated, forms of second-generation memory” (183). Ulanowicz attempts to justify her non-traditional readings; yet, her final sentence here reads a bit ambiguously. While I don’t disagree that an associative reading can have value, I think her admission that the overwhelming majority of readers would not interpret the text this way may undermine the strength of her argument.

Method: Capshaw – “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Lit”

In “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation between Fields,” Katharine Capshaw calls attention to the deficit of children’s literature about/by people of color in relation to U.S. demographics. She reads ethnic studies onto children’s literature, and then attempts to explain why children’s literature might be particularly fruitful for furthering ethnic studies. Capshaw emphasizes the importance of producing more scholarship on ethnic writers so that it “can filter down into our classrooms to feed our students and their students” (238), helping to shape a more inclusive society.

Coincidentally, in discussing the purpose of her keynote address, Capshaw notes: “While my focus here is the United States, I hope to launch a conversation with colleagues who are experts on representations of race and racism as an interdependent dynamic in Canada, Australia, in the United Kingdom, Europe, the Caribbean, West Africa, and other contexts” (240). The order of this list, as well as the specificity with which she does (or doesn’t) name locations, serves to privilege Caucasian scholars, thereby reinscribing the very issue she wishes to draw attention to and dismantle. While Canada and the U.K. come early on the list and are named explicitly, places that would be home to larger proportions of “ethnic” writers are tacked on at the end, and referred to by much larger geographical regions (the Caribbean, West Africa) rather than individual country. Her colleagues from the U.K. are actually double-counted as she references both the U.K. and Europe, hinting at larger institutional biases.

Capshaw begins her speech by attempting to trace why race has become so difficult to talk about in U.S. scholarship, beginning with the Civil Rights Movement. After an initial influx of ethnic literature in the 1970s, production slowed and its place in academia became increasingly fraught: “With the commodification of ethnic texts, we find a deepened interest in what is authentic about writing, a turn to the sociological with the expectation of usefulness for the white reader within an institution… and representationality offering the ‘typical’ story framed within the limited narrative of a syllabus” (242). These works became reappropriated for white readership, and so were/are expected to fit into a certain narrative of American values and rhetoric. I appreciate Capshaw’s attention here to the politics of drafting syllabi, and the pitfalls of selecting works of ethnic literature that become representative of entire ethnicities in ways that are not always accurate or productive. She will bring up this issue again, explaining: “The ‘right story’ of an ethnic culture is something that we all still struggle with when constructing our syllabi, full well knowing that our pedagogy extends into the way the elementary and secondary classrooms work to produce citizens. In our own work and teaching, we need to watch for how we pose the supposed ‘truth’ of an ethnic community’s story through books” (244). Again she emphasizes the trickle-down nature of scholarship/pedagogy, and the tensions present in course-design as we strive to construct classes that satisfy multiple curriculum requirements without watering down content. Given such limited space, how do we tell the “‘right story’ of an ethnic culture,’ or of any minority community for that matter?

Capshaw goes on to note some vulnerabilities or limitations that children’s literature may have in attempting to incorporate ethnic studies, most interestingly its “attraction to the colorblind” (246) whereby works attempt to posit themselves as positioned in a “post-racial” (247) society despite all evidence to the contrary. I appreciate her reminder here that “We can’t be afraid to name racism as racism” (247), and I would extend this by saying that white educators can’t be afraid to discuss racism in general, even if they cannot identify with all of their students’ experiences. (This is a conversation we had in my own classroom when a particularly insightful student asked how I felt as a white educator, speaking to an entirely of-color class about racism).

Capshaw then goes on to examine the advantages children’s literature might have in hosting ethnic studies. However, I’m unsure how many of these advantages are really specific to children’s lit, as they often seem to categorize many, if not all, subfields of English. Her initial formulations of these three advantages are incredibly general: “We can see” (249); “We can speak” (250); “We can dream” (251). And even once she articulates these ideas more explicitly, there is not much about them that seems particular to children’s lit. For example, she mentions how the field is “aware of our situatedness and the connection of our work to actual people outside the academy” (249). But I’d argue that most every subfield is concerned with some sort of wider reaching politics that exceed the boundaries of academia. Nor is children’s literature the only field that is “fundamentally interdisciplinary” (250). And surely it’s also not the only place where new pasts and presents are dreamt. Her claim that “there is something special about children’s literature generically in terms of opening new pathways. Our writers are worldmakers in a way that other genres cannot achieve” (252) seems a bit glossing and unsubstantiated. What about Science Fiction? Or even just Fiction more generally? Isn’t every text an example of world-making? So while I agree that ethnic literature needs to become more of a priority, and that children’s literature is as good as any place to start, I somewhat disagree with her rationale as to why it might be better than anywhere else.

Primary Post: Applying Gubar to What Maisie Knew

In her preface to Artful Dodgers, Marah Gubar concedes that her argument concerning the cult of the child is currently incomplete, and that a fuller understanding would necessitate an expansion of her body of primary sources to include (amongst others) “literary texts aimed at adults” (x). One such text she briefly mentions within Artful Dodgers is Henry James’ What Maisie Knew, which traces the development of a young girl as she is repeatedly handed off into the care of a series of irresponsible adults. This blog post will take a deeper look into What Maisie Knew to test Gubar’s arguments in this expanded arena.

Gubar pulls What Maisie Knew into Artful Dodgers in order to support her claim that: “The Victorian age was marked by a new interest in the child’s perspective and voice” (39). While What Maisie Knew is written from the perspective of an omniscient (adult) narrator, most of what readers receive is filtered through the lens of young Maisie herself, presenting readers with an “adult” translation of a child’s internal monologue. While written for adults, What Maisie Knew is indeed child-focused, and takes up questions of both child-agency and precocity. The title itself alludes to the text’s theme of knowledge acquisition and the blurred lines between knowing and not-knowing, which are often caught up in the novel’s adult-child relationships.

One of Gubar’s central arguments is that Victorian literature: “…represented children as capable of reshaping stories, conceiving of them as artful collaborators in the hope that – while a complete escape from adult influence is impossible – young people might dodge the fate of functioning as passive parrots” (8). Her idea of collaboration (which I agree with Elissa is incredibly capacious) I think largely serves to suggest that Victorian literature represents a blurring of boundaries between children and adults, which helps purport a two-way exchange of knowledge, as well as a breaking down of the assumed “innocence” of childhood which would preclude children from being analytical of adult influences.

So, does What Maisie Knew uphold or refute these claims? What are adult readers supposed to learn about childhood and the relationship between child and adult? And are children viewed as innocent or as artful dodgers?

At the start of the text, Maisie perhaps functions less as an “artful dodger” than as a “passive parrot.” Caught up in the ugly divorce of her parents, she is initially stripped of agency, imagined as “” (16), whose job was to literally parrot back the message of one parent to the other. She does not interpret or translate the messages, but simply repeats, fully under the influence of both adults and not yet questioning their motives. However, her mimicry quickly evolves and dissipates. As Gubar suggests of Victorian children, Maisie indeed comes to be associated with precocity: “It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood , but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before” (9). After repeatedly being put in the position of shuttling back and forth bitter messages between adults – messages which often enraged their receivers – Maisie comes to learn she has another option, namely “concealment . She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.  Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen”  (16). Ironically, Maisie’s precociousness causes her to be dubbed an idiot by the unknowing adults around her; yet, she takes pride in the label because it symbolizes the success of her subversive tactics. Although her agency here takes shape as passivity in the form of silence, it is actively employed and demonstrates that she actually has learned to be an artful dodger of adult influence, refusing to serve as pawn. Such a behavioral shift would support Gubar’s argument of children as artful dodgers, as well as help to breakdown the idea of child as innocent, since Maisie is clearly aware of the adult influence around her, and understands way more about the communication patterns (and love affairs) of adults, as well as her own role in them, than the adults give her credit for.

However, it is also clear that this form of agency is problematic, and that, although Maisie learns how to disengage from adult influences, this also causes her to suffer from forms of oppression (i.e. – silence). Additionally, her precocity is not absolute. James writes Maisie as alternating between precocity and unknowingness. She is still often tricked and manipulated by adults, particularly one of her many caretakers, Sir Claude, who guilts her by expressing how much he and others have sacrificed for her well-being. In response, Maisie: “coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire it should be remarked how little was lost on her. ‘Oh I know! ’” (165). Since the adults in her life have actually made very little sacrifice for her (instead using her as a cover for their many extramarital or out-of-wedlock affairs) her “Oh I know” is actually a statement of innocence and unknowing as she fails to comprehend the manipulation. “Oh I know” becomes a constant refrain of Maisie’s throughout the novel as she feigns intelligence or unquestioningly agrees with adults in order to receive validation.

James succeeds in painting an image of a child who is deeply immersed in the world of adults, and of an incredibly blurred boundary between child and adult. While Sir Claude, similarly to Maisie’s parents, also labels the girl “the perfection of a dunce! ” (200), since this is a novel for adults, and we as readers are acutely aware of Maisie’s intelligence, this perhaps shows that one of the goals of the novel itself is to encourage adult readers to reevaluate our often false and reductive understandings of children. And despite this insult of Sir Claude’s, at other points in the novel, he makes drastically different observations of their dialogue, remarking: “I’m talking to you in the most extraordinary way—I’m always talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain’t I? One would think you were about sixty…” (431). And the narrator comments elsewhere that Sir Claude “was liable in talking with her to take the tone of her being also a man of the world”(102). Thus, Maisie is imagined, even by the other adults in the novel, as a hybrid being – one which crosses boundaries of both age and gender. This forces adult readers to also reexamine the relationships between child and adult, as well as where children lie on the innocent to precocious spectrum.

James’ narrator, in fact, declares that if Maisie can be considered innocent at all, it is an innocence “saturated with knowledge” (233), which Gubar would perhaps agree with as a more true generalization of Victorian children than innocence (or maybe even precocious) alone. Additionally, the narrator sets up for a reciprocal (perhaps in Gubar’s terms – collaborative) relationship between adult and child, whereby Maisie comes to influence and edify the adults around her, even if unwittingly: “I am not sure that Maisie had not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs. Beale’s” (361). Thus What Maisie Knew further breaks down the adult-child binary by proving how permeable those borders truly are. Not only can adults influence children, but vice versa.

Overall, an examination of What Maisie Knew supports Gubar’s claim regarding the Victorian era’s interest in, and complex relation to, childhood. Far from being the ideal of innocence, Maisie instead comes to represent one of the “complex, highly socialized individuals” (181) Gubar claims exemplify the definition of a Victorian child. And the novel importantly opens up questions regarding child-adult relationships, causing adult readers to act as artful dodgers themselves by reconsidering their own definitions of children and how those children do or do not differ from themselves.

Method Analysis: Westman’s “Beyond Periodization”

In “Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History,” Karin E. Westman builds off the work of Eric Hayot’s “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time.” In his essay, Hayot had argued against chronocentrism, calling for a reform of humanities programs to be more self-critical about their pedagogies, curriculums, and hiring practices by investigating the theories of literary history these decisions are based on. Hayot’s claim is that literary periodization leads to the privileging of certain (groupings of) texts, along with their associated geographies. It also leads texts to be dominantly and inaccurately defined by their “period,” which can in turn lead to false assumptions about both the texts and, reflexively, their larger historical contexts.

Westman picks up on Hayot’s remark that the field of children’s literature might serve as a model for a concept of literary history that provides an alternative to those based on periodization. Her own essay goes on to explain how children’s literature’s attention to genre might help literary scholars gain awareness of the pitfalls of periodization and how we might differently conceive of literary history.

Westman begins by tracking the term “genre” over time as its definition becomes more expansive and amorphous. She ultimately settles on “genre” as wrapped up in connections to performativity and audience: “For, like a performance, a text’s generic classification is site specific, contingent upon an audience’s expectations and response as much as on the text’s form and content. The audiences for a text—audiences past, present, and future—establish, maintain, or change generic expectations, which emerge from a negotiation between convention and innovation” (465).

Due to children’s literature’s “intergeneric potential” (465) – stemming from its multiple audiences and ability to evade typical academic or cultural categorization – Westman argues that it becomes these questions of genre that “not only organize responses to individual texts but also determine questions for the field” (465). However, it seems a bit ironic that the first question she lists here is “When did children’s literature begin?” (465), which forces questions of genre to immediately regress back to chronocentrism, bringing into question the true potential for a generic organization to subvert the norm.

And while she does point to specific examples of how a genre-based treatment of literature might differ from that of periodization in practice, such as the Norton anthology of children’s literature, which organizes works into “nineteen genres, including “Alphabets,” “Chapbooks,” “Primers and Readers,” “Fairy Tales,” “Animal Fables,” “Classical Myths,” “Legends,” “Religion: Judeo-Christian Stories,” “Fantasy,” “Science Fiction,” “Picture Books,” “Comics,” “Verse,” “Plays,” “Books of Instruction,” “Life Writing,” “Adventure Stories,” “School Stories,” and “Domestic Fiction” (“466), she does not explain what the benefit of this type of categorization might be. How exactly does organizing by genre instead of period alter our interpretation of literary works or open up new avenues of inquiry?

Even in her discussion of modernism and Goodnight Moon, while she describes how the text eludes periodization as it is reprinted and reappropriated into other forms, she does not explain how a critical interpretation based on genre instead might become more meaningful.

So although I agree with Westman (and Hayot) that periodization often seems an arbitrary and inadequate means for organizing literary history or for structuring the larger academic institution, I find myself questioning whether or not the example of children’s lit/genre would really solve the problem or just provide an alternative, yet still constricting, labeling system. I find Westman’s two-sentence conclusion a bit vague and insubstantial: “To resolve the ‘inadequacy of the period,’ in Hayot’s words (740), and to recognize the systemic contribution of children’s literature to literary history, we should champion the generic performance and remediation of children’s literature. We will then gain much-needed sightlines through the literary landscapes of the past, present, and future” (467-8). I agree that children’s lit might help deconstruct periodization, but what are these “sightlines” we might gain through examining its “generic performance” and what exactly will they do?