Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. By Ellen Pifer. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2000. x + 272 pp. $55 (paperbound $19.50). `Whether the image of childhood in recent fiction appears intact or in pieces, wholesome or horrifying, its many facets constitute a kind of mirror in which we seek reflections of our naked, or original, selves: what we once presumably were but now can only faintly reconstruct' (p. 3). Ellen Pifer promises to tell the story of different or changing `images' of childhood. At the same time, Demon or Doll narrates the detours and misadventures of a single `childhood'. Indeed, `images of ` already postulates `childhood' as something outside language that is subsequently captured by it. This thing, `childhood', may be perceived differently in different times and places, but the difference is on the side of perception, even if this is said to produce `real' results. As well as being essentialist, Pifer's narrative is also historical and developmental: in line with the great majority of criticism dealing with `the child', it postulates a broad move from a more to a less distorted knowledge of this essential reality of the child. So we move from a `Victorian' idyll of `innocence' that either has decayed, or is itself decay, towards a more `modern' recognition of instability and the dark side. Indeed, innocence is predicated throughout Pifer's text as a lure that it is the modern novelist's task to dismantle: peering beyond the veil, we must descry the `reality' however dark. For only in the recognition of that darkness may we move towards the light. Most chapters end on this note. The first heralds of this recognition, and so of a `cure', are known as `Freud' and `Henry James'. James proves superior in the end, because in What Maisie Knew he `celebrates the child's inner resourcefulness' and thereby `controverts Freud's more deterministic vision' (p. 42). In like fashion, Doris Lessing proves, at a later point, superior to Derrida, because less `optimistic'. Whatever one makes of such judgements, they claim access to a true knowledge of childhood against which to measure not just the veracity of the current `image', but also of a current `reality'. In Pifer's criticism, `character' and `reader' are taken as pyschological entities that are not only coherent and whole in themselves, but are also consonant with each other. The differences are a matter of history. So, apparently, it is `Victorian reticence' that keeps the governess in The Turn of the Screw from `naming the dread thing that she knows' (p. 53). To `contemporary readers', on the other hand, such things are `obvious' (p. 54). Similarly Maisie's `precocity' results from her `parents' disruptive domestic relationships' and the `inevitable inroads' they make into the `innocence' of the child (p. …