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

The Search for Children’s Literature

In her article Medieval Children’s literature: Its Possibility and Actuality. Gilliam Adams argues for a new, flexible philological approach towards children’s literature of the Middle Ages, one that is more comfortable with textual instability in its material context (18).

As part of this process Adams suggests that we ‘strip away preconceptions of what children’s literature ought to be’ and instead focus on the fiction actually written and read by children in those times.

In order to do this we must dispose of some commonly held myths about medieval children like the ‘Aries thesis’ (2) that proposes that the concept of childhood was ‘discovered’ in the seventeenth or eighteen century.  Adams maintains that concepts of childhood did exist in earlier ages, but that they were different from present day concepts.

Adams goes on to enumerate other ‘barriers to locating a medieval children’s literature’ such as:

  • The assertion that the ‘middle ages made no provision for a separate literature for children apart from pedagogical texts designed to teach them to read, to write, to cipher and to behave civilly”(2)
  • The idea that parents’ did not love or were afraid to love their children because infant and child mortality were so high”. (3)
  • The idea that in the Middle Ages children were viewed as ‘miniature adults’ (2)
  • The idea that a different conception of childhood operated in the past and that conception required no special literature for children. (4)

Adams argues that there is no reason that a culture, even with notions of childhood different from our own, would not develop a special literature for those children, and labels such an attitude a form of ‘cultural imperialism and ideological colonialism’ (4)

She argues that pedagogical works are in fact literature, even if their aim was instructional, and not to entertain.

While I agree with Adam’s points, what I find exciting is not just the expanded view, the reconsideration of historical childhood[s], but of historical literacy that her paper encourages.  For example, the quote taken from Suzanne Reynolds, that ’emphasizes the orality of education’ in the Middle Age – that students ‘do not read (in our sense of the term) the text at all, for it remains at all moments and in all senses in the teacher’s hands…” Just as children might have been thought of in a different way, so were books and ideas of what it was to be literate. Reading was not the internal, silent, solitary process that it is today, but an external, oral, aural and communal one.

Part detective, part archaeologist, her approach is methodical and seems a combination of New Criticism (inferences and deductions based on a close reading of the text) and Historicist, asking for consideration of the texts in the context of their times. ‘If we wish to certify [certain] texts as children’s literature, we must examine their use of language, the local meaning of terms, – the literary and legal evidence for what constituted a child at that time, the location, situation and other possible audiences’ (16) It is by this process that Adams seeks to prove the presence of a child reader and by association, the qualification as a children’s text.

In her search Adams tests a work against specific criteria. She asks: is there a dedication to a child, introductory material indicating a younger reader, is the language simple and direct? Is a child directly addressed or portrayed as a main character? Are there explanatory glosses directed as inexpert readers?

It very much remains for Adam’s to prove whether or not a text was written for a semi-literate adult or a child. Such theories are problematic. How can we ever know with certitude? We can’t, but if we broaden our definition of literature to include those didactic, non-fiction texts that children might have read, then such texts could more safely be ascribed to classification.

Most of the works cited are in Latin, which stands to reason because most of the works are didactic, and ‘most education was conducted in Latin throughout the European Middle Ages,’ (15) Although Adams does reference Chaucer’s Astrolabe as an obvious example of non-fiction for children, she says that ‘neither space nor the limits of my investigation to date permit addressing the possibility of Medieval children’s literature in the vernacular.”  She contends that more work needs to be done in this field to connect vernacular work directly with children. I wonder if similar studies of works in the vernacular might not yield more conclusive evidence, just because language, style and content would make classification both easier and obvious.

In conclusion Adams says that she hopes ‘to counter the current wave of ahistoricism among some scholars – blind to the fact that like readers at the end of the middle ages, we face a radical transformation in both the way that words are transmitted and the way that children are constructed.’

What I think she means by this is that since we in the present are undergoing a ‘radical transformation’ then we should be sensitive to similar transformations in the past, and, rather than let that transformation narrow our definition of children’s literature was, or is, that our awareness of and sensitivity to, a continuum of change, should allow for some inclusion.

On the (Performative) Destruction of Periodization

Sometime in the month before the Comps, something inside me starting having a very visceral response to the word “period” (read: it makes me twinge on the inside now). So when Westman titled her article “Beyond Periodization,” and then – within a paragraph – referred to children’s lit as “the disempowered stepchild of literary history” (so deliciously campy, and thus so deliciously children’s lit… meta), I was in love (464).

Interested not only in tickling my anti-period sensibilities and affinity for all things campy, Westman wants readers to come to understand “the viability of children’s literature for rethinking our narratives of literary history” (464). Just from the start, I have great respect for this mission: not only is Westman here establishing her interest in elevating children’s literature to the (masculinized) “seriousness” that it has been denied through its erasure in periodization (*internal twinge activates*), but she is also making it her mission to use children’s lit not to join the ranks of literary canon per se (an arguably conservative move), but as a way to fundamentally restructure how all of us think about what we study.

Bold moves, Karin. Bold moves.

Building into the perpetual scholarly conversations on whether or not children’s literature even exists (and if so, how and how do we know when something’s children’s lit, anyway?), Westman argues that thinking through the genres (and “intergeneric potential”) of children’s literature is extremely productive in helping us delineate histories of the field, target audiences of the field, and when individual works are worthy of receiving accolades in the field (465). In doing so, Westman cross-sections her work with the deconstruction of periodization as the dominant mode of classifying literary history.

Using the example of Hurd’s Goodnight Moon, she argues that this text (and by extension, other works of children’s literature) “repeatedly and frequently exceeds its initial generic performance of ‘picture book’” (467). Tracing the renewed iterations of this book (Goodnight iPad comes to her mind) since its original publication in 1947, she asserts that this work fundamentally “challenges periodization as a defining method of literary history” (467).

Reading this, I couldn’t help but persistently wonder how this framework of analysis could have fundamentally changed/contributed to Adams’s article on medieval children’s lit. If she’d traced the moralistic educational works, for example (or the Bible, for that matter), out of the medieval period and into their manifestations throughout more recent history, could her argument have been even more readily apparent to the ‘non-experts’ she kept referencing?

I also can’t help but wonder whether, had Westman more explicitly elaborated on the importance of performance theories in “instances of generic performance across established periods” (which she referenced several times), her own analysis could have been more complex (467, emphasis added). Do the texts we classify as children’s literature perform differently as their expected audiences change? As their medium of re-production changes (picture books, chapter books, YA, interactive ipad books, ‘you choose’ books, books that children get to read to themselves rather than having a live-and-in-person adult read to them, etc.), how does the performative power of these works change? What does it mean, anyway, for a work of literature to engage in performative action? Had Westman explicated some of these thoughts, all of which are held within her repeated references to texts’ performativities, perhaps the analysis would have been able to reach further into the intergeneric potentials of children’s lit.

Mitzi Meyer’s “Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form”

Categorizing children’s literature often creates rifts in the way that literature is viewed, especially within the academic community. The three articles this week all deal with a different version of categorizing children’s literature, from its origins, to genres, to what part of children’s texts can be studied as true literature. Mitzi Meyer’s “Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form” does not trying to categorizing children’s literature, instead, she makes a plea to the academic community for the inclusion of a type of children’s literature into revisionist (similar to the new historical/cultural criticism of literary studies) scholarship.

Normally, revisionists have previously concentrated on “fantasy” texts in children’s literature, but Meyers defends the use of more “historical mimetic tales” (Meyers 56). While her article leaves room for a broader interpretation of what historical mimetic tales might mean, her study seems to focus on women writers and educational tales. Often in the article, these educational tales translate into the overarching genre of didactic literature, especially since the primary text Meyers focuses on is Maria Edgeworth’s “The Purple Jar,” a classic (and more well-known) example of didactic children’s fiction.

“The Purple Jar” provides an ideal case-study for Meyers due to Edgeworth’s notable pedagogical background. Edgeworth’s Practical Educataion, a collaboration with her father, was one of the most well received texts on pedagogy “between Locke and the mid-Victorian period,” a time line of over one hundred and thirty years (53). One of the main points of the Edgeworths educational theory was that education was a lifelong journey, and that the texts being used could be informative and entertaining.   This emphasis on didacticism was well-received during Edgeworth’s time, as Meyers notes through various reviews from the period. This praise only highlights the shift to contemporary critics’ dismissal of didactic literature because “[they] usually assume, it must be intellectually unproblematic and literarily uninteresting, especially if it is rationale, realistic, and domestic.” However, Meyers is swift to point out that fault in this statement: “a strong case can be made for the position that juvenile literature is inevitably and rightly ‘didactic’—that adults do, must, and should teach values to their child audience. But we moderns like our teaching camouflaged.” In this, Meyers claims that even the fantasy literature that revisionist scholars favor is didactic in some way.

While I am not going to go in-depth into Meyer’s justification didactic literatures’ historical mimetic nature, I believe she successfully proves her point through aligning points in “The Purple Jar” to the historical and cultural context of the tale. Through this example, Meyers is able to prove that women writers’ educational tales can be used in revisionist studies. However, I think it is wrong to limit “The Purple Jar,” and Meyers study, just to women’s educational tales. By broadening her argument to all of didactic children’s literature, Meyers would provide a vast number of texts to reference in future studies, without the limitation of women writers. Part of her point is that women wrote the majority of educational texts, but there was didactic literature beyond this small sampling.

She also uses an extremely small sample to defend her argument: only one text. While this is an article, it is very short, and there is still plenty of room to include two or three different works that would have aided Meyers in her argument, further validating a revisionist analysis of women’s educational texts.

As much as I wish she had expanded her own call for inclusion, I do appreciate the structure in which Meyers goes about demonstrating her argument.   While my own area of interest is not primarily aligned with the texts Meyers works with, I appreciate the flow of her argument and possibly even go as far as to suggest it as an example for how people can go about arguing for inclusions of genres/subgenres/ /authors/texts/etcetera into their specific literary canon. For someone actually in her specific field of study, this article would serve as an inspiration to expand past fantasy and didactic and possible include even more categories of children’s literature in revisionist studies.

–Kristi Fleetwood

Peter Pan, Primary Text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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