Is reconciliation possible?

Gubar is thorough and methodical in her argument that the children’s literature of Victorian England reflected a changing social dynamic. ‘Nineteenth century England was a nation in which the concept of childhood was being actively developed and redrafted (sweet 171)  – through this period all kinds of debates were taking place about the definition of childhood and the child’s proper role within the family and society at large.’ (152)  Bur as I read Gubar’s Artful Dodgers I felt as if I were being compelled to take her position instead of Rose’s,  namely that children’s lit is not a ‘colonization’ of children by adults as Rose contends, but rather a collaboration with them – and though she may be right, I feel more comfortable somewhere in between.  Isn’t it possible to reconcile the ‘cult of the child’ with the ‘artful dodger’?

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist seems to be a manifestation of that reconciliation. Although the book is considered adult literature, it exemplifies the ‘collaboration’ between child and adult that Gubar suggests. If her argument is that many celebrated Golden Age children’s authors were extremely self-reflective about their own genre, producing children’s book that attend to the issue of the complications that ensue when adults write books for children.(126) Might we assume

that Dickens’ was aware of this complication as well, and perhaps even created characters that personified  the debate? Oliver in all his goodness, is a symbol of the ‘pure child’, while Dawkins, is the symbol of an experienced, precocious one. Oliver is shy, timid, and very much a pawn of the adults around him, while Dawkins is empowered, an agent of his own destiny, who is able to make his way in the adult world.He tries to convert Oliver to his lifestyle, but Oliver does not have the constitution for it. Hawkins appears as a foil to innocent, guileless Oliver. Each character or caricature, is at opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s as if they need each other to exist.
Although children of the era may not have read Oliver Twist, the story is does contain a lesson aimed at them, namely that goodness and obedience are rewarded, while Artful Dodging lands you in prison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primary Post: 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.

The Artful Marah Gubar: Dodging Jacqueline Rose and Institutional Structures

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.

 

Artful Dodgers – Method

In keeping with our seminar’s theme of movements in criticism as swings of a pendulum, we see Marah Gubar framing her project in Artful Dodgers as a counter to the popular critical idea that the victorian period – and victorian children’s literature in particular – created a complete separation between adults and children. The child, in this critical conception, was the primitive, Otherized “emblem of innocence,” and childhood was portrayed as a refuge from the “painful complexities of modern life” (Gubar 4). Gubar does not deny that such a cult of the child, or even of child innocence, existed; rather, she argues that victorian children’s fiction is characterized not by a total allegiance to childhood purity, but by competing – and sometimes clashing – visions of childhood, including the child as innocent, the child as a small adult, the child as a collaborator, the child as a highly literate interlocutor, and the child as an uneasy partner. In fact, for Gubar, children’s literature is the space that offers the “most serious and sustained resistance to the cult of childhood” (9). When authors like Dickens, who write children as victims in most of their adult novels, turn to children’s literature, suddenly their child protagonists turn into clever heroes, challenging the adult world (52).

According to Gubar, many victorian children’s literature authors did not portray children as untouched by adult influence:

“they generally conceive of child characters and child readers as socially saturated beings, profoundly shaped by the culture, manners, and morals of their time, precisely in order to explore the vexed issue of the child’s agency: given their status as dependent, acculturated beings, how much power and autonomy can young people actually have? In addressing this question, Golden Age authors often take a strikingly nuanced position, acknowledging the pervasive and potentially coercive power of adult influence while nevertheless entertaining the possibility that children can be enabled and inspired by their inevitable inheritance” (5).

Indeed, many of the authors Gubar reads, including Frances Burnett, E. Nesbitt, Lewis Caroll and Robert Louis Stevenson, invite their readers to be suspicious of the act of storytelling, to participate in, appropriate, steal and rework stories into creative works of their own, and to distrust adults telling stories to children. These authors’ view of culture, Gubar argues, is not that culture is inherently corrupting towards childhood innocence – she does not see them as advocating a Rousseau-style, book-free education – but that children may be capable of “reshaping” those same stories and cultural values into something of value to them – that they are not doomed to be passive receivers of the text. Nor was this view simply unbridled optimism: Lewis Caroll, in Alice in Wonderland, proved aware that asking children to participate in the endeavor of story-creation could itself be as oppressive and punitive as didactic storytelling.

One of the great strengths of Gubar’s argument is the breadth of her primary materials – both literary and historical. She uses both canonical and noncanonical children’s literature to advance her case about the complexity of victorian children’s literature. The noncanonical texts she reads, many of which were written by women like Hesba Stratton, Juliana Ewing and Dinah Craik, serve to counter popular critical narratives about the development of children’s literature in the victorian period. Gubar does not just rely on these lesser-known authors: she also reads canonical texts alongside their works, rereading Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland and The Little Princess (among others) in order to find their disruptive, subversive potential. By reading these many texts alongside one another, Gubar persuaded me that she had found an actual trend in victorian fiction – not just that she had found a few striking instances in canonical texts. Gubar’s second major strength in pushing back against the idea that victorian children’s fiction was obsessed with childhood innocence is her use of historical material – specifically of the original reception of the children’s literature she reads. As Gubar points out, many works by authors critics now identify as part of the “cult of the child” were received by critics as being too difficult for children to read, too erotic, too literate, and too allusive: these were not texts, in other words, that the authors’ contemporaries necessarily saw as upholding a division between children and adults, or as reifying childhood innocence (22). Gubar’s use of original reception is one possible answer to our question last class about how critics can responsible portray and understand the way literature was understood in the past (although original reception is probably easier to come by for the victorian period than for the medieval period!)

Since Gubar argues that victorian children’s authors encourage their readers to appropriate parts of their work, I’m going to do the same to Gubar and latch onto one specific moment in her argument. I was struck by Gubar’s fleeting reference to Felicia Hemans’ poem “Casabianca,” given our last few readings’ discussions of pedagological texts (137). In “Casabianca,” a young boy is trapped on a burning ship and will not leave until he receives his father’s permission; unknown to him, his father is already dead and the boy perishes. “Casabianca” is a highly appropriate intertext for Gubar’s work, because it’s traditionally been read by critics as a conservative, patriotic poem that celebrates a child’s innocent devotion. In recent years, however, scholars have started to read the piece as a critique of parental and national authority (most of my understanding of “Casabianca” comes from Catherine Robson’s article “Standing on the Burning Deck,” which I will upload to the dropbox in case anyone is interested). So in theory, “Casabianca” seems like a poetic version of the texts Gubar discusses – one that may teach children to question adult and parental authority. However, what complicates this reception of “Casabianca” is the fact that it was used as a recitation text – a text young victorian schoolchildren were meant to memorize and recite. They were meant to “parrot” the text. I bring the history of “Casabianca” up because I wonder how the existence of recitation texts and the victorian school system in general impacts Gubar’s argument. Recitation texts like “Casabianca”, to me, seem like a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they create the highly-literate child (including the E. Nesbit character who referenced Hemans) who can then shape and appropriate cultural texts to their own ends, but on the other hand, they also suggest that the texts Gubar examines can be appropriated by the education system and turned into works that children are just meant to parrot (and indeed, we know that some of them, like Peter Pan and Treasure Island, were turned into educational texts). Moreover, is the victorian school system necessary to creating the “highly literate child” who can enjoy some of these more allusive works? What kinds of children are then excluded from participation in these subversive texts? Since Gubar doesn’t touch on victorian education often, I’m wondering if a consideration of education would extend and build on her argument?

Japan Cuts the Humanities and Social Sciences

Some of you expressed interest in Japan’s order to close Humanities, Law, and Social Science departments in their universities. This is an important moment for higher education. It is also one that is going on under the radar for the most part.

TIME: Alarm Over Huge Cuts to Humanities and Social Sciences at Japanese Universities

The World University Rankings: Social sciences and humanities faculties ‘to close’ in Japan after ministerial intervention

Bloomburg View: Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities

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

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

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

Westman asserts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Karin Westman’s “Beyond Periodization”: Method Analysis

As someone deeply invested in exploring genre and its limits, I was excited to read Westman’s article. From what I could gather, her main argument is that as children’s literature scholars, we need to consider how our field can speak to and illuminate conversations happening about genre and periodization in literary studies more generally. Westman starts by emphasizing is that genre is a performative, not material or static, category that changes depending on audience and context. As such, children’s literary has a unique potential to extend outside of its traditional subfield to inform other areas of literary studies.

In terms of critical approach, I think Westman certainly falls under the broad category of “historicist” because she believes that context is crucial in understanding a text. More specifically, Westman draws on reception theory and book history—she’s interested, for instance, in the publishing and re-publishing of Goodnight Moon and how the work has been read by audiences over time. I also see Westman implicitly relying on poststructuralist thinkers (such as Foucault) in that her piece examines how the seemingly stable structures we use to categorize things like literature—in this case, periodization and genre—are not only arbitrary but historically mediated.

In reading the article, I was initially captivated by Westman’s call to arms of sorts, that as students in this field we have the potential to rethink large-scale structural problems in literary studies more generally. At the same time, I felt that Westman failed to discuss the institutional barriers within academia that might make this type of cross-disciplinary work challenging. If children’s literary studies has been somewhat segregated from English scholarship, how can we collaborate with literature critics to create these sorts of more inclusive, comprehensive analyses? And how can scholars publish non-traditional, genre-bending articles if literary journals tend to be periodized as well? Periodization seems like a deeply entrenched institutional issue, as well as an epistemological one. That’s not to say that moving beyond issues of genre isn’t possible, only that I think it will be more challenging than Westman lets on.

However, Westman’s article was originally read aloud as a “manifesto” at a couple of literary conferences (Notes, pg 468), so I can understand that the context might not have allowed her to delve into specific solutions to the problems she addresses. In any case, this article left me with a lot to think about as I begin writing my paper for this course—especially that I should look into scholarly conversations outside of children’s literary studies even while studying children’s literature.

– Anna Zeemont

Gillian Adams, “Medieval Children’s Literature: Its Possibility and Actuality”

Gillian Adams sets out a really strong case for the existence of a category of literature for children in the Middle Ages. At some point while I was reading this, I got uncomfortable, but then I double-checked the date and was reassured. This article was published in 1998.

Yes, in 1998 most medievalists who did not study children needed to be convinced that medieval Europe did have a conception of childhood, that they were not just miniature adults or added workforce who were not viewed with love by their parents. By now, even medievalists who don’t work on material involving children usually are aware that our understanding of this has changed significantly. The field of medieval childhood studies is still quite young: the books Adams mentions (Shahar, Schultz, Hanawalt) are still almost the only books devoted entirely to medieval European childhood. (I’m not including some of the others she mentions because they deal with “after 1500,” or with only a specific aspect of childhood, like literacy. Nicholas Orme has a few really important and comprehensive books which were published by then but which she doesn’t mention.)

But medieval childhood studies definitely has progressed beyond simply refuting the Ariès model, and the field of medieval children’s literature has progressed beyond redefining what kinds of texts should be considered children’s literature. Still, this was a really useful article to read because it allowed me to explicitly acknowledge a lot of things I, as one of those “younger scholars” Adams mentions, take for granted as I work on medieval childhood and children’s literature – even as there are many points in her article I think don’t completely hold up.

First, some of the points that now almost go without saying:

Childhood was clearly defined in the Middle Ages, even if it wasn’t what we think of as childhood. Medieval philosophy of the stages of life, which Adams mentions, includes far more than the childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood that we have. And the idea that children were not loved is absurd, as Adams says, though for more reasons than her claim that equating high mortality with absence of love is historically wildly inaccurate. Evidence gathered from inscriptions on infants’ gravestones, for instance, proves that burying these day-old babies was as heartbreaking and anguish-ridden for their mothers as it is for mothers today. Literature itself, like the Pearl poem in which a father mourns his daughter, is evidence enough that there was love. This poem, of course, is highly allegorical, and it is not all that likely that it was written by an actual father mourning his actual daughter. And yet in order for readers to understand and appreciate the allegory, they would have to understand and appreciate the sentiment of a father mourning his beloved daughter.

In this discussion, Adams sets up a kind of strawman argument. She makes her point as a refutation of Perry Noedelman, saying that a different concept of childhood than we have does not automatically mean no children’s literature existed. She quotes Nodelman as saying that “‘a different conception of childhood operated, [and] that conception required no special literature for children’.” Later in that paragraph, she says that Nodelman “assert[s] that only our conception of childhood can result in children’s literature” (4). Nodelman in fact does not assert this, at least not in this quote (I haven’t read the original, so I can’t tell if her reading is based on anything else he says). He simply says that the medieval conception was different and that this particular difference resulted in no special literature for children.

That’s wrong, of course, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that there may well be a concept of childhood that does not require a special literature for children, and that where Nodelman goes wrong is that the medieval concept of childhood was not in that category. The general consensus for a while has been that children’s literature started in the mid-eighteenth century, but no will argue that the concept of childhood in the eighteenth century is the same as ours is now. It’s a different concept of childhood, which calls for a different definition of children’s literature in that time period.

Once we’ve established that there was a concept of childhood, Adams turns to defining which literature can be rightfully called medieval children’s literature. First of all, didactic literature is literature, and allowing that creates a flood of texts in this category. Besides, conduct books (like Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry), while they are absolutely didactic, are not dry moralistic texts but full of imaginative narrative as well. And who are we kidding – “all literature has an agenda,” and defining literature as being pure art without any practical purpose is absurd. So much of the medieval canon has explicit lessons that to apply that distinction to children’s literature makes no sense.

In terms of fiction, there was probably not such a sharp divide between what adults read and what children read in the Middle Ages. Adams calls this “shared literature,” a concept I had never thought to define, but having the term will be useful to me, I think. The problem Adams has with this is that she claims medievalists specializing in children’s literature tend to look at these texts as shared and to ignore the possibility of some of them being exclusively for children. I’m not fully convinced that this is a problem, and I’ll return to that in a moment.

She also claims that medievalists specializing in children’s literature tend to focus on how well contemporary children’s literature portrays the Middle Ages. If that was true then, it most certainly is not true now. I recently presented a paper on Adam of the Road at the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, and while I did talk about the accuracy of medieval life in the novel, that was because I was concerned with how much influence historical fiction could have on young readers to study that historical period later on, and accuracy was one of the factors I considered. The others on my panel barely talked about historical accuracy. They talked instead about “medievalisms,” aspects of contemporary literature (and film, and video games, etc) which are loosely based on “medieval-y” stuff. Scholars look at what medievalisms do for the modern child reader, how they help them understand their own world, why some themes persist and some models of “medieval-y” stuff are useful in representing certain ideas, how adult authors of children’s literature view the Middle Ages and why, and what all of that might mean.

In any case, Adams’ detailed explanation of how one might determine if a medieval text was aimed at children is incredibly thorough. Many of the strategies she mentions are foundational in studying any medieval text (as she points out, philology – but I can’t imagine that was never indispensable to study of medieval literature). I know that my response here sounds like I think most of Adams’ argument has issues, but I don’t. I think that this chunk is the most essential part of her argument, and I take very little issue with it. But I don’t think it’s useful for me to recap it here, so I’m focusing on the parts I did take issue with in some way or another. I’ll briefly run through a few of her points that I think don’t have as much impact in identifying texts as children’s as she claims.

The question of a child possessing a book seems very important to Adams. Her example of Sado’s inscription sounds convincing (the translation, by the way, seems deliberately clumsy – the Latin is pretty standard and doesn’t sound childish at all, but she’s only quoting the translation), and we might think that being able to prove children owned their own grammar books is useful. But she does acknowledge that children were more likely to hear texts read to them than to read them themselves, and I don’t think she differentiates enough between the modern concept of connection between literacy and a child owning a book, and what the medieval concept might have been. Books were expensive, as she notes, and educational material was usually communal and/or familial, not owned by children.

A larger issue is her almost off-hand comment about using the major characters of a text to determine whether it was aimed at children. If the major character is a child, she says, it’s likely the text was meant to be read by or for children. Even in contemporary literature, that’s not a good indication, so I don’t understand why she would say that at all. Especially within the context of highly allegorical medieval literature, the inclusion of children characters is no indication of an intended audience’s age. This is crucial to understanding how and why medieval children’s literature existed, so this bothers me a great deal.

One of her really satisfying points is looking at texts which are referred to in other texts as somehow connected to children. Intertextuality! Actually, there is a medieval text which lists authors starting from the Classical period and classifies what they’ve written, and that has been used to identify some texts as children’s literature. I came across this while I was writing about Robert Henryson’s fables, which are not classified as children’s literature, but which I want to talk about here for a second because they’ll help me make a point, also related to Adams’ point about considering genres of texts included in books which were obviously used in education. If a genre, like fables, is included in educational texts, we could extrapolate to other fable collections and in some cases posit that they were children’s texts.

So Henryson has never been classified as children’s literature (it’s written in Middle Scots, not in Latin). But his fables are the same fables which Marie de France, Lydgate, and Caxton (and others) use in their own collections. Marie de France and Caxton’s collections have been discussed as possibly being used in the classrooms themselves, as memory and recitation exercises and to teach the lessons of the fables. Lydgate’s is argued to have been used in classrooms as well, but for different reasons. His fables are all really long, as opposed to Marie de France and Caxton’s really short fables and morals. Lydgate’s reflects the medieval lesson of expansion, where students were taught to elaborate on texts for various reasons. His fables could be his own exercise in this tradition and/or an example that could have been used in classrooms.

This is what I find so interesting and useful about Adams’ idea of “shared literature.” It never really occurred to me to separate the children from the adults as an audience for most texts. My work on Henryson can’t be applied to children, but children of course came up in a discussion of fables, and it is possible that my interpretation of these fables working through a manipulation of emotion actually relies on adult readers approaching fables with a bit of nostalgia about the content of fables which they read as children.

If we’re arguing for leaving aside our preconceived notions about children’s literature, one of them has to be that for medieval scholars to look at children’s literature, there may be a reason it’s predominantly shared literature we look at (didactic texts of course sidesteps this question, though even those can be and are considered as adult texts in some ways).

That’s another point I had trouble with. Adams says that proof these texts are not dead is “most of the material in the texts that I cite in the last part of this essay is an integral part of the ‘sea of stories’ and continue to be found in the modern period in works now generally agreed to be children’s literature” (17). But aside from her point about shared literature, she very clearly says just before this quote that a lot of these texts she is identifying as children’s literature are actually sometimes “regular” texts modified for children. Ysengrimus, she says, had a “smutty” section taken out for inclusion in a manuscript for a teaching establishment. She says this is one of the stories Grimm “recognize[d as] a fine story when he saw one,” but it existed as an adult story before that. Based on her previous discussion, it’s not material or content but the style which identifies a children’s text, so the continuation of these stories in children’s literature doesn’t say much about medieval children’s literature. As I mentioned before, I think the useful question here is not similarities in material between children’s literature then and now, but tropes and themes that remain.

Final thought: Adams says that “although Hunt claims that ‘different skills’ are required to read books from earlier periods (202), no different skills are needed for the imaginative works that I have mentioned when they are well translated” (17). Actually, methods of reading differ so greatly that translations always obscure the possibilities of the text. Medieval punctuation actually has such tremendous impact on how a text is read that editors of critical editions have a huge task deciding when to sacrifice some of that in order to enable a modern student’s comprehension of the text. For example, some punctuation leaves a text deliberately ambiguous so that the reader has to puzzle it out, and can – and should – read it twice or three times, attempting a different reading each time, and not choosing one over the other but accepting all as part of the text (Gawain and the Green Knight is notorious for this).

Basically, I think her analysis is really great, but still slips into the flattening of comparison of medieval children’s literature to contemporary ideas of children’s literature that she argues so much against. But since she wrote this in 1998 at the beginning of this realization in scholarship, it makes sense that these inconsistencies would sneak in.

— Esther Bernstein