- Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction
As an institutionalized area of inquiry, childhood studies may still be in its infancy, but, if Susan Honeyman's book is any indication, its APGAR1 scores are looking pretty good. Indeed, if readers will forgive an extended metaphor, scholarly "activity" in the area is quite robust, with Honeyman's book keeping good company with Kenneth Kidd's Making American Boys and Steven Mintz's Huck's Raft, to mention a few stellar examples; the "pulse" is rapid, with journals and academic conferences devoting special issues and sessions to the field; "grimace" or "reflex irritability" is manifest as keen arguments and disagreements among scholars that are helping define the concepts worth taking issue with; "appearance" is flush and healthy with more undergraduate programs becoming visible; and "respiration," which I will extend metaphorically to mean meditative circulation of ideas, is certainly well on its way.
Honeyman's most important place in this delivery room scenario is her careful articulation of the terms and concepts that emerge as important in the field of childhood studies. Throughout her book, she urges readers to look with informed and careful academic skepticism at the way both the field and its object have been and are being constructed. Through her readings of representations of children in literature, the ideological stakes and underpinnings of developmental models, and the various self-serving and contradictory uses of childhood in adult discourse, she teases out the dissonances and pitfalls that inform this nascent area of inquiry, extending and critiquing the project as it has been developed by critics such as Jacqueline Rose, Reinhard Kuhn, and Tim Morris. She draws on an impressively large list of primary and secondary texts, moving seamlessly from the likes of Henry James and Edith Wharton to X-Men and Power Pack comic books and graphic novels. Her project leans more toward deconstruction and critique than toward developing a new critical practice through which scholars might approach texts; she poses the problems and unmasks the pretensions of the ways in which we have approached childhood, concluding finally that "we have to learn to look at ourselves and re-evaluate our rhetoric for a keener detection of the arbitrary limitations we impose" (151) on human "becoming."
Honeyman begins her argument by situating the discourse of childhood studies under the aegis of cultural [End Page 87] studies, claiming that the emergence of identity politics required a consideration of a literature defined by its audience rather than its authors. She moves deftly through the critical literature, using her predecessors to establish her own view that childhood is ultimately an inaccessible space that is ham-fistedly appropriated by adult authors to serve their own needs. "My method," she says, "is to approach childhood as portraiture in relief, reading adult desire in the 'empty spaces' created for hypothetical children in discourse" (17). In subsequent chapters, she elaborates the idea that childhood has been constructed as a foil, a negative and positive reinforcement, and/or a disruption to adult preoccupations with rationality and knowledge. This method, of course, reveals some "empty spaces" in her own assumptions. Repeatedly, for instance, she uses some form of the phrase "adults and those constructed as children" (132) (compared, for instance, to "adult desire" versus "hypothetical children in discourse" in the quotation above), which rhetorically conjures the image of an essentialized and ultimately knowable half of a binary—adults—and their merely posited ideological support—beings that we name children. More than a slip of the keyboard, this strangely opaque and uninterrogated assumption of the intellectual accessibility and transparency of adult minds and desires (because they write?) set over and against the inscrutability of children (because they are written?) informs her argument throughout, tainting her truly laudable and consistent reminders that child-subjects are constructs by rhetorically repressing the fact that adults are, too.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on literary representations of children and childhood spaces. Honeyman applauds the innovative way with which Henry James undertakes the task of representing children without attempting to appropriate their mindscapes. Using...