The Age of Innocence

Innocence and Experience is a crowded book. Within its covers are selections from fifteen different study programs or institutes conducted between 1975 and 1986 at the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College. Formal addresses, informal conversations, lectures, and panel discussions about children's literature—they are all here, awaiting the reader's attention. So too are seventy-six contributors, most of them authors and illustrators of children's books. One would expect differences of opinion to arise in such a large gathering, so it is not surprising to read co-editor Gregory Maguire's prefatory assurance that "the contributors do not speak with a single voice, no more than myriad children can become The Child" (xx). The surprise comes about six hundred pages later, when the reader has finished the book and has noticed that—Maguire's assurance notwithstanding—Innocence and Experience offers scores of remarkably similar entries. Even if the contributors do not speak with a single voice, they all seem to be reading from the same hypothetical master text.

It is true, nonetheless, that the inspiration for the pieces in Innocence and Experience came from a number of different voices. This may have contributed to the editors' belief that the volume is truly polyphonic. Barbara Harrison's introduction declares that "to be located in New England means to be partially shaped by that period in literary history called 'the flowering of New England,'" but the "spirit of transcendentalism" (xvii) has to share the spotlight with the "benevolent spirits of poets whose works are part of the landscape of theme and topic that we have examined." Chief among these works are William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (in particular the lines "Do I dare / Disturb the Universe"), and C. P. Cavafy's "Ithaka" (xiv).

Idiosyncratic though it may seem to describe these three poets—an apocalyptic visionary, a weary modernist, and the poet laureate of cafe life in Alexandria, Egypt—as "benevolent spirits," the designation is in keeping with the book's aforementioned high-minded transcendentalism and attendant predilection for asking big questions about the significance of life. The fancy moniker for the list of poets is also symptomatic of the name dropping that pervades this volume. Paul Heins underestimates when he states that the seven pieces in the "Mythic Patterns" section include more than fifty allusions to books and writers, with more than half of them referring to adult literature (90). The number of allusions is actually closer to a hundred. Like all name dropping, these allusions are made in an attempt to legitimate status, in this case the status of children's literature as a serious field of study.

A more effective strategy would have been to fulfill the intention announced at the outset of the book: to examine concepts of innocence and experience "in the context of childhood, literature, and society" (xiii, my italics). Serious discussion along these lines would have entailed careful definitions of such key terms as "innocence," "experience," and "childhood"; a variety of critical approaches; and close readings of a substantial number of children's books. Unfortunately, aside from a few pieces—such as Barbara Harrison's "Howl like the Wolves," an essay about war and literature (which appears under the same title in a revised and improved version in volume 15 of Children's Literature)—substantive discussion is the exception to the rule. It could hardly be otherwise in a book that is not only resolutely anti-theoretical but also wary of devoting more than a paragraph at a stretch to any one text. The New Critic F. R. Leavis merits a three-line reference, but feminist critics, structuralists, deconstructionists, Marxist critics, and even practitioners of a little mild reader-response criticism all fail to earn a good word or two. For that matter, so does almost anybody who is primarily a scholar rather...