From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel ed. Holly Blackford

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel ed. Holly Blackford Yvonne Hammond BLACKFORD, HOLLY. From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2018. 296 pp. $50.00 hardcover; $50.00 e-book. Definitions of the “child” differ based on varied and diverse circumstances and the myriad of disciplinary perspectives, especially the ever-evolving psychological mappings of human development. Although the definitions for “child” and “childhood” have widespread cultural and political implications, these definitions often draw from cultural narratives driven by fantasy notions produced by mainstream culture. In literature the child remains ill-defined, complicated by the effort to represent the child’s voice through adult perspectives. Holly Blackford’s From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel works to bridge gaps between psychological and literary definitions of the child by drawing together the various ways child consciousness has been represented and defined. Situated within the developments of psychology, anthropology, sexology, and sociology, Blackford’s argument asserts that the novel’s use of child protagonists tends to reflect psychology’s efforts to understand the human psyche. According to Blackford, child studies is both a detached object of scientific contemplation and a study of interiority apart from moral judgments. Her definition [End Page 315] broadens possibilities for an ambitious project examining American and British literature to consider the contributions of modern novels’ comprehension of the “wonders and limits” of child consciousness (4). Blackford’s primary claim isolates the unique nineteenth-century novel’s child consciousness in texts such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Peter Pan—novels featuring characters with a “growing sense of the child as an intellectual, developmental, and artistic being”—to expose how the child characters “express modernity by expressing ‘alienated perspective[s]’” (23). Rather than highlighting the moral qualities of the characters’ experiences, the novels in her study use child’s play, imagination, and moral reasoning to reveal the child’s experience and parody of the modern world, and to inform adult understandings of the world (23). While grounded in late-nineteenth-century works, Blackford extends her argument to consider the comprehensive impacts of her definition for child consciousness, specifically concerning theories about queerness, criminology, and disability. Blackford’s key methodology pairs the literary tradition of the child consciousness as an “experimental site for the unstable concepts of evolution, civilization, and development” with the use of the child protagonist as a means for exploring adult behavior and psyche (5). The child’s perspective explores the adult social environment in “alternative” geographies like Neverland, the Looking-Glass House, and the Unconscious, all of which project distortions, windows, and alternative surfaces to “pierce an aperture and offer a distorted lens on the social scene” (6). Blackford’s work draws attention to new Darwinist evolution theories—no longer a tabula rasa—emphasizing the child as a remnant of ancestral memory, which is exemplified by child protagonists’ capabilities, such as expressing jumbled collections of cultural knowledge in profound streams of consciousness. In the first four chapters of the book Blackford pairs texts to follow the shifting landscape of the child’s mind. In the first chapter, Blackford begins with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, novels influenced by the Victorian idea that the child is “pre-evolved” and alien to the adult world. The chapter explores how the protagonists, Huck and Maggie, articulate the evolution of human consciousness in climaxes dependent on expressing moral reasoning through exercising freedom of choice. In the next chapter, Blackford transitions to modernist novels, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass, to discuss newly pioneered methods for interpreting and displaying child consciousness—child stream of consciousness. Transforming the adult world, the novel, and novel theory, Alice’s opening monologue establishes a metaphor for the margins of consciousness between internal and external worlds, which pass and mix in the permeable child imagination. In Chapter Three, Blackford introduces the child as increasingly queer, an alien to civilization both practically (as outside the workforce) and psychologically. Analyzing J. M. Barrie’s...