Margaret and Michael Rustin's Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children's Fiction
Barkan, Joanne
NARRATIVES OF LOVE AND Loss: STUDIES IN MODERN CHILDREN'S FICTION, by Margaret and Michael Rustin. London and New York: Verso, 1988. 268 pp. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $13.95. Every socialist...
...According to the Rustins, the works they've chosen find symbolic equivalents for unconscious states of feeling—states of feeling typical of a child's psychological development...
...What—beyond genes and early experiences in the family—shapes a child so that in later life she or he hopes for a better future and can act on that hope...
...Michael Rustin, a sociologist and contributor to Dissent, and Margaret Rustin, child psychotherapist and senior tutor at the Tavistock Clinic in London, explore these questions in their fine book, Narratives of Love and Loss...
...Arable happened to look up into the starry sky and saw her little daughter sitting with WINTER • 1989 • 113 Books Henry Fussy and going higher and higher into the air, and saw how happy Fern looked, she just shook her head...
...Megacorporate capital invaded even the most genteel editorial offices, launching a process of industrywide consolidation...
...The key word is "safe...
...The market for juvenile books in the United States has boomed in the 1980s...
...What worked before is done again . . . and again and again...
...London and New York: Verso, 1988...
...and fiction for the middle grades—the category of books investigated by the Rustins —is often neglected...
...Even reading the newspaper becomes an exercise in imagining what should be rather than what is...
...Who is buying all these books...
...The mode is metaphoric rather than direct...
...In turn, the child's belief in a better future—his hope—elicits the remaining capacity for moral discrimination in members of the crew...
...For the Rustins, The Slave Dancer is as much about Jessie's inner ability to maintain a sense of a good parental object as it is about the external circumstances of the slave trade...
...So they buy books...
...But suppose part of the reason kids don't read is that they're not encountering books that connect with them at the deepest level...
...More recently, market researchers have identified a promising crevice between beginning-reader books and middle-grade fiction...
...Simultaneously, children at this age are attempting to negotiate a space between family and social world, a space that is critically linked to their developing sense of a personal self...
...she moves on, the Rustins say, "to the wider world where there is a different sort of adventure and where sex exists...
...Along with the primary experience of the family, each of these influences the development of the personal self...
...But why...
...They— like most adults—initially pick up what's familiar and easy...
...At the invitation of an acquaintance named Henry Fussy, she soars above the country fair in a Ferris wheel...
...Editors look for humor and adventure...
...This is the story of a child's maturation through confrontation with a brutal historical reality...
...Books that won't fit into labeled slots aren't published...
...and expertise in marketing...
...So better the current crop of books than no books at all...
...This novel for older children tells the story of thirteen-year-old Jessie who is kidnapped and coerced into service aboard a slave ship bound for Africa...
...Books compete with the tube, and the tube is winning...
...A few years ago, everyone rushed into the preschool space...
...Juvenile publishing resembles nothing so much as Hollywood movie-making...
...But the character of the business has changed: the financial types, rather than "book people," now dominate...
...The readers (or listeners) of these stories would range in age from about five to eleven...
...This is the quick fix—like Band-Aids over gaping wounds...
...They want their kids to get ahead and they've been told that the "reading habit" is important...
...My, my...
...it comes with the territory...
...They point out that in the twentieth century, Western society has made childhood into a field of social practice that includes schooling, publishing, family policy, and therapy...
...For 1988, the industry projects domestic sales of $367.7 million...
...Like Hollywood producers, publishers don't want to shake anyone up...
...trade book publishing...
...The executive overseeing a juvenile books division is likely to be someone with an M.B.A...
...The Reagan administration has played a role in the degradation of children's publishing...
...Children's books are probably the fastest growth area in all U.S...
...As a consequence, "toy-based TV" was born, and a chunk of children's publishing attached itself to the toy industry...
...Even the "prestige" houses conform slavishly to market norms...
...For them, the best writing for children has a profound impact...
...The new FCC regulations permit stations to air 114 • DISSENT Books give kids what they want—easy entertainment—the little television addicts wouldn't read at all...
...Mass market" refers to books sold in supermarkets, convenience stores, and so on...
...NARRATIVES OF LOVE AND Loss: STUDIES IN MODERN CHILDREN'S FICTION, by Margaret and Michael Rustin...
...The world in most children's stories is predictable, unambiguous, and there is never an authentic sense of loss...
...The children who respond to these stories are beginning an independent exploration of the social world (in school, through friendships, during periods away from home) at a psychological phase when family relations—good or bad—are still central...
...But whether they're getting quality for their money is another question...
...But who develops the capacity to fantasize and who doesn't...
...Domestic sales of hardcover children's books totaled $151.5 million in 1979...
...But Fox has enabled a young reader to assimilate the history of the slave trade through identification with both the interior and exterior odysseys of the child protagonist...
...The themes of separation, loss, and reunion are lived by them every day...
...Yes, Grandma died, but a nice woman with grey hair has just moved in next door...
...Good storybooks are wonderfully serious business...
...The story pursues Wilbur's maturation into an independent being, able to take responsibility for others...
...Yet it's foolish to think that most children can find these books themselves...
...Publishers spend several weeks each year in sales meetings listening to sales reps tell them where the best niches are...
...No more myths about lovers of literature hovering over manuscripts with blue pencils...
...It turns out that one boom begets another: members of the postwar baby boom generation now have small children...
...The resulting corporate structure is supposedly streamlined—leaner and meaner...
...All the books are beloved and best selling, so the Rustins can assume that kids do, in fact, respond to them...
...Once the ship has picked up its human cargo, Jessie is made to play his fife while the slaves are forced to "dance" for exercise and for the sadistic pleasure of their captors...
...The Rustins analyze about two dozen works written by ten authors (seven British and three American...
...Topping the list is a chapter on E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan...
...The baby boomers are better educated and have more disposable income than previous generations...
...Juvenile book publishing in the United States has changed substantially over the last decade...
...By identifying with his remembered parents, with two alternative parent figures, and with the slaves who suffer more than he does, Jessie manages to survive...
...When Mrs...
...Any adult lucky enough to have read stories of this quality as a child knows how important they are...
...Under Charlotte's guidance, he also prepares for the death of his "parent" and finds the resources to live without her...
...If the Rustins are correct, adults retain strong feelings about their favorite childhood books precisely because those books functioned as symbolic equivalents for unconscious states of feeling...
...and much of the meaning is latent rather than explicit...
...Henry Fussy...
...picture-book art takes precedence over text...
...Typically, one publisher ingests several others...
...The narrative depicts a second, simultaneous process of development...
...The White House heartily supported changes in the FCC regulations that govern television programming for children...
...Parents, teachers, and librarians have a role to play in introducing kids to the best...
...They place the most emphasis on the psychoanalytic dimension, and this is where they are most insightful...
...The Hollywood syndrome infects both major sectors of juvenile publishing—mass market and trade...
...The Rustins examine in depth one piece of the emergent culture of childhood—modern fiction for children...
...The Rustins see Charlotte's Web as a fable of an infant's development under the competent care of the "good mother...
...An editor-in-chief acquires properties, contracts out series, and establishes publishing programs ("We need sixteen Care Bear manuscripts written in the next six weeks, and bound books shipped for Christmas...
...q 116 • DISSENT...
...she said...
...Trade" books are sold in retail bookstores...
...Through these symbolic equivalents, the stories connect with children at the deepest level...
...Charlotte the spider bears the young pig Wilbur's anxieties about abandonment and death while she devises a way to save him...
...Think of that...
...Shouldn't such books be irresistible...
...The best chapters in the Rustins' book analyze the best of the children's stories they've chosen...
...The Rustins carry out their investigation from three points of view: psychoanalytic, sociological, and literary...
...And when there's a "message," it's aimed smack into everyday consciousness: "Don't be afraid of the dentist because he's really as nice as your dad...
...Every socialist knows how to fantasize...
...In one of E. B. White's loveliest visual metaphors, we see Fern separate herself from her own good mother...
...Fern, the little girl who also plays the role of good mother for Wilbur, gradually relinquishes the normal preoccupations of the latency period...
...But unless children's publishers make a greater commitment to literature, there won't be much new substance to nurture the current generation...
...The Rustins' illuminating study can help them...
...The Rustins skillfully weave the psychoanalytic and the sociological when they analyze The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox...
...Just be yourself, and you'll be popular, too...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
