The Family in English Children’s Literature (review)

Well-researched and thorough, Ann Alston’s The Family in English Children’s Literature is an ambitious attempt to chart ideological assumptions about the family in the children’s literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alston persuasively contends that children’s literature is inherently conservative in its celebration of an idyllic nuclear family that serves as a haven in a disorderly and contentious world. As she argues, even when twentieth-century children’s literature graphically portrays bleakly dysfunctional families, it implicitly holds up a countervailing ideal to the chaotic reality. In general, Alston asserts, children’s literature celebrates the traditional two-parent family, the solace of a conventional home with orderly spaces and predictable routines, and the shared family meal, which serves as an emblem of familial warmth, comfort, and affection.

Reflecting the structure of this argument, Alston organizes her book into three sections. The first chapter offers a brief social and theoretical history of the family, and its arguments will already be familiar to scholars of children’s literature and culture. Viewing the family as a “site of discipline” and of Foucauldian “surveillance,” this chapter traces both the gradual emergence of the nuclear family and its links to the middle class (10). Alston’s purpose here is not to explore new or original ideas but rather to provide a concise history of a specific line of argument that has been made many times before. The next two chapters examine depictions of family in children’s fiction from 1818 to 2003, emphasizing the endurance of idealized nineteenth-century conceptions of domesticity. Because she covers so much territory here, Alston must restrict herself to very brief analyses of the numerous works under discussion. While these chapters provide a valuable historical review for those new to the field, Alston risks losing those readers in search of a complex or original argument. Her historical review tends toward concise plot summaries linked with brief analyses that emphasize the enduring importance of the family as a locus of disciplinarity and a focus for didactic instruction.

Alston seems to hit her stride, however, in the final section; these three chapters explore a series of themes and motifs related to family life: the conception of home, domestic space, and the family meal as an image of emotional sustenance and parental nurturing. Here, Alston develops engaging and extended analyses that shed new light on an array of recent and classic children’s texts. As she convincingly argues here, traditional housekeeping practices and family meals frequently become indices of a family’s health and viability. While spatial partitioning can offer an illusion of privacy and independence in a child’s bedroom, in fact the so-called bedroom sanctuary serves as a “controlled” space, since its “ownership” is still “vested in the adult” (99).

Despite its clear strengths as a valuable and concise historical review, Alston’s work occasionally suffers from an overly reductive thesis. As she repeatedly asserts, “[e]ven in the more modern texts, the traditional family is depicted as desirable,” while “families that deviate from this ideal are depicted as other” (26). Thus, for Alston, “the strict patterns of children’s literature are inescapable” with regard to domestic ideology and familial norms. Whether the families portrayed in individual novels are idealized, mixed, or dysfunctional, they always appear to reinforce the traditional nineteenth-century norms enunciated in such works as Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family or Sinclair’s Holiday House. Such an argument lacks nuance; the more interesting question involves the tension between children’s literature’s undoubted endorsement of traditional norms and its complementary tendency to stray into subversive transgressions of those norms. While it certainly holds a measure of accuracy, the danger of Alston’s thesis is that it risks equating such works as the Fairchild Family, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and the Harry Potter novels without accounting for their differing degrees of tension as they strive to resolve (or fail to resolve) idealistic familial norms and subversive subtexts. Ultimately, the presence of...