The Image of the Child in Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking

The Image of the Child in Lindgren's Pippi Lonqstockinq In her book The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction. Jacqueline Rose argues that there is no "real" child behind the image of the child depicted in children's fiction. She stresses that this image is a projection of what the adult writer thinks children are or should be. After all, the production of fiction for children is completely carried out by adults. And it is again the adults who actually bring the final product into the lives of the children because books are not only written, but are also generally chosen, bought, offered and read to children by adults (especially if children are too young to know how to read themselves) . The recognition of this dependency and powerlessness of children in the creation of their image in fiction necessitates the examination of what the adult "desires in the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech" (Rose 2) . In her answer. Rose emphasizes the adult need to see childhood as the pure and moral origin of a universal meaning, untouched by historical and social reality, by tracing the persistence of this need from Locke and Rousseau to the present day. She shows that this utopie view of childhood as the locus of a primordial totality that is lost to adults serves as an answer to and a defense against the fractures, divisions, and ambiguities of meaning created by the realities of class, language, and sexuality. Thus, Rose's conclusion is that "there is no child behind the category 'children's fiction,' other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes" (10) . But this is only, a partial conclusion. Even if the image of the child in the text is nothing more than a projection of the adult author, once it is presented to a "real" child, it becomes an image to be emulated and duplicated in reality. The child's capacity to identify is the greatest factor in the translation of the fictional image into reality. Rose writes, "Children's writing seems to operate according to a regime of attraction which draws the child into the path of identification—with the intimacy of the story-telling itself, or with the characters, in whom the child recognizes himself or herself on the page" (140) . As a result of this, "children's fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child," becoming "something of a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction" (Rose 2) . Rose underlines the meaning of this last statement by reminding us that some children's books like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan were originally used by their authors to literally seduce children. 112 Thus, adults exploit their uncontested monopoly in the production of children's fiction and children's capacity for identification to form "real" children in the fabricated image of the fictional child in the text. Most generally adults use fiction as a means of socializing children, to facilitate their internalization of and conformity to the adult way of seeing, thinking, and living. Don't Pippi Lonqstockinq books contradict this argument by presenting the image of a self-sufficient, independent, and free child who successfully defies each and every adult expectation from children? Nancy Huse's answer would be "Yes" because she argues that "Lindgren wrote the Pippi Lonqstockinq books ... in a pedagogical context advocating children's liberation" (Huse 29) . My answer, on the other hand, is an emphatic "NO" because in presenting the liberating fantasy of a child who lives outside of adult rules and untouched by adult expectations, these books also expose the fictionality, the fantasy nature of Pippi' s free life and wild behavior. Hence, children are constantly reminded that Pippi can only exist in a fantasy, that her life cannot be imitated in reality. There are two contrasting images of the child in the Pippi Lonqstockinq books. Against the self-admittedly fictional "unreal" image of Pippi, Lindgren gives us the conventional and typical image of the child in Tommy and Annika, who are drawn...