The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature Read online

  Ideas about children’s books are inextricably bound up with cultural constructs of childhood. But what does ‘construct’ or ‘construction’ mean in this context? Derived from psychology, the term is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an object of perception or thought, formed by a combination of present with past sense-impressions’. Since the Oxford English Dictionary also equates ‘construct’ with ‘anything constructed, especially by the mind; hence specifically, a concept specially devised to be part of a theory’, we might say that a construct is more authoritative than a notion or a belief, because it is an idea based on observation and refined by analysis. A construct can never claim the authority of a model, paradigm or law. But it can exert considerable influence on people’s thoughts and actions much like the habitus, which French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defines as: ‘necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions’.1 Constructs might be thought of as those acquired notions, of which we are generally unaware, that influence our attempts to accommodate larger social and cultural priorities with individual requirements in a given situation.

  In this chapter, I will focus on describing ways constructs about childhood can influence the form children’s books take, and shape discourse about children’s literature. In the first section, I will resort to a fiction about a woman selecting holiday gifts to show how constructs figure in her approach to book selection. In the second section, I will argue that constructs are dynamic concepts that evolve over time but provide a basis for understanding changes in the conception of the children’s book. John Locke’s famous discussion of reading instruction in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) will be the point of departure.

  Bookbuying for children: constructs in action

  The time is Christmas, a season when, in the West, books are traditionally purchased for children as gifts, and the agent will be Mrs X., a well-educated, affluent white woman living somewhere in the northeastern United States. She plans to visit her local branch of a national chain of bookstores for some items to contribute to a local holiday book drive, but her experiences would be similar anywhere in the developed world. As Mrs X. puzzles over what to buy, she draws – consciously or semi-consciously – upon cultural constructions about childhood and books to make decisions that can be justified as in the child’s best interests.

  When Mrs X. enters the bookstore, she does not need to ask where the children’s section is located because she can take it for granted that it will be readily identifiable from the architecture and décor. It takes her almost no time to spot the semi-enclosed room painted in bright primary colours that announce the existence of a kid space. It never even occurs to Mrs X. that the children’s books might be integrated into appropriate adult sections, as that would fly in the face of the near-universal modern practice of assigning merchandise for children to their own spaces. But the practice of putting this particular category of books in a special department is indirectly predicated upon the notion that childhood is a separate stage of life, a cultural construction that may not always have been in place. This construction was the subject of Philippe Ariès’ famous study, Centuries of Childhood (1960), where Ariès observed that, in early modern Western Europe, it was eventually ‘recognized that the child was not ready for life, and that he had to be subjected to a special treatment, a sort of quarantine, before he was allowed to join the adults’.2

  Segregating the children’s books from the rest of the volumes in the store certainly reflects that ‘special treatment,’ for specialisation – in this case, the differentiation of facilities and products for young people from those for adults – is a form of quarantine. The children’s book department where Mrs X. is shopping supposedly provides the same safe and comfortable space that a public library offers young patrons, but with the important difference that all the books are for sale. But, in fact, the concessions made to children, the stated primary users of the space and notional beneficiaries of purchases made there, are relatively minor. It’s true all the merchandise is intended for young customers, who can avail themselves of tables and chairs whose proportions are too small for grown-up bodies. But little children can comfortably access only the lower shelves of the book cases. Moreover, the alphabetical filing of books by the author’s last name within each section is counterintuitive to all but relatively mature children. If they were consulted about how the books should be organised, they might suggest ways based on different criteria, such as the response a story arouses (fright, laughter or boredom, for example) or favourite characters (Captain Underpants, Olivia the Pig, Harry Potter). It is the adults who can easily navigate the shelves and are therefore invited to locate – and therefore screen and select – any book. Adults will bring the material chosen mostly under their supervision to the cash register, which is also sized for the big people who pay for the books, not for little people who will read them.

  Thus far it looks as if the quarantine construct posits an unattainable ideal. Is the most logical conclusion that the needs of children are being overlooked or ignored? Relying on binary oppositions between a construct and reality in discussions about the adult and child is always risky because, as other chapters in this volume demonstrate, they over-simplify an extremely complex relationship. Western constructs of childhood, infused with adult projections, expectations and anxieties about individual fulfilment and society’s future, usually point to foundational principles. While the quarantine construct arises from the conviction, based on observation, that enlightened segregation from adults serves children’s needs, it does not serve as a formula, blueprint or heuristic. Indeed, the flawed design in the children’s section actually underscores a tension inherent in the quarantine construct, for it calls attention to the fact that a child’s limited agency means that segregation is rarely total. If adults need to play an active role assisting children in the bookstore, including the all-important one of paying for purchases, they must be accommodated. This tension also bears out observations by sociologists that the tendency in modern Western culture to ‘island’ children, or to insulate them from experiences for their own benefit, further restricts their agency by making them more, not less, dependent upon adults.3

  Let’s return to Mrs X. She has started to survey the stock. She knows from experience that in a large children’s book department a high percentage of the books will be assigned to subject sections by the implied reader’s age. The subdivisions also roughly correspond to levels of reading ability: pre-readers (from babies to four- or five-year-olds); beginning readers (four or five to seven or eight years); independent readers (eight to ten or eleven years); and older readers on the cusp of the transition to adult texts (ten or eleven to fourteen or fifteen years). It’s easy to see that the arrangement of books within the children’s department reflects another application of the quarantine construct. Here children are islanded as readers, by being separated not just from adults, but also from children who belong to other age groups.

  Mrs X has never given much thought to the system, however, having found it perfectly straightforward and convenient over the years. She accepts it as natural, partly because it is consistent with a ubiquitous modern cultural construction of childhood: that children develop biologically and mentally as they pass through a series of age-related stages until maturity is attained. Mrs X may not have delved into cognitive psychology, but she has undoubtedly remembered something from her college classes, or, at the least, has been exposed to popular childrearing literature by physicians, such as Doctor Spock or Penelope Leach. The publications about children’s books she undoubtedly read when her own children were small are full of iterations of the development construct. While waiting in the paediatrician’s office, she might have leafed through a dog-eared copy of Writer’s Digest’s annual, You Can Write for Children, where she would have encountered the construct in articles laying out ‘what most children should know and understand, from kindergarte
n through eighth grade’ so that aspiring writers can be ‘in tune with what your audience knows at each level in life’.4 If she ever consulted a book selection guide like Eden Ross Lipson’s New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children or visited its on-line equivalent at Parents.com, she would have picked up various tips for matching the book to the child, based on criteria keyed to competencies at each age-defined developmental phase.

  Mrs X. pauses in front of the young adult fiction section, wondering if she is really up to the task of choosing books for this age group. She feels as if she’s about to enter a minefield. It’s so hard to predict what kids will and won’t like even when you know them, she agonises. Then there are the parents to consider. Everybody has different tolerances for the representation of controversial topics like violence, sexuality and race. She would not object to her child receiving a copy of Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) from a stranger, but she would wonder what that person was thinking if the selection were an extreme manga such as Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing (1997–2008). She would also be pretty offended if her child received a title in Cecila von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl series (2002–7), but neither would she be very comfortable with bestselling Christian young adult fiction like The Rise of the False Messiahs (2004) in Left Behind: The Kids series by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. She decides instead to focus on finding books for younger children, and wanders over to the baby book section to see what there is.

  As Mrs X. begins to look through the baby books (untearable and waterproof formats for pre-schoolers), it occurs to her that board books would make a perfect donation. A board book is an excellent way to introduce children to reading as it is designed to be sturdy enough for children to handle from the time they can sit up. A baby book’s dimensions (small, square and chunky) and materials (cloth, cardboard, wood, or plastic) are defences against users who cannot be expected to hold a book steady and turn its pages expertly. In the case of the board book, its thick laminated pages can be wiped clean of any marks left by dirty fingers. The rounded corners of pages minimise the chance of poking of tender gums at the time of life when browsing a book may mean a certain amount of exploratory chewing. Another thing Mrs X. appreciates about the board book is the way the contents are as carefully calibrated to the pre-reader’s mental capabilities as its physical form is strategically adapted to work with his rudimentary motor skills. Unlike many people, she does not dismiss baby books as non-books: they are designed to teach critical skills and schemata that prepare children for reading and therefore precede the introduction of more complex texts and literary works. An early concept book focuses on familiar things the child encounters around his home (apple, ball, shoe, telephone), or introduces concepts such as opposites or colours, letters of the alphabet, ordinal numbers or categories of things (animals, modes of transportation). Photographic illustrations are preferred for the objective and naturalistic representation of the subjects, but illustrators also favour pictographs in bold primary colours. The text is rarely more than a one- or two-word caption per page but it is sufficient to help the child establish the essential connections between the lexeme, the picture and the thing.5 Mrs X. sees this as a win–win situation: the child can have pride of ownership while absorbing important ideas and learning how to ‘operate’ a book, the design having significantly reduced the necessity to caution, ‘Gentle, gentle! We don’t tear our books.’ Indeed, it represents the triumph of the development and quarantine constructs.

  The selection in this store certainly could be better, Mrs X. thinks crossly, passing over titles like My First Barbie: Shapes at the Ballet (2000), the Motown Baby Love Board Book Number 1: My Girl (2001), Super Mario’s Adventure: My Very First Nintendo Game Boy (1997) and heaps of Thomas the Tank Engine and Peter Rabbit spin-offs. What she wants are board books that will help the child acquire age-appropriate concepts without sacrificing high standards of bookmaking. She keeps digging until she finds titles that prove it is possible to be highly creative within the confines of the baby book genre: Is It Red? Is It Yellow? Is It Blue? (1987) and Push Pull Empty Full (1972) by distinguished American photographer Tana Hoban; Duck is Dirty (1997), a quirky comic nineteen-word story by the Japanese-born illustrator Satoshi Kitamura; and Inside Freight Train (2001) by African-American artist Donald Crews. Mrs X. also snaps up two finds on the sale table: a very slightly damaged copy of the Ahlbergs’ novelty book The Jolly Postman (1986), and the Cheerios Play Book (2000), touted on the back cover as ‘tasty, interactive fun that toddlers will love!’

  All in all, Mrs X. is quite pleased with her purchases even though they include an activity book that is a blatant advertisement for an international brand. She has also managed to pick a pretty diverse group of author-illustrators, who succeed in presenting material in an engaging, imaginative fashion that appeals to the child’s senses, but is also arresting to the more sophisticated adult. The level of artistry suggests their creators believed that children deserve good writing, good art and good design from the very beginning – and that giving them inferior work could deter them from becoming acquainted with books that will make them lifelong readers. All of her selections should be more than acceptable to give as Christmas gifts. Even though the exchange of books will be anonymous, she hopes her thoughtful choices communicate her affection and regard for the children who will be the recipients of her benefaction.

  Mrs X.’s desire to find books for children who have yet to master the letters of the alphabet reflects some interesting discrepancies in the ways she thinks about child readers. On the one hand, she considers herself to have been buying ‘for’ the child without being aware that the tension about child agency in the quarantine construct is surfacing in another context. Although the child’s status entitles him or her to special treatment as a reader, he or she actually has very limited autonomy for years, until a certain level of competency has been achieved. Even though Mrs X. knows from experience that reading is one of those critical gaps in skill that cannot be bridged without adult assistance, she has left the adult mostly out of the equation during the selection process.

  Yet the youngest ‘readers’ depend upon adults to show them how to make sense of their baby books, so reading is not a solitary experience, in which words are silently construed on the page in the order they were printed. Rather it is a social encounter, in which the adult uses an illustration as a point of departure to explain a concept through conversations with the child. The mother may point to the picture, say its name and point to the word, and make up questions (What is this? Do we have one in our house? Is it in this room? No? Where is it? ) that allow the child to form eventually the connections between the thing, its visual representation, the word and the concept. With a child who cannot yet speak, the process is one-sided, with the adult asking and answering the questions. In practice, a baby book is used together by a child and an adult, and so is more correctly a cross-written text, or one for a multigenerational audience.

  From this perspective, Mrs X’s board books are likewise as much a present to the parent as the child because the books offer them the opportunity to bond through reading together. Indeed, it could be argued that the potential for this kind of experience may be the gift’s most valuable aspect because of the role it plays in defining relationships within a complex social network with literature at its centre. As an instrument of socialisation, the book establishes connections between the child and the giver, but also the giver, the parent and teacher (when they are different people). With the giver’s invitation to read comes the reciprocal obligation to take reading seriously. The gift book also tries to lay the foundation of an alliance between the older and younger generations, but also between the giver and the recipient as members of the community of literate (and ideally civilised) readers.

  In this context, the giver’s generosity is not measured chiefly by the amount of money spent, but by the aesthetic, moral and cultural values she believes worthy of passing to the next generation
. The book may represent the necessity of acquiring cultural capital: learning to read is a critical first step towards mastering skills that will enable the child to earn a living, or, better yet, produce wealth and propel social advancement. Alternatively, the book may promote reading as the disinterested pursuit of self-knowledge and self-control for the individual’s psychological, moral or spiritual well-being, and, indirectly, that of society. Whatever the giver’s motive, the book is the token of a cultural exchange in which the adult shows the child a road that can (or should) be taken. It is a pledge, not a free gift, and to treat it lightly reflects poorly on the recipient, such as Collodi’s Pinocchio, who thoughtlessly treated the primer Gepetto gave him as disposable property when he needed money for admission to a show (fig. 2). Equally ungrateful was Rebecca Sharp upon her departure from Miss Pinkerton’s academy in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8). As the coach drives out of the gates, Becky heaves Johnson’s Dictionary, a copy of which is presented to all Miss Pinkerton’s girls, out of the window. It is the audacious parting shot of a shrewd, ambitious and relatively unscrupulous young woman who will not play the hypocrite and pretend to accept the headmistress’s value system embodied in the dictionary’s definitions.

  Figure 2. Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio. Illustrated by Attilio Mussino. 8th edn, Florence: Marzocco, 1943, p. 62.