Children's Reading and "Potential Power"

Abstract

Children’s Reading and “Potential Power” Richard Flynn The articles in this issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly address a number of seemingly disparate subjects that range from Ann Howey's discussion of Marjorie Richardson and L. M. Montgomery's revisionary uses of traditional Arthurian romance narratives, to Jennifer Miskec and Chris McGee's discussion of young adult novels that concern themselves with cutting or, to use their term, "self-injurious behavior." Despite this variety in subject matter, the articles all offer important challenges to conventional assumptions about child readers. All too often in my children's literature classes I am confronted with the "common-sense" tendency of my students to assume that there is some direct and uncomplicated correspondence between what is represented in a text and the behavior of the young people reading the texts. This often surfaces in comments that assume that the primary function of characters in children's fiction is to serve as "role models" for the actual children reading the work. Whenever I am tempted to throw up my hands in despair (and sometimes I am sorely tempted) I remind myself that reading is a powerful emotional and intellectual activity and—role models aside—both child and adult readers do test various real-life roles, do engage in critical and imaginative examination of themselves, when they lose themselves in books. Ann Howey discusses the ways in which Richardson's Susan Briggs and Montgomery's Anne Shirley both imitate and refashion the character of Elaine of Astolat (the Lily Maid) of Arthurian legend and read against the texts in order to reject Elaine's passivity. While the characters do model critical and imaginative reading strategies for the readers of Briggs and Montgomery's novels, those active strategies—and the insistence on the reader's part in remaking the narrative—represent the antithesis of the passive and largely uncritical relationship with texts that many adults assume is typical of child readers. Howey's elegant discussion invites us to consider what she terms the "potential power of child readers." Laura Mooneyham White discusses Lewis Carroll's satire of John Ruskin's "of Queens' Gardens" in Through the [End Page 83] Looking-Glass and argues that the "queenship" to which Alice aspires is not, as far as Carroll is concerned, a laudable goal for her. Rather, it is a perverse quest for a position of power in which political authority has been abdicated in favor of domestic concerns. Through Alice, Carroll mocks both Victoria's "domestic queenship" and Ruskin's urging Victorian women to become "queenly domestics." For Carroll "Alice's foray into royalty" is a quest for a position "without real authority" and, thus, an abdication of the power of young girlhood. While Carroll (and Ruskin) might find girlhood desirable and charming, the article raises in new and interesting ways the frustrations children face in asserting agency in a world in which girls are constrained and destined to enter a circumscribed domestic realm. In her study of Scholastic's historical journal series in Australia and the United States, Kim Wilson contends that these novels are both ahistorical and intent on "promoting and perpetuating national identity and nation building." Arguing that the novels reflect contemporary values rather than the values of the historical periods in which they are set, Wilson nevertheless acknowledges that the impulse to use history "to give meaning to our world" is enticing. While I find myself questioning Wilson's assertion that children are "concrete rather than analytic thinkers," it is clear that the novels' implicit claim to historical factuality complicates young readers' ability to read against these texts in a creative and critical fashion. Contrasting the role of the county fair in three Depression-era children's books with that in White's Charlotte's Web, Meghan Sweeney notes that in the 1930s books the role of the fair is "regulatory" but never "repressive." The fairs in these books allow "celebration—even exultation—of the ordinary": they are the site of a temporary respite from labor and offer child characters an opportunity to "display practical talents and forge stronger ties with ones community and family." By contrast, for Fern Arable, the fair...