Children’s Literature and the Authority that “Lurks Within”

All of the articles in this issue address questions of children’s empowerment and disempowerment. While this is no doubt unremarkable to readers of this journal, what is remarkable are the multiple ways in which these articles explore the relationship of child readers to the cultural, governmental, and even corporate authorities that seek to market, prescribe, and proscribe what children read. The authors writing in this issue of the Quarterly take up these cultural and political questions as challenges without necessarily providing definitive answers. Clearly, however, these articles reveal that adults are inevitably and inextricably implicated in both the production and reception of texts for young people—for better and sometimes for worse. And they are also implicated in the very definition of the genre—as Perry Nodelman succinctly puts it at the end of his brilliant new book, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (reviewed by Peter Hunt in this issue): “Children’s literature is literature that claims to be devoid of adult content that nevertheless lurks within it” (341).

Sometimes that adult content and adult influence is contested. We are pleased to present in this issue my colleague Scott Beck’s discussion of picture books about migrant children. Beck’s discussion of a comprehensive collection of such books published over the last twenty years is informed by his own activism and advocacy as an educator of Mexican-heritage migrant farmworkers in the rural south. Thus, he brings his adult and professional authority to bear on ideological and aesthetic evaluations of these books in terms of both migrant and nonmigrant child readers. At the same time, of course, his evaluation of these books contends with another form of “adult” authority: today’s increasingly “political climate of rising nativism and punitive, anti-immigrant policy-making.” The adults in control of our educational institutions (legislators, for instance) perpetuate a system that “erases and silences the migrant experience.” As Beck’s subtitle implies, authors’ and illustrators’ depictions of migrant children walk a tightrope between realism and romanticism.

In the past, at least, writers often employed romanticism strategically. Sara Lindey explores the way in which nineteenth-century author Fanny Fern developed her concept of children’s rights, building on a largely sentimental advocacy of the child’s position within middle-class families, such as the one in which she grew up, in relation to her advocacy based on a critique of social and economic conditions. While Fern’s writing reflects a bifurcated view of children and adults, it is in her children’s writing (and her depiction of sentimental reading practices) that she bridges the gap between adult and child selves. Among her examples, Lindey contrasts Fern’s judgmental temperance movement satire of the life and death of Robert Burns for adults with her children’s story about Burns’s childhood, which is, paradoxically, more nuanced.

In “Meet Ivy and Bean,” Jennifer Miskec contrasts the socializing force of the American Girls series with the anarchically camp girl’s series Ivy and Bean, by Annie Barrows. She argues that the series challenges “normalizing representations of girlhood,” by providing a “decided antithesis” to the ideologies of the American Girls series, by creating a “queer subgenre” of girls series books, and by providing performances that are not fixed or stable and eschew making their protagonists role models. (I might note here that while the series appears to operate from “the margins,” as Miskec states, it has certainly attracted great approval from adult cultural institutions of children’s literature such as the American Library Association and the New York Public Library.)

Finally, Chris McGee reexamines a much-discussed young adult novel—Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak—in terms of the way it participates in a problematic discourse about young adult girls typified by pop-psychologists like Mary Pipher. McGee argues that reading the book the way that the jacket blurbs encourage (“This powerful story has an important lesson: never be afraid to speak up for yourself”) misses “the complex ways the book discusses power.” Melinda gains power, he argues, not “from speaking about what happened, but just as often from not speaking...