Critical Conversations about Children's Literature: Orality, Literacy, History

The articles selected for this issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly showcase some of the ways in which books for children are inextricable from the cultural networks in which they are produced and read. While attending to familiar questions about power and ideology—and sharing a commitment to progressive, pluralist representation—the contributors emphasize the continuing relevance of historical narratives for young readers past and present. At issue are both the determining power of cultural ideology and the rich, often unpredictable dynamics of literary engagement. Whatever their particular focus, the essayists insist on the polyvocal nature of children's literature and children's literature studies, preferring the give and take of critical conversation to the monologue.

I have chosen the Brady Collection portrait of Frederick Douglass for the cover of this issue because Douglass's division between opposing cultures speaks to the themes of all of these articles. It speaks most directly, perhaps, to Karen Chandler's article, which proposes an extended (albeit preliminary) answer to her friends' questions about whether literacy is the superhero in contemporary children's fiction about slavery. Contemporary novels and films, especially those featuring girl protagonists, present a view of literacy "aligned with the oral riches of black culture"; they suggest to young readers "that black folk and print cultures are not at odds." As Chandler argues, these works interrogate the typical plot trajectory of the nineteenth-century slave narrative canonized in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative of the Life, in which the individual Romantic hero acquires literacy and escapes both the bonds of slavery and the "limitations" of slave culture. Like Douglass's later autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), these contemporary narratives "offer visions of black family and communal life" that affirm rather than deny the complexity of slaves' lives.

Similarly, Elizabeth Gargano pays attention to the opposition between "literate" European and "oral" Native American literary forms in her discussion of Ojibwa story cycles and oral narratives in Louise Erdrich's two novels for young people. Erdrich's interweaving of the oral narratives "interrupts the forward momentum of the linear plot" and challenges "Euro-American assumptions about humanity's supremacy over nature and the importance of individualism" and the "stark divisions between the sacred and secular realms." Furthermore, Gargano suggests, the subordination of the linear narrative to the story cycles respects the child reader by forgoing conventional "assimilationist" approaches in favor of encouraging, indeed requiring, children to engage in active reading.

Often what may appear transgressive to contemporary readers is anything but in social and historical context. Discussing E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand in light of the nineteenth-century American phenomenon of tomboyism, Michelle Abate argues that the tomboy phenomenon, rather than representing a challenge to hetero-normativity, instead represented a preparation for it. "Young girls," writes Abate, "embraced this new code of conduct not as a means to transgress their adult roles as wives and mothers but, on the contrary, to train for them." Furthermore, she argues, Southworth's novel connects "white tomboyism" with the "hegemonic aims" of blackface minstrelsy. Just as Capitola's cross-dressing is ultimately only a flirtation "with the fantasy of existing outside mainstream culture," her flirtation "with various forms of nonwhiteness paradoxically reinforces white hegemony."

In her contribution, Noriko Suzuki examines the ways in which the official agencies of the American occupation of Japan attempted to use Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter as propaganda for inculcating postwar democratization, but she also reveals the ways in which that novel, more than the other Little House books, was creatively appropriated by Japanese readers. "The Long Winter," writes Suzuki, "seemed to the Japanese a story of themselves." The images of suffering and survival in the American West and utopian hopes for transcending that suffering resonated with the devastation of wartime and with traditional Japanese metaphors of winter as a representation of "hardship" and spring as a representation of "happiness and a new start." Moreover, she argues, Japanese readers idealized the relative autonomy of American...