From the Editors: "Cross-Writing" and the Reconceptualizing of Children's Literary Studies

The Victorian satirist and evolutionist Samuel Butler once tried to depict ancestral genes at cross-purposes with each other. These "former selves," wrangling for "possession" of a single psyche, create a din of jarring voices: "Faint are the far ones, . . . loud and clear are the near ones. . . . 'Withhold,' cry some. 'Go on boldly,' cry others. 'Me, me, me, revert hitherward. . . . Nay, but me, me, me' " (Butler 43).

The notion of "cross-writing" we advance in this special issue of Children's Literature resembles Butler's dramatized crossover in one important respect: we believe that a dialogic mix of older and younger voices occurs in texts too often read as univocal. Authors who write for children inevitably create a colloquy between past and present selves. Yet such conversations are neither unconscious nor necessarily riven by strife. Instead of the competing ancestral voices that Butler posits, we stress creative cooperation. Most of the writers, artists, and editors we consider in this volume manage to integrate the conflicting voices they heed. Their constructs involve interplay and cross-fertilization rather than a hostile internal cross fire.

Cross-writing is not limited to texts written for children. In an "adult" novel such as The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot's Mr. Tulliver is puzzled by the genetic "crossing o' breeds" that makes the dark daughter to whom he gave his own mother's name so unlike his blonde wife. Yet the man who sees everything in terms of contraries cannot help his precocious child cross into a new order of reality. The adult is at odds with the child in an inimical world that has no room for Maggie Tulliver. In contrast, George Eliot's next child-man, Silas Marner, who also gives his mother's name to the orphan who has crossed his threshold, benefits from the reactivation of hitherto dormant childhood memories. Like that other solitary, Robinson Crusoe, whose family name was Kreuzner (crosser), Silas mends a wounded psyche by reverting to a more elementary and childlike world. Given its pastoralism, George Eliot's fable was at one time deemed as suitable for child readers as Defoe's romance. Yet, as two generations of American schoolchildren discovered to their chagrin, the book remains preeminently "adult." Despite its primitive setting and fairy-tale elements, the novel relies on the authoritative voice of an ultra-sophisticated expositor. This linguistically adroit narrator brings out existential complexities that the tongue-tied Silas can by-pass, but which her readers cannot read as merely a "simple twist of fate."¹

Indeed, it might be argued that any text that activates a traffic between phases of life we persist in regarding as opposites demands, yet seldom receives, readings that should reflect a similar critical elasticity. Whether addressing adult or child audiences, or both, such fluid texts often rely on settings that dissolve the binaries and contraries that our culture has rigidified and fixed. Crusoe's island hut and Marner's valley cottage offer blendings not possible in the civilizations each man has fled; and although the raft that acts as a temporary haven for Huck and Jim cannot remain immune to the divisive communities that dot the river, the boy who plans to cross into still open territories at the end of Twain's novel refuses to succumb to the new form of enslavement that Jim accepts.

In transcending the binaries imposed by culture, Huckleberry Finn thus anticipates that other strange pilgrim-navigator, E. B. White's Stuart Little. Himself a cross between different species, the mouse-boy resists the allurements of a human mate his own size, the pretty dwarf child of Ames's Crossing. Instead, he prefers to pursue an elusive bride of still another order, Margalo the Shelleyan (or Materlinked?) bird who never was on land or sea. Were he to find her, his new family would be as cross-grained as that formed by the hunter, the mermaid, and the furry and non-furry foundlings in Randall Jarrell's The Animal Family, an enigmatic fairy tale enhanced by Sendak's...