Robert Pattison

I suppose being Fall-opian is better than being Freudian.

I'd seen this book cited in several other books I'd read, so I finally decided to get it and find out what all the fuss was about. A mistake, frankly.

Oh, there are several valid points in here: that "childhood" was not a special state in medieval English literature, and that it was not until relatively recently that there was such a thing as "children's literature." And, when the latter finally came into existence, it was mostly for Moral Edification and Religious Education. In other words, you didn't read it, you took it, like your daily dose of cod liver oil. The goal was to convince children of the orthodox Christian view that all humans are fallen, and children among them.

That view of children's literature is, I think, mostly true. But I'd find it a lot more convincing if Pattison didn't mess everything else up. Example: Fairy tales. Pattison claims (p. 147) that fairy tales are written from a child's point of view.

Um -- wrong. Ever looked at the Grimm's Kinder und Hausmärchen? Ignore the fact that many of the tales are things we today don't want children to know about. Just think about the fact that they were all collected from adults. The longer fantastic tales of the Middle Ages, the Romances, were written for adults. (Want proof? the best Romances -- Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Wife of Bath's Tale and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- were clearly not intended for those who hadn't reached puberty. Sir Gawain features an attempted, or at least simulated, seduction. The Chaucer tales are mixed in with the pure bawdiness of, e.g., The Miller's Tale.) If you want to talk about children's literature, don't bring in adult literature!

I plowed through all that to get to the Lewis Carroll stuff, because that's what I was interested in. And what do I find? Why, Alice in Wonderland is about a fall (p. 153). The Fall, get it? Just like the Freudians are obsessed with the fact that Alice went down a Hole.

If Pattison had actually studied how Alice in Wonderland had come to be, he would have known that Alice and the other Liddell children liked Dodgson/Carroll because he didn't inflict Moralities on them all the time, and he told the first version of Alice as a spontaneous story on a boat trip on the Thames. There was no Deep Theological Moral; Dodgson was just making things up.

At least, unlike Pattison, he admitted it.

So: There is some good data in here. But don't trust any of the hidden interpretations. After all, real children's literature is generally intended to mean what it says.

[Corrections and clarifications 1/19: Added "That view of children's literature is, I think, mostly true. 1/20: changed the oil forced upon children to "cod liver oil."]… (meer)