Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children's Literature (review)

Jerry Griswold's Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children's Literature is a visually sumptuous book, stunningly appointed and lovely to behold, one that is well-designed for its intended reading audience: the general public. The unannounced goal of the book is to provide a thematic explanation of children's literature to nonspecialists, and the visual appeal of this volume will play no small role with the success the book will undoubtedly have with that audience.

Griswold approaches the topic at hand by identifying five "themes" in children's literature, each of which is treated in its own chapter: snugness, scariness, smallness, lightness, and aliveness. Griswold convincingly argues how these issues inform the canon of children's literature: for example, snug homes and hiding places that are "enclosed," "tight," "small," "simple," "well designed," "remote," "safe," "self-sufficient," "owned," and "hidden"—like Badger's home in The Wind and the Willows—provide characters in children's literature with places in which to have "cozy times" (9–15). The type of scariness that children learn when adults pop out behind their hands saying "boo" appears in children's literature both as a means of teaching children how to deal with fear and as a means of helping them to master it. Smallness is a way to "present alternatives to consensual notions of dimension and, consequently, adult notions of importance," both in books that have the word "little" in their title (Little Women, Stuart Little) and in some that don't, like The Borrowers or The Tale of Two Bad Mice (73). Lightness manifests itself as flying or mischief or humor or optimism in texts such as Pinocchio or Mary Poppins that invite children to question the relationship between the physical world and the metaphysical world. And "aliveness" includes the concepts of anthropomorphism of animals, toys, and objects that reflect the child's "remarkable extension of consciousness" by which some texts create "a vision of a conscious universe, both polymorphous and polyphonic" (121, 122). Ultimately, Griswold concludes that the most important aspect of children's literature is the way that it reflects—and stimulates—the tremendous "distribution of consciousness and the child's feeling that the world is alive" that typifies childhood (126).

Perhaps the most important political gesture in Griswold's argument is his insistence on the alterity of childhood. Whether in their need to create safe places, away from the madding world of adults, or in their recurring self-awareness of being small, the characters Griswold analyzes indicate that the world is a frightening place for children. Griswold asserts that scary children's literature has two traditions, "one meant to intimidate children into being good and the other meant to encourage their mastery of fears" (40). Either way, Griswold understands the powerlessness of child readers—and thus of child characters. He praises Hugh Lofting's motivation to create Doctor Dolittle because of the series' "extensive egalitarianism where likeness is emphasized and otherness diminished" (108). Even more directly, Griswold refers to the separateness of children's lives from adults as "a separate-but-equal apartheid between young and old" (58). This is a critic who understands the role of children's literature as being rooted in structures of power (and powerlessness) in ways that profoundly affect the lived reality of children.

For all that Griswold is so sensitive to concerning the power issues of childhood, however, he sometimes romanticizes childhood, despite his stated intention not to do so. His audience is middle-class parents and educators, so he rightly rails against well-meaning but misguided efforts to sanitize the violence out of children's books while he simultaneously assumes that "kids get a special pleasure from playing underneath tables, and setting up housekeeping in tents made of blankets and chairs, and creating cardboard boxes, and passing time behind the furniture" (5). The children Griswold writes about all have access to middle-class constructions of childhood that include free time, enough furniture to play behind, and...