Children's Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race

Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature

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Citation Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Children’s books, dolls, and the performance of race; or, the possibility of children’s literature. PMLA 126(1): 160-169.

Published Version doi:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.1.160

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Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; In about 1855, three decades before Frances Hodgson Bur- or, The Possibility of nett wrote her first best-selling children’s book, Little lord

Children’s Literature Fauntleroy, she was a child—Frances Eliza Hodgson—and she read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.1 She found Stowe’s novel, like all the stories she encountered, to be “unsatisfactory, filling her robin bernstein with vague, restless craving for greater completeness of form” (Bur- nett 44). The form the girl craved—that is, the material she believed she needed to complete the narrative—was a black doll.2 When Bur- nett obtained the doll, she named it Topsy and used it to “act” out the parts of the novel she found most “thrilling” (53). Casting a white doll she already owned as Little Eva, she played out ever-repeating scenes of Eva laying hands on Topsy, awakening the hardened slave girl to Christian love. Burnett also kept the Eva doll “actively em- ployed slowly fading away and dying,” and in these scenes she took on the role of Uncle Tom (57). At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva’s death, casting the white doll as Eva and herself as “all the weeping slaves at once” (58). And at least once she desig- nated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “[F]‌urious with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll (fig. 1). Throughout the whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, which suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” of being “brutally lashed” (56, 55). Burnett was no outlier; many nineteenth-century white children—especially but not exclusively girls—read books about slav- Robin bernstein, assistant professor of ery and then used dolls to act out scenes of racialized violence and women, gender, and sexuality and of his- forced labor. The memoirist Georgianna Hamlen recalled that an tory and literature at Harvard University, antebellum childhood friend, “who had been reading about South- is currently a Harrington Fellow in the De- ern plantations and the negro slaves,” procured six black china dolls, partment of Theatre and Dance at the Uni- versity of Texas, Austin. Her book Racial which she then configured as slaves to a white doll who “looked very Innocence: Performing American Childhood Southern and very proud” (227). Another girl, the future British from Slavery to Civil Rights is forthcoming American novelist Amelia Barr, read a schoolbook that contained “a in 2011 from New York University Press. picture of a very black slave loaded with chains, toiling in the sugar

and methodologies

Fig. 1 Illustration by Reginald B. Birch from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (55). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. 162 Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature [ PMLA

field, and a tall, white overseer with a whip marketed with nonbook consumer items, standing near.” Inspired by the picture, Barr have been commodified through products “very soon abstracted the steel chain that held ranging from dolls to stickers to pajamas. my mother’s bunch of keys, loaded my negro Books and toys jumble together in children’s doll with chains, [and] selected a white doll to rooms, in their beds, and in their play. act as overseer” (“Dolls”). Most scholars, however, treat children’s These racial and racist fantasies emerged literature and material culture as separate

and methodologies and through doll play and not other means of rep- discourses. Superb historians of play such

resentation, such as drawing, because for Bur- as Karin Calvert, Howard Chudacoff, Gary nett, Barr, and many other children, literature Cross, and Miriam Forman-Brunell com- and material culture appeared to invite en- ment on literature mainly as a source or rep- theories gagement with each other. As Burnett writes, resentation of ideology that concretizes in stories in the absence of dolls were “imperfect” material culture. Meanwhile, leading schol- and dolls “seemed only things stuffed with ars of children’s literature, including U. C. sawdust” until “literature assisted imagination Knoepflmacher, Seth Lerer, Perry Nodelman, and gave them character” (44). The commer- and Maria Tatar, focus their core analyses on cial interdependence between children’s lit- textual representation. Some scholars connect erature and material culture dates from 1744, children’s literature and toys by foreground- when the British publisher and book vendor ing their similarities: Anne Scott MacLeod, John Newbery sold A Little Pretty Pocket-Book for example, reads books and toys together as together with balls and pincushions, and ex- meaning-making texts, while Philip Nel and tends to the present-day American Girl series, Leonard Marcus historicize books and play- in which books and dolls accessorize each things as consumer products. Lois Kuznets other (Clark 1). When Newbery paired books and Sharon Marcus examine representations with toys, he not only sold an extraordinary of dolls or doll play in literature. Even books quantity of merchandise but also conceived that aim to study toys and children’s litera- of children as a market and children’s books ture simultaneously often draw the fields of as a distinct literary category (Noblett). This inquiry toward each other rather than in- accomplishment earned him the honorific the tegrate them: for example, in Beverly Lyon “father of children’s literature” (Kidd 171). Clark and Margaret Higonnet’s foundational Children’s literature as a genre, then, collection, Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender emerged in crucial part through the relation in Children’s Literature and Culture, most es- between books and toys, and that connection sayists consider either literature or material has expanded since the eighteenth century. culture but not both.3 This magnetism with the material culture of Either to split or to lump children’s litera- play distinguishes children’s literature from ture and material culture, however, is to erase other literatures. The actions of individual representational play as many children’s lived book publishers and children vary infinitely, connection between them. For Burnett, Un- but the pairing, through play, of children’s lit- cle Tom’s Cabin and a black doll were not two erature and toys has persisted for three centu- kinds of texts (literary and visual-material, ries. Even when manufacturers do not market respectively), nor were they two forms of ma- books and dolls in packaged combinations, terial culture. Nor did Stowe’s story provide a many children invent their own, as Burnett linear narrative that the girl simply imitated. did. And in recent years many works of chil- To the contrary, Burnett’s practices of play dren’s literature, such as Curious George and connected literature and material culture The Cat in the Hat, which were not initially without eliding differences between the two 126.1 ] Robin Bernstein 163 theories forms: the girl perceived an absence in a text, stead constructed her whiteness and girlhood sought out the black doll that, in her view, through alternating performances of debased filled Stowe’s void, and then used the doll blackness and iconic whiteness in men and

along with her white doll to perform scenes girls. When Burnett played weeping slaves and methodologies that she chose from among a panorama of sce- and vicious slaveowner against her dolls, or narios in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jacqueline Rose, when, as puppeteer, she ventriloquized Topsy in her 1984 field-defining book, The Case of and Eva through her dolls, she performed race Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s and gender as complexly as did the blackface Fiction, calls children’s literature “impossible” minstrels who trod the boards at that time. because it is the only genre that is written by When scholars tear children’s literature one group for another group; thus, the genre from material culture, despite the interweav- imagines the category of “child” through the ing of fiction and playthings that has grown simultaneous describing and hailing of a cat- ever denser since 1744, they create the ap- egory that it is in fact creating. Rose argues pearance of an “impossible” top-down sys- that children’s literature creates a dynamic tem in which adults produce culture and in which the empowered “adult comes first children receive it. This paradigm erases the (author, maker, giver)” and the disempow- ways in which children’s play performances ered or even colonized “child comes after revise rather than only reify narratives. The (reader, product, receiver), but . . . neither of stakes of this erasure become visible through them enter the space in between” (1–2). In the a case study of the racial functions of black past few years, scholars like Marah Gubar, dolls and white children’s performative doll Kimberley Reynolds, and David Rudd have play during the second half of the nineteenth led a reassessment of the “impossibility” of century.4 Through these performances, children’s literature. Missing from this reas- nineteenth-century white children played at sessment, however, is a consideration of how violence against African Americans precisely the linked acts of reading and playing disrupt as abolition, emancipation, and then freedom Rose’s paradigm. This absence obscures the were eroding American white supremacy. role of children’s agency in the formation of race. Burnett—and children like her—did not Animate dolls, in literature and play, raise passively receive works of literature. Rather, slavery’s most foundational, disturbing, and she used dolls to reconfigure the stories she lingering question: what is a person? As Bill read. She entered Rose’s “space in between” Brown has observed, this question has, from through play, through performance. the antebellum period to the present, under- Representational play is performative lain anxieties so powerfully as to constitute in that it produces culture. As the Dutch the “American uncanny.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin historian Johan Huizinga argued in 1938, encapsulated and shaped these anxieties be- “[C]‌ulture arises in the form of play”; culture, cause, as Philip Fisher argues, the Emancipa- including racial formation, “is played from tion Proclamation combined with the Union’s the very beginning” (1, 46). Performance military victory and “the cultural work of theorists have expanded on Huizinga’s argu- Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “redesign” the “bound- ments to understand play as a major mode of ary” between human and thing. (Stowe ac- performance in everyday life and a crucial knowledged this project when she originally component in the construction of race, gen- subtitled her novel “The Man That Was a der, and other categories of analysis (Goffman; Thing” [Fisher 4, 100].) In other words, slavery Bial). Burnett’s play did not represent some legally defined some humans as things, and preexisting racial or gendered essence but in- emancipation legally redefined all humans 164 Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature [ PMLA

as humans. Antebellum abolitionist culture, eyes become “overcast with tears” (245); thus, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, laid conceptual Topsy’s conversion alters the precise organ groundwork that made this change compre that previously constituted the character’s hensible and therefore possible. After eman doll-likeness. Stowe configures Topsy’s con cipation, however, “Lost Causers” and other version as one from superficial doll-likeness white supremacists marshaled popular culture caused by slavery’s pathology to the realiza to undo this work and redesign, yet again, the tion of Topsy’s Christian and human poten

and methodologies and boundary between human and thing. This tial; she thereby delivers one of her sharpest

effort appeared especially clearly in the post arguments against slavery (84–86). emancipation attempt by the Daughters of the When Burnett read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Confederacy and other groups to freeze the however, she was not filled with the impulse theories imagined “faithful slave” in stone monuments to engage in abolitionist activism or even to (Savage; McElya; Blight). “feel right” but instead wanted to reconsti The cultural effort to objectify and later tute Topsy in doll form—that is, to reverse the reobjectify African Americans found rich trajectory that Stowe wrote for Topsy. Thus, potential in doll play and doll literature, be Burnett resisted Stowe’s narrative even as she cause all stories about sentient dolls reorga enacted it. Burnett behaved not only from an nize the boundary between human and thing. individual, psychological urge but also, cru As Lois Kuznets observes, sentient dolls in cially, in response to two cultural prompts: literature “embody human anxieties about Stowe’s narrative and the doll’s color and what it means to be ‘real’—an independent tough physical composition. subject or self rather than an object or other” Nineteenth-century doll manufacturers (2). Around the time of the American Civil invited enactments of racial violence when War, books about sentient dolls increased they made black dolls of materials, especially in popularity (Formanek-Brunell 23), and rubber and cloth, that could withstand rough dolls in these books discuss their racial sta usage that would destroy dolls of ceramic or tus, their duties to their owners, and even wax. Patent applications and advertisements their relation with enslaved people of African often described soft black dolls as prompts descent. The doll narrator of Julia Charlotte toward violent play. In 1893–94, for example, Maitland’s The Doll and Her Friends (pub the Arnold Print Works of Massachusetts ad lished in 1852, the same year as Uncle Tom’s vertised a black doll alternately called “Topsy” Cabin) describes dolls as “a race of mere de and “Pickaninny”: “What child in America pendents; some might even call us slaves” (1). does not at some time want a cloth ‘Nigger’ The narrator, however, pointedly informs the dollie—one that can be petted or thrown reader that she is “not a negro doll, with wide about without harm to the doll or anything mouth and woolly hair” (4). In this children’s that it comes in contact with[?] ‘Pickaninny’ book and in many others, “dollness” is itself a fills all the requirements” (550). The adver racial category that denotes servitude. Stowe tisement claimed that the doll, identified by injects anxieties about dolls and slaves, things a racial epithet, could and should be “thrown and people, into Uncle Tom’s Cabin by liken about” because it was black and made of cloth ing Topsy to a doll with eyes as “glittering as and that this abusability constituted desir glass beads” (206). She is careful, however, ability. For the Massachusetts manufacturer to identify Topsy repeatedly as an “abused that named its doll “Topsy” and for Burnett, child” (209), even the abused child, as Rich soft black dolls combined with the narrative ard Brodhead argues (85). When Eva converts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to script performances Topsy, the enslaved girl’s formerly beadlike of violent play. 126.1 ] Robin Bernstein 165 theories The term script does not refer to compul- I supposed to do with it? Pretend I was its sory behavior but instead describes a set of in- mother?” However, Claudia read “[p]‌icture vitations or prompts that by definition remain books” that were “full of little girls sleeping

open to resistance and revision. Like theatri- with their dolls”—that is, white girls and white and methodologies cal practitioners, I understand a script as a dolls. From these books she “learned quickly” dynamic substance that deeply influences but that she was “expected” to “rock [the doll], does not entirely determine live performances, fabricate storied situations around it, even which constantly change according to agents’ sleep with it” (20). The narratives in Claudia’s visions, impulses, and accidents. Items of ma- picture books combined with the materiality terial culture “script” in much the same sense of the doll—its blond hair and white skin—to that literary texts “mean”: neither a thing nor tell Claudia what she was “supposed to do”; a poem (for example) is conscious or agential, that is, children’s literature together with the but a thing can invite behaviors that its maker doll prompted tender bodily actions, and both did and did not envision and a poem may these actions interpellated Claudia into a rac- produce meanings that both include and ex- ist ideology that the novel attacks. ceed a poet’s intentions. To describe elements Like the fictional Claudia, historical of material culture as “scripting” actions is children of the nineteenth century absorbed to suggest not that a thing possesses agency prompts toward tender play with white dolls, or that people lack agency but, instead, that but they also received the violent scripts co- agency and intention emerge through every- produced by black dolls like the Arnold Print day engagement with the stuff of our lives. Works’ Topsy and by the widespread, repeti- In my forthcoming book, I develop a method tious works of children’s literature in which for reading the scripts coproduced through black dolls underwent whipping, flogging, literature and material culture; I use archival beating, drowning, shooting, burning, decap- evidence to determine the documented, prob- itation, or destruction from overwork (Jimmy; able, and possible uses of a category of object Trew; Aunt Fanny; E. L. E.; Optic). Certainly, such as a doll. (See also Bernstein, “Dances.”) girls in literature and in life abused white dolls This horizon of known and possible uses then (Marcus 159–63; Formanek-Brunell 24–32), informs a close reading of an individual arti- but novels singled out black dolls for especial fact. The operative questions are, What histor- viciousness and racially specific forms of vio- ically located behaviors did this artifact invite, lence, such as hanging. D. P. Sanford’s Frisk and what actions did it discourage? The goal and His Flock provides one example. In this is not to determine what any individual did 1875 novel, a white girl named Eva (a name with an artifact but rather to understand how that invokes Stowe’s novel) hangs a black doll a nonagential artifact, in its historical context, “for a punish”—a spectacle that causes other prompted or invited—scripted—actions of white children to laugh (110 [fig. 2]). people who were agential and often resistant. Many white children performed the vio- The act of scripting, that issuing of a cultur- lence that black dolls and children’s literature ally specific invitation, was itself a historical coscripted: they whipped, beat, and hung event—one that can be recovered and ana- black dolls with regularity and ritualistic lyzed as a fresh source of evidence. ferocity. In the magazine Babyhood in 1887, Toni Morrison fictively describes the pro- for example, a mother told how her daugh- cess of scripting and its racial ramifications ter’s black rag doll had endured a “gash in in The Bluest Eye, set in 1941: her narrator, a her throat” (English 264). A decade later, the black girl named Claudia, recalls being given psychologists G. Stanley Hall and A. Caswell a white baby doll and wondering, “What was Ellis observed white children in Worcester, 166 Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature [ PMLA

Massachusetts, burning black dolls and us- letters focused on black dolls, and most of ing them to stage slave auctions (30, 34). And them reported violence. A girl named Alice in 1898, when a Minneapolis newspaper in- Leland stated that she had “burned to death” vited children to write letters describing their a black doll, while Wm. Scholtz reported that play with toys, seven of the forty published he enjoyed pinching his “little black rubber and methodologies and

theories

Fig. 2 “How the children laughed! Eva had hung her old black doll, Dinah, against a beam, ‘for a punish’ as she said.” From D. P. Sanford’s Frisk and His Flock (110). Elizabeth Nesbitt Room, Information Sciences Library, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh. 126.1 ] Robin Bernstein 167 theories doll named Tom” and that he allowed a cat Fauntleroy, a girl approached her to say she to “bite Tom’s toes and pull his hair.” He de- had read about Burnett’s whipping of her clared that his Tom doll, like Burnett’s rubber black doll and had been inspired to play in

doll of the same name, “never complained.” similar ways with her own black doll (“Little and methodologies Harry Cass enjoyed violence with his black Lord Fauntleroy” 17). doll: “Sometimes I would play I was hanging Since the eighteenth century, children’s him” (“Toys” 1, 6–7). play has increasingly connected children’s lit- Harry Cass performed a lynching but erature with material culture; today children’s probably never witnessed one: no African play, literature, and material culture are con- Americans were hung—legally or by a mob—in joined. Many observers decry these connec- Minnesota during the seventh-grader’s lifetime tions as the commercialization and dilution (Bessler 104–05). And the Worcester children of literature. But it is precisely these connec- whom Hall and Ellis observed playing at “slave tions that deliver children’s literature beyond selling” in 1897 could not have witnessed slave the paradigm of “impossibility.” In the tri- auctions. These children—like Burnett, Geor- angulation of play, literature, and material gianna Hamlen’s friend, and Amelia Barr— culture, the three categories of cultural actors performed in response to narratives they read, are children, authors, and those who manu- saw, or heard and to the materiality of dolls. facture and sell playthings. In other words, Perhaps the slave-selling children of Worces- children are coproducers in the play-book-toy ter had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Cass, who also formation from which children’s literature is named his doll Tom, may have read Stowe’s now inextricable. Some scholars criticize the novel, and perhaps he read Frisk and His Flock commodification of children’s literary char- or one of the many other stories in which white acters in everything from dolls to pajamas to children hung black dolls. And he very likely keychains to sneakers, but as children play observed the play of other children, including with, dream in, and unlock doors with the that of his Minneapolis neighbors who cheer- material interdependents of children’s liter- fully reported burning and otherwise destroy- ature—as they literally walk in characters’ ing black dolls. shoes—they alter the landscape of children’s literature, as Eliza Hodgson Burnett and Literature and material culture, I have Harry Cass did when they recast Topsy and argued, coscripted nineteenth-century prac- Uncle Tom as things. Pace Rose, children not tices of play, and white children like Burnett only receive literature, they receive the co- enacted—and thus revised—the scripts. This scripts of narratives and material culture and process of reinvention, of repetition with dif- then collectively forge a third prompt: play it- ferences, was collective. Nineteenth-century self. The three prompts then entangle to script doll play was never private; representational future play. The scripts that children cocreate play occurred in the home and also outside, with authors and toymakers are inseparable where it was witnessed by adults and, more from children’s literature and are therefore a important, other children. Children and functional part of it. Performative play makes former children described their play in pe- children’s literature possible—all too possible, riodicals and books, further transmitting it turns out. The possibility of children’s lit- practices from child to child. Burnett took erature forces us to look anew at nineteenth- cues from Stowe’s novel and a doll, but then century white children and see not racist she published accounts of her play and thus culture’s reflectors but its coproducers. coscripted other children’s behaviors: in 1888, when she was publicizing Little Lord 168 Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature [ PMLA

No t e s Brown, Gillian. “Child’s Play.” Differences 11.3 (1999– 2000): 76–106. Print. I thank Colleen S. Boggs, Julie Buckler, Caroline Levander, Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The One I Knew the Best of Linda Schlossberg, and especially Ellen Gruber Garvey. All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child. New York: 1. Barbara Hochman reads Uncle Tom’s Cabin as chil- Scribner’s, 1893. Print. dren’s literature. Stowe’s novel was widely read by or to Clark, Beverly Lyon. Introduction. Clark and Higonnet children, starting with Stowe’s own, to whom the author 1–8. read her first draft (C. Stowe 148–49). On children’s abil- Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Margaret R. Higonnet, eds. Girls, ity to define a work as children’s literature by reading it, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and and methodologies and see Hunt 2–4. Marah Gubar argues in this issue of PMLA Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Print. that defining children’s literature as anything young peo- “Dolls of Famous Women: Miss Mary Wilkins, Miss Su- ple read is overly broad but that including children’s acts san B. Anthony, Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin and Others of reading among qualities that constitute the “family re- Had Them.”Portland Oregonian 16 Apr. 1899: 17. Nine- semblance” of children’s literature grants the suppleness

theories teenth Century U.S. Newspapers. Web. 29 June 2010. that the field requires. E. L. E. “Topsy.” Youth’s Companion 8 May 1879: 159. Amer- 2. Black doll is the term that people of diverse races ican Periodicals Series Online. Web. 29 June 2010. used most consistently throughout the nineteenth and English, Margaret. “Home-made Rag Doll.” Babyhood: twentieth centuries to identify dolls that represent people A Monthly Magazine for Mothers Devoted to the Care of African descent. of Infants and Young Children, and the General Inter- 3. Karen Sánchez-Eppler and Gillian Brown are ests of the Nursery July 1887: 264. Google Books. Web. among the few scholars who analyze literature, material 29 June 2010. culture, and historical children’s practices in complex relation with one another. Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the Ameri- can Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. 4. For analysis of the construction of gender and sexuality through literary representations of doll play, Formanek-Brunell [Forman-Brunell], Miriam. Made see Marcus 149–66. For analysis of African American to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of children’s practices with dolls, see Bernstein, Racial In- American Girlhood, 1830–1930. New Haven: Yale UP, nocence. On representations of Japanese dolls, see Shoaf. 1993. Print. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1959. Print. Grandmother Trew. “Sweet-Water.” Youth’s Companion Wo r k s Ci t e d 9 Sept. 1869: 284. American Periodicals Series Online. Arnold Print Works. Advertisement. Youth’s Companion Web. 29 June 2010. 26 Oct. 1893: 550. American Periodicals Series Online. Hall, G. Stanley, and A. Caswell Ellis. A Study of Dolls. Web. 29 June 2010. New York: Kellogg, 1897. Print. Aunt Fanny [France Elizabeth Barrow]. The Children’s Hamlen, Georgianna. Chats: “Now Talked of This and Charity Bazaar. Edinburgh: Edmonston, 1870. Print. Then of That.” Boston: Lee, 1885. Google Books. Web. Bernstein, Robin. “Dances with Things: Material Culture 29 June 2010. and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 101 (2009): Hochman, Barbara. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading 67–94. Print. Revolution: Race, Childhood, and Fiction-Reading, 1851– ——— . Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood 1911. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, forthcoming. from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York UP, Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- forthcoming. Element in Culture. Trans. Huizinga. New York: Roy, Bessler, John D. Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Exe- 1950. Print. cutions in Minnesota. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, Hunt, Peter. Children’s Literature: An Anthology, 1801– 2003. Print. 1902. Malden: Blackwell, 2001. Print. Bial, Henry. “Play.” The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Jimmy: Scenes from the Life of a Black Doll. Told by Him- Bial. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2007. 115–16. Print. self to J. G. Sowerby. London: Routledge, 1888. Print. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in Kidd, Kenneth B. “Prizing Children’s Literature: The American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap–Harvard Case of Newbery Gold.” Children’s Literature 35 UP, 2001. Print. (2007): 166–90. Print. Brodhead, Richard H. “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Kuznets, Lois. When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Ani- Fiction in Antebellum America.” Representations 21 mation, Metamorphosis, and Development. New Ha- (1988): 67–96. Print. ven: Yale UP, 1994. Print. Brown, Bill. “Reification, Reanimation, and the American “Little Lord Fauntleroy: A Pleasant Chat with the Gifted Uncanny.” Critical Inquiry 32.2 (2006): 175–207. Print. Author of a Children’s Classic.” Daily Inter Ocean 126.1 ] Robin Bernstein 169 theories [Chicago] 4 Nov. 1888: 17. Nineteenth Century U.S. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Newspapers. Web. 29 June 2010. Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chi- Maitland, Julia Charlotte. The Doll and Her Friends; or, cago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina. London: Grant, 1852. Sanford, D. P. Frisk and His Flock. 1875. New York: Dut-

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