Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (review)

Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity, by U. C. Knoepflmacher; pp. xxi + 444. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998, $35.00, £27.95.

In the years since U. C. Knoepflmacher shifted the focus of his teaching and writing to children's literature, the field once derided as "kiddie lit" has matured. Reprints and anthologies have attached available works to names like Juliana Horatia Ewing and Mary Louisa Molsworth, while scholarship implies that one ought at least to have heard of Hemyng S. Bracebridge and Hesba Stretton. It is no longer necessary for critics and historians of children's literature to justify their interest and produce general surveys. Ventures into Childland might be considered a second-generation work in this field. It investigates the interplay between the lives and works of seven authors--John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti, and Ewing--in a restricted time frame, the years between the publication of Ruskin's The King of the Golden River in late 1850 and Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses in 1874.

Knoepflmacher's underlying assumption is that in the gender ideology of the Victorian middle class, the position of sexually undifferentiated childhood was implicitly female, so that when the male child developed the positive characteristics of masculinity he had to leave a nursery identity, a "sororal self" behind. Some writers, Ruskin and Carroll in particular, clung to that identity and projected it onto idealized girls. Others, such as Thackeray and MacDonald, while not identifying themselves with girls, still wrote with specific girls in mind as an audience and emphasized maternal power to a degree that, in Knoepflmacher's view, affronted women writers of children's stories both as inheritors of a female narrative tradition and as women who had to contend with the realities of Victorian patriarchal power.

The retention of certain "girlish" characteristics as general Victorian ideals has been advanced before, in Claudia Nelson's Boys Will be Girls (1991), for example, but whereas Nelson's primary concern is gender ideology itself, Knoepflmacher is more interested in the psychological effects of female identification and projections of maternal power. It is Knoepflmacher's interest in psychological issues (seen primarily through the lens of object relations theory) and his interest in a particular historical moment that produces what might seem eccentric selections from the larger Victorian canon or from a survey of the "best" in the period's literature for children. Ruskin's keynote work, The King of the Golden River, written in 1841, but not published until a decade later, would never have been published had not Ruskin become "The Author of Modern Painters" in 1843. The Rose and the Ring (1855) is not about to displace Vanity Fair (1847-48) when one thinks of Thackeray, nor Rossetti's forbidding Speaking Likenesses her Goblin Market (1862), or "Monna Innominata" (1881), perhaps the century's finest English sonnet sequence. But when Knoepflmacher studies the influence, intertextuality, and personal contact between authors in his time frame, these choices cohere. Ruskin knew Thackeray, Carroll, Ingelow, and MacDonald, the last of whom was a confidant during his tortuous relationship with Rose La Touche. Carroll used the MacDonald children as a test audience for Alice in Wonderland (1865) and, of course, MacDonald did likewise with his own children's books. Ingelow, Ewing, and Rossetti responded to the Alice books, and Mopsa the Fairy (1869) clearly rewrites portions of MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871)--to note just a few strands in the complex web of relationships Knoepflmacher traces.

The much-celebrated triumph of the playful and fantastic over the moral and practical in the "Golden Age of children's literature" was also an intrusion by male writers, preeminently Carroll, into one of the few areas in which the culture ceded authority to women. However attractive wonderlands may be, they are also male fantasies of a lost Eden threatened by the ordinary process...