You're Only Young Twice: Children's Literature and Film (review)

Tim Morris. You're Only Young Twice: Children's Literature and Film. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2000.

For readers weary of overwrought pedantry in children's literature scholarship (some of which is inevitable when a subject enters the academic mainstream), Tim Morris's You're Only Young Twice:Children's Literature and Film may be a welcome relief. This is not so much a systematic scholarly study as a collection of informal, entertaining, and provocative observations about some of Morris's favorite things. Unfortunately, not everyone will agree as to the significance of Morris's choices, which range from Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, to the Hardy Boys, to Burnett's The Secret Garden,to R. L. Stine's Goosebumps series. About half the book is devoted to films, although not all are (despite the subtitle) films specifically for children. Morris is an English professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and his interest seems clearly to be popular culture, and that is the tack this study takes. Again, despite the subtitle, children's literature as literature is not his principal concern nor, I suspect, his field of academic preparation. He seems to base much of his expertise in the field on the fact that he has a young son with whom he has shared children's books.

Morris boldly announces his agenda at the outset: to examine "power relations as they are expressed through children's culture" (4). Morris reminds us that "insults based on childishness are the last frontier" and that still we cast aspersions on our adversaries by labeling them as "childish" or "immature," or implore someone who annoys us to "grow up" (4). What Morris finds more troubling is the way our culture has tolerated the imposition of the adult will onto children, often in brutal ways. He notes with horror the extent to which so many modern Christian fundamentalists insist on "the moral sanctity of punishment"--violence is tolerated, but "bad" language is abhorred (8-9). Citing childhood as possibly the archetypal form of "Otherness," with children being the ultimate oppressed class, Morris claims that "[a]s often as not the children's text will act as an advocate for the child in the face of oppression" (9). This is not a new argument, of course, as a glance at Philippe Ariés's History of Childhood will show. Indeed, the politicizing of children's literature has been studied by several recent scholars, such as Jacqueline Rose in The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, to which Morris refers, and a host of others--including Peter Hunt, Donnarae MacCann, Perry Nodelman, and Jack Zipes--who are not mentioned.

Morris begins with a discussion of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, a book written not to amuse children, but to deplore the inhumane treatment of horses in Victorian England. This book has endured as a popular children's classic for over a century despite its literary flaws, its sentimentalism, and its message, which, as John Rowe Townsend has pointed out, has been "largely outdated since the motor-car has succeeded the horse" (105). Most critics feel compelled to explain this unusual work's abiding popularity, and Townsend attributes its survival to "its successful appeal to compassion in children" (105). Morris sees the book as a polemic not simply against animal cruelty but against Victorian social abuses in general, and "the physical punishment inflicted on women and children," in particular (22-23). By focusing on the connections he finds throughout the text between animals, women, and children, Morris argues that Black Beauty becomes a statement about the dynamics of power and violence in children's culture. By implication, he suggests that therefore children cotton to the book because of the author's bold stand against the oppressors of the young and helpless. Morris's reading of Black Beauty inspired...