Children's Literature

Robert Coles's two-page foreword to this collection dwells on matters that appear to be peripheral to the nineteen essays that follow. Coles's avoidance seems understandable, however, because these contributions are a varied lot, as the introduction by the three editors confirms. Some valuably introduce genres or authors about whom we may know far too little, whereas others helpfully trace the historical representation of children and the adaptation of adult writings for a juvenile readership. And the final offerings, mini-essays in which three contemporary writers look directly at the child language they use or have overheard, provide a refreshing antidote to the academic prose of the other pieces. For even the most original and well-read contributors to this volume all too often undermine their best perceptions by relying on a programmatically voguish language that distracts rather than clarifies.

As a miscellany containing contributions that were solicited to [End Page 229] broaden and enhance four pieces originally delivered at a colloquium, Infant Tongues is concerned with a great variety of topics, such as adult authors who impersonate children, the voices of real children, publishers, and the usurpation of power positions. To summarize these diverse strands seems impossible in this space—yet it is fair to say that a degree of coherence is achieved by the repeated attention paid to the narrative devices authors use to give the illusion that they are speaking in a child's voice. The reasoning behind the book thus goes something like this:

1. 1. Children talk; they have "voice."

2. 2. As children become socialized, they modify or self-censor their language.

3. 3. In trying to render child language, novelists create a host of mediating devices.

4. 4. Critics write about such novelistic stratagems.

5. 5. Children, novelists, critics, and cultures have conflicting "interests." The "interests" of novelists and critics may reflect adult "needs"—as determined by history, sex, or their own sociocultural conditions—rather than the actual conditions of child-hood.

A number of the essays in this volume demonstrate both "interests" and "needs" by linguistically and substantively calling attention to themselves. They thus shuttle between childhood, adult authorhood, and supervisory critical commentary. Although some contributors manage to limit themselves to their announced topics, rather few have much to do directly with the "infant tongues" of this confusingly misnamed collection.

Aside from Darrell H. Y. Lum's fascinating account of his efforts to capture the pidgin lingo of his youth, it is Gillian Avery's "The Voice of the Child . . . in Early Modern England" that, by following the Opies, most directly attends to the actual voices of real children. By introducing one of the collection's themes, Avery foreshadows a later contribution in which Maria Tatar argues that children, being unable to "represent themselves," are obliged to find voice by way of adult ventriloquism (275). Avery poignantly illustrates one such act of ventriloquism by looking at the example offered by John Evelyn's written record of his dead little son's life (1659).

Alexandra Johnson considers the self-censorship and modification [End Page 230] she detects in the 1810-11 diary of seven- and eight-year-old Marjory Fleming, a vital, imaginative, and literarily impressionable child who wrote directly and with considerable verve. Johnson unfolds for us how even in the course of two years Marjory modulated her natural voice to the subtly felt demands of those she loved; she shows, furthermore, how long after Marjory's death the diary was taken over by well-intentioned nineteenth-century editors who made it consonant with their own orientations and thus, wittingly or unwittingly, colonized what they purported merely to transcribe.

According to Michael Lastinger, the childhood pressures recreated by an adolescent writer, the poet Rimbaud, were hardly unwitting and certainly less subtle or benign. Relying on psychobiography, Lastinger's essay delves into poems such as "Le Bateau ivre" (The drunken boat) in order to recover the "poetic voice [of a] precocious genius [subjected to] the most traumatic forms of emotional...