Contradictions

One of the pleasures of good literature is its unpredictability. Formulaic texts that comply too closely with a pattern dictated by conventions of genre, social norms, or an author’s adherence to branding and marketing requirements tend not to stand the test of time, while texts that upset our expectations open up new possibilities for discovery and insight. A major means by which a text may manifest unpredictability is through contradictions that thwart the reader’s expectations, whether of what a text should be or of what this particular text should be. Authors may tantalize their audience by showing that they understand what is expected of them, dangling the predictable before the reader and then pulling it away. For if the reader can snag the bait, like a cat catching a toy on a string and refusing to release it, the fun of the game is over.

Because readers’ expectations are formed not only by their experience of the individual book that they are reading but by their knowledge of other works presumed to be similar, this game of contradictions is never conducted wholly within a text. Yet texts also play with internal contradictions, setting up harmonies, resonances, and controlled dissonances that lead to a rich and polyphonic reading experience. Together, the five articles included in this issue illustrate multiple uses of contradictions both internal and external.

We begin in the nineteenth century with Sara Lindey’s article “Sentimental and Redemptive Girlhood in the Abolitionist Adaptation of Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter,” an examination of an antislavery picture book based on Cummins’s lengthy 1854 best seller for older readers. Lindey finds that the rewriting of Cummins’s protagonist to associate her on the one hand with abolitionists and on the other hand with the enslaved works to “complicate the representation of sentimental girlhood with the values of redemptive girlhood,” thus commingling “two girlhood discourses [that] share much of the same lexicon even as they access differing values.” The resulting contradiction, Lindey argues, “reveals the greater conversation around defining and calibrating girlhood.”

Danielle A. O’Connor’s “Frozen Rivers, Moving Homes, and Crossing Bridges: Liminal Space and Time in Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants and A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner” opens with a consideration of the “Contradiction” that Milne substitutes for an introduction in his 1928 classic. For O’Connor, the deeper contradiction that animates Milne’s and Gaiman’s works, bringing together what might otherwise seem an unlikely pairing, is that between mythic and linear time. Identifying five liminal spaces common to both texts, she proposes that these spaces privilege transition and the connection of “two opposing concepts.” This contradictory juxtaposition, O’Connor suggests, mirrors the fact that “adult authors are often attempting to guide the child reader down contradictory roads,” urging children both to mature and to remain in a state of prelapsarian innocence. Space and time in these texts thus work together, but they also work at cross purposes.

In “Against Suspense: Ginger Pye and Pinky Pye by Eleanor Estes,” Claudia Mills explores the contradiction between the two novels’ adoption of a mystery structure (Who has stolen the Pyes’ dog? What has become of Mr. Hiram Bish’s lost pygmy owl?) and Estes’s extirpation of suspense from these questions, which young readers should be in a position to answer long before the denouements. Mills sets herself a tripartite task: “1) to excavate and examine Estes’s own stated disregard for a certain kind of suspenseful plot, as shown in her correspondence, speeches, published essays, and other sources; 2) to offer a reading of both Ginger Pye and Pinky Pye as . . . cautionary tales against suspenseful storytelling; and 3) to explore the alternate sources of the books’ narrative pleasure,” as texts that replace the delight of uncertainty with the delight of recognition. Yet the latter delight is complicated in Estes’s works by the reader’s likely awareness that a mystery is supposed to be mysterious, so that something pleasurably new is going on where the novels’ genre is concerned.

We move to a new genre in “Issues of Control and Agency in Staged...