A New Salvo in the Literary Battle of the Sexes

Abstract

In one of most famous volleys in war over fairies—the lit- erary battle over whether fairy tales and fantasy were proper fare for children—Charles Lamb called books of female didactic writers nonsense that was dangerous to imaginative development of children, and then he fired this denunciation: Damn them! I mean cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Hu- man in man and child (1:326). Lamb's explosive curse succeeded. In Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in Eighteenth Century (1984), for example, Geoffrey Summerfield dismisses female didacticists as morally shrill women (188), saying that, fortunately for deeper health of young readers and listeners, Wordsworthian of reality will always have the energy and will to em- piricists' view (305). Most critics have credited Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as shot that made victorious this Romantic vision of childhood. Percy Muir, in English Children's Books, 1600-1900(1954), thus approvingly notes that Alicedid not kill off all namby-pamby writers. . . . But mortality rate was high (149). For Muir and like-minded critics, Alice altered literary for better by establishing hegemony of a male tradition of fantasy. Later Victorian female authors, they believe, were little more than sen- timentalists reproducing an outmoded, ineffective, and imaginatively debilitating didactic tradition. Because criticism itself has become a literary battlefield where theo- rists launch mortars at every redoubt of conventional interpretation, it is startling that few critics have reassessed a of children's literature that debases efforts of women, who have traditionally been assigned role of educating young. Ventures into Childland, U. C. Knoepflmacher's refiguring of literary history (430), is there- fore a welcome challenge to dominant opinions about Golden Age