Children's literature: this is the name we give to a form of cultural production controlled almost entirely by adults. No other body of literature is so openly funded by difference: between author and audience the ideological and generational gaps are-despite frequent denials-vast. Yet no other body of literature also constructs itself so emphatically as champion, cocon-spirator, or advocate of its audience (children's literature gets its name because it is for children) even as it resolutely aims to se-cure control of it. That the characters inside children's books tell us less about the desires and anxieties of the child outside the book than about an adult author's agenda for shaping the desires and anxieties of the child reading the book may seem a point too obvious to make, yet we firmly resist reflecting on the full implications of that fact-perhaps nowhere more willfully than in our critical inquiries into the culture of childhood. Our constructions of childhood tend to extremes. On the one hand, we hold sentimental notions about the purity and in-nocence of childhood and endorse Locke's pronouncements about the child's mind as a tabula rasa-a blank slate waiting to be inscribed with cultural sentences about civilized behavior. On the other, we have by no means relinquished Calvinist notions about original sin and Freudian premises about children's oedi-pal desires and their feelings of murderous hostility toward" loving" parents.

For those who subscribe to the notion of the tabula rasa, children may be born without desires, but they quickly develop them, and it is the responsibility of adults to reprogram them. Locke urges that we" teach him [the child] to get a mastery over his inclinations, and submit his appetite to reason"(255). This mastery of desire marks the age of wisdom and the triumph of adult over child. Calvinists and Freudians have been no less in-