Revisitings

From an adult perspective, reading children’s literature requires a revisiting of childhood. Certainly, journeys back to the perceptions and preoccupations of youth are often prompted by a desire to recapture lost innocence or to lay down adult burdens by vacationing in what may seem a simpler and more carefree time; as Perry Nodelman (among other critics) has noted, one way of defining children’s literature is as “a literature of nostalgia” (192). Yet not all revisitings are nostalgic. Sometimes what motivates them is the desire to gain a new perspective, to complicate and reassess, to challenge, or to teach. (Nodelman argues that writers for children may be seeking to model for children how “to perform childhood, much as Judith Butler suggests people generally learn to perform gender” [193].) The articles in this issue all involve backward looks: some by the critic, some by the child character, some by both.

In the opening article, “Odd Woman, Odd Girls: Reconsidering How Girls Can Help to Build Up the Empire: The Handbook for Girl Guides and Early Guiding Practices, 1909–1918,” Katherine Magyarody revisits the early years of the Girl Guide movement, with particular attention to founding mother Agnes Baden-Powell and the wooing of girls who asserted their interest in androgynous approaches to Guiding (or Scouting, as some originally termed it). Magyarody finds that in taking up Guiding as a career, Baden-Powell renegotiated gender roles both for herself and for the girls to whom she addressed her handbook and its pamphlet precursors. Archival Guiding/Scouting material produced by girls suggests that early Guiding practices enabled young women to approach the maternalist rhetoric of empire in ways that simultaneously permitted the flourishing of the “odd girl” who might have no intention of marrying. Here, the revisiting of dominant constructions of womanliness by Baden-Powell and her acolytes permitted a culturally approved form of resistance.

In contrast to Magyarody’s examination of texts largely forgotten today, Alexandra Valint’s “‘Wheel Me Over There!’: Disability and Colin’s Wheelchair in The Secret Garden” revisits a familiar classic in an unfamiliar way. At the center of Valint’s reading is a material object so fundamental to Burnett’s novel that we might not remember to notice it: Colin’s wheelchair. As Valint points out, the wheelchair, an expensive aid propelled not by its occupant but by carefully chosen subordinates, functions on a symbolic level to establish Colin’s social superiority, a matter that the text then takes pains to reestablish by different means once Colin learns to walk. If The Secret Garden is legible in one kind of reading as a text whose happy ending requires that disability gradually give way to health, Valint suggests the productiveness of reading it also as a text whose happy ending requires that in a social sense, Colin be allowed to retain the distinctiveness that his wheelchair has marked.

Andrew McInnes’s “‘Wild Surmise’: The Pleasures and Pains of Coming Second in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons” approaches the question of revisitation from the characters’ point of view. Ransome’s series, particularly the eponymous first volume, is preoccupied with his central characters’ experience of “coming second”: finding apparently undiscovered spaces (islands, mountains, and so on) that have already been visited and claimed by earlier explorers. Framing this issue in terms of the literary context of Ransome’s references to such earlier writers as John Keats and Daniel Defoe, and the developmental or familial context of the child’s relationship to parents who have both mapped out and departed from childhood before the child ever comes on the scene, McInnes provides a meditation on Ransome’s series—and perhaps children’s literature more widely—as autumnal texts ever conscious of belatedness, of revisiting experiences that simultaneously are and are not fresh.

Nearly half a century after the initial publication of I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip., a pioneering work in its focus on adolescent homosexuality, many critics are inclined to read the novel as a best-forgotten artifact of a more repressed era. The narrative, they complain, helped to establish a pattern of compulsory unhappiness and lack of...