Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children's Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Looking Glasses and Neverlands. Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature Hamida Bosmajian (bio) Karen Coats . Looking Glasses and Neverlands. Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2004. Karen Coats's study is a major contribution to the content and form of critical discourse about children's literature. In her interdisciplinary Lacanian reading and interpretation of primarily canonical narratives in children's literature, Coats demonstrates how a psychological paradigm, a narrative text, and a young reader are contextualized by the concepts and values of a given time, in this case modernism. She does so as an attentive and active interpreter of theory and narrative, revealing the relation between each in such a way that the reader is called to "understand Lacan" and surprised to "discover Lacan" in children's literature. Coats contends that modernist children's literature mirrors and shapes the process of the child's evolving subjectivity, which is always "a [End Page 292] movement between that which we control and that which controls us" (5). The visual or linguistic images in children's literature affect the child from the outside in, shaping the child's social identity and constituting the child's subconscious: "By offering substantive representations for words and things to the child, stories, especially those found in children's literature, provide signifiers—conventional words and images—that attach themselves to unconscious processes and have materials effects on the child's developing subjectivity" (2). Adults create and produce, select and share stories with the young child and thereby become ethically accountable as they mediate for the child whatever social identity and values are deemed appropriate. The first chapter, "How to Save Your Life. Lessons from a Runt Pig," interprets Charlotte's Web as a Lacanian allegory of the advent of subjectivity, allegorical in the sense that the story has at least two levels of meaning in Fern Arable's, Wilbur's, and the child reader's journey from the Real, through the Imaginary, to the Symbolic. The second, third, and fourth chapters consider the loss of the (m)Other, the unmediated Real and its recuperation through image and language, which leads the developing consciousness through alienation, to self-idealization, the Imaginary (Looking Glass World and Neverland) in preparation for the Symbolic, the world of the Name of the Father, of rules and laws. In the process, the developing subjectivity relentlessly follows an exclusionary logic that eliminates more and more possibilities. Even looking at the simplest pre-reader picture book, the child is prepared to eliminate options, e.g., "A is for apple and B is for ball." Chapters five, six, and seven focus on the outside pressures the Symbolic brings to bear on the developing subject and the prospects of resisting those pressures. Thus Coats discusses Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking not in terms of gender socializations, but in terms of how the female creative imagination that pops into a phallocentric Symbolic or the sheer "queerness" of Pippi resist the world of the Name of the Father. In her discussion of race, she defines whiteness as "the master signifier" that must be decentered so that authentic diversity is possible and the exclusionary logic is dissolved. In her last chapter, "Abjection and Adolescent Fiction. Ways Out," Coats views the second crisis of identity in the growing child: adolescence, where the subject has to remap the body's physical changes—which in and of themselves are real and unmediated—and transform emotions of abject revulsion into creative erotic acceptance and a positive ethics of the Real. In Charlotte's Web the allegorists are the voices of E. B. White and Charlotte, both of whom devise Imaginary and Symbolic means to help [End Page 293] the evolving subject(s) triumph over "the terror of being-toward-death" (16). "Enjoying her symptom," Fern observes the talking farm animals, allowing the Imaginary to mediate the subject for the Symbolic. It seemed to this reviewer that Coats personally cherishes and values Charlotte's Web more than any other of the modernist narratives she discusses, though at times her use of Lacanian jargon is a rather clumsy instrument probing the fragile yet tensile strength...