Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children's Rights by Susan Honeyman (review)

One of the fundamentals of studying children's literature covered in introductory courses is the invented nature of childhood innocence. Students learn to challenge their preconceptions about whether children should be exposed to fictional depictions of "mature" themes, including sex, violence, war, and drug use. While the fabricated nature of childhood innocence underwrites the theoretical foundations of literary analysis of children's fiction, the relationship of the idealized child to historical and contemporary children's rights remains comparatively undertheorized. In Susan Honeyman's first monograph, Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction (2005), she examines the creation of childhood and its stereotypes by adults. In Perils of Protection, she narrows her focus to the adult protectionism that denies children's agency and needs through their figuration as vulnerable victims, exploring the ways in which such narratives work to prioritize adults.

Honeyman's study is informed by her experience as a former court advocate for children in foster care, and it aims to marry legal approaches to the topic with those of children's literature. She seeks to demonstrate that protectionism—as enacted through the privatization of childhood—"has in fact left minors increasingly isolated in dwindling (and sometimes nonexistent) social units such as 'nuclear family,' vulnerable to multiple injustices made possible by eroded or unrecognized participatory rights" (4). Her historical analysis—and problematization—of the notion of "children first" has significance for contemporary ideas of "selfless parenting" and child worship. This book seeks to show how a historical emphasis on the protection of children from harm has led to the contemporary condition in which children have lost their freedoms. The broad range of literary sources incorporated into the analysis is marshaled in the service of "reflecting communal perspectives toward child protection and participation" (5).

In chapter one, the narratives surrounding historical shipwrecks are interpreted for what they can reveal about male power, ideas about motherhood, and how mythologies about childhood serve adults. Honeyman punctures the aura surrounding the disaster tenet of "women and children first," tracing its origins to the HMS Birkenhead sinking in 1852 in which soldiers placed women and children in an inadequate number of lifeboats. Her investigation of scholarly sources and historical practices leads her to conclude that there was little focus on saving children in actual instances of shipwreck and that the real motto might be "mothers first—we need them to do the hard work of parenting" (19). In addition, narratives about male sacrifice for women and children reinforce male heroic power that works to deny the grim reality of most historic shipwrecks. As Honeyman observes, we are culturally fascinated by romanticized stories about the Titanic, for example, because it is exceptional: "it flatters our hopes that children are safe rather than alerting us to problems that beset the small and outnumbered" (28).

Perils of Protection slides between consideration of history and fictional narratives, with chapter two turning to novels about castaway families and children, which were popular with child readers in Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. While children's literature scholars often describe the removal of parents as an essential plot device to enable children to act independently and pursue adventure, Honeyman suggests that the popularization of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the tradition it inspired served adult needs to isolate children through an island setting. She proposes that the novel represents "optimism about breaking away from the nuclearizing family and a naïve but sinister faith in privatizing property" (42). The chapter draws parallels between the Robinsonade flourishing for child readers and the increasing isolation of children in the United States in the nineteenth century by adults who sought to segregate them from "current geographies" in order to reproduce the circumstances of their own childhoods (49). In contrast, comic strips, such as Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates Shipwrecked on a Desert Island (1938), provided a highly gendered ideal for boy readers, in which a heroic...