In troubling the idea of childhood, there is perhaps no better place to go than children’s literature. Children’s literature is where stories of childhood are produced, ostensibly, for children; it is also, inexorably, a topography of adult power. Even in the best of children’s literature, we cannot escape this predicament: that everywhere we look for children, we find a property relation.
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We are also confronted with what queer theorist Rebekah Sheldon describes as the temporal disjointedness of the child, as a figure that directs us “toward a future formally fore closed by its very constitution,” she writes, “because the future the child points to is the adult who stands where the child no longer is.”
In Inventing the Child, a study of childhood and fiction, literary scholar Joseph Zornado traces this disjointedness throughout children’s literature: where adults construct a story for themselves “not so much from what really happened to them as children as from what they wished would have happened.”
Poet, essayist, and children’s book author June Jordan once offered the question: “What do we have in mind when we give children a book?” She asks this while reflecting on her own commitment to writing for children, and on her curiosity about what that commitment entails as a practice of writing.
Much of children’s literature can be understood as written not for children but to children, baring a pedagogical function precisely as an expression of adult domination.
During the process of writing this book, I’ve come back to Jordan’s question many times, hoping to uncover in some way what it means to write not necessarily for children, but with children. Much of children’s literature can be understood as written not for children but to children, baring a pedagogical function precisely as an expression of adult domination.
Throughout the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, published in two volumes between 1812 and 1815, disciplinary fantasies run rampant. Among these stories, the most succinct articulation of this disciplinary imaginary can be found in the tale of “The Willful Child”:
Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do as her mother wished. For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed. When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth was spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again. Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.
The willful child’s silence strikes at the very notion of childhood’s beginning—where childhood meets the end of infancy, rooted in the French infans, “not talking.”
Following his pronouncement that “there is no such thing as an infant,” British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott argued that childhood starts when the “infant ego eventually becomes free of the mother’s ego-support,” at which point the infant can achieve “mental detachment from the mother [and] differentiation into a separate personal self.”
Yet in the story of the willful child, it is the child’s silence that acts as a symptom of her independence from her mother. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed notes, “We do not need to know any other details than that the child does not do what her mother wishes,” but at the same time, “we do not need to know what the mother wishes.”
For the child, she is willful because she is silent, while she is silent because she has been reduced to her willfulness—to an arm that reaches out from the grave, which must in turn be buried through force.
In her reading of the story, Ahmed extends Gayatri Spivak’s famous question “Can the subaltern speak?”—and more specifically, “Can the subaltern (as woman) speak?”—to the figure of the child.
Variations on the willful child appear throughout children’s literature, nearly always to instill adult authority. A prominent version of this trope can be found in the figure of the feral child—an iteration of the noble savage.
As Spivak argues, the subaltern woman “cannot be heard or read,” existing without history. Between patriarchy and imperialism, “the figure of the woman disappears,” she writes, “into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization.”
In the story of the willful child, the mother is likewise “obliged”—in her case, to strike the child’s arm with a rod—but her obligation is always at odds with her child’s willful condition. That is to say, for mother and child alike, the story is a warning.
Variations on the willful child appear throughout children’s literature, nearly always to instill adult authority. A prominent version of this trope can be found in the figure of the feral child—an iteration of the noble savage. In Mowgli, the wolf child of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, colonial rule is asserted not through the parent but through parental absence.
This unfolds as a conflict over the Law of the Jungle: while the Law “forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill”—as the narration explains, since “man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches”—the tiger Shere Khan wishes to kill Mowgli.
For the sake of the Jungle, Mowgli is ordered to leave by the Wolf Council, and he becomes willful, protesting to the panther Bagheera, “I was born in the Jungle. I have obeyed the Law of the Jungle.” Eventually, Mowgli agrees to leave, promising the wolves that he will someday return, bringing the hide of Shere Khan.
When he fulfills this promise, the pack begs Mowgli to stay: “Lead us, O Man-cub, for we be sick of this lawless ness.” Mowgli refuses, however, and instead, as the story ends, he “became a man and married. But that is a story for grown ups.”
The “story for grown-ups” of Mowgli’s adulthood, in this sense, is that of not only his willingness to become civilized but of his ultimate exertion of power over the Jungle. This white imperialist trope of the feral child was taken up two decades after The Jungle Book by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Tarzan stories, originally a serialized comic following the youth and adulthood of a British child raised by Mangani apes after his parents are killed somewhere vaguely on the West African Coast. Frantz Fanon and Edward Said both interrogated the Tarzan stories as colonial indoctrination. This entire genre of comics, Fanon argued, was “written by white men for white children. And this is the crux of the matter.”
This misidentification generates self-hatred in Black children, creating the psychological conditions to be dominated by white supremacy and adult supremacy as contiguous forces.
In Burroughs’s Anglophilic and racist fantasy, as Said noted, Tarzan is extremely acculturated—whereas in the movie versions of this character, played by Johnny Weissmuller in twelve films between 1932 and 1948, what we find instead is “a barely human creature, monosyllabic, primitive, simple.”
For Fanon and Said alike, Tarzan operates primarily as a figure of misidentification for young readers and viewers. All children will see themselves in “the good guys,” as Fanon insisted, with the “young black man [identifying] himself de facto with Tarzan versus the Blacks.” This misidentification generates self-hatred in Black children, creating the psychological conditions to be dominated by white supremacy and adult supremacy as contiguous forces.
These literary jungles, where feral, “willful” childhoods meet the seeming inevitability of colonial rule, share much in common with the island in the sky dreamed up by J. M. Barrie as Never land, where Peter Pan and his “Lost Boys” exist forever outside of adulthood. Like Mowgli and Tarzan, Peter and the Lost Boys are orphans, another prominent trope of nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature.
The orphan’s predicament is as much a matter of willfulness as of survival—inseparable, as in the works of Charles Dickens, from a dream of being somehow rescued by the idea of an adult world. But conversely, in the case of Barrie’s mythology, Peter’s survival is predicated on his access to adult power, key to his rivalry with Captain Hook, and an ideal of white purity. Rather than a story of being rescued (and therein disciplined) by adults and the call of adulthood, Peter’s eternal childhood functions instead as a fantasy of his own colonial and patriarchal domination over Neverland.
In Barrie’s novel Peter and Wendy, these fantasies of domination appear most clearly in Peter’s competing relationships with Wendy, Tinker Bell, and Tiger Lily, reaching a point of crisis in what’s described as the “Night of Nights.” On an otherwise ordinary day in the domestic imaginary that begins to take hold of Neverland, Wendy feeds the Lost Boys while Peter is out of the house. So overwhelmed by the boys’ complaints, Wendy cries to herself, “I sometimes think that spinsters are to be envied.”
When he eventually returns, Peter tells Wendy that she is “so queer . . . and Tiger Lily is just the same. There is something she wants to be to me, but she says it is not my mother.” Peter asks Wendy what it is, but she refuses—“it isn’t for a lady to tell”—“perhaps Tinker Bell will tell me,” he scoffs.
For each, non-childhood is a state not only of exclusion but of captivity.
Then, as the narrator indicates, Peter has a sudden idea: “Perhaps Tink wants to be my mother?” Throughout their exchange, it becomes clear that Peter understands his eternal childhood as dependent upon Wendy’s coerced motherhood. More and more, he appears as the villain. “I am only a little girl,” Wendy tells Peter. “That doesn’t matter,” he responds, “what we need is just a nice motherly person.”
In contrast to Peter and the Lost Boys, Wendy, Tinker Bell, and Tiger Lily exist somewhere outside the possibilities of childhood. Tinker Bell, trapped in fairydom, is envious of the way Wendy is seen by Peter, while Wendy longs to be seen as a “little girl.” Tiger Lily lives in her own refusal of becoming married off and “staves off the altar with a hatchet.” For each, non-childhood is a state not only of exclusion but of captivity.
It is noteworthy that the character of Peter Pan initially took shape outside of children’s literature, in a series of novels and plays written for adult readers. Before Barrie published Peter and Wendy in 1911, marking his first attempt to write about this mythology explicitly for children, he introduced the Peter Pan character in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird, followed by the play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904), then the novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), and the short play When Wendy Grew Up (1908).
Yet, as feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose contends, Peter and Wendy “has never, in any easy way, been a book for children at all,” and “the question this throws back to us is whether there can be any such thing.”
In its myth of the eternal child, Peter and Wendy exemplifies “the idea that childhood is something separate which can be scrutinized and assessed . . . the other side of the illusion which makes of childhood something which we have simply ceased to be”—and this is the fundamental problem of children’s literature. In other words, the wish for childhood to never end should be understood through this logic of childhood: as that which can only begin as ending.
We can trace these contradictions everywhere in the narration of Peter and Wendy, and the suspicion it evokes. The narrator—clearly an adult, as Rose insists—is endowed with “the hindsight of one who is no longer a child, who can qualify ‘children’ with the ‘all’ of a total wisdom” and who “thus places at the safe distance of the third person the group which he goes on to describe.”
The elsewhere of Neverland is the ideal of childhood we find ourselves simultaneously lost in and banished from, extending far beyond the narrative spaces of children’s literature: a site of longing for what is forever out of reach, both parts a dream and a nightmare.
For Rose, this peculiar voice subsumes the text as “a monument to the impossibility of its own claims.” The narrator explains: “They”—as in children—“soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother.”
The narrator continues, “I supposed she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’” The paragraph ends, “Hence forth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know that after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.”
The elsewhere of Neverland is the ideal of childhood we find ourselves simultaneously lost in and banished from, extending far beyond the narrative spaces of children’s literature: a site of longing for what is forever out of reach, both parts a dream and a nightmare.
Neverland summons what is desired of childhood through the dream of an island—that which, whether in joy or in fear, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, “dreams of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone,” while it is likewise “dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.” The dream of an island is based in an ideal for which “there is something that precedes the beginning itself, that takes it up to deepen it and delay it in the passage of time.”
This dreamscape of the island, like that of the jungle, illuminates in children’s literature a sense of utopia and longing about childhood as a not-quite-place, situated in an irretrievable past-yet-future, while at the same time rooted in an anti-utopian logic of adulthood. Inasmuch as articulating a shared desire for ongoing possibility, these spaces are defined in relation to a sense of foreboding impossibility.
With this, I want to return to June Jordan’s question: “What do we have in mind when we give children a book?”
As a writer of “allegedly children’s books,” Jordan ponders her own motivations: “I want to say to children, tell me what you think and what you see and what you dream so that I may hope to honor you.”
For Jordan, this is a practice of offering respect—a hope to convey to young readers, “I believe you can handle it, that there is a way and a means to creatively handle whatever may be the pain or the social predicament of your young life, and that I believe that you can and will discover or else invent that way, those means.”
In learning to do this together as readers, perhaps we might also learn to do this with what lies beyond the page.
Instead of offering the fiction of a solution—a moral of the story that can be imposed on children, in some better form of adult authority—this offering of respect directs us to ways of moving into a shared predicament, and toward solidarity.
Liberatory representations of childhood may be few and far between. And we would be better off doing away with the notion that narratives have that purpose. However, when we give children a book, we can share something more useful than a representation of their liberation—handed down to them, like everything else. Among parents and caretakers, it’s hard to avoid debates about what kinds of narratives children should and shouldn’t be “exposed to,” as some put it.
Yet these debates often ignore the question of how to discuss and interpret these narratives together; they are not interested in helping children become active readers and critical thinkers, but are instead mostly resigned to raising children as passive consumers. Sharing a practice of reading with children is also a practice of listening to children: What are you thinking about? What are your questions? It’s a practice of reading, together, against narratives of domination, of children and others. In learning to do this together as readers, perhaps we might also learn to do this with what lies beyond the page.
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Excerpted from Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley published by Haymarket Books.