Deep calling unto deep: Pre-oedipal structures in children's texts

Abstract

Our family copies of Wind in the Willows and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are heavily thumbed. Wind in the Willows has been and is often still in all our hands; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though worn and disheveled from the children's enthusiastic grasp, has been little touched by parental fingers. The two texts, however, have at least one thing in common: both raise strong passions of delight, affection, distaste... There are several ways in which these passions may be explained. My present response to Wind in the Willows is doubtless shaped by nostalgia for lost childhood and for the comfortable Edwardianism of which I caught a fading glimpse in my grandparents' world; my response to Charlie is, equally predictably, that of the responsible parental and pedagogic gatekeeper of children's reading and morality. I am not, however, entirely satisfied with such explanations; although they may convince when we are thinking of the responses of civilized and sophisticated adults, they do not quite catch the intensity of those early passions that the books raised in me and in my children when we were at best only half-civilized young creatures. I want therefore to provide a fuller account of these deeply felt responses. The focus of attention will obviously be child readers, but the way in which these texts also touch readers later in life must, from time to time, lead the discussion beyond the childhood years. A complementary source of explanation to the sociological and sociopolitical is, of course, that of developmental theory and partic