Obvious Subversions

Abstract

Obvious Subversions Lois R. Kuznets (bio) Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature, by Alison Lurie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. I always enjoy reading Alison Lurie's prose, fiction or nonfiction. The pieces collected in this volume, most of which I had read in the seventies in Children's Literature, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, reveal her usual self-confident erudition, wit, and determination to treat the writers and writing of children's literature seriously while taking her role as critic and scholar with the proverbial grain of salt. These qualities are not always found in the rather ponderous American critics and scholars (among whom I include myself) of children's literature. The British are better practitioners of belle-lettres, and Lurie reveals her transatlantic affinities admirably. Ties with the British literary tradition can be seen not only in Lurie's style but also in her subject matter and theoretical approach. With few exceptions, the authors and works Lurie considers are British of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like many British critics who write about children's literature (Humphrey Carpenter, for instance), Lurie likes to link authors and works through telling biographical detail while generally shunning Freudian analysis of the texts. As Lurie notes in her foreword, in her childhood she discovered that there were: two sorts of books on [the library] shelves. . . . The first kind, the great majority, told me what grown-ups had decided I ought to know or believe about the world. . . . But there was another sort of children's literature. . . . These books . . . recommended—even celebrated—daydreaming, disobedience, answering back, running away from home, and concealing one's private thoughts and feelings from unsympathetic grown-ups. They overturned adult pretensions and made fun of adult [End Page 189] institutions, including school and family. In a word, they were subversive, just like many of the rhymes and jokes and games I learned on the school playground. [ix-x] And in her first chapter, Lurie attempts to tie together the wideranging subjects in the volume under the rubric of "subversive literature," dubbing as subversive all those works that seem to challenge the didactic mode of many children's books from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. As she loosely defines it, the subversive may be discovered in the scatological sexuality of skiprope rhymes as well as in texts that portray relatively powerless characters—like the children and the protagonists of fairy tales—who subtly challenge or evade prevailing adult authority. She also includes in her idea of subversion a somewhat stronger anti-establishment stance, rarer in children's literature: such politically challenging tendencies as T. H. White's pacifism in the face of World War II or E. Nesbit's late nineteenth-century Fabianism. Only the foreword—in which Lurie expresses her own childhood preference for such subversive literature—seems to have been written especially for this volume, which is made up of diverse works, including book reviews. The subsequent chapters seem not to have undergone much change from their original presentation, although she has occasionally combined two pieces. The short studies that follow Lurie's initial thematic linking chapter meander into many areas and consider the following: folktales as liberating for female and male protagonists; American novelists of the twentieth century ("Fitzgerald to Updike") who employ fairytale motifs; books about elves that have become "Fashionable Folklore for Adults"; the literary and personal effects of Kate Greenaway's relationship with John Ruskin; Lucy Clifford's "Tales of Terror"; the fairy tales of Ford Madox Ford; Beatrix Potter's struggle, expressed in her animal stories, to emerge from her suffocating family; the "Modern Magic" of E. Nesbit; J.M. Barrie's Peter Panism; Frances Hodgson Burnett's need for happy endings; A. A. Milne's retreat to "Pooh Corner"; J. R. R. Tolkien and T. H. White as producing "Heroes for Our Time"; the godlike bear in Richard Adams's Shardik; William Mayne's Games of Dark; and finally, the rhymes, games, jokes, riddles, and superstitions that belong to the "Folklore of Childhood." [End Page 190] Don't Tell the Grown-Ups also includes an extensive bibliography of...