In the Summer 2006Claremont Review of Books, Dorothea Israel Wolfson reviews the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature, and finds in it a desire to turn children into adults. This is done specifically by using literature as a tool to turn children on to “the grim realities and multicultural obsessions of contemporary adults.”
Wolfson observes that almost every text and author, except for very recent ones, is “subjected to a wicked scolding from the editors for its racism, sexism, and elitism. Forget about ogres, witches, monsters, and evil stepmoms,” she writes. “Today’s villains are gender stereotypes, white males, the middle class, and the traditional family.” She cites the Norton editors’ applause for the way in which “judgments of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are no longer easily made” in children’s literature, “the distinction between heroes and villains is often blurred.”
Wolfson identifies the key factor in the shift from traditional and contemporary children’s literature in the assumptions about childhood itself, assumptions in which “the lines between childhood and adulthood have themselves become blurred.” This is the reason, she asserts, that the most celebrated contemporary stories for children deal explicitly with such “adult” matters as the mechanics of sexuality (she cites a 1984 children’s book on The Facts of Life that is a “pop-up” book). It’s also why so many contemporary children’s books are so predictably moralistic on social issues, always in a progressive direction.
Wolfson compares the kind of children’s literature admired by the Norton editors to the orthodox Christianity passed along in the Puritan readers of old. The new children’s literature mavens, she writes, “have more in common with the New England Primer than they dare to admit. They, too, are obsessed with death and the apocalypse, only they don’t believe in redemption.”
