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  • From the Editor
  • Julie Pfeiffer (bio)

As I think about the eleven essays gathered in volume 33 of Children's Literature, one passage stands out in particular. In Janni Howker's novella, The Topiary Garden, Sam the gardener says "'I've been thinking of all the years of me four-score and ten that I've spent turning what's natural into what's unnatural, just for the pleasing of a gentleman's eye'" (187). This quotation comes from Kathryn Graham's essay on topiary in children's fiction, which deals explicitly with the notion of cutting and shaping, arguing that "of the three primary fears topiary evokes, the most severe must be a child's horror of mutilation or the snipping away of a body part." It also serves to forge a link between the other essays in this volume for, as I see it, these essays suggest a number of kinds of shaping—physical, intellectual, economic, social, moral—and provide a variety of examples of how these transformations take place. Ultimately these essays, as a group, point to the centrality of the child's body as a site for authorial experimentation and ask us to reflect on what is natural and what unnatural, in what ways texts argue for the "correct" form of a child's body and mind.

But this scene in The Topiary Garden also allows us to move beyond discussions of adult manipulation of the child's body to the child's response to that act of indoctrination. When Sam the gardener defines topiary to "Jack" (really the heroine Sally) as "'turning what's natural into what's unnatural,'" she replies, "'It's like putting a tree in corsets.'" Her response points to another aspect of the shaping of child bodies: the child's ability to articulate that experience. Sally, on the verge of being discovered (and perhaps forced to wear corsets herself), makes the link between the forcing of the tree's shape "for the pleasing of a gentleman's eye," and the shaping of the child. Just as the topiary resists shaping by throwing out untidy branches, children extend in new and unexpected directions. And while some of the texts discussed in this volume identify the over-cultivation of the child's body as a source of stress and restriction, others ask us to acknowledge the attempts of adults to understand the child's self-articulation.

Elizabeth Gargano makes the case in "Death by Learning: Zymosis and the Perils of School in E. J. May's Dashwood Priory" that the genre of the British school story must be understood in terms of Victorian [End Page vii] ambivalence towards institutional education. The "sensitive body" of the child serves as a site for revealing the danger of too much education: both in terms of the overtaxing of the mind, which draws strength away from the body, and of the physical place of school, which puts the child at risk from the effluvia or bad air of the closed institution. Gargano argues that the school story despises the "very disciplinary processes and mechanisms that it appears to enshrine"; in fact, the hero who is made ill by school revives under the more moderate intellectual activity and increased fresh air of home.

Aaron Shaheen examines the body of the child in a very different context as he draws on Marxist theory to interpret a hero who roams the streets of New York City. His essay, "Endless Frontiers and Emancipation from History: Horatio Alger's Reconstruction of Place and Time in Ragged Dick," moves us from the hypercontrolled environment of the school story to the wilderness of the big city—a city, Shaheen claims, that is reconfigured as frontier and source of support for the capitalist project. While the preface to Ragged Dick acknowledges the historical reality of nineteenth-century urban blight, Shaheen sees the novel itself as denying historical realities in favor of an ideology of endless economic development. Here the "natural" body of the child is itself a frontier for development, as Dick's transformation is traced in his new clothes and in a physical prowess that links economic achievement to physical capacity. While Gargano reads...

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