Readers: Characterized, Implied, Actual (Critical Essay‪)‬

In its Fall 2010 issue, Children's Literature Association Quarterly has published a special section assessing the impact on the study of texts for young people of Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction twenty-five years after it first appeared. Reading the essays collected for the section prompted me to remember my first encounter with Rose's book and the bold claim on its opening pages that As reviewers of the book recognized, this statement not only advanced an argument about J. M. Barrie's perplexed text and the ways in which Peter Pan might illustrate something about fiction for young people in general, but it also announced a challenge to the assumptions and the terms of the criticism of those texts as it was generally undertaken at the time. That critical discourse, as the co-editors of the ChLAQ section, David Rudd and Anthony Pavlik, suggest, often stopped at "celebrating the aesthetic and literary qualities of texts" on the way to "finding books suitable for children of different ages and backgrounds" (223). I was then an M.A. (with a thesis on Jacobean drama in hand) who had found (under)employment as a contract instructor in children's literature on the strength of having taken some courses in the subject from Perry Nodelman. My return to the undergraduate classroom after my graduate degree had itself been an attempt to figure out why, despite my advanced studies in the aesthetic and literary qualities of texts, I did not know much about how to locate good books for my daughter amid the stacks of Disney tie-ins and bland picture books on offer everywhere. My ignorance, as I came to realize in Nodelman's classroom, was both a matter of the low status of the study of texts for young people within the academy--so that, as an Honours student, I had never been introduced systematically to this body of work and had to rely primarily on what I remembered of my own childhood reading--and a matter of the style of the texts, their apparent simplicity and coherence covering contradictory subtexts and hiding the operations of the conventions that permit the reading of any text. The gap between writer and the reader addressed by texts for young people was an established fact well before Rose published her book, as she recognized when she suggested that scholarship in the field "rests openly" on it (2). At least from the time of the publication of Harvey Darton's history of English children's books in 1932, scholars had known that "children's literature" could not exist "until adults came to believe that children were different from adults in ways that made them need a literature of their own" (Nodelman and Reimer 81). But it was Rose's theoretical vocabulary that made me recognize something new: it was not only that I had not been taught about children's books or had become such a practiced reader that I no longer paid attention to the assumptions on which those practices were predicated, but also that the culture itself wanted or even required the habituated unknowingness of adults like me in order to sustain itself. "It will not be an issue here of what the child wants," Rose asserted, "but of what the adult desires--desires in the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech" (2). The implications of this seemed to me worth unpacking. When I returned to study for my Ph.D., I turned to the study of texts for young people and to the search for models of reading adequate to that study.