Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik (review)

Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with cities. On the one hand, cities offer diversity, entertainment, excitement, and opportunity; on the other, they are equated with crime, unsavory characters, and poverty. The urban landscape becomes even more complicated when a child stands at the center, and this is the phenomenon that Pamela Robertson Wojcik explores in Fantasies of Neglect, the most recent volume in the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies. Her contribution is well timed. In our current age of helicopter parents, when a woman in New York is vilified for allowing her nine-year-old son to ride the subway alone, Wojcik reminds her readers that throughout the history of film and literature, children have roamed city streets. She opens with a contrasting story of a humorous 1963 children's picture book, How Little Lori Visited Times Square, written by Ann Vogel and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, in which a child of around six or seven navigates New York City, encountering adventures along the way. How such journeys are framed and what they mean constitute the focus of her book.

Fantasies of Neglect grabs the reader in its introduction, providing a provocative account of the ideas that surround children's place in the city. Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, saw cities as safe places where children could play and find community under the watchful eyes of family and neighbors. This view gave way to the "islanding" of children, relegating them to child-only areas such as child-care centers, playgrounds, craft centers, and the like, and limiting their mobility. In the process, the city itself was transformed as a public space by excluding young people. Wojcik references a plethora of popular texts that show children in urban areas, including books such as Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day (1962) and Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964), and the movies Oliver! (1968), Annie (1982/remake 2014), and Mary Poppins (1964). She contrasts these with the rural ideal, as exemplified in classics such as A. A. Milne's Winniethe-Pooh (1928), Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Johanna Spyri's Heidi (1880). In the popular imagination, children are imbued with innocence, but, as Wojcik writes, although there are many examples of city orphans who need care and protection, "the notion of childhood innocence conflicts with aspects of the urban child, who is social and knowing, if not corrupt" (11). In her book, Wojcik considers two intertwined narrative fantasies of the urban child: a figure of neglect and an agent of freedom, independence, and spatial mobility. These fantasies, she writes, "bring together a host of ideas about the urban, children, space, parenting, neglect, poverty, reform, and more; and they shift over time" (12). By considering the function and image of the urban child in media, Wojcik addresses key issues in American culture.

Fantasies of Neglect takes a historical approach, centering on the image of the urban child in American literature and film through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Selective in its method, it does not catalog all child tales with urban settings but rather uses particular texts, some aimed at children and others at adults, as case studies of major trends. Some choices may surprise the reader, such as the book's inclusion of the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, but a child's journey to the imaginary Emerald City captures key tropes and themes of urban child narratives of the early twentieth century. Wojcik is not so much interested in particular settings and actions as she is in ideas: What does the urban child say about modern society?

The book's first two chapters look at 1930s texts that feature urban boys and girls influenced by social problems. The first centers on films of the Dead End Kids...