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  • American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood
  • Richard Flynn (bio)
Gail Schmunk Murray. American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood. Edited by Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. Twayne’s History of American Childhood Series. New York: Twayne, 1998.

This ambitious book is an attempt, as the author notes in her introduction, to “understand the critical connection between the creative work of fiction and the cultural and social reality of which the author is a part” (xv). And it is part of a larger ambitious project: a new Twayne series on the history of American childhood, edited by Joseph Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, whose collection of bibliographic-historical essays, American Childhood, is still useful to students and scholars of children’s literature and culture, despite its 1985 publication date. Unlike most “outsiders” discovering the field of children’s literature, Gail Murray, an associate professor of history at Rhodes College, has taken the trouble to consult the existing body of literary criticism and to interact at conferences with scholars in children’s literature and cultural studies in the course of her project. For the children’s literature scholar seeking new insight into the political and economic forces shaping the conception of childhood, the book falls short. But for the general reader, Professor Murray’s book is a deft survey of the history of American children’s literature seen through the lens of the cultural historian.

The notion that childhood is a socially and historically constructed category is familiar to most readers of this journal. Though one might expect to find more evidence here of the extra-literary forces through which childhood was constructed and the ways in which those forces influenced literary texts and literary production, nearly the opposite is true. Murray argues, convincingly, that children’s texts not only reflect, but also play a big role in constructing the kinds of childhood that teachers, parents, and writers wish to impose on children. Largely a [End Page 304] “conservative medium,” children’s literature has largely been used as a way to “shape morals, control information, model proper behavior, delineate gender roles, and reinforce class, race, and ethnic separation” (xvi). Yet we find something vibrant and worthwhile about this conservative medium and many of its texts, despite their conservatism, didacticism, and even their ideological failings. And it is Professor Murray’s appreciation for the literary pleasure the texts can give to children and adults that makes her comprehensive survey a joy to read.

The informative early chapters of the study concern colonial childhood and children’s texts, as well as the ways in which the nascent publishing industry sought to inculcate “virtues for the new republic” (23). Despite calls for universal public education by none other than President Washington in his “First Message to Congress in 1790” (25), the doctrine of federalism dictated that universal schooling could not be a matter of national policy. Attempts to provide publicly funded education on the state level also proved largely unsuccessful because of the reluctance of the citizenry to pay taxes to support schools and their fear of abdicating parental responsibility and control. The publication of “texts for the new nation” largely fell to entrepreneurs and social reformers such as Noah Webster, William McGuffey, Samuel Goodrich, Jacob Abbott, and Lydia Maria Child. Just as the nation was in transition from former colony to new republic, the view of children as needing redemption from sin was giving way to more Romantic notions of the child. Murray chooses the 1850 publication of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World to mark the shift in which “the construction of childhood moved from society’s need to redeem the child to one in which the child became the redeemer” (54).

Noting the gendered nature of writing for children in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Murray notes that even in a relatively subversive text, such as Alcott’s Little Women, the “reinfantilization” of Jo March is similar to that of Warner’s Ellen Montgomery (65). Though the implications of this are not fully explored, Murray’s reading of the novels suggests that to be “childlike” was, perhaps, more attractive by...

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