feature Snow White, and upon her frail and white shoulders was built a canon-making
kingdom of children’s cinema that still has not received the attention it deserves as a
seminal force in story-telling that would also eventually beget, for example, George
Lucas’s Star Wars and Shelley Duvall’s television tales.
But before exiting the late twentieth century, we should note (however briefly) a
relatively recent phenomenon in the USA during the last two decades: the extensive
adult interest in children’s literature. While the number of children in the population
has dropped precipitously (for example, total births in 1987 were only 58 per cent of
what they were in 1958), children’s books have been selling in extraordinary numbers
(for example, sales quadrupled between 1982 and 1990) and marketing surveys indicate
that as many as a third of all sales are made to childless customers in their 20s or 30s
who don’t mean to pass these purchases along to a minor. In a similar vein, courses in
children’s literature are now among the most popular electives at American universities
and, since 1960, the number of universities offering courses in the field has
mushroomed. Likewise, adults are now revisiting the fairy tales in theatricals like
Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods or in National Book Award winning books like
Bruno Bettelheim’s study of the fairy tales The Uses of Enchantment. Add to this another
item of news: in the 1980s, picture books by Dr Seuss (The Butter Battle Book and You
Only Grow Old Once!) had a long run on adult bestseller lists. We can see something
when we note that Stephen Spielberg’s recent film Hook is about adults restoring their
youth by means of children’s books, about reliving Barrie’s Peter Pan.
It may be difficult to know just what, in the USA is fuelling this resurgence of interest
in childhood, especially among adults. One explanation may be found, however, in a
number of social critics who have noted (in the words of a title of a book by Neil
Postman) ‘the disappearance of childhood’. Noting how taboos are disappearing (how
television programmes were routinely addressing subjects from hermaphroditism to
spouse swapping once deemed too sensitive for tender years); noting how child actors
were no longer waif-like Shirley Temples but (from Gary Coleman to Brooke Shields)
transistorised adults; noting how the distinction between juvenile and adult court
systems seems arbitrary (once the label ‘gang member’ is no longer applied to Al Capone-
like adults but to metropolitan youths not yet old enough to vote)—noting all this and
other evidence, social critics have sent up their wail and insisted that the concept of
childhood (invented in the sixteenth century, according to historian Phillipe Ariès) is
being dismantled before our eyes. These same critics (besides Postman, Marie Winn in
Children Without Childhood, David Elkind in The Hurried Child) predict a return to an
earlier time when ‘children’ were not separated from ‘adults’, when those cultural
concepts and divisions did not even exist. They predict a return to conditions seen, for
example, in the paintings of Breughel where young and old alike are carousing together,
equally besotted and groping each other with abandon.
These pessimistic and conservative views may explain the late twentieth century’s
increasing fascination with ‘childhood’: if the cultural notion of childhood is
disappearing into some Spenglerian void, then we have grown nostalgic in its twilight.
American films of the 1980s and 1990s, however, suggest a more centrist explanation.
With Spielberg’s Hook (where a workaholic adult played by Robin Williams is redeemed
when he is stripped of his cellular phone and every other vestige of maturity and made a
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