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  • Interrupting the Critical Line from Rationalism to Romanticism
  • Lissa Paul (bio)
Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr.Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

The best essay in Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, a collection edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr., is "Romancing the Moral Tale: Maria Edgeworth and the Problematics of Pedagogy" by Mitzi Myers. With a brilliant mix of scholarly breadth and compassionate, critical insight Myers illuminates a world that is usually opaque, even to children's literature specialists. Although the essay appears in the middle of the book, I am situating it at the beginning of the review, not just because the essay is an exemplary work of criticism, but because it offers a glimpse of what the collection might have been.

With the provocative collision of romancing, moral tale, and pedagogy in the title, Myers interrupts the traditional straight and narrow line from rationalism to romance. She questions beliefs received from Harvey Darton (and often parroted by children's literature scholars) that didactic tales are undifferentiated, boring aggregates and not up to the original art of the romantic writers. Through her analysis of Maria Edgeworth's Simple Susan as a "nurturing fantasy masquerading as rational moral tale" (111), Myers demonstrates how to read moral tales against the grain and so release forgotten "maternal pedagogies" and a "plurality of meanings." She shows how to open up relations "between nurturance and autonomy, connectedness and individuation, child and parent, dependence and dominance, feeling and reason, and, finally, between experience and the discursive practices that configure or constitute it" (98).

When Myers explains how late twentieth-century poststructuralist criticism destabilizes the privileging of nineteenth-century romanticism over eighteenth-century rationalism, she is explaining [End Page 210] how we can revise our assumptions about the period—and so discover readings unlike the ones we knew. Myers is joined in this endeavor by other contributors to the book, particularly Jeanie Watson, Alan Richardson, Patricia Demers, Michael Hancher, Phyllis Bixler, and Anita Moss. All write about un(dis)covering received ideological assumptions—and that, it seems to me, is a good reason for assembling a collection of critical essays about romanticism and children's literature in nineteenth-century England. To demonstrate what I think is best about the collection, I will focus first on the critical lines in essays by Richardson, Bixler, and Hancher. With those examples up front, my difficulties with the collection as a whole will be easier to explain.

In "Wordsworth, Fairy Tales, and the Politics of Children's Reading," Alan Richardson uses a New Historicist approach to explore how the didactic writers of the early nineteenth century did not so much censor the fairy tale as appropriate it. He reveals the blurring of genre distinctions. Like Myers, Richardson shows that the boundaries between the fairy tale and the didactic story are not as clear as they have been assumed to be. And that contention opens up a radical new project for children's literature criticism. He suggests a possible direction: "Rather than maintain a simplistic opposition between didacticism and fantasy, indoctrination and a negative 'natural' education—a model inherited from the Romantics themselves—critical studies might profitably develop more complex approaches attuned to the intricate politics of literacy and education in the Romantic period" (49).

In the same spirit of redefining relations between rationalism and romanticism, Phyllis Bixler uses the insights of feminist theory to focus on the community of mothers in The Secret Garden. She reads beyond the subjugation of Mary within the story and extrapolates why Mary continues to be celebrated by female readers despite the way she apparently recedes into the background of the narrative. Bixler reads the feminist "webs of symbolic imagery"—especially the house and garden—as "a celebration of nature's power, . . . a primarily female power" (209). To use the terms of "ecriture feminine," Bixler "thinks through the body" in order to reveal a feminist reading of "the maternal body" in The Secret Garden.

Another essay that awakens alternative interpretive strategies for reading nineteenth-century children's literature is "Alice's Audiences." Michael Hancher takes the old problem of trying to...

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