the point is that ideas entertained about these [family] relations may be dissimilar
at moments separated by lengthy periods of time. It is the history of the idea of the
family which concerns us here, not the description of manners or the nature of
law.... The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children: it
corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular
nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult.
Ariès 1973:8, 125Ariès makes clear that the ‘family’ and ‘childhood’ are ideas that function within
cultural and social frameworks as carriers of changeable social, moral, and ethical
values and motives.
British theorist Jacqueline Rose further elaborates views such as those of Ariès with
respect specifically to children’s literature by applying them to contemporary processes
within Western culture, rather than by tracing historical or cultural shifts. Rose argues
that
children’s fiction rests on the idea that there is a child who is simply there to be
addressed and that speaking to it might be simple. It is an idea whose innocent
generality covers up a multitude of sins... Peter Pan stands in our culture as a
monument to the impossibility of its own claims—that it represents the child,
speaks to and for children, addresses them as a group which is knowable and
exists for the book.
Rose 1984:1Rose points out that, to begin with, ‘children’ are divided by class, race, ethnic origins,
gender, and so on, but her argument is more radical than that: to Rose, the ‘child’ is a
construction invented for the needs of the children’s literature authors and critics, and
not an ‘observable’, ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, entity. Within Rose’s argument the adults’
needs are discussed within a Freudian terminology involving the unconscious, and Rose
is therefore emphatically not arguing that this process of constructing the ‘child’, or
books for it, can—or should—simply be stopped: it serves important functions which she
is attempting to understand better in her terms. Children’s literature and children’s
literature criticism have not, in fact, made much use of Rose’s argument, and, indeed, in
many ways they cannot, for the very existence of these fields depends utterly on a
posited existence of the ‘child’: all their work is ostensibly on this ‘child’s’ behalf. Yet,
with or without Rose’s argument, children’s literature and its criticism continue to
assume many different —and often contradictory—‘children’, and this can only be
accounted for by either accepting the notion of the ‘child’ as constructed (which, again,
it should be noted, should not be taken to mean that it is superfluous or irrelevant: this
use of ‘construction’ has to do with wider philosophical ideas about the way meaning
works), or by maintaining that some critics are more correct about the child than others
and adhering to their view.
The problems of children’s literature criticism and theory, then, occur within the
confines of the field of tension established by the contradictions and gaps between the
assumption that ‘children’ and ‘literature’ have self-evident, consistent or logically
DEFINING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CHILDHOOD 17