The Case of Children's Fiction: Or The Impossibility of Jacqueline Rose

If the argument Jacqueline Rose presents in The Case of Peter Pan were correct, then an issue of the Quarterly devoted to the topics of language and style in children's literature could not in fact exist. You have that issue before you, and I think Rose is seriously wrong in her assessment of children's literature; but the conclusions she reaches, in a book with the inflammatory subtitle "the impossibility of children's fiction," are true enough and important enough to demand the serious attention of anybody interested in children's literature.

Baldly stated, Rose's thesis is that children's literature is an enterprise of much greater significance for adults than for children. We adults write (and market, and review, and discuss) children's books not for children, but for ourselves, and we do so in terms of a notion of childhood that has far more philosophical and psychological relevance for us than it does for the presumed audience of youngsters.

Rose proposes that our contemporary notion of childhood is still firmly based in ideas first presented by Locke and Rousseau in the eighteenth century, and centering on the supposed purity and innocence of children. Not yet contaminated by the values of the adult world, children supposedly have two wonderful gifts: an intuitive wisdom that allows them to understand the world directly and without confusion, and a blissful freedom from the complications of sexuality. In other words, children represent everything which opposes our discontent with, even our fear of, our own lot in life as responsible adults. In Rose's words, childhood is "a primitive or lost state to which the child has special access. The child is, if you like, something of a pioneer who restores these worlds to us, and gives them back to us with a facility or directness which ensures that our relationship to them is, finally, safe" (9).

"Safe" is the key word here. Rose believes that the realities of childhood threaten adults. For instance, the actual sexuality of childhood is bisexual, polymorphous, and in terms of our usual adult notions of sexuality, perverse—everything we have come to perceive, in our process of maturing, as chaotic and abnormal; indeed, "maturity" might well mean merely our acceptance of one specific kind of sexuality as "normal," and the accompanying perception that all others are perverse. The same is true in areas of life beyond sexuality, "mature" adults are those of us who have accepted the political, social, and cultural values of our parents, and who see other values, other ways of organizing perception and experience, as chaotic and threatening. Because we do so, and because we perceive that threat in those who have not yet learned to share our maturity, we then deny the threat by imposing a utopian and unreal vision of innocence and purity upon children, and by expressing that vision again and again in children's fiction.

In addition to reassuring us, this vision helps us in our efforts to deprive children to the realities of their childhood: "If children's fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp" (2). The real propaganda of most children's literature is not what it suggests children ought to become, but rather, what it assumes they already are.

I think Rose is right about all that. It doesn't take much reading of children's books to realize that the "children" in the phrase "children's literature" are not real human beings at all, but merely artificial constructs of writers; as is true of all works of literature, each children's story implies its audience; and thus each children's story reveals its author's assumptions about childhood. Rose is also right to insist on the limitations of those assumptions, and to demand our acknowledgement of them. In the often unconscious determination of writers to impose artificial ideas about childhood on their child readers, those writers do, often, fail real children—and anyone...