Rules

Abstract

Rules Claudia Nelson Children's literature is notoriously a literature that lays out rules for the reader's inspection: moral rules, social rules, rules for reading, rules for being a child. Adults tend to disapprove of works that seem to get moral rules wrong; as George MacDonald explains in "The Fantastic Imagination," his introduction to The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales (1890), "In the moral world" an author may "employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent." Yet children's books that urge blind obedience to social rules—that mistake the social and contingent for the moral and timeless, if you will—are likely to attract disapproval as well, on the grounds that they are tiresomely didactic, fail to understand child characters or child readers, and/or perpetuate outmoded and perhaps oppressive mores. Similarly, children's books that take creative and rule-bending approaches to reading often garner critical praise, but so do those that show insight about the rules governing childhood without seeking to change those rules. Meanwhile, child readers' responses to these rule-bound texts may be entirely different from adults'. Faced with these contradictory expectations, what is a poor author to do? As the articles in this issue of ChLAQ suggest, where rules are concerned, children's authors have found many ways of having their cake and eating it too. Strategies on display in this issue include attacking certain social or literary conventions while sedulously conforming to others; appearing to abide by rules while actually breaking them; and making distinctions between adult rules and child rules, while privileging the latter through narratorial address. In each case, navigating the full extent of a given text's approach to rules turns out to require a layered approach to reading, wherein what may be evident about rule-breaking or rule-keeping at first glance is not the same as what may be evident when one looks deeper. The primary texts explored in this issue span a relatively narrow period chronologically, from 1904 to 1967. Perhaps not coincidentally, these years witnessed tremendous social change, an upending of expectations and rules arguably as rapid and sweeping as that in any sixty-three-year span in history. [End Page 123] We begin in 1904 with Erica Kanesaka Kalnay's consideration of "Worlds of Realism and Romance: Ironic Play and the Child Reader in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Two Bad Mice." Using Potter's picture book as an example of "ironic play," or "the dissonance between realism and romance in children's literature," Kalnay suggests that texts such as Two Bad Mice encourage a rethinking of what we might assume to be the rules governing the book/reader relationship. Rather, by acknowledging their own contradictions and rule-breaking, works that engage in ironic play challenge the conception of the child reader often assumed to be dominant in Golden Age children's literature, as an uncomplicatedly passive consumer of meanings made by adults. Kalnay contends that in its focus on the title characters' invasion of a dollhouse, a home at once imaginary and materially real, Two Bad Mice offers insight into forms of immersive play that include but are not limited to reading fiction. In "Co-Narrating like a Child: Adding the 'Blots' and 'Interesting Bits' to Peter Pan," Carrie Sickmann Han examines multiple versions of J. M. Barrie's iconic tale in order to show how, in her view, Barrie works "to promote collaborative and creative reading practices for adults." As in Kalnay's discussion of Potter's picture book, this article rejects the vision of the passive child reader reified by canonical critical works such as Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction. Moreover, Sickmann Han continues, "Barrie collapses the divide between reading and storytelling" for adult readers as well as for children. If, geographically speaking, boundaries are the most common type of rule, Peter Pan launches assaults not only...