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One of my students in a recent children's literature course wrote a paper on Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book that traces in upbeat rhythm and rhyme the gruesome deaths of twentysix children. My student noted that its format suggests that it is a children's book: it is small, just the right size for small hands and a size that often indicates a children's book; it is short, for the supposedly short attention spans of children; it has pictures of children on every page; and, finally, it is an alphabet book, traditionally a form designed for children learning to read. But my student argued that despite these elements, The Gashlycrumb Tinies is an adult book because of the overt violence enacted upon children's bodies in the depictions of their deaths-deaths that in some pictures occur in the midst of ordinary daily activities. Underlying her argument were the unspoken assumptions that children would be psychologically damaged by witnessing, in print, the grisly deaths of other children and that children's books depicting violence will instill fear in their young readers and, hence, are problematic and inappropriate.
The Gashlycrumb Tinies is part of a long tradition in children's literature in which young characters meet with violent punishments and even death because they transgress social boundaries and challenge adult authority. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts were designed to frighten young readers into obedience through threatening dire punishments for disobedience. But for modern adults, books that purport to relieve children of their fears of everything from monsters to nightmares are preferable to the older, fear-inducing texts. Many of these modern "fear-alleviating" books are explicit attempts at bibliotherapy, designed to help children, psychologically and emotionally, by demonstrating how young characters overcome frightening situations.' Yet, their ideological functions are more complicated than this informal definition suggests. In fact, the varied cultural work performed by these texts reveals the many conflicting assumptions adults hold regarding children. Because the overt goal of some of these modern, fear-alleviating books is to free children of fear, they appear at one level to be liberating and possibly subversive of adult power. Underlying these possibilities, however, are unspoken issues of authority and control that add layers of complexity and suggest parallels with older texts that sought...