International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

the selves we see ourselves as being are as fictional [made up of language] as the

stories of written fiction—limited images like those we see in mirrors when we first

became conscious of our separateness—so fiction can be read in terms of the way it

echoes our basic human activity of inventing ourselves and becoming conscious of

the limitation of our invention. All we usually call reality is in fact fiction, and

always less complete than the actual real world outside our consciousness.

Nodelman 1992:93–94

Perry Nodelman discusses how Cinderella becomes a fixed subject at the end of the
story rather than the multifaceted one she was. As she completes her stage of becoming,
she has actually lost wholeness in her state of being (94). An analysis of Charlotte’s Web
shows how Lacan’s imaginary and symbolic stage work through the ‘Miracle of the web’
in that Wilbur perceives himself and is perceived as transformed through the ability of
words to reorient desire by demonstrating ‘that things are desirable because they are
signified and, therefore, significant’ in and through language (Rushdy 1991:56). Another
Lacanian interpretation applies the concept of the subject being created by disjunction
and discontinuity to Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child where the mouse child,
submerged to the bottom of a pond, is jubilant when it sees itself reflected in the
labelless Bonzo dog food can: ‘He sees himself suddenly whole, apparently co-ordinated
and in control’ (Krips 1993:95). The directive ‘be happy’ is in The Mouse and His Child as
authoritative as Charlotte’s five single word texts in the web, in that it creates the
illusion of desire fulfilled, even as desire is deferred.

Psychoanalytic Theory and the Feminist Critique

The patrimony psychoanalytic criticism received from Freud has exerted a deep ‘anxiety
of influence’ on the feminist critic (Gilbert and Gubar 1979:45–92; Gallop 1982),
primarily because of Freud’s definition of female sexuality and his centring of the male
myth of Oedipus, both of which reduce the female to an addendum. Revisionary
readings of Freud, particularly those by French feminists influenced by Lacan, both
appropriate and retain his powerful influence. Feminist readings of Jung underwent less
radical revisions (Lauter and Rupprecht 1985). Even without specific reference to ego-
relations and object psychology, the feminist critic, by delineating the struggle of the
female in a patriarchially constructed world, finds in the concept of self-actualisation an
ally in her attempt at social transformation.
While not denying the existence of the subconscious, feminist psychoanalytic criticism,
including the feminist criticism of children’s literature, privileges the concept of social
construction in the development of the female. Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of
Mothering has been especially influential in its synthesis of psychoanalysis and the
sociology of gender where ‘the reproduction of mothering occurs through social
structurally induced psychological processes’ and is ‘neither a product of biology nor of
intentional role training’ (1978:7). Here the critic of children’s literature finds a female
focus, especially for the motherdaughter relation (Barzilai 1990; Murphy 1990; Natov
1990). The focus on the body—self relations allows the feminist critic to explore unique
female experiences that have been neglected in the study of literature. The focus on the

94 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES