"The case of Peter Pan"

Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan, or, The impossibility of children's ficton / Jacqueline Rose, Macmillan.

I was introduced to Jacqueline Rose during the theory unit of my Masters degree. I quickly discovered that she is the person to quote for anything to do with children’s literature and her work is the aspirational standard. At least, apparently. In actual fact, I notice that while everybody references her, I have yet to see any in-depth analysis or comment on her work (though that may be because I haven’t read much). For my own part, I wouldn’t dare analyse her work - I am too far from understanding it. I have now read the book twice, and was pleasantly surprised on the second reading to discover that a few more grains of wisdom passed through to me. If I read the book about ten more times over the next twenty years, I might passably be able to claim that I have a nodding acquaintance with her ideas (at least enough of an understanding that only the elite might call me out).

The interesting thing about reading Rose is that, because she is the person to quote, there is a distinct sense of pressure to do so. Academia provides its own standards and norms for acceptability, subject to the theoretical perspectives espoused. And then, within children’s literature, you stand or fall by your ability to come to grips with Rose. I wonder how it feels to be in a position like that of Rose? Since I am not attempting in any way, shape or form to compete on academic terms, I have a temptation to rebel against received wisdom. The trouble is, Rose makes sense. I don’t understand her work, but I find it both compelling and exciting. My imagination fails as I try to ponder what it would be like to have a mind as capable of complex thinking as hers. And so, of course, I have to include her.

Unsurprisingly, Rose explores the use of children’s literature as an attempt to shape child development. She provides examples from the English Board of Education, demonstrating the change in stance towards children’s education across the twentieth century. She documents the ways in which the board explicitly set out to dictate the type of language that would be taught to children, with education style divided according to class lines. In the early part of the century, the privately taught, middle class child was encouraged to learn the abstract language of literature, while this form of thinking, speaking and writing was actively discouraged for the working class. The children of this (less / more fortunate ?) class were to be taught to think and describe concrete objects and ideas only, with written language being subordinate to the spoken. Amusingly, this strategy ultimately proved to be maladaptive as the century progressed, as a requirement emerged for a workforce with more complex language skills. But Rose makes clear the deliberate use of language by the government to differentiate and shape its people according to its perceived needs. Books were also carefully chosen and used as prizes, “with the book as a reward for a correctness which it is intended to encourage” (p. 105).

However, Rose does not stop at the level of describing the educational and economic manipulations of language and literature. She points to the desire of the adult for the child in some complex fashion (although, while the concept of “the child” is extensively analysed, I did not see much to define what “the adult” might be):

It will not be an issue here of what the child wants, but of what the adult desires - desires in the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech (p. 2)

For Rose, the adult has an investment in what the child represents; the child is seen as a gateway, making the child disturbingly valuable, not for and of itself, but for what it can offer to the adult. She describes a mythic concept of “the child” and its connection to “nature”, as described by Rousseau and others:

Children’s fiction has never completely severed its links with a philosophy which sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the state (p. 8)

Despite Freud’s work on the problematic and inherently deceptive nature of language, emphasis is, according to Rose, placed on the innocence and primitive nature of the child, setting it up as the gateway back to an apparently pure point of origin, not only moral, but linguistic. Rose suggests a desire for a perfect and unproblematic mode of communication and of being, in which words can have simple, absolute and non-deceptive meanings, with the child (conveniently universalised across all classes) being used as the representational aspiration to:

a primitive or lost state to which the child has special access. The child is, if you like, something of a pioneer who restores these worlds to us, and gives them back to us with a facility or directness which ensures that our own relationship to them is, finally, safe (p. 9)

Dawkins and Jensen both discuss the ways in which society may attempt to shape its future generations. Rose goes further, by attempting to examine why this might be so. More than merely a desire for the material success of a society, Rose suggests that her undefined “adult” needs the concept of “the child” as a bridge to something which it believes it has lost, but which, in fact, never existed in the first place.