Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (review)

There is something aerie and dreamlike about Reading Boyishly as it takes the reader on a meandering journey through Mavor’s study of J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. The book defies easy categorization because it is so intensely personal—Mavor not only analyzes these boyish men in the traditional academic sense but also inserts herself into the discourse. Reading Boyishly is an incredibly insightful, at times quite brilliant, book that defies the traditional separation of the academic from the personal. Historians will find a great deal of penetrating analysis of these men and the boyish themes that dominated their lives and work. Equal parts literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, art criticism, and personal meditation, this study is both fascinating and frustrating.

Nostalgia is the analytical tool that Mavor chooses to examine these writers and photographer in her self-styled attempt “to rescue nostalgia . . . as a formidable critical tool” (34). Nostalgia is the feeling of loss between child and mother as the child grows older, introducing the child to “life’s succession of losses” (53). These losses generate the desire to return home to mother. Mavor notes her book is full of “long and brief excursions home to mothers, by the four boyish men and one real boy who have generated not only their own boyish productions but my own imagination of what it means to play their forgotten games” (56). Ultimately, Mavor’s goal is to tear down the fear of the feminine that seems to dominate Freudian psychoanalysis as well as the criticism of the works of these boyish men. Mavor challenges us to think about why boyish impulses and connections to mother should be viewed negatively.

Mavor is completely unconcerned with academic notions of objectivity, for she is fully participating in the “productions” of these men. Metaphor and reality flow together. Motherhood, desire, and home appear in the forms of ingenious metaphors of nests, cake, birds, fairies, string, flight, and kisses. Mavor brilliantly uses these metaphors to deconstruct the lives and works of Barrie, Barthes, Proust, Winnicott, and Lartigue.

It is also worth noting that Duke University Press has produced a lavish, beautiful book. Reading Boyishly boasts high quality paper, over two hundred sharp images, and is interspersed with lively blue text at random moments. Mavor’s specialization in art history and visual studies certainly had a positive influence on the stunning look of this book.

Mavor’s participation in the book is both its greatest strength and weakness. There are few people who could pull off a book like this. She knows these men and their work intimately. While fascinating, her deliberate blurring of reality and analysis will disturb many historians who still hold that there is some objective reality to the past that we diligently try to represent. Her analysis occasionally outruns reality. For example, Mavor’s analysis of Barrie’s play Peter Pan and the subsequent novel Peter and Wendy ingeniously explores the gender bending qualities of the plot and as evidence notes that Peter Pan was played by a woman. From the evidence we have, however, it was not Barrie’s idea at all to have an adult woman play Peter, instead it was the brainchild the American producer of Peter Pan. While attributing this idea to Barrie beautifully fits Mavor’s gender analysis, it is the perfect example of the weakness of the book from a historian’s perspective, where fact and fancy take flight. At the same time her ability to unravel metaphors like cake through the likes of Barthes and Proust is astounding. Reading Boyishly is definitely not what historians do, but that does not lessen Mavor’s accomplishment.

While insightful and brilliant, this book makes great demands upon the reader. The book’s deliberate pacing and roundabout style, which is of course by design, reflects her unabashed...