Playing with Books: A Study of the Reader as Child (review)

As John Morgenstern explains in his suggestive study, "ever since the eighteenth century we have increasingly been providing our children with manufactured objects to play with. These fall into three categories: toys, games, and books. It is natural for the literary critic to privilege the last but it might be more interesting to think of the book as just another toy" (72). Thus, he considers children's literature—specifically, the children's novel—in the context of play. How has children's play influenced children's literature? Additionally, what distinguishes children's literature—particularly the children's novel—from adult literature? Morgenstern responds to these questions in part by providing "an analysis of narrative techniques in the children's novel and how those techniques are related to the nature of children's play" (127).

In chapter 1, "The Fall into Literacy," Morgenstern draws on a wealth of resources, from literary criticism to marriage registers to the publishing history of chapbooks, to demonstrate the existence of a literature for children prior to the eighteenth century. "Instead of trying to understand how the 'discovery' of the child in the seventeenth century gave rise to children's literature in the eighteenth century," he writes, "we should investigate how the spread of literacy changed social institutions and led to the construction of the child as innocent, which is to say, as a pre-reader. Or, to put it simply, it is not the 'child' that gives rise to children's literature but children's literature that gives rise to the 'child'" (21).

In chapter 2, "Children and Other Talking Animals," he focuses on "textuality and how the socialization process affects the choices that writers make when they write for children" (46). As children move from the semiotic to the symbolic, they may "prefer the language of mastery to the painful ambivalence of the semiotic" (56); adult writers for children thus provide literature characterized by "its curious opacity, its smoothness, its resistance to penetration, its feeling of completeness that cannot be opened" (53). He encourages readers who remain skeptical about his distinctions between adult and children's literature to contrast, for instance, Alice in Wonderland and The Nursery Alice, or Swift's original Gulliver's Travels with abridgements of the work intended for children.

In chapter 3, "Playing with Books," Morgenstern suggests that the rise in children's literacy and the spread of mandatory education reduced children's opportunities to engage in play, with the result that children's literature increasingly focused on children's play. Referencing Perry Nodelman's claim in The Pleasures of Children's Literature (1992) that the defining characteristic of the children's book is a tension between the idyllic and the didactic, Morgenstern responds, "[t]he idyllic is nothing but the assertion of the value of play; the didactic is nothing but a warning about the dangers of play. The adult's nostalgic desire to return to a state of play generates the idyllic; the child's will to power the desire to master the rules of the game, generates the didactic" (79). The reader of a children's book demonstrates both impulses; the writer of a good children's book manages to balance them, primarily through the use of humor. Morgenstern refers to children as "perverts" in the sense that they willfully refuse to do what is expected of them: in the work of successful writers for children, whom he also refers to as perverts, "the child is treated humorously as a pervert totally dedicated to a play that is transgressive and anarchic and though the representation is playfully exaggerated it is not too much different from the actual play of children" (82).

In the remainder of his study, Morgenstern addresses narrative technique in a number of children's novels. He repeatedly cites Barbara Wall's The Narrator's Voice (1991), but he characterizes his own contribution to the critical conversation as having a greater emphasis on "the position the...