Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters 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 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4795341 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA [ PMLA theories and methodologies 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 chil- dren—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 160 [ © 2011 by the modern language association of america ] 126.1 Robin Bernstein 161 ] theories and methodologies and 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 methodologies and that she chose from among a panorama of sce- and vicious slave owner 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).