The Lion and the Unicorn

The Lion and the Unicorn 25.1 (2001) 174-179

Psychoanalytic Responses to Children's Literature

This is a difficult and challenging book to write about--though not for immediately obvious reasons. These, I hope, will emerge over the course of the review, which I intend to conduct at two levels: a more conscious, accessible level and one that moves us into more troubling, contentious areas.

Rollin and West state that their intention is to "bring together a number of basic psychoanalytic ideas that make this form of interpretation particularly appropriate for examining children's literature" (xi), and this they do. But their wording bears analysis, for they do exactly this, and no more; that is, they have taken just those psychoanalytic concepts that particularly lend themselves to explicating children's literature. In fact, the carefully chosen wording of their title--Psychoanalytic Responses to Children's Literature--is also precisely accurate. In other words, psychoanalysis is treated like a toolbox into which the authors dip, applying the notion of the "pleasure principle" here, "narcissism" there, and so on. I would not want to decry this; there are some keen insights. But ultimately psychoanalysis is reduced to the status of any other interpretive tool.

What do we have then? Essays on Dahl, Harriet the Spy and Nancy Drew, The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte's Web, Pinocchio, The Prince and the Pauper, nursery rhymes, Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter, Mickey [End Page 174] Mouse, and a few other areas (for example, illustration and censorship). Lucy Rollin, whose excellent earlier work on nursery rhymes many might know (Cradle and All), has the lion's share of the book, with 90 pages. She continues her nursery rhyme work here, and her excellent essay "The Reproduction of Mothering in Charlotte's Web" is itself reproduced. Mark West contributes 55 pages, including his memorable essay "Regression and the fragmentation of the self in James and the Giant Peach" (it is worth noting that material from eight of the sixteen chapters has appeared elsewhere). Besides these, there are other gems, like Rollin's reading of Nancy Drew (and Harriet the Spy) using Freud's notion of "the uncanny"--which I found resonated with my own analysis of the English series writer, Enid Blyton, where children also find objects, repeatedly, but never what lies behind them.

Other essays, though, are less solidly grounded in psychoanalysis, such as West's "The Grotesque and the Taboo in Roald Dahl's Humorous Writings for Children," which is only tangentially related to Freud's theory of jokes. The passage that West quotes from Freud unfortunately points this up, stating that jokes are adult ways of replacing a child's more direct expression of hostility. However, in the Dahl books that West quotes, George's Marvelous Medicine and The Twits, there is never any attempt to disguise or sublimate physical hostility; indeed, it is wallowed in--a fact that might lend itself more productively to a Bakhtinian, "carnivalesque" reading.

Rollin and West's introduction usefully outlines the various ways that psychoanalysis can be used, focusing on literary characters, the author, the reader, or--reversing this process--"to explicate a particular psychoanalytical concept" through a literary work (12). West often takes a "character" approach (in three of his essays), producing some informative readings, but ultimately this tack is the most problematic. It shows, for example, in his essay on The Wind in the Willows: "Grahame provides little information about Toad's childhood, but the information he does provide suggests that Toad may not have experienced the mirroring process. . . . Toad's mother may not have been available to help build her son's sense of self" (50). Aside from the fact that none of the main characters' childhoods is discussed, there is the more significant point that, unlike real people, most adult literary figures never had childhoods: they are textual creations only. ("How many children had Lady Macbeth?" as L.C. Knights famously asked; this said, Robert...