The Doubtful Marriage: A Critical Fantasy

The inhabitants of a faraway country known for its ivory towers and for its export of literary monographs were forever quarreling over who might best represent them. One day, two tiny factions decided to join forces: the adherents of the Princess Childlit and the followers of Prince Psychian, the great-great-grandson of the Empress Psyche. Both groups had for a long time felt themselves unduly spurned, even ostracized, by the powerful Board of Canonizers who had ruled Arkademia for over a century. Might not a wedding between the two claimants strengthen their status? Accordingly, Princess Childlit, chaperoned by her great-aunt Dorothea, was introduced to Prince Psychian, accompanied by his uncle Bruno. The meeting took place near the Sigmund-Platz in Urstadt, the sleepy old provincial town bordered by the half-wild, half-tended groves of the Märchenwald. The result was pleasing to both parties. As one interested observer noted, "there definitely was some chemistry there." A courtship followed, but just as the engagement was to be announced, the whole affair was abruptly called off. What had happened? Princess Childlit and Prince Psychian had liked each other well enough. The trouble lay elsewhere. Their cohorts had begun to quarrel most bitterly with each other. Who was Childlit, the prince's party wanted to know? Was she not simply the simpering idiot-child the canonizers had always made her out to be? Surely the prince would be far better off wooing an eligible heiress from the post-modernist elite in the Duchy of Durrheim. The princess's followers were outraged. They pointed out how divided the prince's own partisans had always been. Sweet Princess Childlit would at last have brought some respectability to a prince unable to control the factions in his own camp, all of whom professed fealty to him as the descendant of Empress Psyche, yet none of whom could agree on how to present him best, or, for that matter, how to present themselves. The wedding did not take place. Soon the Board of Canonizers issued an edict pronouncing both groups to be out of the system. Hereafter, their passports would be stamped with the word "MARGINAL" in red Gothic print.

If fantasies express anxieties, I suppose this little parable expresses my own fear that the union between children's literature and psychoanalytic criticism may never come about as long as we remain unsure of what is being wedded and why. We may rightly disparage the insufficiency of "Bettelheimian assumptions" that lay readers have somehow come to regard as the best way to talk about a literature of enchantment; we may propose less fallible alternatives by turning to sociological models or by insisting that this or that children's classic illustrates—mirabile dictu—the theoretical validity of the claims made by Winnicott or Chodorow or whoever. Still, in the process of dis-affiliating and re-affiliating we incur the risk of unduly rigidifying texts notable for their fluidity and rich multiformity of meaning.

To avoid the condescension shown toward the literary study of children's books by the "canonizers" of our own times, we must make the most of that fluidity and multiformity by adopting a stance that retains multiple perspectives. Children's books are written by members of that hybrid species of ex-children called adults. And these hybrids are noted for never having quite forgotten the child or adolescent they once were. Lewis Carroll's Mock-Turtle, drawn by John Tenniel as a composite creature that combines the vulnerability of the young (a calf) with the self-protectiveness of the adult (a turtle's shell), is a fitting emblem, not just for Carroll himself, but also for his adult readers and would-be critics. If children's books differ from "adult" texts by being addressed to an implied readership that is multi-leveled, then we need as critics to remember that we too contain a multitude of selves at different age groups to which the text we are interpreting may simultaneously appeal. A small child who finds pictures more interesting than words, an older child interested in verbal mastery, a...