Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture (review)

In her 1993/1994 essay for this journal, "Fairy Godmothers or Wicked Stepmothers: The Uneasy Relationship of Feminist Theory and Children's Criticism," Beverly Lyon Clark accused feminist cultural studies of avoiding, and thus negating, children's literature. Her arguments suggested that feminists had suffered a collective failure of nerve, or worse, her arguments imagined that, glancing back upon the darkened patriarchal house that feminists had fought so hard to escape, they trembled. (Or, did they look back at all?)

Clark's outrage, you should be delighted to know, is unabated. She presents her earlier arguments, in a candid, gracefully formed introduction to this collection, and turns them upon mainstream children's literary criticism, too, in which she remarks a reciprocal pattern of denial. Literature for Children, Peter Hunt's oft-cited 1992 anthology of children's literary criticism, includes but a single instance of feminist criticism, she notes. Girls, Boys, Books, Toys, a title with a savvy sense of balance (even the playful innocence of the rhyme is counterpoised by a low, suggestive, hiss), redresses this oversight.

The unheimlich kind of house imagined above, used to decorate the covers of paperback Gothic thrillers (and to beguile their mostly female readership), haunts the subtext of "Taking Over the Doll House," Lois R. Kuznet's meditative critique of dollhouse literature. Kuznets' provocatively conflicted essay cuts painfully against the grain of her own sympathies. Confessing to an "ineradicable longing" and "homesickness" for "an idyllic past" (143), she argues nevertheless that this irresistible hearth orientation, this need to find fulfillment in illo tempore, serves to instill "impossible expectations of emotional satisfaction" and must therefore be eradicated (153). Thus, Kuznets places readers at an utter impasse, unable to adjudicate between equally unconstrainable desires. And there she leaves us.

Dolls serve again as a metaphysical trope in Lynne Vallone's sensitive investigations of Riot Grrrl culture in "Grrrls and Dolls: Feminism and Female Youth Culture," which considers the challenge of promulgating feminism across the generational divide. Vallone's is one of several more or less sociological studies in this book; Susan Willis writes on the ideological skeleton within our cultural construction of the dinosaur, and Karen Klugman on the influence of toys on the formation of gendered identities in children. Klugman reiterates the image of the unheimlich dollhouse and the question of exorcism with her observation that toys visit amplifications upon gender difference that elude self-examination and that are inescapable. Once the plastic wrapping is off, she warns us, "our childhood dolls accompany us through life" (182).

The essays in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys seek to expose the ideologies that underpin children's literature and culture. Collectively, they also demonstrate the viability of a feminist critique of children's literature. It may help bring the dual nature of this book into sharper focus to remember that the editors' initial call for papers, published in this journal in the fall of 1993 (18:3), asked for essays "engaging both feminist theory and children's literature/culture" (143)—mentioning feminist theory first. Of course, feminism, as Vallone ironically remarks, "has never been homogenous"(209); in its rich diversity, this collection invites us to consider the heterogeneous assumptions and valorizations that constitute feminist/post-feminist scholarly production.

U.C. Knoepflmacher's compelling literary analysis of Perrault's "Sleeping Beauty" and its re-telling by later female authors is grounded in valorizations of female empowerment wholly compatible with the women's liberation movement of the 1960's. Roger Clark, Heidi Kulkin, and Liam Clancy, while appearing to consolidate a frame of reference beyond "The Liberal Bias in Feminist Social Science Research on Children's Books," nevertheless fall back upon the traditionalist paradigm when imagining experiments that might exercise a greater sensitivity to issues of class and color. In his poetic, playful study of women and the picture book, William Moebius also valorizes "feminine agency," both in the production of the picture book, and within its figurations...