Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood (review)

This book is a passionate, accessible, often clever, and always irreverent discussion of the ways that child-rearing pedagogy has shaped not only children's books in the western tradition but "the story of childhood" itself. Zornado argues that we live in a culture "long gone blind to the child and the child's most basic biological and emotional needs" and that the chapters of his book "combine to tell a larger cultural story of violence and the misuse of power that proceeds virtually unchecked" (xiv).

Both the introduction and the first chapter lay out Zornado's basic argument about not only the vicious cycle of violent child-rearing ideology that is its own "mechanism for the reproduction of the dominant culture," but even the ideological obfuscation "that blinds even the brightest scholar to [this] most obvious truth" (xiv). Zornado puts it plainly: "Western history might be read—and will be read in this book—as one long, intensifying series of responses to the suffering of emotional deprivation that the adult inflicts upon the child, and the child inflicts upon the world" (5). Zornado claims that the child, at the hands of this pedagogy of "false consciousness," suffers a fragmentation among the child's intellect, "the energetic body, the feeling heart, and the body's intuition"(11). The book examines all of this through readings of selective children's literature as well as Hamlet.

Hamlet, we are told, is a kind of children's literature because it shows "relations of power and violence between the adult and the child" (xv). In the second chapter Zornado argues that we make a mistake to focus on Freud's theory of the Oedipal complex rather than his earlier theory of seduction as a way of understanding the child/adult relationship. When Freud realized how the seduction theory, which "explained adult psychological disorders as latter-day expressions of childhood sexual trauma," implicated his own father, he abandoned it for the nature-rather-than-nurture explanation of the Oedipal complex. Zornado uses the seduction theory to speculate about both Shakespeare's life as the product of Elizabethan England's dominant child-rearing pedagogy and the psychodrama of Hamlet's childhood relationship with his parents.

Chapter three examines the psychosocial origins of the Grimms' tales. "As ideological productions of the dominant culture...the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm do not, in fact, record archetypal myths of the human psyche but rather, they reify cultural myth as if it were archetypal myth" (75). Zornado shows how the Grimms, especially the elder brother, Jacob, were influenced to collect the tales based on a combination of their middle class aspirations, nationalism, and their unconscious need to replicate the adult/child relationship of the dominant culture. "Children are terrorized in these tales, then, because terrorized children are easier to manipulate"(84).

The fourth chapter gives a broader view of Victorian era child-rearing practices and shows how the works of Carroll and Grahame ultimately reflect those practices in ironic fashion as they each try to provide social critique on the major beliefs of their respective times. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Babar and Curious George are later extensions of the notion of colonization and its attendant racist ideology that is a product of Victorian era thinking.

Walt Disney is the subject of the fifth chapter. Disney's life is read as an example of how the poisonous child-rearing practices of domination, subjugation, and violence are reflected in Disney's relationship to his workers and his company's textual production and those products' inevitable subtexts of racism, hierarchy, and violence. Disney, it is argued, is an unconscious vehicle of the dominant child-rearing ideology and merely replicates in his life and work what he knew from his own violent upbringing.

In contrast, Sendak's work consciously reflects what the dominant culture does to children. In the sixth chapter we are told of Sendak's dominant theme, which he...