Inside Picture Books (review)

Ellen Handler Spitz. Inside Picture Books. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

"Sometimes," says Robert Coles in his foreword to Ellen Handler Spitz's Inside Picture Books, "the most obvious and important aspects of our lives go unnoticed" (ix). Readers of this journal devoted to the study of children's literature will be surprised to learn that the unnoticed things he means here are books for children, that "we have paid relatively little attention to what our sons and daughters read (or hear read), and to what moral and psychological consequence . . . " (ix). The saddest and most infuriating aspect of Inside Picture Books is that its author seems to share Cole's mind-boggling ignorance of our discipline.

"Occasionally," says Spitz, "people argue about the extent to which children's tastes and preferences are formed by early reading, but rarely is effort spent trying to understand how this influence comes about, how psychic tasks are portrayed in picture books--for example, how moral lessons are conveyed, how prejudices are subtly implanted" (xiii). Rarely? I seem to recall hundreds of books and thousands of articles by specialists in our field that try to do exactly that.

Spitz seems unaware of most of those books and articles. As Marina Warner points out in her New York Times Book Review review of Spitz's book, "Perry Nodelman's wide-ranging 'Words About Pictures' is oddly not mentioned" (10). Also and as oddly not mentioned is important work about picture books and about the specific books Spitz discusses by Joseph Schwartz, Jane Doonan, William Moebius, Barbara Kiefer, Jon Cech, Jean Perrot, Michael Steig, and many others. While Spitz lists important theoretical books about children and literature by Jacqueline Rose and Virginia Blum in her bibliography, the text of Inside Picture Books offers no evidence that she has read them or considered the ideas they contain. Other relevant theoretical work by Zohar Shavit, Peter Hunt, John Stephens, Lois Kuznets, Roderick McGillis, Maria Nikolajeva, Barbara Wall, Marjorie Hourihan, and a host of others isn't even in the bibliography.

Even more astonishing: this book about the psychological effects on children of their reading is devoid of any reference to any specific psychological or psychoanalytical theory that might support (or even, at least, account for) the positions Spitz takes about the books she discusses. Her bibliography indiscriminately includes texts by Freud, Kornei Chukovsky, and Dr. Spock, but the text of the book never makes clear how her readings relate to any or all of their conflicting views. Most of her discussions of specific children's books and their effects on children emerge from what appear to be unexplored and dangerously normative assumptions about what, supposedly, all children always feel and think, interspersed occasionally with what appears to be a vaguely Freudian take on family dynamics. She says, for instance, that in Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, "we can interpret the house as signifying the mother herself and his behavior as a thinly disguised attack on her . . . " (127); and in Munro Leaf's Noodle, a book about a dachshund who dislikes his body, "[a]dumbrated are covert wishes to be the sex one is not (to have both male and female genitalia)" (173). A true Freudian would be hard put to figure out, on the one hand, where specifically in Freud Spitz gets these ideas, and on the other, why she applies them so patchily and inconsistently, in between vague and decidedly un-Freudian generalizations about separation anxiety and the need for grandparents and such.

Perhaps I am being too hard on Spitz. She does say, "This book is for mothers, fathers, grandparents, teachers, therapists, and scholars" (xiii)--and I suppose it's possible that only the scholars in this eclectic group might be expected to care about the fuzzy scholarship. According to an article about Inside Picture Books in the Chronicle of Higher Education, one scholar of children's literature, Maria Tatar, actually approves of Spitz's procedure: "'When you write for...