Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood (review)

Joseph L. Zornado. Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood. New York: Garland, 2001.

Nearing the end of Joseph Zornado's curious study, in its best chapter, "Maurice Sendak and the Detachment Child," I was struck by the following question: "Why do academics so routinely develop their intellects and neglect their emotional lives?" "The answer," Zornado continues,

is simple, though not simplistic: because of their traumatic experiences as children. I think it is safe to say that successful scholars, writers, and critics draw upon skills that once were childhood coping mechanisms: we saved ourselves when we withdrew into books, study, thought, and our own intellects. The cognitive life begins when the "life of the heart" becomes too full with the shame of its own "wildness." (192)

Now, I'm a reasonably successful academic, scholar, and writer, and I'm blessed with a fairly accurate remembrance of what it is like to be a child. While I'll decline to comment on the present state of my affective life, I can assure the reader that I have one, and a fairly rich one at that. And in addition to the various traumas and joys of my childhood (yes, reader, there were both!), I have deeply embodied memories of the significant role that reading played in my understanding of what it means to feel, and, indeed, in helping me learn more sophisticated human emotions like empathy. Furthermore, I don't know how I could understand anything about "the life of the heart" without cognition, but if I could, I doubt I would be trying to articulate it here. (Is it really accurate to oppose affect to cognition?)

This rather grandiose claim is, unfortunately, all too characteristic of the claims made throughout Inventing the Child. Coupling Althusser's analysis of ideology with psychohistory as his basic interpretive framework, Zornado sets out to tell a "story of childhood" that with each successive chapter becomes mind-numbingly repetitive, dishearteningly programmatic, and delivered in excruciatingly tortured prose. Zornado is often a smart reader of the primary texts he chooses--among them Hamlet, Grimms' tales, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, various Disney texts, and, especially, Sendak's We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. And he is an impassioned advocate for children who, he rightly notes, are all too often at the mercy of a culture that devalues them. But the theoretical apparatus of Inventing the Child (like the ideological state one) is oppressive. The phrase "dominant ideology" occurs with such frequency and in so many contexts as to become virtually meaningless. More problematically, Zornado's accounts of such issues as Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory simply ignore the complexities of that debate in psychoanalytic criticism. One of the major critics of that abandonment, Alice Miller, is cited frequently. Her early works, The Drama of the Gifted Child and For Your Own Good, are useful; I have relied on them in my own criticism. But there is a fine line between Miller's concepts of the "true self" and "false self" outlined in Drama and the cheapest kind of pop psychology. Zornado crosses that line (in his analysis of Barney, the purple dinosaur) when he cites approvingly the work of John Bradshaw (the man who gave us the phrases "inner child" and "toxic shame"). While Miller makes a number of valid points about the "poisonous pedagogy" of accepting violence in childrearing, Bradshaw advocates a very pernicious form of navel-gazing.

The book's reliance on dubious scholarship, while ignoring standard works, is its biggest flaw, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the analysis of Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. All the biographical information on Dodgson comes from Richard Wallace's largely discredited speculative biographical study, The Agony of Lewis Carroll, a work that a Carroll-specialist friend of mine describes as a very bad...