Making Change

Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America, by Beverly Lyon Clark. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.

Beverly Lyon Clark calls her book Kiddie Lit more in fury than in fun. Her study calls into question the criteria by which literary and academic critics, publishers, authors, librarians, and other gatekeepers sort literature by age, sex, and worthiness. It examines the critical and popular responses to some of the best-known examples of children's literature of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is complex, well-researched, opinionated, and a valuable contribution to the ever-expanding conversation about literature for children.

Clark's preface gives the plan of her work. She examines in the first three chapters the general picture of the changing climate of literature for children, from the current scholarly thinking about children's literature (in chapter one), to the turn of the twentieth century when adult and children's literature began to separate (chapter two) and, in chapter three, the institutional shifts at the turn of the century, including the professionalizing of literary study, that affected children's as well as adult literature. These broadly conceived chapters are followed by six "case studies": the boys' book, which focuses on Mark Twain; the girls' book, centered on Louisa May Alcott; Frank Baum representing American fantasy; Carroll and Rowling for British fantasy imported to the US; and, finally, The Case of the Disney Version. Throughout the book, Clark's stated goal is to examine the cultural construction of childhood and how that construction affects children's literature.

Chapter one confronts American ambivalence about children. Our rhetoric says we love them, but our actions often devalue them: witness the number of children who live in poverty. The devaluation extends to literature for children, as the dismissive term "kiddie lit" indicates. Clark offers many examples of twentieth-century scholars who denigrate children and childhood by equating immaturity with inferiority. She also traces the association of women with children and (therefore) with immaturity to explore the unsatisfactory relationship between feminism and childhood. "Feminist theorizing," she says, "has rarely recognized, let alone addressed, the position of the child" (7). On children's literature, she quotes Mitzi Myers's observation that feminist criticism has "looked askance at the child text; it's nobody's baby. Gender has long since been in; generation (except when it has to do with sexuality) remains out" (9).

Children's literature has not always been as unregarded by the literary community as it is today. Many authors wrote for both children and adults in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; many adults read literature for children and vice versa. Respected magazines—The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Scribner's, among others—reviewed and discussed books for children. In chapter one, Clark focuses on Frances Hodgson Burnett and Henry James as representative of the period and its changing literary climate.

Burnett was an admired author of several adult novels when she published Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1885. The book was hailed by reviewers in major journals, read avidly by adults and recommended highly for children; it was one of the three best-selling titles in the US in 1886. The dramatized version in 1888 drew throngs of delighted adults, some, but not all, accompanied by children. Yet Burnett's immense popularity did not endure much past the turn of the century, a time when the literary landscape was being reshaped. By 1920 Burnett's work was all but discarded with other trappings of the Victorian era—too sentimental, too feminine, too unrealistic, said the critics. Only The Secret Garden (1911), largely ignored by contemporary reviewers, survived the general rejection of Burnett's writing. In spite of Burnett's distinctly period attitudes toward class and gender, Secret was, and still is, handed from child to child, a subterranean success undiscovered by critics until recently.

Clark begins her chronicle of the separation of children's literature and literature for adults with Henry James, an active reviewer and...