The Ethics of the Author/Audience Relationship in Children's Fiction

Literary works can be evaluated on many levels. One form of evaluation, increasingly denied in recent years but nonetheless powerful, is the ethical: the analysis of a work in terms of the values it expresses and invites us to share. In The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne Booth encourages a revival of ethical criticism of fiction, both urging "professional critics to abandon their theoretical neutrality," since we all make value judgments about the content of our reading whether or not we admit to doing so, and spurring "the general reader to view ethical judgments of narrative not only as highly important but as more complicated than they appear to be in most accounts" (ix). Booth's arguments may strike a particularly responsive chord with critics of children's literature, for we are more willing than many other critics to concede that one aim of a children's book is to shape the evolving character of its readers. Thus critics of children's literature may more easily endorse Booth's claim that "all works do teach or at least try to [and] no reading can be considered responsible that ignores the challenge of a work's fixed norms" (142-43).

This paper examines a crucial subset of ethical norms as they are revealed in a certain group of children's books. Booth proposes that one way in which we can provide an ethical appraisal of works of fiction is by trying to understand the relationship that a given work of fiction establishes between its "implied author" and its "implied reader." Booth is careful to distinguish a work's "implied author" from either its immediate narrator or its "flesh-and-blood author," the real human being who is responsible for its creation. The implied author, instead, is the source of "whatever values or norms" the work as a whole implies (125). So, for example, the narrator of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn —Huck himself—is openly racist; the implied author of the work is arguably making a searing criticism of racism; the flesh-and-blood author of the work is Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens, whose "real" attitude toward racism can be uncovered only by complex biographical and historical investigation. Similarly, Booth distinguishes the "implied reader" of the work from the "flesh-and-blood" individual engaged in the actual reading.

To look at the relationship between fictional writer or storyteller characters and their fictional audiences may shed light on the relation between the implied author (who may or may not be the immediate narrator) and the implied reader of the work itself. I am not interested here in the relationship between the flesh-and-blood author and the flesh-and-blood reader: I will not be examining biographical evidence of real authors' attitudes toward their readers or real readers' varied responses to these works. My focus will remain within the arena of ethical criticism that Booth describes, with its focus on implied author and implied audience.¹

A number of well-known North American children's books, both classics of an earlier period and more or less contemporary stories, provide a portrait of the relationship between a child author/storyteller and her audience. The classics of an earlier period that I will be discussing in this article are Little Women (1868), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1904),A Little Princess (1905), Anne of Green Gables (1908), Daddy-Long-Legs (1912), and L. M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon trilogy (1923, 1925, 1927). To this list I will also add Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books (1940, 1943, 1945) and Carol Ryrie Brink's paired books, Two Are Better Than One (1968) and Louly (1974). Although published later than the "classic" books, they are set in approximately the same period (the turn of the century) and seem to share some of the features of books written in the earlier period. The more contemporary stories I discuss are Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964), Eleanor Cameron's Julia Redfern books (1971, 1977, 1982, 1988), Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik (1979), and Zilpha Keatley Snyder's...