Revising the Seduction Paradigm: The Case of Ewing's The Brownies

Children's literature has persuasively been described as a means of seduction, a solicitation by which the adult writer draws in and defines the child reader.¹ Given the anxiety that has traditionally hovered around the connection between childhood and sexuality, it is perhaps unsurprising that in this critical story seduction almost invariably gets equated with abuse. Following the lead of Jacqueline Rose, who repeatedly relies on the paradigm of abuse in her seminal work The Case of Peter Pan, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein twice encourages readers of her study Children's Literature to take "the problems of professionals dealing with child abuse and neglect as an emblem to be kept in mind in this discussion" (18, 164).² Even James Kincaid, who centers his analysis of texts for and about children on pedophilia precisely in order to deconstruct our culture's reliance on a "melodrama of monsters and innocents," ultimately focuses on how actual children are "assaulted," "sacrific[ed]," and "abuse[d]" as a result of how we—that is to say, adults—conceptualize childhood (5-6, 10). Interested in highlighting how the adult writer's desire for and investment in the figure of the child shapes children's literature, these critics tend to treat use and abuse as interchangeable activities; thus, Rose argues that "the child is used (and abused) to represent the whole problem of what sexuality is . . . and to hold that problem at bay" (4).³

But this conflation of terms denies the productive, reciprocal possibilities of use, even as it effaces the pleasurable aspects of seduction. Certainly, adults have the power to exploit children for their own purposes, but children can also exploit parents, loved ones, and especially texts in order to develop into creative individuals. If we conceptualize the text as a "potential space" that can be colonized not only by adult writers but also by child readers, we can reinvest seduction with its original charge; closer to flirtation than abuse, seduction is about attraction, not abduction.⁴ This is not to deny the aggressive aspects of the act of seduction, but merely to restore a more flexible continuum; like flirtation, seduction can be invasive, threatening, and unwelcome, but it can also be flattering, titillating, and extremely pleasurable for both parties. Given that our subject here is reading—notactual sexual relationships—it seems crucial to keep the possibility for mutual pleasure open, even as we acknowledge the skewed power dynamic that complicates the adult writer-child reader relationship.⁵

Taking the trouble to tread this line becomes even more important when we consider how explicitly and ingeniously many texts aimed at children attend to this very issue. Even stories produced during the period famous for creating and promoting the "cult of the child" prove remarkably willing to acknowledge the aggressive aspects of romancing the child, and consequently to explore strategies for facilitating noncoercive cooperation between adults and children, between storytellers and story receivers. In her popular tale The Brownies (1865), for example, Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-85) employs a plethora of individualized narrators who essentially function as a string of suitors, flattering, cajoling, and ultimately seducing the child into acting in accordance with adult desires.⁶ Using multiple frame narratives, Ewing highlights the presence of this chain of storytellers, thereby acknowledging adult authorship of and investment in tales told to children. Directly addressing "the question of who is talking to whom, and why"—the key issue that Rose claims children's fiction consistently ignores—Ewing makes explicit her project of importuning and even manipulating the child (2).

Nevertheless, in the drama of seduction that Ewing depicts, the prescriptive power that adult scripts wield over children is mitigated by the force of revision, a mode of active appropriation that Ewing suggests is available to adults and children alike. The overarching frame narrative of The Brownies presents the relationship between a rector's children and their neighbor, a friendly doctor who successfully practices Ewing's own teasing tactics, charming children into gratified (and gratifying) submission. Like other adult storytellers in Ewing's tales, he does not simply flirt with...