Modernism and Childhood

The schedule for my junior seminar "Modernism and Childhood" is below. Comments welcome.

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Modernism and Childhood

This course will examine the role of childhood in British and American literary modernism, as well as the role of modernity in childhood, with an emphasis on U.S. culture. Many modernist authors were fascinated by childhood and wrote books intended for children; meanwhile, scientific and pedagogical theories of childhood—prescriptive, descriptive, and everything in between—proliferated, revealing the degree to which childhood has always been subject to historical and cultural contingencies. In this course we will explore ideas like cuteness, innocence, play, and learning as they were constructed in the early twentieth century, and the roles that they played in the overlap between modernism and children’s literature. We will touch on some canonical children’s literature (Winnie-the-Pooh, A Child’s Garden of Verses) and some canonical modernist literature (Harmonium, Tender Buttons), as well as some literature that fits neither category very comfortably. We will also devote significant portions of the course to understanding psychoanalysis, both as a critical tool and as a set of powerful primary texts of modern childhood. Students will write two medium-length essays and complete a final exam.


Week 1

Tu 1/15 Introduction: What is modernism? What is a child?
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Gertrude Stein, “Susie Asado”


Th 1/17 “The Psychology of Modernism in Literature” (JAMA editorial, 1935) [CR]
Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon


Week 2

Tu 1/22 Childhood, 1900: pedagogy, medicine, art
Sally Shuttleworth, from The Mind of the Child [CR]
Maria Montessori, from The Montessori Method [CR]
Jonathan Crary, from Techniques of the Observer [CR]

Th 1/24 Psychoanalysis and developmental theory
Sigmund Freud, from Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis


Week 3

Tu 1/29 Psychoanalysis continued
Sigmund Freud, The Wolf-Man

Th 1/31 Freud, The Wolf-Man continued
“The ‘Uncanny’” [CR]


Week 4

Tu 2/05 “Innocence” and challenges to innocence
Robert Louis Stevenson, from A Child’s Garden of Verses [CR]
Jacqueline Rose, from Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature [CR]
Psychoanalysis exercise due: Choose one of the following concepts to explain, based on our reading of Freud: ego, id, castration complex, Oedipal complex, primal scene, uncanny. The goal is to summarize a concept as faithfully as you can, using Freud’s own words as evidence. 2-3 double-spaced pages; no more than 1000 words.

Th 2/07 “Innocence” continued: sexuality
Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack


Week 5

Tu 2/12 Barnes continued
Kathryn Bond Stockton, from The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century [CR]

Th 2/14 “Innocence” continued: race
Anne Anlin Cheng, from The Melancholy of Race [CR]
Zora Neale Hurston, from Their Eyes Were Watching God [CR]
James Weldon Johnson, from Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man [CR]
Frantz Fanon, from Black Skins, White Masks [CR]
Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred


Week 6

Tu 2/19 Hughes, Montage continued
Pastiche exercise due: write a poem on any subject in the style of Langston Hughes.

Th 2/21 Cultivating the “innocent eye”
Hughes, poems for children
Marianne Moore, “Critics and Connoisseurs”; “Lines on a Visit of Anne Carroll Moore to Hudson Park Branch” [CR]


Week 7

Tu 2/26 Colonial allegories and the innocent eye
Paul De Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity” from Blindness and Insight [CR]
L. Frank Baum, from The Wizard of Oz [CR]
Arthur Ransome, from Swallows and Amazons [CR]
William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” [CR]

Th 2/28 Nonsense and sound-sense
Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussycat”; “The Quangle-Wangle’s Hat” [CR]
Ogden Nash, selected poems [CR]


Week 8

Tu 3/05 Nonsense and sound-sense continued
Wallace Stevens, poems from Harmonium, “The Poems of our Climate” [CR]
midterm essay due (5-6 pages)

Th 3/07 Learning to read
A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner


3/09 - 3/24: SPRING RECESS


Week 9

Tu 3/26 Ezra Pound, from A B C of Reading; “In a Station of the Metro” [CR]; Canto II [CR]

Th 3/28 Cuteness
Gertrude Stein, “Objects” and “Food” from Tender Buttons
Pastiche exercise due: write a poem on any subject in the style of Gertrude Stein OR Ezra Pound.


Week 10

Tu 4/02 Cuteness continued
Stein continued
“Palilalia and Gertrude Stein” [CR]
Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde”

Th 4/04
Stein, The World Is Round


Week 11

Tu 4/9 Cuteness and kitsch
T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [CR]
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” [CR]

Th 4/11 Playing I: Object relations
D. W. Winnicott, from Playing and Reality [CR]


Week 12

Tu 4/16 Margret and H. A. Rey, Curious George and Curious George Takes a Job
Michael Taussig, from Mimesis and Alterity [CR]

Th 4/18 Playing II: Language games
Lorine Niedecker, New Goose
selected nursery rhymes [CR]


Week 13

Tu 4/23 Niedecker continued
Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations [CR]

Th 4/25 Modernism and childhood: conclusions
Final essay due

Final exam date TBA

Let's talk about children. I don't trust them. They are just biding their time until we're gone, and then they get our stuff.

—Stephen Colbert, interview with Maurice Sendak, 1/24/2012

Gendered souls in The Golden Compass

I'll be lecturing on Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (1995) in Katharine Wright's children's lit course tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2pm in 159 Mulford.

I'll be making three main points.

1. The Golden Compass is very self-conscious about its relationship to other literature. When you have an epigraph from Milton, you are not playing around. The book is situating itself in a specific, very eminent, masculine literary tradition, even as it tries to intervene in that tradition. Pullman’s hero is Milton by way of Blake; his enemy is C. S. Lewis.
2. The Golden Compass is obsessed with gender. It can’t help being obsessed with gender given the literary tradition it’s taking on. Pullman is explicit about this, and he specifically sees himself making a feminist intervention. I argue, however, that Pullman’s anti-Lewis intervention is subsumed by the logic of the very tradition he’s interrogating.
3. The tradition into which Pullman inserts himself is variously Christian; consequently The Golden Compass constructs a complex (and somewhat garbled) theology. Part of this theology involves imagining souls as separable from, and gendered complementarily to, the body.

These ideas are related to some of my recent musings on the relationship between children and animals (1, 2) and on the idea of a child whose soul is separable (e.g. in Pinocchio).

Should be fun!

Animals and children

I've been meaning to put it out there that I've been doing some reading around in animal studies recently. I feel very ambivalent about this, in part because animal studies always seems to me to have the potential to reveal itself as sentimental "I love my dog!" BS. I still find the cyborg wave of posthumanist studies more compelling.

I think one day I'd like to undertake a serious study of the symbolic-discursive relationship between animals and children. We sometimes speak of children as if they were little adults, or as if they were the colonized (Nodelman). The latter is particularly troubling to me when we consider that there are people who are both children and colonized, a fact that the analogy between children "in general" and colonized peoples tends to obscure.

Freaky baby turkey costume courtesy of Martha Stewart.

The real analogy that pervades our literature is between children and animals. Think of Curious George and Stuart Little, the child-animals--even the boy in The Witches who is quite content to have turned into a mouse. Animals and children are the two paradigmatic cases for studying cuteness. The question of language acquisition (and whether it is possible in the case of animals, and whether children who never have it are therefore animals) is likewise a central connection. I think we should take the comparison between children and animals seriously. We need a better philosophy of childhood, and the philosophy of animals could be illuminating in that regard.

But wow, I really do not have time to do that right now.


Fuss, Diana, ed. Human, All Too Human. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Print.

Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991. Print.

Morgenstern, John. “Children and Other Talking Animals.” The Lion and the Unicorn 24.1 (2000): 110-127. Print.

Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

Puerility and corporate authorship; or, Being a real boy

Oh boy. (So to speak.) Fall semester is in full swing, and and I'm having to put Gertrude Stein and Susy Clemens on hold for a while in order to move some other writing projects to the head of the queue. It's busy, busy, busy, and I would grouse about it, but the truth is it's my favorite way to be.

Anyway, that's why I've been meaning, but failing, for weeks to post on Jerome Christensen's wonderful talk at the English Institute, "Pinocchio Logic, Pixar Theory, and the Assertion of 'Cultural' Authorship." I thought it was amazing, but I also had a huge beef with it, which of course means blogging, since I distinctly don't have time to write up some kind of formal response.

Corporate authorship

At this late date I can't summarize the whole talk, which included some really brilliant readings, but I'll try to represent it as best I can.

Christensen wanted to know what it would mean, exactly, to construe a corporation's "culture" serve as its conscience.

Juridically, guilt depends on mens rea, or a guilty mind, for which corporations lack the subjective capacity. It can break the law, but a corporation itself can't know right from wrong, and the difference matters legally. An undesirable consequence of this distinction is that corporations escape accountability for their actions.

On the other hand, in the recent Citizens United decision, the court ruled that corporations do have the right to protected speech, where speech is construed as indistinguishable from money, since speech need not originate in a physical body, even for you or for I. A key example in the Citizens United decision is that of the Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which the opinion construes as an instance of corporate authorship on the part of Columbia Pictures--over and against, Christensen pointed out, the auteur theory suggested by what is technically the film's full title, Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Indeed, the decision conspicuously omits any mention of Capra or his negotiated billing. The film, the court opined, was an example of protected free speech on the part of Columbia Pictures; the ability to make money is reinterpreted as the ability to speak politically and construed as a right that all corporations hold.

The idea of corporate film authorship, something Christensen has written on before, thus underwrites the Citizens United decision. (One wonders whether the same principle is really extensible to corporations that don't make films but rather, say, chocolate pudding, since corporate pudding authorship seems less analogous to speech, or to corporate-funded political ad campaigns. But I digress.)

Christensen then turned to two corporations and their corporate-authored, animated allegories of animation itself, Disney's Pinocchio and Pixar's Toy Story trilogy. It's important to this story that both Disney and Pixar have distinctive corporate cultures, and that when Pixar was acquired by Disney, a clause in the contract stipulated that Pixar's "culture" -- quotation marks in the original -- remain intact.

Despite charges by Winfried Fluck, Jack Zipes, and others, Disney's corporate culture reveals itself as entirely contemptuous of mass production, Christensen argues. Pinocchio is never represented as a commodity in the film; not only does Geppetto never sell Pinocchio, the idea of selling Pinocchio is pointedly raised precisely as a repugnant notion to be rejected. Geppetto is never really a toy-seller but an animator, a bringer-to-life; likewise, Pinocchio is always a boy manqué, who will always need to have a cricket substitute for his conscience but who is deserving of animation nonetheless.

To Pixar, however, a toy is not a near-child longing for subjectivity (or a conscience); it's always a toy. It therefore never wants to be a child; it is manufactured to be played with by a child, and therefore that is what it wants. Mass production is the condition of their existence, as we see when the toys in the films confront identical copies of themselves who both are and are not them.

The Roberts court, like the Blue Fairy, rescues an artificial person, the corporation, that has proven constitutively incapable of maintaining a conscience. But a corporate culture can substitute for subjectivity, serving as the source of a conscience that need never be internalized. Pixar doesn't maintain any fantasies of becoming a real boy, but it preserves in its place the Pixar "culture," which will do just as well. As Christensen put it, "If it makes no difference who is speaking, it may as well be a cricket who can tell right from wrong." Under the terms of the Disney-Pixar merger, Pixar preserves its autonomous culture; thus its authorship and speech remain accountable to the Pixar culture. Thus the Citizens United decision, by making corporate authorship into legal precedent, backhandedly confers an external but still functional conscience on corporations, providing, perhaps, the grounds for mens rea and responsibility.

Real boys will be real boys

Now here's where I wanted to hear more from Christensen: What about gender--specifically, gendered childhood? At the risk of being The Feminist (look, someone has to be The Feminist), I posed this question after the talk and was very disappointed not to receive much of an answer. Here's why it matters: American corporate culture is famously masculinist, as is Pixar's oeuvre. If Pinocchio and Toy Story can be read as allegories of corporate culture, and I'm persuaded that they can, then their constructions of boyhood have implications for how we construe corporate authorship, hence corporate liability. In fact, it's worth noting that Toy Story's plot comes almost wholesale from a really terrible 1986 made-for-TV muppet production called The Christmas Toy (yeah, you read that date right, so don't judge; I was FIVE). The Christmas Toy is less a missing link between the Disney masterpiece and the Pixar masterpiece than an inconvenient cousin, and not only because live-action muppets are an odd form to triangulate with animated puppets (Pinocchio) and hyper-round animated dolls (Toy Story). It's inconvenient because it contains -- wait for it -- girls.

In The Christmas Toy, the loved child is not a boy (Andy) but a girl (Jamie). More importantly, the central conflict between the old favorite toy and the new, flashy superhero toy is not a battle of competing masculinities but an allegory of the glass ceiling: instead of comically super-butch Buzz Lightyear, The Christmas Toy's threatening but ultimately lovable interloper is a classic 1980s castrating bitch, the metal-be-boobed Meteora ("queen of the asteroids"). (Oh, the eighties!)

It could be argued that the dynamics brought into play by Buzz Lightyear's gently mocked hypermasculinity are as complicated as those engendered by Meteora's masculine performance. Pushed far enough, gender always reveals itself as drag. But Pixar's version has consequences for corporate authorship because it not only embraces the existential quandary of mass production (for the toys, that is) but also reimagines toy consciousness as an allegory of rightly performed masculinity--the masculinity of good workers (toys) and of good managers (real boys). In Pixar's toy universe, you can have old-fashioned masculinity (the cowboy--as Christensen pointed out, at one point Woody's skill at being played with is remarked upon: "Are you classically trained?") and a futuristic masculinity (the space invader); there are good boys (Andy, who takes care of his toys) and bad boys (Sid, who likes to blow them up). Nearly as unacceptable as being owned by the bad boy is the possibility of being owned by a girl, which Christensen did not mention because there is, of course, no possible analogue in the corporate history of Pixar. The result of being owned by a girl would be a situation antithetical to the playful aims of any self-respecting toy: boring, unimaginative girl play, most likely someplace pink. The girl is benign, but out of bounds.As Christensen remarked, success in Toy Story doesn't lie in achieving subjectivity but in getting oneself managed by a good, rather than a bad, boy (or, say, getting acquired by the right parent company, which will let you keep your "culture"). That's why gender is so crucial in this understanding of corporate authorship and its consequences. With Pixar, there's no longing to be a "real boy," but there's an insistence on maintaining a corporate culture in which boyhood--and emphatically not girlhood--is the name of the game. And boyhood--the kind of playing that boys are imagined to do, the kind of creativity and propensity for technical production that boys are supposed to have--is central to the way the corporate author is imagined.

But it's not just Pixar but Pinocchio that's instructive here, since Pinocchio supplies the metaphor that makes Pixar's culture into a potential source of conscience. Perhaps we're comfortable with a boy whose conscience is a cricket. Perhaps that's cute, perhaps that's even the condition of puerile creativity. Perhaps boyish ruthlessness is what lets Pixar be as technically skillful and imaginative as it is. But how would we feel if girlhood were the model for corporate authorship? Could we countenance a girl with a cricket for a conscience?*

Christensen proposes a legal model that he represents as ungendered. I'm persuaded that he is right to see corporations, now granted protected free "speech," as substitutes for real boys. He is wrong to suppose that "boy" means the same thing as "person" or "subject." The insight that Christensen makes and then misses is that corporations are precisely "boys' clubs." As of the year of our Flying Spaghetti Monster 2009, three percent of Fortune 500 companies were headed by women (source). The model of personhood that Christensen extrapolates from the court's decision is in fact a model of boyhood. It depends entirely on a specific, historical construction of boyhood that underwrites what we see as possible and permissible in corporations, especially insofar as they are understood as "creative," and therefore capable of authorship in the narrower sense. And it is this narrower creative corporate authorship that, as Christensen shows, enables the broader understanding of corporate speech on which Citizens United relies. Since this model of boyhood is specifically one of ruthless creative play and total amorality (his conscience is a bug), can we expect corporate culture to serve any differently from the ultimately ineffectual Jiminy Cricket?

Boys--male children--have been constructed as creatures that are morally culpable for very few things. Nor are they legally liable for much. Boys will be boys.

What, then, is the real upshot of puerile corporate authorship?

-----
The obvious point of comparison is Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Her daemon, Pantalaimon, is an externalized manifestation of her soul. Note (1) Pantalaimon is explicitly male, part of Pullman's complicated and generally misguided attempt to rectify C.S. Lewis's objectionable gender politics; and (2) the film, in which Pantalaimon was of course animated, was a flop.

White children and their natives

Aaron's recent post on the American "bad boy" in Avatar made me think in general about children's narratives that construct a "native" with which the child may have an adventure.

The American bad boy is very, very familiar: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Rip van Winkle, etc. Avatar seems to fall into this (primarily nineteenth-century) tradition as well. There's an extensive literature, from Fiedler to Jehlen and beyond.

I found myself thinking about Aaron's claim that this is a specifically American construction. I think that's right, but it put me in mind of its early twentieth-century non-U.S. cousins as well, who deviate from the model in interesting ways.

Related to the bad boy is the jolly uncle, e.g. the professor in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Albus Dumbledore, technically a grown-up but a boy (not a girl) at heart. Jolly uncle is British and is there to let you in on some arcane knowledge that will help you on your boyish adventure. He'll also help you subvert the mean (female) housekeeper. It helps that he is an Oxford(ish) professor -- a puerile pedant, as it were.

Swallows and Amazons is also British, and offers yet another model. Here the mother is not to be resisted, because the mother is supremely pliable, an ally in the children's play. She will set you up with regular shipments of butter, eggs, milk, and cake made of butter, eggs, and milk, and will allow herself to be designated a "native" from whom the conquering children can get their various dairy products for free. We don't have a fun uncle/mean mom dynamic here; the mother is perhaps the most fun character of all, the best at playing, the ideal imaginary Indian. She's so good at playing that she is easily conquered.

Oddest of all to think about in the context of Avatar was Anne of Green Gables. Avonlea is a female utopia, and Anne peoples her woods and lakes with other girls and women, in part quite clearly because her tragic past has forced her to invest in objects in lieu of friends (her first best friend is her own reflection in a cabinet), but ultimately because creating alien others -- dryads, naiads, animated plants -- is a form of creative play that marks Anne as interesting.

Yet those creations are also a way of staking claim. As soon as she arrives at Green Gables, before she even knows that she will stay, Anne begins to name things, and thereafter they are in a sense her gentle friends -- hers. She is a second Adam, in her childishness experiencing her own days of prismatic color and offering the adults around her a cherished glimpse. Her "marriage" to her first real friend, Diana, in the garden (a little homespun Eden) confirms rather than undermines her status as namer and master of her environs; Diana never reaches Anne's imaginative capacities, and only ever shows the initiative of an Eve by her multiple failures to adequately enter into Anne's imaginary realm. If anything, Diana acts as the female principle of fun-squelching, not because she is mean but because, like Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly, she simply has an inadequate imagination.

Is Anne a colonist? She is, of course, a "spunky girl," but is she a "bad boy" too?

And what does it mean, in Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables, that in the absence of indigenous peoples, the children must invent some?

Fairies and Indians

I subscribe to Debbie Reese's RSS feed because she puts books on my radar that usually wouldn't otherwise get there. Her blog on the representation of Native Americans in children's literature is not a litcrit blog per se--it's closer to Sociological Images, except there's only one theme: obnoxious and harmful stereotypes about Native Americans.

This is the "strong ideology" model if you like, but it's a theme that bears repeating. Debbie's posts don't have the texture, twists, and turns of, say, Aaron's. But you see the necessity of what she does when time and again she rebuts comments by offended school librarians and authors. They're offended, of course, that Debbie was offended by their stereotyping of Native Americans.

Their first line of defense is of course authorial creativity. It's not books that grossly stereotype (homogenize, Orientalize, temporally displace, and kill off) Native Americans that are miseducating children; it's the terrible people who want to censor creativity. Do we not realize that this is art.

And as a corollary, It's just a book; it's not real.

Ought we forget that there are actual children involved--some of them nonwhite? And that when we depict certain people as "magical," we move them into the realm of the not-real as well?

Is it really a terrible abridgment of artistic license to insist that historically oppressed peoples are not toys for you to play with?



Today Debbie writes about a trope in the unreal-Indians vein:

This morning, I read an article in the Telegraph about the "Latitude Festival," an annual music festival that takes place in Suffolk, England. The first one was in 2006. The article in the Telegraph isn't about the music. Instead, Neil McCormick describes the people and setting. Here's what caught my eye:

People enter into the spirit with colourful costumes: there were parties of American Indians, Smurfs and an engaging posse of pensionable old dears dressed as fairies. The audience is, it has to be said, overwhelmingly white and middle-class (and probably predominantly middle-aged).

Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Reading those words reminded me of an email I received on December 30, 2007 in response to critiques I posted about one of Jan Brett's books. In her email, the author wrote:

Why is there always someone who wants to rain on someone else's parade? Why can't children just enjoy a good read? I am sure you don't believe in Santa, the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny because they are incorrect in guiding young children's beliefs.

For those that want to study the American Indian ways and beliefs, good for them. For now I will read and enjoy books, just because.

It struck me that she would cast American Indians in that particular framework---of things-not-real. She is a librarian in a public school in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Santa. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny.
Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Debbie's post caught my attention because the Indian-as-fairy trope has been something I've been thinking about, in a back-burner way, for a few years now. The Indian in the Cupboard and Disney's Pocahontas are two twentieth-century examples, but it's also powerfully present in the literature of the early 1800s, leading up to and following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. In Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1826), Mary Conant is an Episcopalian misfit among the Puritans, having a "fairy" nature better suited to old England (17). In an act of rebellion carefully staged to evoke British fairy myths, she walks into the woods to find a husband:

...taking a stick and
marking out a large circle on the margin of the stream, she stept into the magic ring, walked round three times with measured tread, then carefully retraced her steps backward, speaking all the while in a distinct but trembling voice. The following were the only words I could hear,

Whoever's to claim a husband's power,
Come to me in the moonlight hour.

And again,—

Whoe'er my bridegroom is to be,
Step in the circle after me.

She looked round anxiously as she completed the ceremony; and I almost echoed her involuntary shriek of terror, when I saw a young Indian spring forward into the centre. (23)

The mapping of Indian to fairy here is unmistakable; likewise, the ideology that fashions the Indian as destined to vanish (as the fairies are said to have vanished from England, inevitably, with the coming of modernity). Comparing Native Americans to Smurfs makes them not-real; comparing them to fairies makes them an anachronism, a move that can be and has been used to justify their brutal marginalization. And indeed, Hobomok eventually honorably disappears to make way for white modernity.

We're used to the figure of the Vanishing Indian in the U.S.; in parallel, some have hypothesized that the Vanishing Fairy in British folklore is actually based on an oppressed indigenous group, the Picts (I don't have the books on hand, but I believe that Diane Purkiss, for one, entertains this theory).

What's interesting is the way that images of Native Americans can be appropriated as symbols of national identity even while that nation founded itself in part on the violent oppression of said Native Americans. This, too, finds a parallel in fairy mythology, here courtesy of John Ruskin:

Suppose you had each, at the back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to run,--no more—and that you could not change your abode; but that, if you chose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it? I hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold.

Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let them all run there. And this little garden you will turn into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the furnace as of the wood... (126-7)

Fairies, vanishing though they be, remain powerful signifiers of English identity. Ruskin argues that it is a tone to transform the English landscape through industry, yet there is a sense of resignation in his words. And perhaps Ruskin can be resigned because, he argues, in spite of everything, the fairies in England will persist. Even if England should lose its gardenlike character (which Ruskin hopes will not happen), England will remain English, hence populated by fairies. In a similar way, Native Americans (who, unlike fairies, are real) are appropriated as signifiers of Americanness even as their anachronism is enforced. And frequently, that enforcement arrives by way of children's literature, which is, don't you know, creative.

"Ilse and I had a fight yesterday about which we'd rather be Joan of Arc or Frances Willard. We didn't begin it as a fight but just as an argewment but it ended that way. I would rather be Frances Willard because she is alive."

--L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon (1925; Toronto: Seal, 1992) 156.

Recently read children's fiction

I haven't yet had time to blog about some children's fiction that I read in the past year. The novels usually went up on the sidebar with no comment. Here are a few that I enjoyed, in no particular order. I wrote something similar, only a bit more streamlined, for the Cal English blog.

M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Volume I: The Pox Party, 2006

I described this book to my children's lit cohorts as "Johnny Tremain meets Vathek," and I stand by that description. Highly stylized, in pitch-perfect eighteenth-century prose, the novel follows a young boy in colonial New England who is highly educated, but who only learns the reality about his situation in the world once his formal education stops. I was rather blown away by this novel, in part because the technical mastery was so greatly superior to much children's fiction currently being published. I have not had a chance yet to read the second volume, which was just released in 2008. I did, however, read a bizarre hyper-satirical mystery novel by the same author, which I can only describe as Nancy Drew on McSweeney's. It exhibited the same stylistic mastery as Octavian Nothing, but was otherwise very different, and it was, like McSweeney's, irritating.

William Nicholson, The Wind on Fire trilogy, 2002-2004

This fantasy trilogy did something astonishing, namely it kept the parents alive (well, mostly) and unhated. The first book begins in a brave new dystopia, and the whole family is lovingly united in sticking it to the man, often in very satisfying ways. Sentimental at times, but also sweet, and there is a hilarious flying cat that makes up for quite a lot, to my mind.

Karen Karbo, Minerva Clark Gets a Clue, 2006

This appears to be a series, and I do not intend to read anything else in the series, but I found the first book quite amusing. Minerva Clark is an inquisitive middle schooler whose main guardians are her three older brothers, whom she unhesitatingly ranks by level of responsibility or flakiness. Minerva is a bit like Harriet the Spy, only she isn't neurotic. How can this be? Well, she's struck by lightning of course, and this causes her to lose her natural middle-school-girl self-loathing, astonishing the doctor. Very funny.

Mary Hoffman, City of Masks (2002), City of Stars (2003), City of Flowers (2005)

In the Stravaganza series, teenagers from present-day London are magically transported to Talia, the Renaissance Italy of a parallel universe. Hijinks ensue. I can see the City of X conceit getting a bit old (apparently there is another volume that hasn't made it to the Claremont Branch yet), but so far I've found Hoffman's world-building subtle and creative. The part that tickles me the most is the old man, William Dethridge, who comes from Renaissance England and speaks in early modern English, spelling and all. Hoffman has a good ear for this, and it amuses me that to the Talians Dethridge sounds normal, but to the English teenagers he sounds "old-timey."

Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted (1997), Fairest (2006), and The Two Princesses of Bamarre (2001)

My attempt to post on Levine a long time ago was derailed by my having read Jennifer Holm's Boston Jane in the same week; praise was naturally superseded by a rant. I expected to dislike Levine, owing to the fact that a bad-looking Disney film existed based on one of her novels. But in fact I think she's great. I've read some reviews suggesting that her characterization is lacking, and I think that might be right, but also a bit beside the point. These novels strike me as interesting and well considered thought experiments, performed by a smart woman, in how you could conceive of a genuinely feminist princess story. These three different novels are three different kinds of answers, and they each have their successes and failings, but they are all interesting, they all engage serious questions, and they are all deeply interested in language.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), Year of the Griffin (2000), Power of Three (2003), Eight Days of Luke (1975), Hexwood (2002)

Oh, so many Diana Wynne Jones novels. Dark Lord of Derkholm is a very funny satire on fantasy conventions; a world full of magic is forced to give guided fantasy tours, complete with a seductive enchantress and a Dark Lord. A misfit named Derk, father to a multispecies family, is selected to be Dark Lord one year, and the whole family has to band together to pull it off and try to get rid of the devastating, exploitative tours in the process. In Year of the Griffin, the sequel, Derk's griffin daughter Elda goes off to the university, which turns out to be an extremely bootleg affair, especially when several foreign nations turn their wrath upon said university, including a series of highly trained assassins. Elda and her friends save the day with the help of some hard-core studying. I love that the undisputed leader of this world is a snakelike elderly lady named Querida. Power of Three is more or less a medievalist fantasy, or at least so it seems until we learn more about the Giants and the reader is forced to totally reorient. Well done, with that classic tongue-in-cheek Diana Wynne Jones style. Eight Days of Luke and Hexwood are myth-related fantasies in the style of Fire and Hemlock, by which I mean the protagonist is a normal child who is forced to enter into the logic of mythology. Hexwood is by far the more complicated and trippy, since a good part of it takes place entirely out of chronological sequence.

Austin Grossman has a very interesting review of Maze of Bones.

It’s a story about people born into the most privileged family in the world, who then set out to become the most important people in history. Whatever happened to just owning your own chocolate factory?

Quick notes on three recently-read children's books

Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, some Soup, and a Spool of Thread, 2003.

     In case you were wondering whether a fat working-class girl with a hearing impairment could be a princess, the answer is no.

Shannon Hale, Princess Academy, 2005.

     The Book of Esther meets Heidi. Yes, including Peter and the goats.

Blue Balliett, The Wright 3, 2006.

    Charming, as must be any book in which a major plot point revolves around the box of free books outside Powells. Interesting sensitive touch on the awkwardness of mixed-sex friendships in sixth grade. Alas for the "Bach symphony" moment, however. 

Greatest ever

Guardian: JK Rowling gives Labour £1m donation.

Brown said: "I am delighted that JK Rowling, who is one of the world's greatest ever authors, has made such a generous donation. I thank her for supporting the Labour party and our values of social justice and opportunity for all."

Oh, yes. Definitely on par with, like, George Eliot.

(Via Silliman)

The necessary spinster

I recently read Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, which I very much enjoyed. It's a novel about love, and sincerity, and partly about the strangeness of communication. It's also about the isolated spinsters and widows who hold the world together, point by point, with their renunciations, so that beautiful young mermaid-women can have war heroes and sincerity. Their loves are necessary but not sufficient.

The necessary spinster is a trope that one finds frequently in fiction for girls. I am thinking in particular of Anne of Green Gables and I Capture the Castle, but of course it lurks in the background of nearly every novel with a literary young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Jo March ought to turn out a "literary spinster" -- like herself, of course. And the spinster Jane Eyre might have become is Lucy Snowe.

The misogynistic suspicion arises, always, that a woman cannot be both intellectual and sexual; this is one theme in Le Doeuff's The Sex of Knowing, and one of the great problems addressed women's fiction. (One possible conclusion is that women are a priori sexual, are the sexual, and that therefore women cannot be intellectual, full stop. This is a favorite theme of men's fiction.)

In women's fiction, the woman is usually forced, painfully, to choose--and really, it is no choice at all. The usual way out is for the heroine to marry an intellectual man, one who respects her enough that he intends to let her keep on thinking. Mr. Rochester is one such; Professor Bhaer is another. Gilbert Blythe, we are to assume, another.

But Jo puts away her writing after marriage; so does Anne. Anne instead mentors a bright young boy who goes on to be a writer himself. Jo and Anne recede into the roles of teacher and mother: support staff. The happy ending is a compromise, as Alcott saw.

The necessary spinster is in the background as a warning of what might happen. Marilla in Anne of Green Gables is a classic example. Secretly brilliant and warm-hearted, she develops a no-nonsense approach to the life that she devotes to maintaining her kind, dreamy, utterly socially impaired brother. In her youth, Marilla has a brief affair with Gilbert Blythe's father, which ends when both are too proud to make the first gesture toward ending a fight. This is, we are to understand, Marilla's fault and Marilla's tragedy; she is, after all, the one who remains single.

Anne learns of this, and must get over her pride (some might call it self-respect) and marry Gilbert in order to set it to rights. Anne saves Marilla partly by giving her another shot at motherhood, but partly by redeeming Marilla's spinsterhood in the next generation, House of Seven Gables-style.

It's, to put it lightly, problematic, from a feminist perspective.

I find I Capture the Castle more thoughtful on this subject, but of course it's a different kind of book. Marriage is a matter of love in this novel, but also of rescue. All the women in the family are extremely practical on this score, and so is Miss Marcy, the necessary spinster of the novel. Miss Marcy is the local school teacher, who has given up on expecting things for herself and has moved on to sustaining others.

The Mortmain family's desperate financial situation stems, we are told, from a misunderstanding that destroyed the father's ability to write -- he was once a celebrated novelist. But it is equally a consequence of the sexual division of labor in the household. The women are excellent housekeepers, good at spending wisely and frugally what the men gain. This is nearly meaningless, however, in the absence of gain.

Miss Marcy, though certainly not wealthy, is financially independent; she has a job, and she helps the Mortmains. She has stability and a meaningful life, but nobody loves her, and this, Cassandra decides, is unacceptable. Miss Marcy is necessary; Cassandra benefits from her presence and learns from her. But Miss Marcy is also a warning: this is what could happen.

What I find so interesting about the spinsters in The Great Fire is that the spinsters are not warnings so much as emulable models.

Not for Helen, of course, who, because female, is subject to the same strictures as the spinsters. Already at seventeen she is used to being exploited by her parents as a nurse for her brilliant brother Benedict, who is ill. (Fortunately for the two of them, Helen is competent and Benedict is good company.) It is possible for the poetic, intellectual Helen to be buried first in interminable nursing and then, later, to "knuckle under" in the isolation of New Zealand, where the women ultimately marry and renounce intellect or pleasure. Such a fate is strenuously to be avoided, and near the end we feel the danger for Helen.

But unlike so many novels in which the literary girl is trailed by the warning specter of the literary spinster, The Great Fire does not hold anyone up as the tragic example. Instead, it dots the globe with necessary spinsters, interesting women who have tamped themselves down in order to survive. Each acting in isolation, the spinsters ameliorate the cruelties of geography and of loneliness and provide needed funds of love. They are geniuses of repair, quiet human connective nodes that master distance. The final chapter is a neural mass of correspondences: telegrams, long distance calls, and finally, necessarily, travel. Their jobs done, the spinsters recede into the background.

And as the spinsters carefully reach out and make themselves useful, Aldred also learns to do so, moving swiftly to repair a connection between Helen and Benedict and engaging himself in the complex network of human communications of which the spinsters, it turns out, are the anchors. If such actions are dangerous for Helen (there is no question of bucking the sex/gender system), they are required for Aldred. It is by entering this network of letters and telegrams and telephone calls that Aldred finally understands what to do, how to manage his father's estate and how to reach Helen. It is also by entrusting the care of Peter Exley to such women that Aldred is able to turn his attentions where they are most needed. The necessary spinster here is not merely a faintly pitiable fairy godmother. Rather, she is model of active, adult human compassion. Thus the solution for Helen is not only to marry an intellectual man who will allow her to think, although Aldred is also that. Helen must marry a man who is, in a sense, a spinster, the kind of person who makes sincere love possible for others. Above all, he must make it possible for her -- really possible, without concomitant renunciations.

Update: Sadie Stein on spinsters.

Counting to four

Recently Hillary showed me this video of Feist singing “1, 2, 3, 4” for Sesame Street.



I found the video very funny, and particularly enjoyed the way Feist’s dancing mimics the movement of the muppets – head upturned, mouth wide open, body being flung from side to side. The clusters of muppets seem to drag her around the set, as if she’s a muppet herself. As Hillary pointed out, this version is more appealing than the original.

The lyrics aren’t especially clever; it’s obvious that it was a pre-existing song being adapted to fit an educational theme. It’s charming nonetheless, especially the earnestness with which the merits of the number four are announced: it’s “one less than five, and one more than three.” I mean, who can argue with that?

The song blithely suggests that there’s something natural about counting up to your favorite number (in homage?). In fact, what’s amusing about the song is the absurd specificity of the activity being lauded, not just counting (as high as you can), but counting to four.

I suppose it could be argued that all the counting represents a set-theoretic construction of the number four (i.e. as a set of four elements). The singer then points to a three-dimensional Arabic numeral 4, singing “I see four here,” and correlates it to the four penguins she’s just counted (one, two, three, four) by pointing to them and singing “I see four there.”

Of course, any pedagogical achievement in that line is undermined by the next two: “My favorite number/ Nothing can compare.” Contra the lyrics, usually natural numbers don’t inspire affect (“my favorite,” and the gesture of laying the hand over the heart). Instead they are the abstractions by which certain kinds of comparisons become possible (to wit: four monsters, four penguins, four chickens, "one less than five and one more than three").

But in general, counting over and over again is usually read as a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. Émile Zola suffered from this particular obsession, and experienced deep shame that, while publicly committed to a scientific program, he privately performed over and over these rituals of order that were essentially superstitious.

Part of what’s appealing about the Feist video is the unironic joy in counting to four. But I wonder if that appeal doesn't have more to do with its absurdity -- an absurdity specifically associated with children's (perceived) cognitive limitations -- than with any actual desire to get toddlers pumped about counting to four. And perhaps a bit of the pleasure comes from the juxtaposition of those perceived childish limitations (counting, not as high as one can, but to four, and not because it's useful but because four is your favorite) with our own adult sophistication -- our recognition of the tune from a different context, etc.

Of course, I still like the video. And is anyone else detecting a subtle shout-out to Lyn Hejinian here? Like plump birds along the shore? Yes?

* * * * *

In other news, I sincerely hope that Poe studies have not really come to this.

(Of course they haven't; it's just that the NYT would rather report on this than on anything actually literary.)

Two kinds of cross-dressing in young adult fiction

As I've mentioned before, teaching A Room of One's Own forced me to face up to the overwhelming prevalence of the girl-in-drag-has-adventures meme. It is everywhere, from Shakespearean comedies to Mulan.

Several YA books that I've mentioned on this blog wholeheartedly embrace the idea that a girl should embrace her Inner Dude by making it her Outer Duds. In Boston Jane you're practically clubbed over the head with it. In Philadelphia, Jane wears corsets and is exaggeratedly feminine; out west, she loses the corset and Finds Herself (TM). In The Shakespeare Stealer, a girl is shown, without a trace of irony, making it in the Globe Theater by cross-dressing (in order to cross-dress yet again on the stage). And don't even get me into Alanna.

I find this device deeply irritating when it's used in order to mock women for being oppressed. This is the case in Boston Jane, and to some extent in Mulan as well (although Mulan actually does some interesting things with the performance of gender). Such narratives are merely another spin of the patriarchy wheel: "girls are stupid and useless, and if you want to avoid being stupid and useless you have to become an exception to your gender."

So I was interested to read Mary Hoffman's City of Stars, about a fifteen-year-old girl named Georgia O'Grady, who travels in her sleep to Talia, the Renaissance Italy of a parallel dimension. She's a loner at school and is bullied in particular by her older stepbrother Russell. Russell's taunts are truly vile, and insistently sexual. This fifteen-year-old girl loves horses, practically the quintessential little-girl obsession, but Russell spins it as a cheap Freudian substitute for frustrated sexuality, constantly accusing Georgia of both out-of-control desire and sexual failure (he actually calls a fifteen-year-old a "spinster"), simultaneously female and insufficiently feminine. Especially given that he's her older step-brother, the fixation on Georgia's body and on her sexuality is extraordinarily creepy.

So: she puts on drag.

Not drag in the sense of "drag queen," but drag in the sense of a sexual masquerade: she effaces the social markers of her femininity. With her short hair and baggy clothes that hide the shape of her body, Georgia announces that she withdraws from the femininity game. She knows she cannot win it and she doesn't intend to play.

But unlike in the spunky-girl narrative, merely wearing trousers does not solve Georgia's problems. She doesn't suddenly come into dudely awesomeness, complete with spitballs and weaponry. Instead, she travels to to another world, where she becomes embroiled in a complicated political situation marked by magic. There she dresses as a boy, since the demands of femininity are even stronger in this world, and there is no hope of avowing femininity with such short hair. Nonetheless, all of the friends that Georgia makes there know her to be a girl in boys' clothing (and haircut), not a boy or even an honorary boy.

Georgia eventually saves the day in a public event under the name "Giorgio Gredi," and the ability to pose as a boy certainly helps her in the "city of stars." But the real difference in this alternate world is not that she acts boyish -- she acts the same as she does at home -- but that she has a chance to interact with people who are not vile sexists. Putting on drag at home is a defense; putting on drag in Talia is mostly fallout from the situation at home. Georgia has her adventures in boys' clothing, but those adventures allow her to re-embrace femininity from a place of safety rather than anoint her an honorary XY.



I'm partly struck by the way the masquerade in City of Stars echoes the masquerade in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. Like Georgia, the protagonist of Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie, starts out under a sexual threat, though it's much more euphemized here than in City of Stars. Sophie, the eldest of three daughters in a fairy-tale universe is constrained by what's expected of women and of eldest daughters.

"What made me think I wanted life to be interesting?" she asked as she ran. I'd be far too scared. It comes of being the eldest of three."

When she reached Market Square, it was worse, if possible. Most of the inns were in the Square. Crowds of young men swaggered beerily to and fro, trailing cloaks and long sleeves and stamping buckled boots they would never have dreamed of waring on a working day, calling loud remarks and accosting girls. The girls strolled in fine pairs, ready to be accosted. It was perfectly normal for May Day, but Sophie was scared of that too.

Ho-hum, it's just another day in patriarchy-land, with the usual catcalls from drunken men.

Sophie is suddenly freed from the sexual threats of her world by being magically disguised not as a man but as an elderly woman. In her pseudo-old age, she is no longer expected to be a sexual victim; instead she is free to be catankerous, eccentric, and bossy, something her apparent old age lets her get away with. As an elderly woman, Sophie's even mistaken for a witch, a category seen as repulsive yet powerful.

It's an interesting twist on girl-in-drag-has-adventures; although elderly women are not free from the threat of sexual violence, that threat is more socially acknowledged as inappropriate, unlike the harassment of young women, which is "perfectly normal." Sophie escapes into a marginalized category, and its similarity to Georgia's escape into androgyny is revealing.

In books like Boston Jane, a particular model of masculinity itself is powerful, desirable, and laudable, and is therefore the thing to be emulated. The way to kick ass is to approximate masculinity.

The sexual masquerades of City of Stars and Howl's Moving Castle, in contrast, are not attempts to emulate masculinity but to seek the kind of exemption from the threat of sexual violence that masculinity (anxiously) entails. These sexual masquerades are recognized as unsustainable but crucial stopgaps that allow the young female protagonists the respite from sexual threat that is necessary to develop selfhood. Undercover as a boy or as an elderly woman, these protagonists get a chance to build up reserves of experience and strength.

Of course I have mixed feelings about how femininity manifests at the end of the novels as heterosexuality and empowerfully normative beauty; surely there is more to achieving a secure home environment than a boyfriend and a halter top. After all, in City of Stars, the crucial resolution at home is similar to that in Talia: thanks in part (but not entirely) to Georgia's opportunity to spend some time around people who aren't vile sexists, Georgia's parents wake up and stop her being surrounded by vile sexists. In Howl's Moving Castle, something surprisingly similar occurs: Howl regains his heart and stops his predatory womanizing. So it's a bit disappointing that, in the end, both protagonists get makeovers.

But partly I think these endings recognize the difficulty of these radical positions. The woman who is rejected as beyond the pale of unfemininity is not resisting femininity by choice. She may embrace her position as a position of resistance, but because others have constructed her very body as unassimilable to society, she is abjected (the "radically excluded," as Kristeva famously puts it).

Georgia's drag is a sign of her abjection, of absenting herself from the game of gender by trying to become androgynous (which here means boyish, on which more could be said). Sophie's drag is also imposed, by the Witch of the Waste, and similarly represents Sophie's desire to exempt herself from the sexual economy. It is a radical position, yes, but also a painful one and a dangerous one. This drag is not the stuff of Butlerian parody but rather of self defense, and existing as a marginal figure (of ambiguous gender, of old age) carries with it its own problems.

The two protagonists therefore undertake the dangerous performance of femininity by drawing on a period of differently but equally dangerous resistance through sexual masquerade. Masquerade supplies not only a period of subject-formation in which the protagonists are allowed a sense of personal integrity (to wit: the notion that they own their bodies) but also the means of removing vile sexists from the vicinity.

Though I'm ambivalent about these endings -- I find them too easy -- I can see a certain logic to them. These protagonists have made femininity safe for themselves. That it takes magic and/or trips to an alternate universe in order to accomplish it registers the precariousness of that safety.

Historical fiction again

Regarding historical fiction again -- Anne Scott MacLeod, whom I have long known to be awesome, notes in general how children's historical fiction tends toward presentism.

They evade the common realities of the societies they write about. In the case of novels about girls or women, authors want to give their heroines freer choices than their cultures would in fact have offered. To do that, they set aside the social mores of the past as though they were minor afflictions, small obstacles, easy — and painless — for an independent mind to overcome.

The smug presentist science I noted is but one facet of this general tendency, and I think MacLeod gets it right when she brings up the "independent mind." It's this idea that if you're just spunky enough you can Set Yourself Free from your historical context. The desire for a protagonist who is Set Free in this way, as revealed by the way such protagonists appear over and over, is effectively a desire for the opposite of historical fiction. As MacLeod puts it,

Most people are, by definition, not exceptional. Historical fiction writers who want their protagonists to reflect twentieth-century ideologies, however, end by making them exceptions to their cultures, so that in many a historical novel the reader learns nearly nothing — or at least nothing sympathetic — of how the people of a past society saw their world. Characters are divided into right — those who believe as we do — and wrong; that is, those who believe something that we now disavow. Such stories suggest that people of another time either did understand or should have understood the world as we do now, an outlook that quickly devolves into the belief that people are the same everywhere and in every time, draining human history of its nuance and variety.

Smug presentist science and historical fiction

I recently read a trio of children's novels set in the Elizabethan period, concerning a boy (orphan, naturally!) who joins Shakespeare's acting company.

When I taught A Room of One's Own a few years ago, I had my class discuss the "Shakespeare's sister" section. The almost universal cry was, "well she knows girls aren't allowed on the stage; why doesn't she just dress up as a boy?"

That masquerading as male is the natural solution to all a woman's woes is of course suggested by a good number of Shakespeare's plays (including Hamlet!). But it completely fails on a political level; it presupposes that the problems posed by women's social circumscription are always exceptional and individual. Cross-dressing isn't a political solution; women as a class cannot masquerade as male in order to gain basic rights. (Though, now that I think about it, it could be argued that the 1980s shoulder-padded, pretend-you-are-okay-with-not-getting-parental-leave model of feminism was an attempt to effect exactly that solution.)

Nonetheless, in his one (in my opinion, failed) attempt to present a three-dimensional female character, Gary Blackwood has said female character... dress up like a boy.* Sigh.

But that is not what I am writing to complain about today. No, my peeve of the moment is: Why is it that in historical novels for children, the main characters always magically transcend the scientific paradigms of their times and intuit the tenets of today's science?

Off the top of my head I can think of not only Widge in The Shakespeare Stealer (etc.) but also Jane from Boston Jane and Ayla in The Clan of the Cave Bear (this last not children's fiction, but something I read as a child -- bizarrely, on an adult's recommendation). I'm pretty sure that if I were to think on it I'd come up with a few more.

It always goes something like this: everybody says disease is caused by foul air, but Spunky Protagonist feels, just feels in her or his heart, that it is transmitted by "tiny seeds" that get passed along by rats and insects. It's just a feeling!

I suppose we are meant to see that pre-twenty-first-century science is so obviously crazy that we couldn't possibly respect a character that believes in such mumbo-jumbo.

This smug presentist attitude presumes that anyone with an ounce of sense could see that, for instance, blood-letting isn't an effective medical practice. But medicine is a notoriously difficult science to control; in any given case there are about a zillion possible confounding factors.

That's why it's irritating when characters intuit the tenets of modern science, but even more irritating when they figure those tenets out from faux-experimental methods. Like the character just happens to notice that, every time a person has blood let, that person's illness gets worse.

Man, if science really worked that way, we'd be in Physics City, as my father would say. Total determinism! No confounding variables! Completely clear-cut data every time! No significant sample size necessary! ...Anyone with an ounce of sense can see it!

The truth is that science is much more complicated than that, which is why centuries of genuinely smart people in the West did not come up with the germ theory of disease. It's not that they lack even the smallest modicum of purchase on reality. It's that science is not straightforward and self-evident. That is why our society employs professional scientists to do research.

It's my impression that this irritating phenomenon in children's historical fiction derives from the fact that most contemporary readers hardly know anything about science, but cling to the few things they do know (by the authority of textbooks or, sketchily, science journalism, and not by experiment) as if it makes them the intellectual superior of the entire population of the world prior to the present era.

This is actually not a new sentiment, but an outgrowth of aggressive Western progress narratives that were particularly prevalent in the nineteenth century. As Thorstein Veblen put it in his 1906 essay "The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation,"

Other ages and other peoples excel in other things [than science] and are known by other virtues. [He gives several examples of achievements in art, metaphysics, and mythology.] ...but in the eyes of modern civilised men all these things seem futile in comparison with the achievements of science.

Science is perceived as the marker of modernity as well as the thing that makes modernity superior to whatever came before it.

Mark Twain even wrote a whole book about a guy (a Yankee, significantly) who goes back in time and (violently) kicks the crap out of a whole lot of medieval people, and a medieval myth in particular (King Arthur) by means of his modern understanding of science and technology. (He also just happens to have a lot of random stuff on him, such as batteries and lead pipes. Hey, no problem! I keep such things in my purse as well.)

The violence with which the protagonist uses science and technology to attack myth and the people invested in it is striking.

But as Veblen suggests, a feeling of temporal superiority is also frequently translated into cultural superiority. A contemporary review of Connecticut Yankee by Sylvester Baxter reveals how nineteenth century narratives about historically prior people slipped easily into narratives about "primitive" people -- "pre"-scientific people who were supposed to need colonization or, as the case might be, violence. The medieval population of the novel becomes a figure for the colonized peoples of the nineteenth century -- needing to be dragged in to modernity, by force if necessary.

By resorting to the principle that "distribution in time" is paralleled by "distribution in space," we may solve many a problem. So there is a certain aspect of sober truth in this most fanciful tale, and, just as the Connecticut Yankee went back into the days of King Arthur's court, so might he go out into the world today, into Central Asia or Africa, or even into certain spots in this United States of ours, find himself amidst social conditions very similar to those of 1300 years ago, and even work his astonishing 19th century miracles with like result.

Nineteenth century science is (ironically) miraculous, and therefore unproblematically equal to progress. Connecticut Yankee is indeed a book about progress -- an anxious one, in which progress depends on mass bloodshed. But Baxter blithely ignores the ideological component of this narrative, even adding some progress-talk about the book's production:

The advance in the art of popular bookmaking in the past two decades is illustrated by the contrast between Innocents Abroad and this volume. In illustration, the progress is particularly notable. Even a child of today would turn in contempt from the crude woodcuts of the former to the beautiful pen-and-ink drawings by Dan Beard that adorn the new work.

Even a child. In the contest of least-infantilized-subject, the modern Western child turns out to be the winner.

As the inheritor of the new science, the newest people -- Western children -- get to assume intellectual authority over both colonized subjects and medieval people (Innocents and its "crude woodcuts") in a way that mimics the intellectual authority that adults hold over them (in school, for instance, where they learn this science and are disabused of fantasies in the first place). It is no wonder that the child is expected to turn away in contempt: it is the contempt of self-recognition.

-----
Gary Blackwood, The Shakespeare Stealer (1998); Shakespeare's Scribe (2000); Shakespeare's Spy (2003).

*The character in question, in my opinion, is usually absent and therefore never a presence; or rather, she is present insofar as she presents as male. Otherwise she is a mystery, an absence, a... lack. H'm, wonder where I've seen that before.

One more google search string:

"the study guide to the book perilous gard."

Somebody is not only bad at reading, but also bad at googling.

Alas.

"Study guides"

Every once in a blue moon, some morbid curiosity impels me to check my Sitemeter in order to peer at the Google search strings.

My friends, I did so today, and now my eyes are bleeding.

I post a lot on children's and YA fiction, because it's an interest of mine, and because my thoughts on children's lit are not quite so tender and fragile as my thoughts on Stein. But what did I ever do to deserve search strings like this?

- "the perilous gard book notes"
- "two princesses of bamarre study guide"
- "Jennifer L. Holm study guide"
- "House of Dies Drear cliff notes"

That is right. Civilization is in ruin.

Because apparently people cannot even read CHILDREN'S FICTION without searching for Cliffs Notes anymore. (I'll admit that The House of Dies Drear is a little trippy and complex in some unexpected ways, but still: these books are written for ten-year-olds.)

If my searchers are reading these books for school, chances are they are not very old themselves. So their reading abilities may be only somewhat sub par. But then, it also means that grade schoolers now troll the web for ways to cheat on assignments. This makes me miserable.

So, although I have said it before, I will say it again for any extremely young fry who may have just typed "boston jane study guide" into their browsers:

When you are asked to read something, and you find that reading hard, it is not acceptable to go read something easier instead.

Doing so is analogous to consuming some futuristic food-pellet that reproduces all the nutrients of an apple instead of eating an apple. The futuristic food pellet might get you somewhere, but it doesn't reproduce the experience of eating an apple.

If you are having trouble understanding the reading, there are many strategies that will help you understand, and will make you a better reader too:

-Re-read.
-Read more slowly.
-Ask a real live person for help with understanding specific passages.
-Discuss the book with your friends.

Looking up digests on the web will not make you a better reader. Reading canned, simplified analyses written (in the case of Cliffs Notes and other such excrescences) by total hacks will not make you a more critical thinker.

Improve your own skills. Think for yourself.

Sheesh.

Boston Jane: An American Girl

I recently read two works of fiction marketed toward girls, Jennifer L. Holm’s Boston Jane: An Adventure and Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre. Both were published in 2001 by Harper Collins. It is my understanding that Boston Jane is a series, and that Levine is working on a sequel to The Two Princesses of Bamarre.

The one thing these two books have in common is embroidery. I am serious; both protagonists are very good at embroidery. But in other respects they’re like night and day.

If you were to guess from the covers which one was the retch-worthily patriarchal of the two, you might have gone with the one that involved princesses. There is a long and shameful history of YA novels that make girls the protagonists primarily insofar as they put on male drag, embroidery and other needlework being a typical and convenient emblem of idle and worthless femininity (Tamora Pierce, I am looking at you).


You might also have thought that, Gail Carson Levine being a Disney sellout, she would surely be the patriarchal hack of the two.

But no.

When I picked up Boston Jane: An Adventure, with the drawing of a spunky girl ^TM on the cover and the subtitle assuring us of said girl's spunkitude, I almost looked for an American Girls logo somewhere on the book, it was that evocative of the genre.

This should have tipped me off, but didn't, that I was in for a tiresome, awkwardly written tale that pays lip service to politically progressive values while keeping its real goal firmly in its sights, namely: to take a nineteenth century girl and make her stop kissing the patriarchy's rear end in nineteenth century ways in order to have her start kissing the patriarchy's rear in twenty-first century ways.

In the novel, Jane is raised by her father, a surgeon, since her mother has conveniently died in childbirth. Because there is no evil female taint in her life (except for Mrs. Parker, a servant who exists only to make cherry pies year round, since apparently Pennsylvania has an extraordinary cherry season), she grows up a healthy tomboy, spitting, slinging mud, and generally wishing she were Lyra from His Dark Materials. Jane remarks that during this period she thinks herself lucky, which is code for "masculine and therefore good."

Along comes Nellie Olsen Sally Biddle, who mocks Jane for her failure to perform femininity. This is the primal scene, so to speak, and at this point, Jane tells us, her luck runs out. Around the same time, Jane's father takes on a cute apprentice, William Baldt, who plays good cop to Sally's bad cop, gives Jane ribbons, and tells her to go to etiquette school.

Jane is quickly brainwashed by Miss Hepplewhite's Young Ladies’ Academy. Every possible trope is trotted out, including fancy embroidery and the corset, and of course the uselessness of everything that Jane learns at the academy. William approves of her progress and gives her hope that she will not be a social reject forever, while her father expresses scorn that Jane has stopped being interesting and has become useless and feminine.

Father, of course, believes that "you make your own luck," which is his way of saying that you are free to choose masculinity (all that is good and holy) even if you were born with a body that is socially constructed as feminine, and that Jane's oppression is therefore her own damn fault.

We are meant to see, of course, that the dear old patriarch is right and William is a jerk, but his total lack of empathy for Jane's position -- that if she continues to fail to perform femininity, she will be screwed as soon as her father is no longer there to shelter her -- merely reveals that Jane is caught between two misogynists: one who would manipulate her and shame her into performing femininity and rejecting her favorite pursuits, and one who despises all femininity and urgently wishes that Jane were a boy (with the attendant freedom to eschew femininity).

Eventually William heads west to make a fortune in timber, for which Father holds him in contempt. William writes letters to Jane and, when she is fifteen, proposes to her. This is repulsive, of course, but it will turn out later that he is a snake for other reasons, so apparently it is okay for this to go under the radar.

Jane talks her father into letting her go to Oregon to marry William, and he finally relents, although he warns Jane that William is an idiot. Of course, father is right about this.

After a two-month delay, Jane sails to Oregon with her Irish servant, Mary. Once Jane has learned a Very Special Lesson About Class from her, Mary kicks the bucket, enabling Jane to Grow.

When Jane gets to Shoalwater Bay, she is horrified to find that William is not there, that the place is thinly populated by crusty pioneer types and a quirky proto-anthropologist, and that she is surrounded by Savage Natives.

She does a fainty-haughty-lady routine, a caricature of the stereotypical silly Victorian lady, and much is made of her total uselessness. She pays a Chinook man to go find William, and meanwhile makes a life for herself. She eventually becomes spunky, and once a Chinook woman named Suis teaches her a Very Special Lesson About Race, Suis kicks the bucket, enabling Jane to Grow.

Jane is very conflicted about Not Being A Proper Lady Anymore, but in the end she rejects William, who is a racist and only wanted to marry Jane so he could get more land anyway, and Finds Herself. The end.

What raises my hackles so much about this book is the way it pats itself on the back for its supposedly conscientious treatment of race, class, and gender.

We are supposed to hate William and love Jane because William wants to put the Americans on reservations, while Jane wants to work and live with them in peace. But we know that actually, the Americans eventually were put on reservations, and that it doesn't matter how many spunky white girls are respectful of native Americans, since they can't vote anyway. And of course, once we have Learned A Lesson from Suis, she dies. We couldn't actually have a strong native woman survive. Why, she might compete with Jane's spunkiness!

Similarly, Mary is there to show that Jane's state as a lady is "useless" (ironically, since nineteenth century conduct manuals for middle class ladies emphasize usefulness -- usefulness to men, of course -- as the pinnacle of a woman's achievement; it is the aristocracy, which does not exist in Philadelphia, that is seen as useless). Once Mary is dead, Jane is free to raid her stash of recipes so she too can become useful. These "lessons" about race and class are here solely for the benefit of the privileged white woman.

And the novel's gender politics are the worst of all, because the novel makes the greatest claims for its gender politics. Mocked at the beginning of every chapter is a different one of Miss Hepplewhite's precepts for gracious middle-class femininity. But there is nothing particularly radical about mocking Victorian standards of middle-class femininity; very few people today think that fiercely adhering to the correct number of petticoats or always exclaiming about what is "proper" are reasonable priorities.

Jane reflects at the end of the novel that Miss Hepplewhite taught her to always perform passive femininity in order to be pleasing to men, but that it doesn't make sense for her to marry William or wear long dresses that restrict her movement. With her recuperated presexual tomboy masculinity, her luck has returned!

Well called? Oh, I think not: for it is not that Jane stops trying to please men at the end of the book, but that she starts to succeed at pleasing the right men (which, of course, includes her father).

Jane's father and the men she meets out west are therefore figures for modernity, but certainly not for women's liberation. Caricaturing Victorian femininity in order to have the protagonist reject it is cheap feminism, especially when it's just a means for Jane to become a spunky-but-nonthreatening woman, aspiring to masculinity (because, as the novel repeatedly assures us, femininity is useless and vapid) while never challenging the order that keeps men in power and defines femininity as worthless.

Sally Biddle, the great enforcer of feminine mores, is always seen as a villain, never a victim, and all sympathetic and competent women except for Jane are killed off. There is no option of real female independence; it's just a matter of figuring out which men to serve (mend their clothes, make them pie, trade your most treasured asset for a canoe so you can financially rescue them, etc.).

Same patriarchy, different dudes, and the fact that they aren't making Jane wear a corset doesn't mean they don't still hold her in disdain for being a woman.

I meant to write about The Two Princesses of Bamarre today, but I think that's enough book-reviewing for now.