The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (review)

Just to save a certain amount of time: all readers of this review should at once clear a space on their shelves, buy this book, and read it—or, at least, read pages 133–244, which alone are worth $35.00 of anyone’s money. This is a fundamental, indispensable book for anyone with any pretensions to understanding the ideas surrounding children’s literature (the body of texts) and “Children’s Literature” (the field of study). I think that is clear enough?

And why? Because, as Nodelman says, “despite its long history, children’s literature criticism . . . has a habit of forgetting its own past, or even, sometimes, utterly lacks awareness of that past’s existence” (134). Worse, criticism “tends to maintain an innocence of its own by hiding—or completely forgetting—any awareness of its past adulthood” (136). Those who teach children’s literature know that the downside of an otherwise challenging and invigorating subject is having to tramp wearily around the endlessly repeated series of questions about what the subject is, its relation to “literature” and to children, and all the other undead questions. No longer! The Hidden Adult is the stake to lay those vampires. Nodelman’s chapter on defining children’s literature (133–244) is also a history, a compendium, of what has been thought about the subject, written by someone who was not only there when most of it was being thought and who contributed a great deal to that body of thought, but also someone who has read everything. Here are all the arguments and reasoned discussion of them; for older readers, they are old skirmishes—with Jacqueline Rose asserting the “impossibility” of children’s fiction, Karín Lesnik-Oberstein damning all criticism out of hand, Peter Hollindale’s “childness,” .. and Peter Hunt’s “childist criticism.” The whole exercise is, as Nodelman says himself, “a concise and revealing overview of how adults over the past century or so in Europe, North America, and elsewhere have generally tended to think about children and literature” (138), and it is fundamental. By supplying such an overview, Nodelman does not close off debate: rather, he supplies us with the materials for an informed debate.

But this book is much more than a review of ideas: it is a magnum opus, and the essence of such books is that they should be idiosyncratic. (Nodelman has, after all, already written the most indispensable unidiosyn-cratic book for students working with children’s literature: The Pleasures of Children’s Literature.) And one idiosyncrasy—apart from the fact that the remark “At this point in my argument, one thing should be clear: children’s literature is not simple” occurs on page 245—is that Nodelman has a thesis, and he is ready to back it up meticulously. The thesis is that children’s books have similarities; they are not

just an indiscriminate body of quite different sorts of text grouped together by adults for convenience merely because of their intended audiences . . . Fictional texts [sic] written by adults for children and young people are enough like each other to be immediately recognizable as having been intended for their specific audiences—as children’s or young adults’ literature.

(81)

But in order to fully address his subject, Nodelman has to start from first principles—the that principles so often are unexamined and, as such, are the root of so much endless and fruitless debate. Thus, he examines six texts and justifies, naturally, his selection at considerable length. The texts are Maria Edgeworth’s “The Purple Jar”; Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Do-little; Beverly; Cleary’s Henry Huggins; Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day; and Virginia Hamilton’s Plain City.

They are all, obviously, children’s books—but how do we know this? Unlike the good Dr. Johnson, who, famously, said: “We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is,” the good Dr. Nodelman is not content with not...