"What's so different About Children's Literature Now? or From Plumcake to Plumcake and From Trade to Trade"

“Trade and Plumcake Forever” – John Newbery

“Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed.” Terry Eagleton

I suppose we might think that literature for children

and young adults today distinguishes itself from the

literature young people read or had read to them years ago

in the following ways: it is more daring in theme and

language; its settings differ from what one might expect in

the past; its male and female characters display more

equality than in the past; its prose is less sinuous and

complex; its diction is less fulsome; its humour is more

raucous; its delight in parody and even satire is more

evident; it is more sophisticated; it mixes genres more

readily than in the past; it is less didactic and less

conservative than earlier literature. Maria Nikolajeva

argues that children’s literature has come of age, and in

doing so it has improved itself. I wonder. My teacher,

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Northrop Frye, used to say that science progressed whereas

literature did not progress in the sense that it got better

formally or that it gathered into itself more knowledge of

how the world worked or human beings thought and felt than

it had previously. Take just one area of knowledge, for

example: gender construction. My students are fond of saying

that contemporary books for children are far more savvy in

their presentation of girls than previous books were, and

that we can excuse early works of children’s literature for

being what we might today call “sexist” because of

historical necessity, as it were. We can, however, find

evidence in the literature dating back at least two hundred

years of “gender consciousness.” What may have improved

(somewhat) over the years is the social position of women,

but the awareness of inequality between the genders has been

with us for a very long time and literature has reflected

and commented on this inequality for a very long time. It

may reflect and comment on inequality differently now than

it did some time ago, but whether this means that the

literature is “better” or more mature than it once was seems

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at least debatable. We may no longer find the kind of

children’s books written by the likes of Mary Sherwood or

Sarah Fielding or Sarah Trimmer attractive, but this does

not mean that they did not please readers of their time or

that they are unworthy of our attention or that they are

immature.

Children’s literature, from its beginning until now, has

derived from the same impetus that has created adult

literature in the west; this is the impetus to instruct and

delight. If children’s literature sets out to instruct and

delight, then it follows that this literature is unavoidably

social in its implications. It instructs in order to improve

the reader in some manner, to make her or him a better

citizen, and it delights either in order to make the

instruction attractive or to provide a pleasure we might

call social in that this pleasure is shareable. But what

does this mean? Is our view of literature as simple as this:

the pleasurable instruction that literature accomplishes in

its work with readers makes for the kind of citizens we

want? What kind of citizens do we want? And will literature

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really help fashion these citizens? Or might it subvert the

very social order we think it attempts to maintain? Can we

have a subversive children’s literature, and if we can, what

might it look like?

We know that Plato feared the influence the poets could

have on social cohesion unless their work was closely

monitored, and that Aristotle believed the influence of

literature could be beneficial. And so the notion of

instructing and delighting took shape to allow for the

poets’ entry into the republic. Instructing and delighting,

Horace informed us, are what literature does. I think we

continue to hold this belief, understanding perhaps just how

delicate the balance between these two is. On the one hand,

we have instruction, the idea that literature has the

socially sanctioned purpose of hailing readers and ensuring

they are compliant and reasonable citizens. The instruction

implied in this view is both moral and practical. The reader

learns how to properly behave in situations both domestic

and public. A reader of Maria Edgeworth’s well-known story,

“The Purple Jar,” for example, learns the importance and

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necessity of making wise consumer choices, ones based on

utility rather than frivolity or even aesthetic appearance.

We might see that the lesson in this book has gone

unlearned, if M. T. Anderson’s Feed contains any truth about

contemporary consumer culture. Concerning morality, Thomas

Day’s tale of the “Ill-Natured Boy” teaches readers about

the unpleasant consequences of cruel and malicious

behaviour. I suspect if stories of this kind had any moral

efficacy, we would indeed inhabit a kinder and gentler world

than the one we do inhabit. And so the “instruction” aspect

of literature seems to me to be singularly ineffective.

On the other hand, we have delight, perhaps a code word

for a carnivalesque release from those very socially

sanctioned instructions that literature is supposed to pass

on. Delight is far more fashionable than instruction these

days, I think. Literature is to entertain us, provide a

diversion from the daily round of unpleasantness we are

bound to encounter as we go about our business or as we

contemplate the various injustices flashed on the nightly

news. We get enough instruction from the news, from the

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workplace, from the school, or from the general shuffling of

social expectations we encounter both inside and outside our

families. Literature is, or should be, fun, escape, playful,

and educative in a pleasurable sort of way. We can learn

about language or about friendship or about tolerance or

about any number of things only if we have fun doing it. The

difficulty I have with this view of literature is that its

emphasis on fun and escape perpetuates an immaturity we

might loosely associate with childhood. The literature-as-

fun argument seems to counter the literature-as-instruction

argument, at least if we take these arguments to their

limits. Or perhaps another way of looking at this argument

is for us to see it as the dark side of the carnivalesque.

The emphasis on fun disguises instruction as social control.

Literature can put a quiescence on us. We are allowed

release precisely so that we can be contained.

And so where does this leave us? Literature is either a

means of instructing readers in behaviour acceptable to what

Althusser has termed ideological state apparatuses (schools,

churches, governments, families, and so on), or it is a form

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of pleasure designed to keep us from confronting or

resisting those very state apparatuses that keep us

compliant and satisfied. In other words, whether we see

literature as instructive or delightful, the result is the

same: literature is a force for social stability rather than

social change. If we ask why this should be, we might only

look to the source of literature itself. More often than

not, we take it for granted that literature derives from a

specific source – usually an author. Postmodern thinking

about authorship, guided by Foucault and Barthes, may have

prompted some of us to question the specific source for

literature, but children’s literature maintains a focus on

the author, as the many school visits by authors or the

celebrity status of J. K. Rowling and other writers

indicate. Not only do we celebrate the author as creator,

but we often do so because we think that she or he offers

readers special insight of some kind, maybe even insight

that challenges those state apparatuses whose purpose is to

keep us satisfied and compliant.

The problem with this Romantic view of the author is

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that the author is part of a system, a publishing system. He

or she is not, or not necessarily, a fiercely independent

thinker intent on fermenting rebellion against the forces of

conformity. Most authors write to make a living; they are

part of the publishing system. This system is also known as

the marketplace. In other words, the author sells his or her

products and in order to do so the author needs to

collaborate with agents and publishers and retailers, and

all the people who work in this system have a vested

interest in not upsetting potential readers many of whom are

also buyers. Writing Little Red Books for the young is most

likely not going to find favour with those who drive the

market system. Having said this, I also note that the

chances of any book alientating some readers are well night

perfect, as J. K. Rowling can testify. What I am trying to

articulate here is perhaps best communicated by a

contemporary board book for very young readers: The Cheerios

Play Book. Here the connection between the author, the

publisher, the book, and the larger marketplace is clear.

But we knew this before. The connection between books and

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toys and video games and clothing and who-knows-what

consumer items is not furtive or hidden. It is, as they say,

in your face. And this connection of the book to the

marketplace has been with us since the beginning of market

publishing practices. The famous example is Little Goody Two-

Shoes, in which Margery’s father is “seized with a violent

Fever in a place where Dr. James's Powder was not to be

had.” The book, just like Dr. James’s Powder or just like

Cheerios cereal, is a product, one product among many, vying

for the consumer’s lucre.

And so the situation as I describe it looks bleak. We

want our books to foster independence, creativity, novelty,

difference, and freedom from a dull orthodoxy. We want books

to foster equality. We want books to foster unity rather

than uniformity. Uniformity makes everything the same,

bland, homogenous, unthinking. Unity accepts difference and

nonconformity. Books for children have always been sensitive

to a dialectic of unity and uniformity, perhaps most

obviously in books that deal with gender issues. Take, for

example, books such as L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables

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or Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Both books set

out to present the reader with an energetic and independent

young female who does not hesitate to challenge the way

things are. By the end of these two books, however, both

Anne and Mary have accepted their place in a society run

according to the rules of patriarchy. An earlier book that

takes a more radical perspective on unity and uniformity is

George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1872). In this

work, MacDonald presents a young boy who is wise beyond his

years. Young Diamond understands the necessity of gainful

employment, and yet he also represents a way of being that

stands in opposition to the run-of-the-mill worker. Diamond

is neither your typical child nor your typical adult. He is

genuinely different from others. Consequently, he is the

book’s hero and he is also the book’s casualty. A person of

young Diamond’s individuality is too good for this veil of

tears, and at the end of the book he passes over the bar to

the place at the back of the North Wind. Difference in

children’s books is as often as not valued and then

contained. A recent example might be Harry Potter, the boy

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with the scar and spectacles that identify him as different.

Of course, we are just about to learn what happens to Harry,

but we already know that, as different from the average

young male as Harry is supposed to be, he is as conventional

a young person as we could imagine with his interest in

sport, his Nimbus 2000, and his adolescent behaviour.

Children’s books both reflect and shape the world of the

reader. Books as apparently cool in the sense that they do

not accept a bland normalcy as those by Francesca Lia Block

or for younger kids, the apparently unconventional Captain

Underpants books, ultimately accept a vision of youth that

conforms to contemporary market notions. These young people

may reflect a new hedonism, but we can rest assured that

they do not in any serious way threaten the status quo

beyond the book. The narrator of the Captain Underpants

books does not tire of reminding us that Harold and George

are really good kids. And at the end of Block’s I Was a

Teenage Fairy, Selena Moon is a successful fashion

photographer ready, I imagine, for her appearance on

Entertainment Tonight.

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I am ranging from Goody Two-Shoes to Harry Potter to

suggest that plus c'est la meme chose, plus ça change, the more

things change, the more they stay the same. That is to say,

children’s literature has changed over time (how could it

not?), but at the same time it has remained the same, a

consumer product that aims to please prospective purchasers.

Our notions of childhood (should I say our constructions of

childhood?) have changed no doubt and consequently the books

published for children have changed. I cannot imagine a book

such as Julius Lester’s When Dad Killed Mom (2001) appearing

in 1860 or even 1960. And our contemporary delight in

scatology would shock some earlier generations. Yet such

changes in content do not necessarily indicate a radical

shift in purpose. Books for the young have been and continue

to be socially conservative, for the most part. They support

the marketplace’s belief in the individual educated to take

his or her place alongside other like-minded individuals in

pursuit of a happiness identified as the collecting of

material goods of one kind and another, including books.

Books that come in series appeal to the human willingness to

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collect. He or she who collects the most things, including

books, wins. Just what the prize is remains a mystery.

We do, of course, have children’s books with a social

conscience. The environment is a theme that many children’s

books develop with greater or lesser degree of

effectiveness. Tolerance is another popular concern of

children’s books. We can see this concern for tolerance in

the many books about disabilities. And since the beginning,

children’s books have tried to confront racism and bigotry.

In the eighteenth century, works by Thomas Day, Laetitia

Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and others brought race and

slavery to the attention of children. Later, in the

Victorian and Edwardian periods, Britain’s colonial activity

comes in for much discussion in work by Kingston,

Ballantyne, Henty, and Kipling. Children were not spared

talk of the white man’s burden. More recently,

multiculturalism is a theme many children’s books examine.

Postcolonialism too has made its way into the books children

read. We might expect that such socially conscious books

would challenge the status quo and make my earlier remarks

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invalid. Would that it were so. If studies of how children’s

books represent “otherness” such as Clare Bradford’s Reading

Race, and Beverly Slapin and Doris Seale’s Through Indian Eyes

(1998), and work by Donnarae McCann, Louise Saldanha, and

others are accurate, then we still have much distance to

travel before we can rest assured that we have, as a culture

and society, achieved unity in multeity.

And so where are we in the world of children’s

literature? Are we satisfied with books, as popular and

exciting as they may be for young readers, that accept a

shrinking of differences. Are we satisfied with safe books,

books that ask for little in the way of social critique?

Most of us would probably say, no, we are not satisfied. But

then we might point out that children’s literature has

always contained books that offer critique: Gulliver’s Travels,

the poetry of William Blake, Ruskin’s “King of the Golden

River,” Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books, work by George MacDonald

and Mark Twain, Wilde’s fairy tales, Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the

Turtle, work by Robert Cormier such as I Am the Cheese, M. T.

Anderson’s Feed, Alan Gibbons’s Caught in the Crossfire (2003),

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and I am sure you have your favourite example. These works

have their readers, but perhaps a small group. We need

something more expansive, and perhaps the postmodern moment

brought what we need: a criticism willing to look beyond

what a book states to what it does not state, but yet may

communicate. Critical practice, as it has developed over the

past half century, gives us the wherewithal to see that a

book as innocuous as A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh contains

material that deals with colonial activity, with

negotiations for power, and with the limits of freedom.

Postmodernism has also intensified our understanding of

words as “live things.” I take that locution, “live things,”

from Coleridge and I note that Wordsworth and later George

MacDonald and later still Ted Hughes said something similar

about language. What just might rescue literature and those

that create it from the strictures of state apparatuses is

language. Language is mostly uncontrollable, and this is why

literature cannot help but be playful and instructive in

ways that we might call political. Take for example one of

my favourite of Aesop’s fables, “Apples and Horse-Turds”:

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Upon a very great fall of rain, the current

carry’d away a huge heap of apples, together with

a dunghill that lay in the water-course. They

floated a good while together like brethren and

companions; and as they went thus dancing down the

stream, the horse-turds would be every foot crying

out still, Alack a day! How we apples swim! (106).

I choose the translation by Richard Lestrange (1692) because

I like it and because it displays a scatological sensibility

familiar to our own. Instruction and delight are clearly at

work here. The fable’s expected lesson – the horse-turds

pretend to be what they are not – finds expression in a

pleasurable dip into scatology. Lestrange’s version of Aesop

is instructive because it combines a number of elements

relating to humour that we can identify in children’s

literature trans historically. I have mentioned scatology,

and as we have seen, scatology continues to inform much

humour for children as pleaasurable instruction (see

McGillis). The verbal ingenuity of this fable is also a

feature we continue to see in children’s books, as the work

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of William Steig makes abundantly clear. Simple inflations

such as “water-course” for “stream,” the pun inherent in the

“dancing” turds crying out “every foot,” and the energetic

colloquialism of “Alack a day” contribute to the linguistic

bounce of this short fable. “Alack a day” sounds antique to

our ear, and perhaps even to a late seventeenth-century ear

as well. Spoken quickly, it may remind us of “I lack a day,”

and whether it does or not, the phrase carries in it an

emphasis on “lack.” In Act 4, Scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet, both

the Nurse and Lady Capulet utter a similar phrase, “alack

the day,” along with “O lamentable day.” The horse turds may

bounce down the stream, but they are well aware that they

lack something the apples have. “Alack a day” signals

reproach to the day – what an unfortunate day. In other

words, the phrase deconstructs the turds’ apparent

joviality. Once we recognize the lament in “alack a day,”

the word “crying” carries an ambivalence a hasty reading

might have overlooked.

The dancing turds also remind us of energy emanating

from kinetic bodies. Much fun for children derives from

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active rather than passive behaviour. Here the dancing turds

are a satire of false pretense and duplicitous bodies, that

is bodies enacting a performance, pretending to be something

other than what they are. They may float and cavort among

the apples, but like the emperor in his new clothes they

cannot hide their true nature. My invocation of the Emperor

serves to raise the possibility of a political content to

the Aesop fable, and James Gillray, in 1800, caricatures

Napoleon as First Consul in a sketch that clearly draws on

“Apples and Horse Turds.” Although parody is more prominent

in children’s literature (and we might see “Apples and

Horse-Turds” as a parody of the fable form itself), satire

also occurs. Take, for example, Dr. Seuss’s “Yertle the

Turtle” (1950), a story that is both a parody of the

Brothers Grimm story, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” and also

a satire of political ambition and unjust desire for power.

Dr. Seuss’s satiric parody is nice because “The Fisherman

and His Wife” is also a politically allusive; like Gillray’s

“Apples and Horse Turds” caricature, it satirizes Napoleon’s

lust for power.

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We might find such political content in more recent

children’s books, as

Julia L. Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the

Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006) illustrates. A

couple of recent examples are Anne Fine’s The Road of Bones

(2007) that allows pre-revolutionary Russia to represent the

excesses and miscues of the Blair years in Britain, and

Kathy Eder’s No, George, No! The Re-Parenting of George W. Bush. Anne

Fine has said that, "I wanted my readers to understand how

important politics are, to understand how these things

reflect on all their lives, and to actually see how small

decisions lead inexorably to other decisions and how quickly

a nation can be cowed under the name of security" (qtd in

Pauli). Children’s books not only champion the political

left. Katharine DeBrecht’s Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed

equates politicians such as Edward Kennedy and Hillary

Clinton with scary monsters lurking under a child’s bed.

These books are rather more obvious than “Apples and Horse

Turds” or “Yertle the Turtle.” I prefer a subtler call to

arms such as we find in Sara’s, Revolution (2003).

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What we need to consider in any investigation of the

kind of children’s books I am listing here is the

marketplace. From the beginning, and I’ll take the

conventional starting place for modern children’s book

publishing as 1744 and John Newbery’s Little Pretty Pocket Book,

the early book trade has had an obvious connection to the

marketplace. The major (or big) publishing houses such as

Blackie in the nineteenth century or Scholastic or Harpers

in the twentieth will publish books they hope will reach the

widest possible readership among the book-buying public.

They will also hope to appeal to institutional buyers as

well. And so we get Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (or

Sorcerer’s Stone, if we are in the United States) and the

plethora of books like it, including the other Harry Potter

books. If they go for wizards or pirates give them wizards

and pirates aplenty. As long as kids read, what does it

matter what they read, one argument goes. This argument

usually situates comfortably alongside another argument that

says kids ought not have books that are too difficult, too

disturbing – in other words, too thought provoking. The big

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publishers either like books that teach children safe and

acceptable lessons, or they like books that delight children

with goofy fun. Then we have the small independent

publishers such as Sister Vision in Toronto. Sister Vision,

and publishers like it, will publish overtly political work

– for example, Himani Bannerji’s Coloured Pictures (1991).

Small press publications do not receive the distribution

that publications from big publishers receive. In

consequence, they reach fewer readers. The books that reach

the majority of readers are, for the most part, safe. My

point is that the book trade is complicit with capitalist

ideology.

I have reached a point now where I can conclude that

authors write to make a living, publishers publish to

maximize profit, and books exist as attractively collectible

consumer items. Everything works to maximize profit –

financial and social profit. To be sure, I generalize

greatly. The sheer number of books published for children

means that some will be progressive and some will be

retrogressive. Some publishers or some editors who work for

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some publishers may have politically left or politically

right motivations and choose books accordingly. I might

hazard the suggestion that, generally speaking, we might

have two strands in the development of children’s

literature. What I propose is a literature with two

impulses, not quite what Zohar Shavit described as a

polysystem consisting of a sanctioned or canonical tradition

alongside a popular or non-sanctioned tradition, but

similar. In Shavit’s formulation, we have what we might

refer to as high and low culture, high culture including the

books that receive the imprimatur of continual publishing

and low culture consisting of ephemeral material such as

chapbooks, series fiction, and comics. What I am searching

for is a literature that looks first at marketability, and a

literature that looks first at independence. Marketable

books are those that find general acceptance and independent

books are those that dare to be different and sometimes

resist orthodoxy. I might term such independent books as

“oppositional.” Harlin Quist used to publish independent

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books, and where is he now? We might rest easy knowing that

the independent book will find its place sooner or later.

Before I offer an example of the two kinds of book, I

might note a middle kind of book. Montgomery’s Anne of Green

Gables is an example of a book that found readers on its

publication and kept readers though the years despite, until

recently, a rather tepid critical reputation. Anne is an

example of a book that struck a cord in the beginning most

likely because it told the story of a spunky female who

learns to accept her place in a male dominated world. From

the perspective of the twenty-first century, however, this

book may well communicate something different. Now we can

see just how challenging to the patriarchal status quo this

book was and is. Now we can see how this book could have and

did and continues to empower young female readers to imagine

a different kind of life for themselves than the one most

readily sanctioned by patriarchy. We might cite any number

of books that look different now from the way they looked

when they first appeared. The reason for this is, of course,

developments in social and cultural history. These

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developments include developments in the way we read, in

other words developments in our ways of reading. Criticism

may progress, whereas literature stays the same. Anne of Green

Gables hasn’t changed, although our way of reading it has.

Before I leave this middle kind of book, I might reflect

that Montgomery wrote for money, but not entirely for money.

She was not fully dependent on writing for her livelihood.

I am not completely satisfied with my thinking about

writing and the profit motive. However, I am going to pursue

the topic by looking at two early examples of children’s

literature that raise the issue of race: Anna Laetitia

Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children and William Blake’s Songs of

Innocence. Specifically, I take notice of how each writer

deals with race. Both Barbauld and Blake wrote to make a

living or at least writing was a moneymaking enterprise for

both of them. Barbauld took part in earning money for her

household; Blake made his living as a self-employed engraver

who also printed and sold his own books. They both moved

among communities of dissenters and those on what today we

would call the political left. When it came to the slave

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trade, for example, both were against it. But when it came

to expressing themselves on race, one was careful not to

offend (at least in writing for children) and the other

threw caution to the wind. One is nicely apolitical, and the

other is fiercely political.

In her Hymn VIII of Hymns in Prose for Children (1781),

Barbauld asserts that “All are God's family; he knoweth

every one of them, as a shepherd knoweth his flock.” She

continues and speaks directly to a Black woman:

Negro woman, who sittest pining in captivity, and

weepest over thy sick child; though no one seeth

thee, God seeth thee; though no one pitieth thee,

God pitieth thee: raise thy voice, forlorn and

abandoned one; call upon him from amidst thy

bonds, for assuredly he will hear thee.

For Barbauld, the “nations of the earth” form a family who

ought to call upon God. She concludes this “Hymn” with the

questions: “Is there any one whom God hath not made? Let him

not worship him: is there anyone who he hath not blessed?

Let him not praise him.” Although Barbauld may decry

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slavery, she does not say so in any outright fashion in this

work for children. Instead she calls on the black woman to

remain passive in the face of oppression; when she refers to

the woman as “pining” and “weeping,” she is close to

upbraiding her. Barbauld acknowledges the woman’s pain, her

destitute condition, and yet her only solace is to urge the

woman to call upon God, “for assuredly he will hear thee.”

Not only does Barbauld offer the woman scant support, but

the support she does offer does not take into account the

possibility of the woman’s own traditions and faith. This is

a paternal, dare I say, imperial position for Barbauld to

take. In this hymn for children, Barbauld’s focus is on the

mother of a sick child, not the child.

For his part, Blake considers a black child in his

poem, “The Little Black Boy,” from Songs of Innocence (1789).

Rather than speak either to or for the boy, Blake gives him

voice. We might argue a sleight of hand here: the boy

speaks, but he speaks only because the white author allows

him to do so and he only speaks the words the white author

places in his mouth. What saves the poem from an unpleasant

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paternalism is precisely the dialectic between innocence and

experience that runs through Blake’s Songs.

The boy’s account of his mother’s teaching is rife with

irony. Before he quotes his mother’s words, the boy ensures

us that “my soul is white,” even though his skin signals

that he is “bereaved of light.” In other words, white is

this boy’s standard of value and goodness. His white masters

or captors or owners or whoever those white people are that

the boy has come in contact with have successfully hailed or

interpolated the boy. He does not question the rightness of

whiteness. After his opening assurance of his inner

whiteness, the boy recounts his mother’s teaching. This

woman connects God with the sun, and her words echo

scripture, but with a twist. She does not speak of weeping

at night and receiving comfort in the morning (Psalm 30:5),

but rather of receiving joy at noonday when the sun is

highest and hottest. The boy is unlikely to notice his

mother’s willingness to change scripture or her hint of sun

whorship. We might also notice the boy’s monosyllabic and

strict rhymes compared to his mother’s willingness to use

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polysyllabic off rhymes. He has yet to learn her

independence of mind.

She tells her son that their “black bodies” are “but a

cloud, and like a shady grove,” and that when they have

learned to bear the heat, they will leave the cloud and

grove behind to rejoice “like lambs” around the “golden

tent” of God. From these words, the boy concludes that when

he is “free” from his “black cloud” he will “shade” the

white boy until he can bear the heat. The boy cannot

overcome his belief in the privilege of whiteness; despite

the boys being free of white and black clouds in his vision,

he cannot envisage a change in their relative positions and

he continues to think of the white boy’s hair as “silver.”

Apparently he does not think that lambs can be both white

and black. What this poem signals is the powerful hailing of

slavers and colonizers to capture not only the bodies but

also the minds of black people, especially innocent and

vulnerable black children. As Frye pointed out an age ago,

in Blake’s Songs, innocence and experience satirize each

other. Perhaps this tension between what we have come to

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term, after Blake, innocence and experience (but what we

might also know as child and adult or acceptance and

resistance) is what identifies potentially subversive

children’s literature. An artist like Blake, free from the

hegemony of the market, can produce work we constantly try

to catch up with, knowing we never will.

And so I tentatively conclude that a number of writers

and illustrators do not have to make their living by selling

children's books – or at least do not produce their

children’s books solely for money. I am thinking of Lear and

Carroll especially. We also have writers who accommodate the

trade and plumcake ethos, but who actually work against the

grain. I am thinking especially of women writers who from

the beginning worked to alter the hegemonic hold of

patriarchy. And I am also thinking of those books that

manage to wiggle free of their author’s conservative

intentions. I don’t have a theory here, but I am curious to

understand what makes a truly subversive book for children.

We like to think of books as important because they make for

critical thinking, but we also take it for granted that

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children’s books serve a socializing purpose that can only

serve social cohesion. Do we really want books for the young

that shake us free from certainties and assumed verities?

I’ll end with one of my favourite fairly recent books

for children, Chris Raschka’s Arlene Sardine (1998). This book

challenges our assumptions about just what a children’s book

should be. Is this book a sick joke? Is the book about

death? Is it an informational story about the manufacture of

sardines? Is it a coming of age story? Is it a success

story? Is it a parody? Is it a satire? Might this book be a

veiled allegory about the author seeking success in a

marketplace that pushes all things toward conformity and

seeks only saleable products? We know that Raschka faced

censure for this book. Here is a book and author willing to

subvert conventional thinking, willing to offer a radical

take on the simple and the nostalgic and the safe. I end

with this book because this book give me hope that the

slogan, “trade and plum cake forever,” with its emphasis on

pleasing the consumer in order to extract spondulicks might

transform into a slogan-less sharing of a healthy diet of

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words in order to strengthen minds and bodies and purge

readers of sameness. The marketplace’s urge to homogenize

could use a challenge, the kind we have in Arlene Sardine or in

a more recent book, Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross’s Tadpole’s

Promise. In these books we have surprises with rather more

bite than what we might find in The Stinky Cheeseman or The Red

Tree. As good as the latter two books are, they leave us, I

suspect, with readers instructed in the ways of the book and

entertained through reading, and yet compliant nonetheless.

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