Reflected Images: The Child in Modern Children's Literature

Reflected Images: The Child in Modern Children's Literature Literature plays an important part in contemporary society, for it both reflects and reinforces society's ideology (Williams 123; Eagleton 167). For the powerless subculture of childhood this notion is even more clearly seen because in children's literature children do not have a voice. The child has relatively little say in any aspect of a book's production. Adults play the major role in every aspect of "children's" literature. Adult book reviewers recommend books to other adults. Adult librarians, teachers, and parents purchase books for children. Adult publishers and editors produce books for children. Even writers of this fiction no longer belong to this subculture. Children have virtually no voice in the literature for and about children. Yet the children's book industry continues to grow, and more books for children are being published every year (Grannis 39; Richardson S18). Since the invention of childhood (Aries 33), books have been published for children, and children have read and often enjoyed them. I wanted to explore what adult ideologies of the child in our culture are presenting to contemporary children. I selected books that the children themselves said they enjoyed since I surmised that the image of the child as presented in these books would be felt by the children to be closer to themselves, or how they wished to be. For this reason I selected books from the "Young Reader's Choice Award" winners. This award, given annually by the Children's and Young Adult Services Division of the Pacific Northwest Library Association, was begun in 1940 and so provided a larger sample than most awards of its type. However, even in a reader's award, adults first select the list from which the children then choose. Ten to fifteen titles from the previous three years are selected by librarians and then presented to children in grades four through eight who vote for their favorite book. The children are from Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. I analyzed fifteen books published over a fifty-year period to examine more closely the image of the child as presented in these books. I chose three titles from each decade to represent my sample. 1 Whenever possible I chose books that had been the top favorites of the children, which I determined by comparing this list to twenty-eight other children's choice awards. My experience as a children's librarian confirmed the list for me. What I would like to present is a brief look at some of the historical as well as the contemporary notions of the image of the child in American children's literature. My own findings will then either confirm or negate some of these notions and attempt to integrate the complexity of today's image of the child by including the introduction of the affective domain, 231 or the sphere based on emotion, and the rise of the rebellious (antithetical) child. Children's literature, historically, has had a consciously didactic purpose. Reality in children's literature is refracted through adult attitudes toward children and society (MacLeod, Tale 116; Kelly xiii; MacLeod, "End" 100). Children reading these stories learn what adults regard as important (McClelland 135). The literature of any given period can be as revealing as a historical portrait since literature provides a coherent organization of thought and feeling in a form that may continue to shape our experience of past and present (Marx 80). Children's literature, then, is a primary source for obtaining a cultural portrait of the child, or more precisely, adult images of childhood, for children. One should then be able to gather from children's literature what adults regard as important for children at any given time. MacLeod, in her book A Moral Tale (1975), examines children's literature of the 1820-186Os. She attributes the great increase in the production of children's literature in the United States during this period to American preoccupation with the future of the republic and with the children who would shape it. Christian morality suffused nearly all popular works of literature of the period and shaped any social or political issue found...