Children's Literature

Ever since its origin in both rationalist and religious moralizing texts, children's literature has been pressed into the service of character formation, charged with the overt or covert task of helping children learn to be good. Or, that is to say, learn to become what the adult moral arbiters of each period believe goodness to be. So it is striking when texts written for children explicitly problematize the project of aspirational goodness, the enterprise of self-consciously and explicitly aiming at goodness itself. What interests me is the phenomenon of stories—forming a distinctive micro-genre of sorts—in which children join together in a collective effort at moral improvement that conspicuously backfires, where it is the very attempt to be good itself that leads to the bad behavior. While of course stories abound in which attempts at moral improvement fail and good intentions go awry, in the stories I highlight the failure is directly produced by the children's own attempts at moral improvement and the formation of their good intentions. Because they seem so clearly structured to problematize the didactic project, stories of this peculiar form are especially well suited, I argue, to offer insights on didacticism in children's literature.

I propose for examination, as central examples of this micro-genre, The Wouldbegoods by E. Nesbit (1901), the chapter "Being Good" in Betsy-Tacy and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace (1941), and the fifth Ivy and Bean chapter book by Annie Barrows, Bound to Be Bad (2008). Various other texts share certain features of this phenomenon (i.e., texts demonstrating the problematic effects of aspirational goodness), but in my view illustrate it less clearly. For example, the "Good-Conduct Club" chapters of Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery (1919) present another failed collective attempt at goodness, but this aspect of her story seems to be deployed with a different purpose and to a different effect (to show the ill results of a lack of maternal guidance, thus helping to advance the romantic plot of a widowed father's remarriage).¹

In Enid Blyton's The Put-Em-Rights (1946), the children create a club focused not on moral self-improvement, but on the righting of wrongs. But while Blyton amply demonstrates the moral unattractiveness [End Page 149] of appointing oneself the corrector of others' misdeeds, her story nonetheless shows the Put-Em-Rights achieving moral growth (i.e., amending their own moral faults) by virtue of their crusade, and so, despite its ultimate termination, the book closes with the rallying cry, "Here's to the Put-Em-Rights all over the world! … Good luck to them, whoever they are, and wherever they live. Here's to everyone who tries to put things right!" This hardly counts as a resounding rebuttal of aspirational goodness.²

The three focal books were published over the course of a full century—Nesbit's at the dawn of the twentieth century, Lovelace's in the mid-twentieth century (but set in the period of Nesbit's), and Barrows's at the dawn of the twenty-first, so we can see them as both expressing continuity in concern about the pitfalls of aspirational goodness and revealing evolving attitudes toward the didactic enterprise. On their surface, all three could be read as poking gentle fun at children's comic misunderstandings of the requirements and rewards of the moral life. But on a closer reading, the texts satirize, not silly childish errors about morality, but the counterproductive ways in which adult authorities—including earnestly moralizing adult authors—communicate morality to children. I argue that these three texts provide material for a more far-reaching critique of the problematic ways in which we, as adults, present the enterprise of morality to children—and to ourselves. If children's literature is, as Perry Nodelman has argued, fundamentally "a discourse about what children are, about how they are different from adults, and about the relative merits of the different qualities" (22), these texts complicate this picture by blurring the distinction between adult and...