Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels

225 Pages·2011·1.91 MB·English

by  Richard Locke

l
p r a i s e f o r
the ten novels explored
o
in Critical Children portray children so
r i c h a r d
c r i t i c a l c vividly that their names are instantly
recognizable. Richard Locke traces
k
the 130-year evolution of these iconic
c h i l d r e n child characters, moving from Oliver
e
l o c k e Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip in
Great Expectations to Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn; from Miles and
Flora in The Turn of the Screw to Peter
“Using the portrayal of childhood as his eye-opening theme and total
tc Pan and his modern American descen-
immersion as his critical method, Richard Locke brilliantly reexamines
h
dant, Holden Caulfield; and finally to
classic novels we complacently thought we understood. He enlarges and er
Lolita and Alexander Portnoy.
freshens our insight into modern works by Salinger, Nabokov, and Philip u
si
Roth by placing them in a line that reaches back to masterpieces by Dickens
e “It’s remarkable,” writes Locke, “that
richard locke is and Twain. This is an intense, subtle, elegantly written, and exceptionally ot c r i t i c a l so many classic (or, let’s say, unfor-
professor of writing at
illuminating work.” fi gotten) English and American novels
the Columbia Univer-
morris DiCkstein, author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History cc should focus on children and adoles-
sity School of the Arts, h
of the Great Depression cents not as colorful minor characters
i
and his essays and lda c h i l d r e n but as the intense center of attention.”
reviews have appeared
h Despite many differences of style,
in the New York Times Book Review, “Richard Locke has done a remarkable job. His criticism operates at a very l
o
setting, and structure, they all enlist
the Wall Street Journal, The American high level of engagement with the text, pulling into play a wide range of o
a particular child’s story in a larger
Scholar, The Threepenny Review, The associations and intellectual focus that is rare and exhilarating.” d
c cultural narrative. In Critical Children,

Yale Review, and other publications. He Jay Parini, author of Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America i
n Locke describes the ways the children
has been editor in chief of Vanity Fair h
in these novels have been used to
and deputy editor of the New York Times t
“Deep, acute, skillful, responsive, and determined to get into these ten e t h e u s e o f explore and evade large social, psy-
Book Review. ni
chological, and moral problems.
famous novels whose exteriors are so glistening, Richard Locke’s Critical
gl
Children is a major instance of active literary criticism in our moment.”
r
d Writing as an editor, teacher, critic,
riCharD howarD, author of Without Saying ea c h i l d h o o d and essayist, Locke demonstrates the
t
r way these great novels work, how

n
“Critical Children is a fine example of literary criticism at its most sensitive they spring to life from their details,
oe
and how they both invite and resist
and probing and hearteningly reminds us that the criticism of fiction is still v
possible and worth doing.” en i n t e n g r e a t interpretation and provoke rereading.
l
Locke conveys the variety and contin-
william h. PritCharD, author of Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered s
ued vitality of these books as they shift
from Victorian moral allegory to New
n o v e l s
York comic psychoanalytic mono-
Columbia university Press/new york ISBN: 978-0-231-15782-7 logue, from a child who is an agent of
jacket design: catherine casalino redemption to one who is a narcissis-
www.cup.columbia.edu
author photo: courtesy of columbia university tic prisoner of guilt and proud rage.
9 780231 157827
school of the arts Printed in the u.s.a. columbia
CRITICAL CHILDREN
R ICHAR D LOC KE
C R I T IC AL CH ILDR EN
THE USE OF CHILDHOOD
IN TEN GREAT NOVELS
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK
columbia university press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2011 Richard Locke
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Locke, Richard, 1941–
Critical children : the use of childhood in ten great novels /
Richard Locke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-231-15782-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-52799-6 (e-book)
1. Children in literature. 2. American fiction—History and criticism.
3. English fiction—History and criticism. I. Title.
ps374.c45l63 2011
823.009'3523—dc22
2010053805
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
design by vin dang
FOR WENDY
co-ntents
introduction     1
1
charles dickens’s heroic victims
Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip     13
2
mark twain’s free spirits and slaves
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn     50
3
henry james’s demonic lambs
Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw     87
4
j. m. barrie’s eternal narcissist
Peter Pan     103
5
j. d. salinger’s saintly dropout
Holden Caulfield     138
6
vladimir nabokov’s abused nymph
Lolita     154
7
philip roth’s performing loudmouth
Alexander Portnoy     173
acknowledgments     187
notes     189
selected bibliography     199
index     209
CRITICAL CHILDREN
intro-duction
in 1876 mark twain stopped working on the manuscript of Huck-
leberry Finn and didn’t pick it up for three years. He’d written 446 pages
and come to the middle of the eighteenth chapter. The fugitive orphan
Huck and the runaway slave Jim have been violently separated once
again after a steamboat has crushed the raft that is their home and their
vehicle to freedom. Huck dives toward the bottom of the river below the
thirty-foot steamboat wheel, but when he surfaces he can’t find Jim and
finally scrambles ashore in the dark. He comes to a backwoods coun-
try mansion, a “big old-fashioned double-sized log house” guarded by
dogs and armed men in a state of high suspicion and alarm, and after
a terrifying interrogation that establishes his status as a castaway and
his ignorance of the local war, he is adopted by the “aristocratic clan” of
the Grangerfords, who tell him “I could have a home there as long as I
wanted it.” 1 Huck has survived a rite of passage from river to shore. He
has reentered civilization.
At first he is filled with admiration: the family and the house are
“so nice” and have “so much style.” He describes the design and decora-
tion of the house (a Kentucky Penshurst) with the astonished precision
of an explorer in a newfound land, but the family’s taste in art and lit-
erature begin to “aggravate” him. They maintain a funeral cult of a dead
daughter whose “sadful” drawings and verse albums Huck describes for
pages on end. Just as we become impatient with his detail, we realize
he’s going on because these images “always gave me the fan-tods” (121);
his catalogue is an attempt at cultural and psychological control. And
2 INTRODUCTION
we recognize that the family’s melancholy taste is a comic but perverse-
ly plausible response to their death-obsessed ethos of revenge killing.
Huck asks the youngest Grangerford son, Buck, who is effectively his
“aristocratic” double (he’s the same age as Huck—“thirteen or fourteen
or along there”—they share clothes, and their names rhyme, of course),
to define the word that expresses the central concept that governs this
rich, highly civilized, long-established, and utterly paranoid community:
“What’s a feud?”
It’s here that Twain stopped writing. He’d sounded a theme that was
large enough to sustain neglect as he moved off toward other literary proj-
ects. But when he returned to Huckleberry Finn in 1879 he immediately
constructed a six-page narrative that ends with one of the most powerful
(and celebrated) presentations of the central themes, actions, characters,
and images of the entire novel. Twain’s creative response to Huck’s ques-
tion is a conspicuous instance of the deepening and enlargement that can
result from using the figure of a child as a means of cultural and moral
interrogation. Huck’s ignorance, vulnerability, and curiosity; his impro-
visatory mix of candor and deceit, prejudice and fresh perception; his
multiple fabricated identities; and his moral bewilderment throw into
relief the ferocious self-destructive world of the vainglorious American
frontier “civilization,” with its Grangerford “clan” and its Shepherdson
“tribe,” all “high-toned, and well born, and rich and grand” (126).
What Huck is discovering is that the shore is even less safe than the
river. A family is not a haven in a heartless world; it makes it even crueler.
Men and boys have been killing one another here for thirty years. The
transgressive love and elopement of a local Romeo and Juliet (facilitated
by Huck’s delivery of a message hidden in a “testament” at the church
where both families hear sermons every Sunday of “brotherly love, and
such-like tiresomeness”) precipitates a climactic slaughter. Huck takes
refuge in a tree; he has rushed back to nature, from which an agile boy
can take a wider view of the human disaster unfolding below. He sees
Buck and another boy caught in a skirmish. His description of it begins
like a boy’s adventure story, but he quickly complicates the narrative and
becomes a distraught participant observer:
All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns—the men had
slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their
horses! The boys jumped for the river—both of them hurt—and as they swam
down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing
INTRODUCTION 3

out, ‘Kill them, kill them!’ [Not calling or crying out but “singing out”—exul-
tantly.] It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain’t agoing to tell all
that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I
hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get
shut of them—lots of times I dream about them.
Huck responds to the horror by insisting that he controls the narrative
of it but confesses that he can’t control the sickening memory that per-
sists even into his current dreams. The trauma isn’t “shut.” And his story
isn’t finished:
When I got down out of the tree, I crept along down the river bank a piece,
and found the two bodies laying in the edge of the water, and tugged at them
till I got them ashore; then I covered up their faces, and got away as quick as
I could. I cried a little when I was covering up Buck’s face, for he was mighty
good to me.
It was just dark, now. I never went near the house, but struck through the
woods and made for the swamp.
There he meets Jim, who has fixed the raft, and they “shove off for the
big water”:
I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the middle
of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lantern, and judged that we
was free and safe once more. I hadn’t had a bite to eat since yesterday; so Jim
he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage, and
greens—there ain’t nothing in the world so good, when it’s cooked right—
and whilst I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time.
The banality conveys a return to commonplace security. “I was powerful
glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the
swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places
do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty
free and easy and comfortable on a raft” (133–34).
Huck says that to be on the river is to be “free,” but to be “safe” they
must put up the “signal”—they need a cultural artifact to protect them;
they can’t entirely renounce civilization. He then swerves into a regressive
childish account of the food the fatherly Jim provides him—the length
of the description somewhat comically conveys Huck’s urgent need to
eradicate the preceding violent narrative and affirm the comforts of life
with Jim. But the chapter ends with Huck’s authoritative expression of