Children's Fiction: Who Speaks? Who Listens?

In Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë's young Cathy Earnshaw described her response—and Heathcliff's—when they were handed improving religious tracts by the self-righteous servant, Joseph: "I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book. Heathcliff kicked his to the same place" (17). And so child readers have often behaved, asserting their freedom to reject reading that suits their elders but somehow doesn't speak to them. To find an appropriate voice in which to address a primary audience of children, and at the same time to satisfy the adult gatekeepers who buy, teach, review, and—in their own way—enjoy the books along with or apart from the children, has always been a tricky business. Barbara Wall's The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction is a thoughtful treatment of a neglected but important subject: narrative address in children's literature.

"Is it really a children's book?" is not, says Wall, "an idle question," but "an important one, which for a variety of reasons demands an answer" (1). Like Sanjay Sircar, who presented a similar idea in a 1989 article, Wall believes "the narrator-narratee relationship . . . is the distinctive marker of a children's book" (Wall 9). Wall argues that "a manner of discourse which is based on direct address to children—overt or covert—is an inescapable and indispensable element in a genuine literature for children, and that critical attention should be directed to analyzing its components, and distinguishing between types and effects of its use" (199). This she goes on to do in great detail, examining closely the work of many authors from the nineteenth century through the present. Despite some minor limitations, Wall's deceptively modest book will be of considerable interest to scholars concerned with defining the genre, to critics interested in the problems of address, and to historians studying the changes that have taken place in children's fiction since the early nineteenth century.

Wall's narrative taxonomy will be familiar to readers of Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse. Wall uses the terms "real author" and "real reader" to describe "the physical parties in the transaction, whose existence cannot be legislated away by theories of narration, for without them there would be no transaction, nor any reason for the transaction" (4). Her schema of the components of narrative communication, then, looks like this: real author → implied author → narrator → narratee→ implied reader real reader. Unlike Chatman, Wall assumes that every narrative has a narrator and a narratee of some sort, and she chooses to concentrate her attention on the manner in which narrators within a text address the implied audience. She notes that "single address," the popular mode of address to child readers that emerged in the first half of the present century and is common today, is different in kind from "double address"—the prevailing mode used previously—which "exhibited a strong consciousness of the presence of adult readers" (9). A fusion of these two modes of address, which she calls "dual address," Wall finds in works that manage to address both adults and children in the same terms and at the same time. But dual address is in her judgment a rare and rather special achievement, attained by authors who are somehow able to avoid self-consciousness about addressing children in the presence of adult readers.

In the first part of her book, Wall deals with some of the problems raised by the situation of adult writers speaking to child readers. Though the term "writing down" commonly has a pejorative overtone because it implies a condescending attitude of conscious superiority to one's audience, Wall contends that in some sense adult writers—if they address children—must "write down" since their writing must "acknowledge that there is a difference in the skills, interests and frame of reference of children and adults" (15). The trick, of course, is to "adjust language, concepts and tone...