Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood.

New York and London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-8153-3882-1

Review by Adrienne E. Gavin, Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK

Natov's book examines the "poetics of childhood," that is, the artistic expression of our sense of childhood involving "the images that cluster around childhood, the voices and tones, the smells and textures that make up the larger landscape that recalls to us our earliest states of mind" (2). Focusing on the "literature of childhood," Natov examines renderings of childhood experience and sensibility in texts written for both children and adults.

The first chapter, "Constructions of Innocence," discusses William Blake, William Wordsworth, and The Diary of Opal Whiteley. Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Natov suggests, reveals not a simple, clearcut opposition between two states of being but a liminality of "permeable boundaries" and "interpenetration" between innocence and experience (13). His poems reveal the child as the figure who guides us to a "higher Innocence" in the imagination. In Wordsworth's work, she shows, the consciousness of poet and childhood are linked, and it is the child figure who is in touch with the primal and truest feelings and the poet who discovers inspiration in the "'spots of time'" which are memories of childhood (28). Natov includes a fascinating discussion of Opal Whiteley's diary, allegedly written when she was six or seven and published in 1920 when she was twenty-three. The diary authentically reveals, Natov argues, "the deeply felt animism of childhood" and is "an exquisite narrative of interiority" (40) showing a child's deep and synaesthesian connection with the natural world during her rural childhood in an Oregon logging camp.

Natov next turns to consider the pastoral as evidenced in contrasting ways in the works of two writers of children's classics. Lewis Carroll's satirical mode, she argues, was influenced by Blake's "ironic use of the child's voice" (49), while Kenneth Grahame followed Wordsworth's linking of childhood with pastoral imagery and poetic inspiration. The Alice books present an antipastoral world in which the natural is absent and, like Blake, Carroll uses the figure of the child to expose the world's corruption. The Wind in the Willows, by contrast, is strongly pastoral.
Discussing the body of the mother as a source for aesthetic experience, Natov in chapter three examines picture books in which child characters through their imaginations experience individuation through separation from the mother, and yet also express their need for connection with their mother. Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny, Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear, Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach, Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen, and Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet are discussed. She also examines adult texts through discussion of the "preoedipal narrative" (75) of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, in which the story is told through the body of the mother, and Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother.
In her "Childhood and the Green World" chapter Natov examines Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, William Steig's The Amazing Bone, Gertrude Stein's The World is Round, Christina Björk's Linnea in Monet's Garden, and Jean Craighead George's Julie of the Wolves. She demonstrates the ways in which the pastoral in the literature of childhood is used to reveal cruelty and corruption in society, but also suggests that while child figures might lead us to nature, childhood can also be read allegorically as the green world itself.

In the next chapter she discusses the "Dark Pastoral" which depicts the nightmare side of childhood represented through nature in such places as the dangerous forests of fairy tales which can be read as containing the socially unacceptable. Analyzing tales by E. T. A. Hoffmann she shows the liminality of his central figures who are caught on the borders between the socialized, "civilized" world and the landscape of the imagination. Discussing tales by Hans Christian Andersen she argues that his characters, who experience feelings deeply, inhabit the dual landscapes of the realistic and the fantastic. Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, she suggests, is "a testament to childhood innocence" (157), showing the "nightmare of childhood" (148) that is reflected in the blurring of "fantasy and reality, daydream and nightmare," in children's imaginations (149).

In her discussion of the antipastoral, in which the pastoral is rejected, Natov looks first at children's texts: Florence Parry Heide's The Shrinking of Treehorn, William Steig's The Zabajaba Jungle, Maurice Sendak's Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life, then at adult texts: Nabokov's Lolita and Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child. She shows that what is presented is a world of isolation disconnected from the natural and often created through irony and humour.

The last two chapters discuss representations of the contemporary child in adult and in children's literature. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, with their child perspectives, both portray childhood as the "history of the self" and as "a microcosmic site of colonization" (203). In these novels, Natov discusses, adults are presented as flawed and children serve as ways of talking about the truth through "their often unconscious questioning of adult authority and in their suffering" (218). Contemporary writing for children is dominated by expressions of the "child's psyche as a dark journey" (220), but Natov examines examples in which she also finds a "poetics for children" to which children can "turn for solace as well as inspiration" (220). This she finds in realist examples: Vera B. Williams's Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart, An Na's A Step From Heaven, and Sapphire's Push, as well as fantasy: David Almond's Skellig, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.

The Poetics of Childhood is an ambitious book which provides an original drawing together of otherwise disparate texts through Natov's examination of childhood and the natural world. Her emphasis on liminality and "permeable borders" is mirrored in her own refreshing margin-merging in that she considers adult and children's texts as part of a single argument. Her study is a welcome addition to criticism on the literature of childhood.

Adrienne E. Gavin