From the Editors
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Volume 29 of Children's Literature brings together essays on literature spanning two centuries. What these essays suggest is that ideology—its creation, its reinforcement, its critique—remains as central to children's literary studies as ever.
The ideological focuses that appear in this volume, however, are tremendously varied. Donelle Ruwe challenges twentieth-century understandings of "the romantic ideology" with her analysis of Sarah Trimmer's work. Ruwe claims that Trimmer embodies a self-confidence and rejection of the imagination that conflict with our assumptions about romanticism and the nineteenth-century female artist. In her essay on nineteenth-century France, Ruth Carver Capasso uses La Bibliothèque Rose as an example of how philanthropy literature was used to shape class and gender identity for children. Both of these essays focus on the significance that educating children, and thus the formation of ideology, holds in the nineteenth century.
In another essay on a nineteenth-century text, Alcott's Little Women, Ken Parille argues, like Ruwe, that twentieth-century feminist ideologies may lead to misreadings of nineteenth-century ideologies. In particular, Parille claims that the "ethic of submission" determines Laurie's roles as much as it does those of the little women.
Claudia Nelson's essay on shifting representations of the orphan in American literature published between 1870 and 1930 places changing ideologies in the context of a changing culture. Nelson traces the evolution of the orphan from a source of labor to an individual with his or her own needs. The texts Nelson examines, however, often critique the social structure they reflect by emphasizing the orphan's transformative function. Though the adults in orphan fiction may see the children they take on in terms of the physical labor they will contribute to the household, the orphan's real task turns out to be the emotional one of healing the adult world (think, for example, of Anne of Green Gables). Kate Lawson's essay on the Emily trilogy looks more closely at Montgomery's depiction of the orphan as artist. Lawson uses conflated images of home and loss to reveal the anxiety that lurks in Emily's moments of epiphany. In contrast to the Wordsworthian [End Page vii] notion of art as "abundant recompense" for the loss of childhood, Lawson sees artistic revelation as linked to trauma in Montgomery's depiction of the child's experience of the uncanny.
The next essays in this volume focus explicitly on the ways that language and pictures shape ideology. Fern Kory's essay on the Brownies' Book considers the "peculiar" situation of early twentieth-century African Americans from the perspective of the rhetorical strategy of "signifying." Kory uses the fairy tales published in this children's magazine as examples of the refashioning of children's literature, as Henry Louis Gates says, "'authentically,' with a Black difference." Her work suggests that these tales required African American children to see themselves both as outside of Eurocentric fairy tales and as participants in a tradition of childhood culture.
Laura B. Comoletti and Michael D. C. Drout ask similar questions based on a very different set of texts. Their analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea tetralogy asks how it is that knowledge and self-knowledge lead to power and wisdom. They, like Kory, claim that it is language, "doing things with words," that allows Le Guin to assert female power in Tehanu without overturning the social structure she constructed in the earlier Earthsea books.
In an increasingly video-driven culture, it seems essential to look at the roles visual images play in constructing and critiquing ideology. The next two essays do just that by using illustration to critique dominant ideologies. Philip Nel, with his analysis of Crockett Johnson, returns to the link between ideology and imagination that Ruwe identifies in the nineteenth century. Instead of focusing on self-knowledge, as Kory, Comoletti, and Drout do, Nel asks the question: "how do you know what's real?" He suggests that Crockett's apparently simple work provokes larger questions about U.S. policy and society. Nel's essay makes explicit ideological issues that are implicit in most of...
