The Hermeneutics of Recuperation: What a Kinship-Model Approach to Children’s Agency Could Do for Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies

In the opening pages of her groundbreaking book Dependent States, cultural historian Karen Sánchez-Eppler clears a path for children’s literature critics interested in challenging the notion that children function solely as passive recipients of culture. Without dismissing the key insights generated by Jacqueline Rose and other literary critics who treat childhood strictly “as a discourse among adults” (xvi), Sánchez-Eppler nevertheless announces her intention to regard children not merely as objects of socialization but also as “individuals inhabiting and negotiating” societal conceptions of what it means to be a child (xv). She thus sets out to analyze not just how American adults in the nineteenth century represented children but also how children represented themselves. To pay attention to children’s diaries and other similar sources, she stresses carefully, “is not to pretend that children are fully independent actors, unhampered by the constraints of adult regulation and desire; but neither is it to see children as incapable of defining their own terms and grounds of power and meaning” (xxviii).

I agree with the idea that not just literary critics but also everyone who participates in the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies should try to chart a middle course of this kind. That said, Sánchez-Eppler’s account leaves open the question of exactly what kind of agency younger people have and how it compares to the sort generally belonging to older people.¹ In what way do children “defin[e] their own terms and grounds of power and meaning”? Sánchez-Eppler frames her intervention in negative terms—children are neither independent nor incapable—and describes young people in the most neutral language possible, referring to them not as agents, or actors, or co-creators of culture but merely as “individuals” who start off their lives in a state of dependency. The bones of a theory about what it means to be a child are here, but there is no metaphorical meat on them. Or, to return to my earlier analogy, the middle ground Sánchez-Eppler wants to inhabit remains mostly unmapped.

As a result, Sánchez-Eppler tends to tack back and forth between the two extremes she hopes to avoid. Keenly attuned (and rightly so) to the primacy and clout of grown-ups, she veers strongly toward the “incapable child” pole: the bulk of Dependent States focuses on “how structural and institutional power is enacted” on young people by their elders (xxiii), often resulting in “the abuse and death of individual children” (151). On the relatively rare occasions when she analyzes children’s words and deeds, by contrast, Sánchez-Eppler swings back toward the “independent child” pole, as when she remarks on “the difficulties of disentangling the experiences of children from the discourses of childhood” (xxvii). This formulation suggests that somewhere—underneath all the grown-up interference—a pure signal pulses that originates solely from the child. Yet, since selfhood itself is shaped by language taught to us by others, shouldn’t scholars who analyze children’s writing resist the temptation to sort out which sentiments expressed in child-authored texts are truly attributable to young authors and which to the adults who surround them? After all, adult discourse is not a cloak that covers up some true, essential child; it is a constituting factor.² But if we are barred from speculating about the degree to which adult pressure manifests itself in child-authored texts, then we cannot distinguish between, say, a passionate fan letter in which a child assures an actress she “adores” that “[n]obody knows I am writing to you, not even my mother” (qtd. in Bold 171) and the kind of rote note a schoolchild pens to an author that adheres to a teacher-approved formula.³ That seems problematic, too.

Because of the complexity of this issue and the challenges of tracking down child-generated documents from the distant past, it is tempting to dismiss the goal of locating children’s agency as a “flawed intellectual project” (Alexander...