In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Waiting in the Hundred Acre Wood:Childhood, Narrative and Time in A. A. Milne's Works for Children
  • Paul Wake (bio)

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place at the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

A. A. Milne, "An Enchanted Place"

Woodbine Meadowlark finds tragedy in the closing lines of A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner. As Christopher Robin takes his leave of Pooh at what is to be the end of Milne's career as a writer of children's stories, and consequently the last of the stories set in the Hundred Acre Wood, we are not, he insists, deceived by "the last pitiful sentence of the book, in which Milne asserts that in some sense Pooh and Christopher Robin 'will always be playing'" (Crews 84). Far from it, for Meadowlark "[t]he sentence takes on its full meaning only as we grasp its purpose of providing a counterweight to the inexorable pull of temporality that is dashing Christopher Robin away from us forever" (Crews 84). Somewhat embarrassingly, given that what is to follow takes seriously the functioning of temporality in Milne's work for children, Meadowlark, that "free spirit unfettered by academic routine" is a fictional character, the creation of Frederick C. Crews in his parody of literary criticism The Pooh Perplex (1964). The genius of Crews' "casebook" lies in the fact that its observations, about both literary criticism and Winnie-the-Pooh, are extremely well-observed with the effect that, as many critics writing on Milne have pointed out, the subsequent embarrassment of pursuing ideas so effectively parodied has led to a relative paucity of critical studies of Milne's works [End Page 26] for children.1 But, while Crews selects the Winnie-the-Pooh stories as the subject of his analysis for just the same reasons that led Dorothy Parker to dub their author "Mr. A.A. ('Whimsy-the-Pooh') Milne" (437), namely their apparent slightness of both subject matter and style, his argument, through its very successes with the text, foregrounds not the impossibility of discussing the books, nor the ludicrous nature of critical studies, but rather the richly productive possibilities of analyzing children's fiction. This is not, as Harvey C. Window (another of Crews' creations) suggests, because Milne's stories are somehow more than "merely . . . little episodes that will engage the attention of small children" (5), but precisely because they are texts for and about children.2

With this in mind, my intention here is to approach Milne's popular works for children (When We Were Very Young [1924], Winnie-the-Pooh [1926], Now We Are Six [1927], and The House at Pooh Corner [1928]) in terms of a temporality that is central to the construction of a childhood that is simultaneously assumed and defined in terms of both the child within the text and the implied reader of the text. As Jacqueline Rose puts it, "[i] f children's fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp" (2). It might indeed be argued that the child reader can only ever be an implied reader, constructed by, and only existing within (and for) what Seymour Chatman terms the "narrative transaction" (147).

Accordingly, this study will follow the well-established, if occasionally controversial, assertion that childhood is, to quote Philippe Ariès, an "idea," and a fairly recent one at that, and that it is thus possible to speak of the "discovery of childhood," perhaps better rephrased in terms of "invention," (which Ariès locates in the thirteenth century) and that the subsequent "evolution of the themes of childhood" (46), as evidenced by the history of art, clothing, games, and education, is the result of a discourse that has been largely circumscribed by adults. What makes Milne's work for children so interesting in this respect is that it signals its recognition of the processes by which the childhood "space" is...

pdf

Share