s5 0f Children's Literature 1, Heterosexuality, and the Queerne 31410 INNOCENCE, HETEROSEXUALITY, AND THE QUEERNESS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Tison Pugh 2Introduction Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Litereature Children cannot retain their innocence of sexuality while learning about nor- mative heterosexuality, yet this inherent paradox runs throughout many clas- sicnarratives of children's literature. A recalcitrant ideological conflict thereby emerges within the genre, in which innoce! conjointly subvert its foundations. Much of children’s literature implicitly or e and heterosexuality clash and explicitly endorses heterosexuality through its invisible presence as the de facto sexual identity of countless protagonists and their families, vet hetero- sexuality’s ubiquity is counterbalanced by its occlusion when authors shield their young readers from forthright considerations of one of humanity’s most ality ders much of children’s literature queer, especially when these texts point- edly disavow sexuality through celebrations of innocence. Steven Brahm and Natasha Hurley posit the assumptions behind children’s currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and should stay! innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, however, chil- dren are also officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual.” This presumed innocence of sexuality in children’s fiction often entails the rejection of aging and the perpetual celebration of childhood, such that heterosexuality appears asa spectral presence within its pages, yet no less powerfull and coercive due to its invisibility. Although lionized in much of Western culture as defiantly normative, heterosexuality, in particular rhetorical circumstances, faces peio- basic and primal instincts. This tension between innocence and se sexuality: “There is rative discourses that color it as abnormal, deviant, and queer “All children, except one, grow up” {1), begins J. M. Barrie's Peter and Wend, and this declaration affirms innocence through eternal childhood as the text’schiel thematic virtue? As the protagonist of Barrie's novel, Peter Pan refuses to mature and concomitant with his reiection of aging is his refusal to “I don't want ever to bea man, he said with a passion. ‘I want mature sexually2+ Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature always to bea little boy and to have fun, So | ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies" (35). In contrast to Peter, Wendy and the lost boys do grow up, and, as the novel ends, the narrator records his ing interest in them, “Wendy was grown up. You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up” (212), he sniffs, attributing a sense of melancholic regret on his readers’ behalf for Wendy's unfortunate embrace of aging, The narrator then dismisses adults as altogether unworthy ofhis attention: “All the boys were grown up and done for by this time; so it is scarcely worth while saying anything more about them” (212). By privileging childhood as abundantly amusing and denigrating adulthood as inherently banal—“grown up and done for’—children’s literature within the vein of Peter and Wendy dismisses sexuality as an uninteresting topic for consider- ation, and thus preserves children from knowledge deemed simultaneously too boring for their tastes and too mature for their comprehension, This conflicted gesture—of purging sexuality from a text to preserve chil- dren’ innocence while nonetheless depicting some form of heterosexuality as wa childhood’s desired end—revea Such posturings of innocence erect but the hollow s the queer foundations of children’s literature 1 of facades, which sexuality repeatedly tears down, and this questioning of innocence engenders the genre's queerness by registering the impossibility for any sexual desire to signify nor- matively under such paradoxical conditions. As Jacqueline Rose argues in her seminal study The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibil ildren’s Fiction, much of children’ literature pretends to speak to children only to mask ulterior motives: “There is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction, other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes, These purposes are often perverse and mostly dis- honest, not willfully, but of necessity, given that addressing the child must touch onall of these difficulties, none of which dares speak.”* Karin Lesnik-Oberstein agrees that “the child does not exist. For the purposes of children’s literature criticism, so closely involved with children’s supposed emotions and states of mind ... the ‘child? is a construetion, constructed and described in different, often clashing, terms.” As Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein astutely demonstrate, the children for whom children’ literature is written do not exist except within the parameters of a fictional world that needs them to exist, and therefore creates them explicitly for that purpose within the contours necessary for a given fic- tional paradigm to prosper. Baseline definitions of children’s literature, which are necessarily oversim- plistic given the confused contours of the field, typically run along the lines of literature written primarily for children’s consumption and featuring chil- dren (or perhaps talking animals or otherwise marvelous beings) as the nar- ratives’ protagonists.* Because adults write most children’s literature, however, it is a unique genre in that its authors create their fictions for an audience of whom they are by definition no longer a part. Charles Sarkand points out this discrepancy between authors and readers of children’ literature: nce there isIntroduction + 3 an imbalance of power between the children and young people who read |chil- dren’ literature), and the adults who write, publish and review the books, there is here immediately a question of politics, a politics first and foremost of age differential.’ For Seth Lerer, children’s literature is implicated within a cap- italistic and profit-driven market economy, which isitself complicit with ideolo- gies that bestow the status of a classic on some works but not on others, and he describes this system as “one whose social and aesthetic value is determined out of the relationships among those who make, market, and read books. No single work of literature is canonical; rather, works attain canonical status through their participation in a system of literary values.” As a result of these dynam- ics, that under most circumstances one must no longer be a child to write well enough to publish children’s fiction, and that literature performs cultural work often in service of larger ideological objectives, children do not define the genre of children’s literature as much as they are defined by it. Along with designating the contours of children’s fiction, adults also assign the values ascribed to childhood and children, often to advance particular cultural objectives. Ideologies rely on children to signify communal values, and, because they so often represent its ideal vision of itself, children can be used to construct and to regulate a society. As Karin Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson claim, ideas of childhood structure contemporary debates of social issues due to the child’s fundamental and foundational position in society: “the child js the discursive node of stories of origin, teleology and its determinacies, and the complex overlapping ideologies of subjectivity, emo- tion, and the bourgeois family in Western capitalism.”* Within many West- ents the future, and er discourses, the child, however problematically, repr perpetuating a given ideology necessitates that children inherit its values. In regard to the cultural symbolism inherent in children, Philippe Arigs’s groundbreaking work on historical constructions of childhood illustrates the ways in which children accrue variable meanings within temporally specific periods (and he demonstrates as well that the construction of children as ava tars of innocence is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon}. ‘To undertake a history of childhood (or of children’s literature as a genre is beyond the scope of this study, yet it is necessary to consider Romanticism's influence on children’s literature and its development, especially in the fre- quent conflation of childhood and innocence during this period. Romanti- cism’s imprint on cultural conceptions of children and children’s literature is most apparent in the figure of the Romantic child, as evident in such master- works as William Blake's Songs of Innocence (including the poems “Introduc- tion,” “The Little Black Boy,” “Nurse’s Song,” and “Infant Joy”) and William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” “To H. C., Six Years Old,” and Prelude. The narrator of Blake's “Nurse’s Song” recalls how children’s play leaves his “heart at rest within my breast,” and “Infant Joy” presents a two-day-old child as the epitome of innocence and joy:" In his Prelude Wordsworth describes his childhood as the “[f|air seed time” of the soul, during which he sported as a4+ Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature “naked Savage,” thereby imbuing his youth with a sense of uncultured inno- cence that nourished him upon reflection during adulthood. In “My heart leaps up when I behold,” Wordsworth espouses his famousdictum, “the Child is father of the Man,” idyllically portraying childhood innocence as rejuvenat- ing adulthood when the adult narrator ponders a rainbow and remembers other such childhood joys. Although Blake and Wordsworth complicate the image of childhood innocence in their poetry—such as in Blake’s thematic coupling of innocence and experience—the Romantic vision of children as idealized avatars of purity resonates in today’s culture, influencing contem- porary debates about the social significance of children and the ways in whi they should not be contaminated with sexual knowledge! But innocence cannot last forever because children—although regrettabl for some, while anticipated by others—must grow up; the Romantic child, as much as this figure stands as a touchstone of innocence, is merely a cultural phantasy of childhood's meaning. In addition to the presumed innocence of their characters, many children’s narratives also depict their protagonists’ maturation into adolescence and beyond, and the authors of such tales must therefore tackle issues of social and psychosexual development, ifonly allegor- ically or otherwise elusively. Jerry Griswold hypothesizes that the “ur-story” of children’s literature is a plot in which “a child ,.. ‘overthrows’ its parents and becomes independent," “and Kenneth Kidd, in his study of cultural con- structions of boys in narrative and culture, analyzes how “[b]oyhood became asynechdoche for evolution and the law of progress." For children to age and to develop entails the assumption of some form of maturity or incipient adult- hood, no matter how attenuated or denigrated adulthood and adult sexuality might appear within children’s fiction, Defining children as innocent of heterosexuality and other subjects deemed taboo for them, no matter the practicality or utility of quarantining knowledge, often reveals cultural confusion or ambivalence about these top- ics among adults, and so children are not as much inoculated from knowledge through this practice as adults are preserved from the challenge of resolving pertinent social conflicts. That is to say, childhood innocence in large mea sure protects adults as much as children, and the issue becomes more com- plex when concerns about children’s knowledge of adult sexuality intermingle with the proscribed issue of childhood sexuality asa topic unto itself. George Rousseau trenchantly observes that “|clhildhood sexuality lies on the bor- der of taboo and the frontier of suspicion,” rendering the topic difficult to discuss due to many adults’ fear of social disapprobation simply—and tauto- logically —for discussing the undiscussable. * As Gary Cross points out, “The child increasingly has borne the obligation of imposing cultural standards ‘ely that is at war with itself over such standards. ... [S]heltering innocence may be more about the deep moral conflicts among adults than the needs of children.” James Kincaid proposes that the ideal of childhood innocence fails to quarantine either adults or children from sexuality: onaIntroduction © [The idea of innocence and the idea of “the child” became dominated by sexuiality—negative sexuality, of course, but sexuality all the same. In- nocence was filed down to mean little more than virginity coupled with ignorance; the child was, therefore, that which was innocent: the species incapable of practicing or inciting sex. The irony is not hard to miss: de- fining something entirely as a negation brings irresistibly before us that which we're trying to banish Shielding children and children’s literature from sexuality can never fully succeed: doing so may drive more blatantly graphic displays of sexuality underground, but sexuality cannot be quelled in a narrative in which a child’s maturation is depicted: what will this child grow up to be if not, in most instances, a heterosexual and sexually active adult? In recognizing the prevailing likelihood of a given child growing up to be straight, [ acknowledge the overarching heterosexuality of the world at large and of children’s literature as a genre, This argument is founded upon the real- ity of heterosexuality’s dominance as a sexual identity, as it also expands an understanding of heterosexuality’s queer foundations and the complex cultural work necessary to preserve its privileges. ‘That | do not address homosexual asmuch as I might like in these pages reflects the narratives and plotlines under examination, not a reluctance to accord it due position within the framework of normative sexuality, nor a reluctance to address its role in children’s litera- ture.!* Of course, heterosexuality does not always emerge triumphantly at the end of childhood and one should not assume it to be the normative telos of chil- dren’ literature or of children: despite parents who might be strongly desirous of raising their children into heterosexuality, gay children continue to spring from straight families. The roots of homosexuality, whether in nature, nurture, or in some combination thereof, elicit strong debates and scientific disquisi tions, yet despite the frequent marginalization of same-sex desire in children’s culture, a defining irony behind young children’s friendships and sexuality that they are encouraged to engage in homosocial relationships but then pre- sumed to develop into heterosexuality—undermines the blanket expectation of sexual heteronormativity as childhood’s tacit telos. Certainly, many young are taught that the opposite sex is unappealing: girls are too prissy for boys, and boys are too icky for girls, or so these stereotypes proclaim, and boys and girh thus the sexes are segregated for numerous educational, recreational, and famil- ial activities. Playful disgust for and teasing suspicion of the opposite sex, often introduced jokingly into conversations with children but introduced nonethe- less, become some of children’s earliest lessons in heterosexuality. Such tactics bolster children’s sense of homosocéal identity, yet, as Emma Renold argues, these apparent disruptions to heteronormativity by privileging homosoctal- “are all peoduced within a heteronormative éramewotk of ‘compulsory heterosexuality.”™’ Even when segregated into same-sex groups, children are assumed to be learning to be straight.6 * Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature Conscripted into building heterosexuality through homosociality, chil- dren become implicated within an ideologically queer system that builds normativity through the abjected position of the perverse. In his pathia Sexuatis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing labels perversions as “|ijdeas physiologically and psychologically accompanied by feelings of disgust” that “ give rise to pleasurable sexual feelings” in which the tion finds expression in pass capture the frisson of hesitancy for the opposite sex coupled with sexual curiosity that circulates throughout childhood, and from this perspective childhood sexuality could itself be viewed as a foundational and tautologi- cal perversion that circumscribes the psychosexual development of children. sycho- abnormal associa- pnate uncontrollable emotion.” These words Sigmund Freud, despite frequently taking egalitarian and progressive views of sexuality, defined perversions as digressions from heterosexual consum- mation; in his view, they are “sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.” To extend this paradigm, innocence could also be con- strued as a perversion by matter, so too could heterosexual foreplay. Freud’s thoughts on childhood sexual development—the Oedipal comples perverse foundations of childhood, and Judith Butler argues that hetero- sexuality subverts the homosexual foundations of children's development: “Heterosexuality is cultivated through prohibitions, and these prohibitions take as one of their objects homosexual attachments, thereby forcing the Joss of those attachments. For Butler, becoming straight requires a person 1 move beyond infantile and childhood attachments that continue to regis- ter asa melancholic loss, which imbue heterosexuality with a confused core, one that can never suture over these foundational deprivations of homoso- ccessively delaying sexual union—and, for that , penis envy—also indicate the cialfhomosexual desires: Due to this confused interplay of heterosexuality, homosociality, and occluded homosexuality, queerness provides an apt metaphor for consider- ing the psychosexual development of children, if one views queerness not as a synonym for homosexuality but as a descriptor of disruptions to pre vailing cultural codes of sexual and gender normativity. As William Turner argues, ““Queer’ indicates a failure to fit not only categories of sexual identity but also categories of gender identity: The conditions of possibility for queer theory involve not only resistance to prevailing definitions of sexual identity but—equally and antecedently—resistance to prevailing definitions of gen- der identity as well” If children are expected to be asexual in their desires, as well as innocent of desire in its sexual incarnations, then either heterosex- ual or homosexual desires, or some unexpected permutation of desire arising from the carnivalesque world of much children’s literature, would result in a child's queerness.Introduction * 7 ‘To view innocence and heterosexuality as queer necessitates a reconsidera- tion of these terms, but in this regard, itis critical to realize that they stand in binary opposition to each other within much of children’s fiction: innocence depends upon ignorance of sexuality, including the ideologically endorsed and normative enactments of heterosexual desire resulting in marriage and childbirth, Other sexualities, notably homosexuality, are typically deemed even less appropriate subject matter for children’s literature than heterosex- ality, but this dynamic does not therefore sanitize heterosexuality as worthy of praise, or even of noncommittal depiction, within a given text. Taxono- mizing queerness and its assumed perversions reveals more about ideological power than about the appropriateness of a given sexual act, for the authority to evaluate sexualities props up ideological frameworks by policing the indi- viduals who might engage in proscribed sex acts. In her consideration of the binary logic of perversion, Kaja Silverman wonders, “What is the ‘truth’ or ‘right’ from which perversion turns aside, and what does it improperly use?” She proceeds to expose how binaries structure theoretical discourses on per- versions, noting that ideologies regulate sexuality by defining “the improper deployment or negation of the binarism upon which each regime depends.” Like beauty, queerness and perversity lie in the eyes of the beholder, and thus innocence, heterosexuality, and a range of taboo acts can be ascribed as queer by particular ideologies seeking to regulate children’s and adults’ sexu- alities. To regulate a child is to regulate an adult, for teaching lessons about sexuality to children reinforces these same lessons for the adults who must impart them. As Michel Foucault understood, disciplining children enacts ideological power: “the body of the child, under surveillance, surrounded in his cradle, the bed, o his room by an entire watch-crew of parents, nurses, servants, educators, and doctors, all attentive to the least manitestation of his sex, has constituted ... another ‘local center’ of power-knowledge.”* To sur- veil the child is to discipline the child, and children’ literature plays a piv- otal role in this process, with narratives instructing their readers in proper ot improper citizenship yet doing so ina manner in which their lessons can be dismissed, if necessary. Tim Morris observes that “|jJuvenilizing children’s books and genre fiction alike serves to repress concerns of great importance, relegating them to a land of children's literature where nothing is really taken seriously. "The cultural power of assigning aesthetic and literary artifacts to the realm of juvenilia underscores once again the power inherent in teaching children and in deciding what is to be taken seriously and what is to be dis- missed, whether innocence should triumph as the dominant virtue of child hood, or whether heterosexuality should be granted a place within children’s realm of the normative. For disciplined children, the transition from child to adult can allow one to overcome the inhibiting perversion of childhood innocence, as Robert Stol- Jer intriguingly suggests: “The hostility in perversion takes form in a fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the perversion and serves to8 + Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature convert childhood trauma to adult triumph.” From this perspective, the regulatory innocence of childhood and the child disciplined into innocence stand as the defining perversions for which maturity into adulthood seeks to compensate, Adult heterosexuality attempts to atone fora lost innocence that cannot help but to be lost due to its own perverse foundations in shoring up rose: adult privilege while policing adult desire. And, as much as perversions are used to penalize those who partake of their pleasures, these pleasures lieat the heart of perversion, as Molly Anne Rothenberg and Dennis Foster argue: “But the purpose of the [regulatory function of perversity] may be less to implant an arbitrarily generated perversity than to provide cover for the specifc plea- sures that sustain and threaten the law: In literature, such is the double promise of disciplining perversions —teaching children what not to do, while simultaneously and irresistibly demonstrating the pleasures of transgression Representations of children and children’s sexuality, which, in Rose's words, are “perverse and mostly dishonest” reveal how the ostensible nor mativity of adult heterosexwality—the unspoken telos into which children are assumed to be maturing ed queer within much children’s lit- erature. That is to say, by privileging childhood as a time of innocence from sexuality, heterosexuality suffers homosexuality within certain homophobic discourses. Homophobia, often tacitly yet with little confusion about the degraded status afforded to non- normative sexualities, tells children that they should not grow up to be gay3in similar manner, much of children’s literature tells children that they should is render milar marks of abjection as accorded to not grow up atall so that they may escape the queer perversion of heterosexu- ality altogether. The fundamental tension between innocence (the ostensibly normative foundation of children’s sexual identity} and heterosexuality ithe ostensibly normative foundation of adults’ sexual identity] renders both per- verse within children literature: children cannot remain innocent of sext- ality while learning about normative sexuality, and heterosexuality cannot stand as normative if innocence is the defining cultural phantasy of children’s identity. And thus heterosexuality itself is rendered queer. Queer theory uncovers the ways in which ideological normativity relies on nnd thus it provides, perverse foundations to cloak its invisible claims to pow a particularly subtle toal to analyze children’s heterosexuality, By articulat ing the ways in which ideological regimes regulate culture through sexuality, queer theory's utility asa theoretical perspective emerges in its protean adapt- ability to address disparate analytical objectives. David Halperin concludes that queerness refers to “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. ... ‘Queer; then, demarcates not a positivity but a positional- ity vis-i-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practice.” Eve Sedgwick likewise points to the mutability inherent in discussing sexuality: “What cowaits as the sexual is variable and itself political. The exact, contingent space of indleterminacy—theIntroduction + 9 place of shifting over time—of the mutual boundaries between the political and the sexual is, in fact, the most fertile space of ideological formation.” Queer theory undertakes the n of ideological policing of sexuality and its effect on a range of human subjects, paying particular attention to those either identifying themselves or identified by others as queer but also confronting the ways in which normativity con- stricts those who fall within the parame Recent work in queer theory makes explicit how children and children’s sexualities register as queer while sinvultancously regulating queerness. Kath- ryn Bond Stockton argues that children, in the nebulous presexuality gener- ally ascribed to them, incarnate queerness: “the child, from the standpoint of ‘normal’ adults, is always queer: either ‘homosexual’... or ‘not-yet-straight,’ merely approaching the official destination of straight couplehood.”* Despite their inherent queerness, children are also used to demarcate normative adult ssuality, as Lee Ed ssary work of exposing the arbitrary nature cts of ideological favor man delineates: On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed ... terroristi- cally holds us all in check and determines that political discourse con- form to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up. ...'The Child... marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged invest- ment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism, ‘The confused space between children’s queernessand their regulation of adult queerness paradoxically marks children as simultaneously queer and anti- queer. To think of children as queer is to acknowledge their inherent other- ness from adults while also realizing that childhood is itself an ideological construction and nota wholly “natural” state of being, Within children’s literature, a child may be hermetically frozen as sexually innocent within a given narrative’s pages, especially if that narrative depicts a circumscribed period of a child’s life. Due to this dynamic, | primarily inves- tigate in this study depictions of sexuality within children’s serial literature, and more particularly, members of the subset of children’s serial literature that depicts its protagonists aging. It is by no means assured that young protago- nists will age in children’s serial literature, as numerous popular series—The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drevs Trixie Belden—depict their protagonists at roughly the same age no matter how many volumes the series contains. Stuck in time yet moving through it, these protagonists are mostly shielded from sexuality, and thus so too are their readers, Readers can rest assured that Nancy Drew and her “special friend” Ned Nickerson, to take or summate their longstanding affections;at the very least, they have not done so in The Double Jinx Mystery, her fiftieth adventure, in which she still remains example, will never con-10 = Innocence, Heterasexuality, and the Queer ness af Children’s Literature eighteen years old.” During one of Trixie Belden’s adventures, the characters Jament their aging: “Don't you wish that [we] could just go on and on as we are now, just the same age we are now?” {90}. Such anti-aging dynamics in serial literature, as Viclor Watson proposes, allow readers to inhabit the protagonist's privileged state as freed from time: “The question of age and the passing of time is important because nostalgia almost certainly plays a big part in series-reading—a desire for the same story to be repeated along witha knowledge that it cannot ever be exactly the same, an impossible longing for a simultaneous sameness and difference.” For s ries in which protagonists age from children into teenagers, or from teenagers into adults, such as Little House on the Prairie, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortu- nate Events, Artemis Fowl and Twilight, sexuality becomes difficult to avoid if the characters are to maintain any semblance of verisimilitude (no mat- ter the particular genre—fantasy, historical, science fiction, or any other—of the texts}, Maria Niko “genre children’s book lajeva believes that readers should distinguish between and ‘auteur’ children’s books” because the “latter are becoming literary, sophisticated, and complex," and the series examined in this study belong within the parameters of auteur series given their interest in portraying some level of psychosexual realism and maturation. The perverse conflict between innocence and heterosexuality in children’s literature is well illustrated in two of the most popular children’s series of the twentieth century, L. M. Montgomery's Aue of Green Gablesand C. S, Lew- is’s The Chronicles of Narnia,” Both series celebrate childhood at the expense of heterosexual adulthood, yet they must then counterbalance such postur- ings as their protagonists mature into adolescence and adulthood. The his- torical allure of Montgomery's Prince Edward Island and the magical charm of Lewis's Narnia represent opposed realistic and fantasy settings for these children’s classics, yet both series agree on the sanctity of innocence as the essential ingredient of a happy childhood and on the perverseness of hetero- sexuality in subverting this ideal innocence. In herAnne of Green Gablesseries, L. M. Montgomery privileges childhood over adulthood, from both children’s and adults’ perspectives" But [ want to have a real good jolly time this summer, for maybe it’s the last summer I'll be alittle girl” (AGG 247), Anne proclaims, and her words indicate that the end of childhood represents the fearful possibility that her life of pleasant amuse- ments will cease, Her adopted mother Marilla likewise laments her daughter's maturation into womanhood: “Marilla felt a queer regret over Anne’ ‘The child she had learned to love had vanished somehow and here was this tall, serious-eyed girl of fifteen, with the thoughtful brow and the proudly poised little head, in her place. Marilla loved the gir] as much as she had loved the child, but she was conscious of a queer sorrowful sense of loss” (AGG 254). A melancholic regret for children’s maturation dogs Marilla, who can only Jament that her daughter ages, The two discuss Anne’s growth, with Marilla expressing her desire for Anne to remain perpetually young: inches.Introduction * 11 “1 just coulditt help thinking of the little girl you used to be, Anne. And [ was wishing you could have stayed a little girl, even with all your queer ways.” “Marilla!” Anne sat down ... “The real me—back here—is just the same. It won't make a difference where | go or how much I change out- wardly; at heart I shall always be your little Anne, who will love you and Matthew and dear Green Gables more and better every day of her life.” (AGG 276) Anne avers her desire to maintain her innocence, claiming the ability to “always be your little Anne,” even as she admits that she cannot refrain from maturing. Such lachrymose regrets for aging appear often in the series, even after Anne and her childhood friends mature and bear children of their own, such as when her childhood friend Diana exclaims, “Oh, | wish children didn't grow up so soon” {A jvig 11). Aging requires the assumption of heterosexuality within the fictions of Green Gables, but Anne and Diana plan to escape adult heterosexual ity by continuing their childhood friendship into old age: “Diana and | are thinking seriously of promising each other that we will never marry but be nice old maids and live together for ever” (AGG 239). Anne and Diana’s devoted relationship, within the scope of sexual history, appears to be a romantic friendship, an intense homosocial coupling in which two friends devoted themselves to each other. Such relationships were cultur- ally sanctioned in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries if they did not distract the friends from heterosexual marriage. Leila Rupp demon- strates how “romantic friendships among women could meet with not just toleration but approbation, as long as they did not in some ways cross the lines of respectability! However, if a romantic friendship between two girls metamorphosed into @ Boston marriage, in which the young women rejected marital heterosexuality in favor of their friendship, social dis- approbation often ensued, In the Anne of C female romantic friendships never threaten society's heterosexual foun- dations, When Hazel Marr moves into Summerside, the narrator reports this newcomer’s deep affections for Anne—"Hazel Mare had a notorious ‘crush’ on Anne” (AWP 175)—and proceeds to elaborate upon the extent of these affections ‘en Gables series, however, Hazel caught Anne's hand and pressed her lips to it reverently. “hate all the people you have loved before me, Miss Shirley. | hate all the other people you love now. I want to possess you exclusively.” (AWP 176) Later in the series, Anne’ schoolmat daughter likewise developsa deep crush on a female but Anne is unconcerned about this passing fancy: “Di will12 * Innocence, Hetevosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature probably get over this ‘crush’ and we'll hear no more of Jenny Penny” {Af 163). When such homosocial attractions arise in theme of Greew Gablesnov= cls, they elicit little comment: the unspoken assumption is that such friend- ships, of the innocence of childhood homosociality rather than an carly sign of homosexuality; will be put aside for marriage and procreation, ‘The fervor behind these friendships nonetheless undermines heterosexual- normative position within the series by painting it as an undesired and unwelcome disruption to the primacy of homosocial bonds. Despite her childhood pledge of shared spinsterhood with Diana, Anne s to preserve their eternal innocence, but as much as Montgomery's novels sanction childhood innocence, they also hint at the undesirability of everlasting youth. When Anne ponders her son Jems maturation—"But it will be rompers next—and then trousers—and in no time he will be grown up"—her housekeeper Susan parties, “Well, you would not want him to stay @ baby always, Mrs, Doctor, dear, would you?” (AHD 226}, For surely, a baby who cannot mature, one who can be imagined as fro- ndicati marries, bears children, and sel zen in time, might remain perpetually innocent, but such enforced innocence strips the child of any potential to develop. Toward the end of the series, Anne realizes the necessity of change and the impossibility of stasis: “Well, that was life, Gladness and pain ... hope and fear .. .and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart Jearn to love itand then let if go in turn” (lng 2 maturation in such passages, but she does so while ing sexuality in her fictions. For example, in Anne's letters to her boyfriend and future husband Gilbert Blythe, Montgomery alerts readers that she is omitting the lovers’ amorous words to each other (e.g., AWP23, 79, 123), and this censorship of romance shields the novels’ young readers from sexuality Montgomery endorses multaneously celud- while paradoxically highlighting sexuality’s latent presence. By pointing out these sexual lacunae to her readers, Montgomery emphasizes that which she appears to elide. Accepting aging and occluding heterosexuality cannot wholly undo the fetishization of innocence throughout the series, and this tension between innocence and maturity emerges in a scene that fractures the category of chil- dren's literature, When Anne ponders the suitability of a story concerning a community scandal for her young son, she determines to protect his inno- cence by censoring it: "But I think the story of what happened at Peter Kir funeral is one which Walter must never know, It was certainly no story for children” (Aing219). This mother’s words, as she guards her son's innocence from knowledge deemed too mature for him to comprehend, undermine the foundations of children’s literature, in that she has just recalled this story in its entirety to herself, and thus has shared it with young readers as well. But then, for whom are Anne's eight volumes of adventures recounted? Are the first novels of the series detailing Anne's childhood written for children, whereas the latter novels of the series detailing her adulthood are written for adults?Introduction + 13 Children’s literature as a category collapses under the weight of Anne's mus- ings, which subvert the fictional foundations of her series. Moreover, when young Faith Meredith insults crotchety Norman Doughs—"You are an old vampire and I hope you'll have the Scotch fiddle” (hig 115}—Montgome no longer seems to presume children’s innocence as a virtue, as this threat of se from the mouth of a babe likewise breaks the blanket promise venereal dis ofinnocence cherished throughout the series."* Her readers are protected from sweet nothings in romantic correspondence between the protagonist and her future husband yet exposed to children cursing adults with genital scourges, resulting in a series conflicted about the desirability both of its cherished vir- tue of children’s innocence and of the normative status of heterosexuality 8. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia likewise promotes the virtue of childhood innocence, yet he develops this theme to the point of evicting adults almost entirely from its utopia if they too energetically pursue sexual pleasuires~* In a scene highlighting the ways in which childhood innocence is privileged within this fantastic land, Peter reports Aslan’s decision forbidding Susan’s and his return to Narnia; “There were things he wanted to say to Su and me because we're not coming back to Narnia. ... He says we're getting too old” (PC 215). In complementary contrast, Eustace Serubb notes in th apocalyptic conclusion that he and Jill Pole are chosen to return to Narnia ies! because their older friends can no longer do so: “It had to be us two who were to go to Narnia, you s e the older ones couldn't come again” (1.850), Only young and innocent children can move between England and Narnia, and adult heterosexuality appears to be Aslan’s primary reason behind this becau: exclusionary practice. In terms of the series as a whole, prejudice against adults is most evident in Lewis's treatment of Susan, who rules Narnia for many years as a queen with her brothers and sister but who also appears to be the least childlike (and thus the least innocent) of the family precisely because she is the most interested in adult heterosexuality. When readers first meet Susan, Edmund criticizes her for “| t}rying to talk like mother” {LW'W’2}, and Lucy pleads with her, “Don't talk like a grown-up” (PC 121}, Even the narrator condemns her when she speaks “in her most annoying grown-up voice” (PC 139). The young adven- turer Corin later compares Susan unfavorably to Lucy simply because the for mer has matured into adulthood: “[Susan is] not like Lucy, who's as good as aman, or at any rate as good as a boy. Queen Susan is more like an ordinary grown-up lady” (HHB 176), In Narnia a girl can equal a man if she evinces no interest in sexualit grates adult heterosexuality: When the Pevensies reunite in Narnia and enjoy their apotheosis into eternal bliss, Peter regretfully declares that Susan cannot join them because she “is no longer a friend of Narnia,” and Jill Pole criticizes her for growing into adulthood: *|Susan is] interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up” (LB 134—35). Nylons and lipstick metonymically a stance that endorses childhood innocence and deni-14 + Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature connote Susan’ interest in her sexual attractiveness, and the invitations sug- gest her pursuit of opportunities to meet men so that she may attract their amatory attentions. Within The Chronicles of Narnia, enthusiastic adulthood is an unforgivable transgression, one that e Susan from eternal com- munion with her friends and family, despite that she displays a wide range of positive characteristics as well, such as her compassion and mercy: “Susan hades was so tender-hearted that she almost hated to beat someone who had been beaten already” (PC102}. In the Narnian algorithm of salvation, Susan's adult heterosexuality trumps her sense of mercy, and so she is left behind to enjoy heterosexual courtships while divorced from her family and bereit of the joys of the hereafter. Incontrast to Susan, Peterachieves his salvation despite his aging. Although he is the oldest of the four children, readers see little of Peter after he is ban- ished from Narnia at the end of Prince Caspian, and he therefore remains perpetually innocent and virginal, no matter his chronological age. Also, the mostly school-age protagonists in the Naruia series occasionally assume adult characteristics, but when they do so, they need not be upbraided for it as long asthese mature acts do not entail adult sexuality: “And Jill notived that Eustace looked neither like a child crying, nor like and wanting to hide it, but likea grown-up erying” (SC2I1). Lewis's treatment of adulthood does not necessarily spark condemnation of his characters, but the nexus of adulthood, heterosexuality, and the ensuing loss of innocence renders salvation a virtue ally impossible goal within his Narnian tales. As might be expected in a land where Susan's heterosexuality precludes her ven novels of the boy erying from entering paradise, few romances blossom within th series, and when they do, they appear to be little more than an afterthought to conclude a novel, such as at the close both of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader “Caspian married Ramandu's daughter and they all reached Narnia in the end” (VDI 216}. A similarly dismissive marriage occurs al the conclusion of The Horse and His Boy: “so that years later, when |Aravis and Cor] were grown up they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got mar- ried so as to go on doing it more conveniently” (HHB 216}, Other marriages that readers might anticipate do not occur, such as between the horses Bree and Hwvin: “Bree and Hwin lived happily to a great age in Narnia and both got married but not to one another” (HHB 216-17}. Lewis often pillories het- erosextial attraction, such as in his depiction of Uncle Andrew's crush on the White Witch: “You see, the foolish old man was actually beginning to imagine the Witch would fall in love with him” (MN 76). When this novel ends after her countless atrocious acts, Uncle Andrew still ponders her attractiveness for the amusement of readers, who are encouraged to laugh at his sexual desires “A devilish temper she had . .. But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman,” he ruminates (MN 186}. Other romances point to the impossibility oftheir consummation: “Jill had, as you might say, quite fallen in love with the Unicorn” {LB86), a moment that hints at the potential perversity of bestialityIntroduction + yet refuses to address it by considering the physical enactments such a love would necessitate, Indeed, the closest the Nariia books come to broaching the subject of sexuality appears in the narrators off-hand comparison of dis- turbing sounds: “You may have been wakened yourself by cats quarrelling or making love in the middle of the night” {LB 108). In Narnia, sexuality cannot comfortably coexist with innocence, and so Lewis mostly exorcises it from his pag for which Susan must be sacrificed from the narrative. , leaving only traces of desire to contaminate his asexual paradise, traces, ‘The queer tension between innocence and heterosexuality, as evident in Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and Lewis’ {es of Narnia, is refkcted to various degrees in the children’s series examined in the follow- ing chapters of Innocence, Heterasexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Lit- erature, The subsequent chapter, “There lived in the Land of Oz two queerly made men’: Queer Utopianism and Antisocial Eroticism in L. Frank Baum’s Oz Books,” first investigates the ways in which the series establishes a quet friendly theme of celebrating the unique over the ordinary. Numerous incar- nations of normativity are denigrated within the Ozbooks, and this dynamic positions Oz as an carnivalesque utopia where an antinormative sensibility xns supreme, Within this topsy-turvy world, Baum r imagines human sexuality, in that intercourse and procreation have been rendered irrelevant because all creatures are frozen in time and incapable of sexual maturation, Dorothy and other Oz protagonists cannot mature beyond their childhood xpression of adult desire. Enforced innocence of sexuality is thus presumed to be a foundational ideology of this phantastic land. Against this backdrop of perpetual innocence, Baum also depicts antisocial erotic possibilities in his fantasy world, in which sexuality is so denigrated as to make any erotic attachments undesirable, as evident in the innocence into heterosexuality as a viabl n Woodman's bizarre backstory of the pleasures of homosocial companion- ip and the horrors of heterosexual attraction Similar to the Oz books in their affirmation of eternal childhood, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books celebrate childhood innocence, yet these novels nonetheless depict Laura's heterosexual maturation through her mar- riage to Almanzo Wilder. The chapter “Eternal Childhood, Taming Tomboy- m, and Equine Frotic Triangles in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little HouseSeries” explores how Laura's sexual development is negotiated through her eroticized attachment to horses. This is not to say that the Little House series plays seri- ously with the perverse possibilities of bestiality, but rather that horses offer Laura a safe investment in eroticism that prepares her for her subsequent roles as wife and mother, For Almanzo to win her affections, he must wean her eroticized attentions from horses and redirect them to him, and this delicate process underscores the untamed nature of sexuality on the nineteenth-cen- tury American prairie. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s psychoanalytical theories posit the possibility of “becoming animal,” and Laura's transforma- tive development through horses allows her to achieve heteronormativity, yet16 + Innocence, Heterasexuality, and the Queerness of Children's Literature the very concept of normativity shatters under the tortuous path necessary to reach it, Along this path to maturity, Laura must also compete with her childhood rival Nellie Oleson for Almanzo’s affections, and she triumphs in this erotic triangle due to her deeper understanding of men’s and women’s equine desires. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy forcefully rejects the emphasis on childhood innocence endorsed in much children’s literature, and the fol ing chapter, “Erotic Heroism, Redemptive Teen Sexuality, and the Queer Republic of Heaven in Philip Pullman's fis Dark Materials” analyzes how his protagonists Lyra and Will triumph over their adversaries by reimagining h erosexuality, Lyra’s and Will's initial investments in traditional gender roles— her misogyny, his Oedipal complex—hinder their psychosexual development, yet teen eroticism becomes implicated with epic heroism in Pullman's the- matic endorsement of adolescent sexuality. Readers might see heterosexuality as triumphantly normative at the conclusion of Pullman's trilogy, but this normativity depends on the rejection of innocence and the reconstruction of heterosexuality into hitherto unimagined and perverse acts. Adolescent sexuality, a topic so troublesome to children’s literature of the Peter-Pairvari- ety, is not only salvitic in Pullman's fictions but revolutionary as well, altering traditional paradigms of intercourse and revealing innocence as a cultural phantasy that can only harm the children whom it seeks to protect. In ‘Dumbledore’ Queer Ghost: Homosexuality and Its Heterosexual Afterlives in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels,” the analysis turns to the ways in which Rowling mostly rejects innocence as a virtue for children by surreptitiously including numerous taboo topics within her fictions {includ- ing profanity, bestiality, alcoholism, and excrementality). Despite these con- troversial subjects that subvert illusions of childhood innocence, Rowling lo simultaneously shields children from candid treatments of human sexuality by obfuscating Albus Dumbledore’s homosexuality. In announcing Dumble- dore’s qu to a live audience rather than within the pages of her books, Rowling occludes homosexuality, and in this spectral state, queerness bol- sters the series’ endorsement of normative heterosexuality: By learning from ere: Dumbledore’s queer lessons in heterosexuality and by successfully reenact- ing his mentor’s failed traffic in women, Harry achieves his great victory over Voldemort and death, but only after realizing what it means to be a straight hero from a dead, homosexual wizard Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events in many ways frees its pro- tagonists from stereotypical constructions of gender, and the next chapter, “What, Then, Does Beatrice Mean?’: Hermaphroditic Gender, Predatory Heterosexuality, and Promiscuous Allusions in Daniel Handler / Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events,” tackles the ways in which these gen- dered freedoms are nonetheless compromised by aggressive enactments of male heterosexuality, In particular, Violet Baudelaire serves as the object of unwanted, predatory, and pedophilic advances, and in responseIntroduction + 17 to this underbelly of sexual tension, Snicket illustrates women’s ability to assert erotic and personal agency through their reading practices. An insis- tently metatextual collection of novels, A Series of Unfortunate Events deploys sning paradigms of gender and sexuality and thus renders innocence—both sexual and intellectual—wholly unsuitable for preserving the very children whom it purportedly shields. The novels also posit he the family unit, as the young protagonists take their initial steps into adoles- cent dating, only to discover the pitfalls inherent in erotic triangles, in which love's competitive edge fractures familial harmony literary allusions as a res istant strategy to rei erosexuality as an undesirable and threatening force to o survive in such a dan- gerous world necessitates knowledge to triumph over innocence, and knowl edge of sexuality and of literature assists the Baudelaire children on the quest to safety, even if it can never wholly resolve their troubles Loin Colfer’s Arteniis Fow! novels insistently and joyously wallow in the lower bodily element of farts and excrement, but more than an extended deployment of coprophilic and scatological humor, these books consider the erotic implications behind ostensibly perverse sexual practices, In “Excremen- tal Eroticism, Carnivalesque Desires, and Gross Adolescence in Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl,” this monograph investigates how Colfer subverts Freudian tenets of child sexual development, Freud believed that anal eroticism must be surpassed on the path to psychosexual normativity, but Colfer celebrates the lower body for its fecundity, for its very potential to generate erotic attrac- tions. In turn, heterosexual adolescence is depicted as a humiliating and truly disgusting experience, one that torments teens and renders them incapable of maintaining their sense of self and agency. Within Colfer’s carnivalesque world, both the anal and the erotic are resignified, resulting in great humor as well as an inclusive view of diverse sexual desires, in which the decidedly antierotic eponymous protagonist, the flatulent dwarf Mulch Diggums, and the fey demon wizard N°I jointly realize the unlikeliness of normative hetero- sexuality as an effective means of quenching their erotic drives. ‘The penultimate chapter, “Masochistic Abstinence, Bug Chasing, and the Erotic Death Drive in Stephenie Meyer's TvilightSeries,” analyzes these books ebration of teen abstinence. Meyer's protagonists Bella and Edward refrain from intercourse for most of the series, but this deferral of desire only heightens the eroticism of their romance. Abstinence in terms of their surface ce enables the two lovers to play with the mutually masochistic foundations of their devotion, in which they welcome pain as a conduit to pleasure but delay pleasure so as to prolong pain to the point of virtually impossible suf fering. With Bella embracing her death as a necessary step to eternal life with Edward, she exemplifies Freud's theories of the death-driven underbelly of masochistic desire. In contemporary parlance she is a “bug-chaser,” one who seeks infection from her lover to prove her devotion, and this single: pursuit of love as infection and death reveals the ugly underbelly of innocence as enacted through teen abstinence: minded18 + Innocence, Heterasexuality, and the Queer ness af Children’s Literature Innocence, Heterosextality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature con= chuces with a brief final chapter, “Homosexuality and the End of Innocence in David Levithan’s Boy Mects Boy:” Levithan’s groundbreaking novel posits the possibility of innocence and sexuality coexisting to the benefit of chil- dren; a gay teen romance, it unabashedly celebrates a utopian high school in which sexual diversity flourishes and where gay adolescents need not struggle to define themselves in contrast to straight culture. As such, Levithan’s novel points to a refreshing new direction for children’s literature, one in which gay angst is rendered meaningless in a world without sexual closets, and in which neither children nor adults are sacrificed to a fetishized belief in innocence as a virtue above all others, ‘The perspectives that form the foundation of this study—that innocence isa perversion of heterosexuality, that heterosexuality isa perversion of innocence, that queerness metaphorically constructs childhood, and that the call for chil- dren's innocence regulates adult sexuality—undermine many of the founda- tional assumptions of children’s literature, especially the belief that this genre ‘tical Theory jill May emphasizes didacticism. In her Children’s Literature and ¢ suggests that children’ literature invites readers to consider themselves imagi- natively through the protagonists depicted, and thereby to learn through the reading process about themselves and their interpretive praxes Authors of realistic fiction want their readers to live through the expe- riences in their books and see the problems another person or culture faces. Good writers succeed because they draw their audience into their stories. They write to evoke a response to the plot. However, response is not enough. Good authors hope that the narrator's voice will haunt the reader enough to cause a second reading, further study, and, finally, a new reader's interpretation to the questions their stories pose." May's persuasive account of children’s personal and intellectual experience of literature is a necessary counterbalance to theorists who deny the concept of the child in children’s literature as little more than a fictional construct Surely there isa child here somewhere—even if itis diluted to the conception of the childlike, as in George MacDonald's famous formulation of his audi ence: “I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five." But with many of this genre's fictions, one might well wonder what it means for “readers to live through the experiences.” Children's literature, in the inherent perversity between innocence and heterosexuality, asks readers to inhabit diametrically opposed positions simultaneously, such that didactic reading practices often fracture under the competing pressures of synchronic yet asymmetrical value systems. In sum, much of children’s literature is not suitable for children if adults want to preserve their young ones’ innocence, but then again, children do not hold proprietary rights to literature supposedly written for their pleasure.Introduction + 19 Adults need to claim these text well, and to do so in defense of reading against the grain, When children's innocence is used as a tactic to suppress queer adults, readers need to resist, not children, but those who conscript children to fight their own ideological agendas, When adults read children’s literature, we should embrace the pleasure inherent in an often nagging ques- tion: are some of these texts truly as perverse as they now seem to be? It is an inherent enigma of the genre because its openness invites resistant read- ings, as Perry Nodelman concludes: “Fexts of children’s literature might be so empty, lack so much, be so full of absence that it is possible to imagine an entire range of shadow texts to be resident in their unconscious.’ Consider a moment from the delightful tale of Mr. Popper's Penguins, an entertaining lark about a poor man whose fortunes turn when he brings his penguins to the stage. In this scene, the penguins escape from captivity and disrupt a female singer's performance \When they saw Mrs, Popper coming after them, the penguins felt very guilty, because they knew they did not belong there. So they jumped up ‘on the stage, ran over the footlights, and hid under the singing lad blue skirts. That stopped the singing entirely except for one high, shrill note that had not been written in the masic. (10)" After the singing ends, what provokes this “one high, shrill note”? The text does not tell us, and moreover, the text is enveloped within an overarching sense of innocence and play, such that only a perverted mind would think that a penguin’s beak unexpectedly stimulates this singer's vagina. This incidental introduction of bestiality into a children’s novel, one that evinces very little interest in any form of sexuality beyond the nuclear family and the hatch- ing of young penguins, destroys innocence and heterosexuality as the text's foundational values in favor of perverse knowledge and unexpected bestial stimulation. Only a perverse mind would read innocence in this manner, but innocence invites perversions, as the following chapters show, in ignoring sexuality at its own peril.