Dangerous Intersection: Feminists at Work

Feminist criticism, with its insistence on disrupting and challenging hegemonic, patriarchal assignations of value, seems a natural companion to a literature that often seeks to do the same. When simpletons become kings, when pigs become minor celebrities, when geeky orphans save the world, we know we are in a Utopian space, a space where the oppressive restrictions of age and gender can be successfully overcome. In fact, so many children's books feature marginalized subjects without much physical or political power overcoming their oppressors through intelligence, imagination, courage, and a facility with language that I might argue that feminism itself can trace its unconscious ideological genealogy, at least in part, to the empowered heroes and heroines of children's fantasy fiction. But that argument is not one that is often made or acknowledged, and this is why the project undertaken in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys is such a significant one to both feminist and children's culture scholarship. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret Higonnet have brought together scholars from various disciplines to work at the current intersections of feminism and children's literature and culture. Clark's introduction sketches the lines of development of both fields, and elegantly posits a range of fruitful and exciting possibilities engendered by feminist inquiries into children's texts and artifacts that seek to go beyond traditional, simplistic readings of how girls have been portrayed in children's texts, or how women's writing differs from men's. The rhetorical force of her introduction and her assertion that what follows will "illuminate the vibrant intersection between children's literature and feminist criticism and spark new questions for scholarship" (8) create high expectations for the volume.

Imagine my disappointment, then, upon finding that the first essay in the collection is one more feminist reading of a fairy tale by one of the venerable fathers of the field of children's literary criticism. U. C. Knoepflmacher's "Repudiating 'Sleeping Beauty'" compares and contrasts the literary retellings of the tale through male and female authors, tracing its lineage through Basile's ur-text and Perrault's sanitized, though still masculinist, retelling. It is not that this essay is not important and informative; rather, what caused my dismay is its pride of place in this particular effort. I feared that the lineage he traces for Sleeping Beauty, from masculine ur-text to feminine repudiation, was somehow the fated structure of the volume itself—resulting in a defensive rather than a creative act. Or perhaps Knoepflmacher's essay was somehow necessary as the authorizing presence for what was to follow—one more example of the totemic Freudian father circumscribing the field of feminine work and play, turning what followed into so much more phallic jouissance after all.

It turns out that my fears were mostly unfounded. The sixteen short, lively essays are divided into three sections—History, Theory, and Culture—but as Clark notes, these categories are not as exclusive as they might appear, and there is much overlap. For instance, Lissa Paul's reading of the poetry of Grace Nichols against that of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Theory section nonetheless brings history and culture together in its treatment of this postcolonial poet. Susan Willis's study of dinosaurs, in the Culture section, reminds us of the historical turns that the scientific and cultural study of dinosaurs has taken since feminism entered the popular imagination. Other essays fit more squarely into their designation. In the History section, for instance, Claudia Marquis' study of nineteenth-century adventure stories gives a strong feel for the imperialist drive to domesticate the exoticized other characteristic of the period. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum offer a post-Althusserian interpretation of the implied reader—who is interpellated as feminist—of adolescent fiction in the Theory section, and Lori Kenschaft's reading of Mary Poppins enacts the necessary, but often frustrating, deferral of ideological certitude in postmodern culture. Is Mary Poppins ultimately subversive or conservative; does it espouse feminist...