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  • Toothless Pedagogy?Problematizing Paternalism in Children's Literature and Childhood Studies
  • Marah Gubar (bio)

About a decade ago, Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter's 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore (2007) caused a ruckus in my college-level children's literature course. I can describe the ruckus. It was prompted by this picture book's final page, which departs from the crime-and-punishment pattern that governs the rest of Offill and Carpenter's narrative about a puckish little girl who gets into trouble for performing one spectacular piece of mischief after another. Before the story draws to its close, we repeatedly see our cheeky narrator engaging in a transgressive act, always introduced by the phrase "I had an idea to. …" Immediately thereafter, she announces that her freedom to execute that misdeed has been curtailed: either lower down on the same page or on the facing one, she repeats the description of the misbehavior that she just gave, inserted in the midst of the phrase "I am not allowed to … anymore."

At first glance, the final page of the story seems like it will follow this pattern, too. The line "I had an idea to say the opposite of what I mean to trick everyone" floats above an image of the little girl hugging her mother while the words "I'm sorry" emanate from her mouth in a speech bubble. But instead of going on to characterize lying as verboten, the narrator unexpectedly concludes, "I am allowed to say the opposite of what I mean forevermore." Clutched behind her back as she smiles at us from over her deluded mother's shoulder is the big black stapler that she used to perform her first transgression, which was to affix her little brother's hair to his pillow while he was sleeping.

What upset my students about this final tableau was not only that it presents lying as a viable option but also that it destabilizes the didactic agenda that structures the rest of the story. Our narrator, this ending hints, hasn't really learned her lesson about any of the seventeen things that adults have forbidden her to do, many of which are quite aggressive. (Besides picking on her little brother in a variety of ways, she also purposely sets a classmate's shoe on fire with a magnifying glass.) Student after student began objecting to the various ways that Offill and Carpenter's protagonist violates the rules of good conduct, [End Page 153] as well as expressing concern that the story's conclusion encourages child readers to regard lying and bullying as acceptable behaviors.

Surprised by the force of this negative response, I wondered aloud whether we might be more tolerant of such misbehavior if the main character were male. Was it possible that Offill and Carpenter were trying to resist the "sugar and spice/and everything nice" view of girlhood, I asked, by confronting us with such a creatively disruptive heroine? Some of my students gamely got on board with this idea, pointing out that the "I had an idea to…" construction aligns mischief with intellectual inventiveness, and that the all-female creative team dress their girl protagonist and her brother in contrasting pink and blue clothing, thus signaling from the start that gender roles are salient to their story. Since they simultaneously subvert the norms of little girl prettiness by giving their white heroine big black boots and hair as messy as a bird's nest, it seems plausible to assume that they are interested in revising our conventional picture of what little girls are like.

Working together, these students and I formulated an alternative interpretation of the story's ending. Rather than assuming that it condones dishonesty and aggression, we suggested, perhaps it aims to open up space for child readers to exercise their own judgment with regard to the question of how problematic the girl's behavior is. Looking for textual evidence to support this idea, one especially ingenious closereader noticed that the illustration on the cover of 17 Things is drawn from the perspective of the mother looking down on her daughter as she misbehaves. By putting readers into the mother...

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