Thirteen Ways of Thumbing Your Nose at Children's Literature

Pretend that the works you are addressing are not children's literature—or, better yet, redeem them from their pitiable status as children's literature. Jane Tompkins, for instance, wants to redeem many of the works she focuses on in Sensational Designs—Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Wide, Wide World, and The Last of the Mohicans—from obscurity, from, in particular, having "come to be thought of as more fit for children than for adults" (xii). Be, in short, a closet juvenilist.

Now I greatly admire Tompkins's work—as I do that of the other critics I address here. In fact, it is because their work is so good, so influential, that their dismissive stance toward children and children's literature is so troubling. In any case, as interest in popular culture takes off, as cultural studies gains respectability and even urgency, it's hard for a critic like Tompkins to avoid children's literature. She wants to choose works that "offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment" (xi). Yet she also chooses to erase part of the readership.

Avoid reference to children and children's literature even when addressing a work of children's literature. Discuss the work (almost) entirely in other terms, the way Nancy Armstrong discusses Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in "The Occidental Alice." She brilliantly explores the intersections of race, class, and gender in constructing Carroll's Alice, yet elides the cleavages of age, most often subsuming it under gender (as in her discussion of eating, situating it only in a sexualized economy, not acknowledging the salience of eating for all children and in all children's literature): it is as if being a child simply makes Alice more of a female.

Rely on New Critical strategies for criticizing a work, strategies that privilege complexity, so that it will be difficult to find anything to say about seemingly "simple" works of literature. Or, conversely, use structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to dehumanize children. As one critic states in a reading of The Scarlet Letter, "An unreadable abbreviation, the letter is a sign of Pearl's half-life: a letter or a child is, in isolation, a sign divorced from meaning and in need of definition through others" (Ragussis 322). Children lack meaning, need to be defined through others? Though of course that's all too true from the adult perspectives that define our society—and we need to recognize as much—we can also qualify our acts, as Ragussis does when discussing parents trying to obscure meaning through hushing or denial: "Such acts become criminal when we realize the way in which signification becomes human, the way in which the child is the letter endowed with life" (323). He seems to recognize the danger of denying humanity to a child. Or maybe he is trying to atone for his earlier denial of such humanity. A truly deconstructive reading will not just treat the child as a sign but repudiate such treatment, contradicting itself, as Ragussis's essay does.

Pretend to be unusually high-minded about making any distinction between children's and adults' literature—claim that such a distinction is futile and tangential:

It is quite clear from any prolonged study of what might be termed "high fantasies" that to label them as children's books is grossly misleading. They operate on an adult level of meaning, and the issue of deciding the dividing line, if such could ever exist, between worthwhile literature for children and for adults seems to be a futile exercise. In any case it is tangential to the current discussion and no such division will be made here.

(Swinfen 2)

Then make sure that virtually all the works you muster in your defense of fantasy—the Narnia and Prydain chronicles, the Earthsea and Borrowers series, works by Garfield and Hoban—are what would usually be considered children's literature. Erase the boundary between adult and children's literature, in short, so that the prestige of addressing the...