Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children Literature (review)

Smart and engaging, Looking Glasses and Neverlands is the best extended psychoanalytic study of children's literature yet available. Coats doesn't merely argue for the relevance of Jacques Lacan's work; she holds that Lacan is the theorist from whom we can learn the most about subjectivity, childhood, and representation. Coats does acknowledge the foundational writing of Sigmund Freud, and interprets adolescent literature in light of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. But the Notorious L.A.C.A.N. takes center stage, and if you're Lacan-phobic, take heart. Coats knows her stuff, and has a gift for examples and phrasing that clarify without dumbing down. "Renouncing one's jouissance," she writes at one point, "does not mean that it disappears. Rather, it circulates in the Other, kind of like a sick-day pool" (93).

Framed by an introduction and a conclusion, Looking Glasses and Neverlands is divided into seven chapters, each elucidating one or more Lacanian concepts vis-à-vis canonical texts and genres of children's literature. Coats puts text and theory in cheerful dialogue. Roughly speaking, the early chapters focus on books for young readers while later chapters address texts for older readers. The book thus profiles the developmental story of a child from babyhood through adolescence, as retold by Lacan and retouched by Coats. Coats revises as she explains Lacan, smoothing over his more controversial ideas.

Ch. 1 attends to the general problematic of subjectivity through analysis of Charlotte's Web. Coats begins here because White's novel seems to illustrate Lacan's overarching conceits, chief among them the registers of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. Stressing the difference between the individual and the "subject," Coats reminds us that we are all subject to language, and that language is a public order with some stability. Our sense of self, she holds after Lacan, is founded upon losses for which language offers sorry, if seductive, compensation. Emphasizing the importance of early childhood, Coats devotes Chs. 2 and 3 to picture books and early readers, respectively, offering fascinating readings of texts such as The Story of Babar, Curious George, and Stellaluna. She suggests how entry into the Symbolic demands the absence and/or renunciation of mothers. "Children's picture books and beginning readers," she writes, "in their colorful, lively, humorous presentation, can be seen as ads for the Symbolic, attempts to ease the child away from an impossible connection to the mother into a slightly less impossible position as a subject" (60).

In Ch. 4, Coats points out that while it's easy to indulge in psychobiography, to pathologize Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie as eccentric or worse, it's much harder to account for the ongoing appeal of their work. The desire of the reader—our desire—is at stake, not simply the desire of the author, and to examine such, "we must employ a critical discourse of desire that focuses on the symbolic rather than the literal uses of sex" (78). To that end, Coats proposes that the character Alice is Lewis Carroll's objet a—in Lacanian terms, a retroactive construction of the Symbolic that promises the illusory wholeness of the Real. Lacan holds that the subject is essentially nostalgic, longing for a sense of wholeness that has ostensibly been lost with separation from the mother and entry into the Symbolic. Coats suggests that Alice embodies Carroll's deep ambivalence about the mandate to grow up. The second part of Ch. 4 elaborates the Lacanian term jouissance in relation to Peter Pan, and while I found this discussion useful, I wish that Coats had likewise speculated about Peter Pan as Barrie's objet a. Also, while Coats emphasizes the "symbolic rather than the literal uses of sex," she still looks primarily to author and text; I would have enjoyed a Lacanian perspective on the cultural life of these tales.

Chs. 5, 6, and 7 take up twentieth-century books...