In Jacqueline Rose’s own words about The Case of Peter Pan, she states:  “Instead of asking what children want, or need, from literature, this book has asked what it is that adults, through literature, want or demand of the child.” Roses selects Peter Pan because it is an enduring example of children’s literature and, because of its content, complicated authorship, and history, a useful site to excavate what she sees as the essentially problematic nature of writing for children.

Rose dismantles prevailing models and conventions of children’s literature by employing a psychoanalytic line of reasoning. Freudian childhood is not a fixed state, but rather a constantly shifting amalgam of memory, the unconscious, and the present. Because the adult can only conceive of this image of childhood, Rose asserts that adults are writing for this false child—truly, themselves–when they write children’s literature.  Likewise, Freud (and many linguists who followed) also recognized a distance between what is meant and what is said via language, an essential disconnect magnified by this unbridgeable distance between adult and child. The story of Peter Pan first appeared framed within an adult work called The Little White Bird, which acknowledged these issues by having it pass from an adult narrator to a child character, the complicated relationship between whom is understood by the reader.  Peter Pan, in its transformation into a purely children’s tale, loses this framing.  There is no acknowledgement of the adult/child relationship between the narrator and the child reading the book.

Rose then traces a line from Locke to Rousseau and on to Alan Garner and other writers of children’s literature, and attributes to this lineage a focus on the concrete realism of the natural (or unnatural, in the eventual case of children’s fairy stories and fantasies) world.  Locke and Rousseau originated the idea that the child is pure, should be sequestered from the corrupting influence of society, and should retain their purity through contact with the physical world.  Language is a corrupting force because of the distance it introduces between the word and its meaning, so the best literature for children keeps them in touch with the natural world (as in Robinson Crusoe).  Rose asserts that the prevailing realistic aesthetic of children’s literature, which requires them to believe the narrator and identify with the characters, can be connected to Rousseau’s concept of the child.  Likewise, Rose sees a relationship between this view of the child and Western, particularly British views of “primitive” cultures, which are both more pure and under the colonizing control of the British adult.

Peter and Wendy, J.M. Barrie’s long-awaited 1911 novelization of 1911 the play Peter Pan, flouts all of these traditions.  The narrator shifts from sentence to sentence, which Rose states is “…remarkable for the way that it exposes this problem of identity in language. (p. 72)” But Peter and Wendy is distinct from the beloved stage version of Peter Pan, and previous book versions of the play not written by J.M. Barrie. Exploring the difference between Peter and Wendy and the rest of children’s literature, Rose suggests that children’s literature should not be grouped by content type but by language—and nearly all children’s literature insists on a reliable narrator and realism.

Rose also investigates the troubling relationship between Peter Pan, the child, and money.  While the play is now conceived of as a children’s classic, Rose insists it was produced as much for adults and gave adults the license to look at children—which she connects, obliquely, to child prostitution.  She also connects Peter Pan with the creation of the child book market, and its production at different price points and its sales to children were necessary for the publishing industry to “render innocent (again) the more glaring commercial realities of the trade. (p. 107)”

Finally, Rose uses Peter Pan’s relationship to the British school system to explore how the state uses children as the site of language production.  In 1912, the British Board of Education stressed teaching “natural,” or plain-spoken, language to working-class children.  A few years earlier, however, the same body stressed “training the mind to appreciate English literature” to wealthier children in secondary schools. Rose stresses that both of these forms of language are manufactured by adults—that they are ideologies.  When Peter and Wendy is edited for inclusion in the school curriculum, it becomes apparent that Barrie is in fact speaking to both audiences, though all instances of the shifting narrator identity are edited out. She reflects that current theories of education stress teaching mastery of language to all students.

Rose concludes that she does not intend to suggest “an ideal form of writing which I am wishing to promote for the child. (p. 140)” Instead, she intends to question how language creates identity and how adults recreate that process in children through children’s literature. This is a critical question, and one that should not be taken lightly when considering what adults give children to read.  While I think it would be highly unlikely that that giving a child either the edited version of Peter Pan or Peter and Wendy in all of its identity-shifting glory would cause that child damage, I think that when you zoom out to how this text related to educational policies for different populations of children, there is a very real concern she unearthed about what we teach to which children and why.  I think her argument that adults cannot truly know the mind of the child restores to them some autonomy and power.  I can imagine that, perhaps, a healthy sense of mystery with regard to their inner lives contributes a certain amount of respect from adults.

However, while I think that Rose used Peter Pan to usefully probe the limits and traditions of children’s literature, I found myself constantly repeating to myself and writing in the margins “…but children do exist.” As much as adults may project onto children their current anxieties and their own complicated feelings about their childhood, children are real, and they must learn to read, and adults must communicate with them in ways that are both practical and entertaining.  I understand that it was not Rose’s intention to suggest a framework for children’s literature, but declaring the impossibility of it certainly leaves the reader at a loss with what to read a kid at bedtime.

I also wonder about how necessary it was to use Peter Pan as the basis for her theories about shifting language, identity, and realism in children’s literature—whether the uniqueness of this particular text in its different incarnations is particularly helpful to her and whether the same conclusions could be drawn from other books of its time, or from books that have been published since. I am thinking here of books that explicitly play with language (and image, in the case of Chris Rascha’s  jazz books) or narration/audience (a weird example, but “The Monster at the End of This Book” was a classic in my house).

–Kathy Cacace

What does it mean to be a child? Out of Marah Gubar’s “Risky Business”, three models of childhood, and in effect three models for developing children’s literature theory, emerge.

Borrowing from ideas rooted in psychology, Gubar argues, “viewing children as deficient—as unable to grasp certain concepts or skills—can help produce the very incapacities we claim merely to describe” (451). Gubar refers to the deficit model and explains that this line of thinking breeds questions like, “why share poetry with children if they cannot be expected to comprehend it?” She then contends, “To treat young people in this condescending way is to adhere to a deficit model of childhood, whereby young people are viewed as lacking the abilities, skills, and powers that adults have” (451). This is has an inherent negativity and is understood to be an ineffective model for theorizing children’s literature. If the field of children’s literature employed this model, the work generated would be show overwhelming bias against it being a child.

The second, and equally problematic model introduced is the difference model. Gubar posits that the difference model of childhood “[stresses] the radical alterity or otherness of children, representing them as a separate species, categorically different from adults” (451). This postcolonial (see the use of self and other in Edward Said “Orientalism”) identification system creates an unfair dichotomy between the child and the adult. At this level of theoretical development, the adult will always be the self. The otherness of the child is a product of the model. Being a child is, here, defined as not being an adult. It is an oversimplification of the question and a model that disallows the child to be anything but a not-adult.

From here, Marah Gubar introduces a possible third model for children’s literature theory to aspire to. Gubar reasons for the kinship model in the following excerpt:

“It is my contention that these texts—which young people had a hand in creating—are worth studying not just because they are critically neglected (although they are), or because we need to make our conception of what children’s literature is more flexible and inclusive (although we do), but also because their content often helps us theorize in more nuanced ways about what it means to be a child, to have a voice, and to exercise agency. These texts are serving as an inspiration for me in developing what I call the kinship model of childhood. This model is premised on the idea that children and adults are akin to one another, which means they are neither exactly the same nor radically dissimilar. The concept of kinship indicates relatedness, connection, and similarity without implying homogeneity, uniformity, and equality” (453).

The kinship model is Gubar’s attempt to fray the otherwise finite boundaries between child and adult. The two distinctions overlap. They are in many ways malleable, conforming to a variety of nuanced identifiers. In many ways, it is easy to agree with Gubar’s development of such a model. The lines between child and adult are often constructs of a particular society or culture. To say that a child is a deficit of an adult, different than an adult, means that we must provide a clear definition of the line that exists between the two. This would be an everchanging boundary.

Gubar goes so far as to say, “It is dehumanizing and potentially disabling to say that a human being has no voice, or no agency” (453). While, these types of stances have an air of melodramaticism, there is something to be said of a model that forces superiority of one subgroup over another subgroup of human beings.

Protecting herself from those who understand the semantic necessity of using a word like child, Gubar orients herself with:

“The kinship model, by its very existence as a model of what it means to be a child, accepts the idea that the category “child” is necessary as a result of this original state of dependency. At the same time, however, it holds that children and adults are separated by differences of degree, not of kind, meaning that we should eschew difference-model discourse that depicts children as a separate species in favor of emphasizing that growth is a messy and unpredictable continuum. There is no one moment when we suddenly flip over from being a child to being an adult” (455).

Gubar outlines the distinction between the deficit and kinship models by arguing:

“Whereas the deficit model portrays children as universal novices who must overcome an across-the-board array of incapacities, the kinship model maintains that development is not always linear, meaning children sometimes have abilities that adults lack, such as a greater facility for learning new languages” (455).

We can not abandon the idea of the child. We should not avoid it in our exploration of children’s literature. Rather, we should be aware of the dangers of particular perspectives that we bring to our theories and methods of inquiry.

This approach is familiar for digital humanists. As we continue to define what it is to be a digital humanist, many see value or danger in using such words. The postcolonial self and other attitudes are active in many debates and the categorization/oversimplification of the other has a valuable parallel.

In this blog post, I will discuss what I see as Gubar’s main argument, contrast it briefly with Rose’s, and then go on to examine the implications that her theorization of kinship between children and adults might have for periodical scholars.

Gubar works to destabilize the binary opposition between the categories of child and adult, arguing that to some extent the two constructs are arbitrary. For instance, she says that “even as it reminds us not to underestimate the capacities of younger people, the kinship model also encourages us not to overestimate the power of older people (454). Though she does admit that we as a society still need the category of the child, Gubar is committed to demonstrating that the categories of adult and child overlap in the development of real children, and in their relationships with adults.

What interests me in particular in Gubar’s article is her discussion of development and her creation of a kinship model to destabilize the hierarchy between adults and children. She writes that “children, like adults, are human beings. It is dehumanizing and potentially disabling to say that a human being has no voice, or no agency” (453). She further describes what it might mean to be human later in the article, describing adults as

always immersed in multiple discourses not of our own making that influence who we are, how we think, what we do and say–and we never grow out of this compromised state…The work of wrangling all these competing discourses and influences–of forging a sense of self…changes as we age, but it never ends. (454)

Gubar thereby suggests that all humans share these characteristics, and defines humanity as a process that continues throughout one’s life, rather than a state one arrives at. Moreover, Gubar’s description of this process as one of “wrangling” discourses to create the self suggests that this process, to use an artistic analogy, is one more similar to mosaic or collage than to writing an allegedly “autonomous” work of art. Gubar’s point here is that the control humans actually have over the formation of their identities, while it is less than what we as adults might believe ourselves to have is still more than we often assume children have. Moreover, the ability children and adults have to form their identities is similar, if not exactly the same.

Gubar’s theory of identity formation builds on the foundation Rose sets up. Far from appearing to disagree with Rose’s argument that adults want to see children as wholly innocent and wholly separate from themselves (in part because of our Freudian desire not to confront the questions children raise about the unity of the adult psyche), Gubar similarly aims to deconstruct “adult claims to autonomy and originality (452). However, she parts ways with Rose in terms of method–in terms of how best to rectify the problem of adult misapprehension about the boundary between themselves and children. While Rose deconstructs this adult perception of children as it is found in literature, aiming at laying bare the means by which the power differential between them is created, Gubar suggests that by ignoring the children reading children’s literature, Rose creates a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that denies them any power they might have had in shaping the literature they read (452).

While Gubar’s use of words like “manifesto” (in her original essay at the Children’s Literature Association Conference),  leave no doubt that she is attempting to frame her essay as a huge intervention in the field, her use of such words is alternately tentative and (intentionally) humorously bold, thereby fending off the objection that she is being overly bold. She also mixes such language with modest, even humorously self-deprecating language, mocking what she calls the “absurdly grand ambition” of her essay (455), and characterizing her theorization about child readers as “outlandish, overambitious, and even dangerous” (454). At the end of her essay, Gubar limits the scope of her argument, and obviates critique even further, by describing her own kinship model as a rubric under which various theories could be said to fall. Gubar then goes on to argue that “they are also meant to remind us, however, that theories are just that: theories, which will probably turn out to be limited, reductive, or just plain wrong” (455). In calling her kinship model a rubric, Gubar distances it from theories that might later turn out to be limited or wrong. Her model is larger in scope, and therefore, aims for less precision than the future theories she imagines her work making possible. Moreover, her admission that theories often turn out to be wrong reduces her liability if her own kinship model is later surpassed by a new theory.

The second reason I am interested in Gubar’s ideas about child development is that some of the same fears about unity have troubled the history of the novel, and led many people to want to separate it completely from its context in and formal connections with periodicals. It is no coincidence that Gubar cites Anna Redcay’s article, “Live to Learn and Learn to Live: The Saint Nicholas League and the Vocation of Childhood” as a scholar doing work on “how children’s texts are received by young people, the creative play and conversations they inspire, how they circulate and get transformed” (452). In nineteenth-century periodicals, the whole created by the sum of its pages had to be coherent, but creating this whole often involved balancing very different genres and authorial personalities, not to mention the demands of a periodical’s audience. Though novelists also have to balance multiple plots, conflicting character arcs, and the demands of audience in their works, novels are often seen as produced by their authors alone, and less attention is given to the commercial and personal networks within which they were produced. Thus, it seems natural that periodicals scholars would be doing pioneering work that attempts to attribute more agency to children. For one, children’s voices are sometimes overt in this venue in the form of letter-box columns in which they wrote letters to periodicals’ editors, and educational essay contests. Even when their voices are not tangible, the acknowledged market-driven nature of periodicals makes the question of audience less confusing than it often is for novels like Peter Pan, for instance. However, as I suggested earlier, I think the dichotomy between novels and periodicals is to some extent, like that between adults and children, arbitrary, and certainly made too much of. Therefore, I think Gubar’s work could both increase the study of materials in which children served as co-creators, like children’s periodicals, and help periodicals scholars to retheorize the influence of periodicals on children’s literature, and perhaps, on the novel in general.

-Elissa Myers