Reading Nineteenth-Century American Boys

Boys at Home is an important exploration of discipline and masculinity as they were understood in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1885. Organized around "a series of arguments about five forms of pedagogy," it examines topics of clear importance to studies of both American culture and childhood: "play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading" (xiii). In just under 130 pages, Ken Parille presents a dense, pointed argument that attempts "to reconstruct and reinterpret the pedagogical culture surrounding boys" (xviii). Using readings of work by historical and literary figures including Horace Mann, Jacob Abbot, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Lydia Sigourney, Parille seeks to correct misconceptions that resonate across key theories of boys and their management.

One of Parille's main concerns is avoiding—indeed, contradicting—the notion that boys can be explained as one great, undifferentiated mass. Here he speaks to a central fear in children's literature scholarship of contributing to cultural tendencies to theorize childhood through a disembodied subject known as "the child" rather than a heterogeneous subject known as "children." Parille's vigilance against broad assumptions about "the boy" is both obvious and necessary. His hope, as he says in his introduction, is that "Writings about boyhood discipline offer us an important way to complicate current critical narratives of gender, childhood, and literary history" (xiii). This goal is not always unequivocally achieved—the material Parille studies is frequently about boys in general, and it best positions his study to draw conclusions that are similarly about ideal rather than embodied children—but it is a hope to which Parille is consistently dedicated, and he uses a clever redundancy to add nuance to the clichés of his subject matter. By putting multiple, contemporaneous forms of pedagogy in dialogue with one another, Parille is able to point to contradictions between conceptions of "the boy," effectively forcing a more sophisticated image of boys than the writers of his subject material would themselves have recognized. As Parille puts it, "The picture of boyhood created by this nexus of relationships offers us a detailed portrait of the pedagogical environment in which New England boyhood was constructed, and it gives us a multitude of perspectives ranging far beyond those of the few nineteenth-century literary figures who have monopolized critical discourses on 'the boy'" (xiv). His choice of material is therefore appropriate and even courageous, considering how very hot is the button he pushes when reading texts by writers who were invested in boyhood as a broad concept, not one full of contradictions.

Similarly courageous is the book's dedication to speaking of topics central to Americanist discourse outside children's literature—such as nineteenth-century US social structures and the history of corporal punishment—in terms that emphasize rather than ignore gender. Such a strategy requires walking a narrow line. In such collections as Chapman and Hendler's Sentimental Men and Davidson and Hatcher's hyperbolically titled No More Separate Spheres!, Americanist editors and writers have criticized the tendency to consider sentimental and realist, domestic and public, feminine and masculine as completely discrete literary and social categories. The frequent result of such criticism is excellent scholarship that profitably reexamines the places where these categories blur, but other results have included poor scholarship that willfully ignores places where recognition of such categories might yield a more historically informed reading of literature.

Parille, however, manages to tap into this current trend in Americanist scholarship without quite abdicating a reading that is aware of gender. He mentions on many occasions his interest in masculinity studies, and as a result his argument is not quite that gender should be ignored, but that insights gained through attention to one gender should be tested for usefulness when reading texts written for another. Thus he argues for a "threefold approach" in which he attempts to consider boys' fiction and girls' fiction by attending to "similarity, difference, or a combination of the two" (xxiii). He calls his study a "dual-gender...