Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)
In "The Uncanny in Children's Literature," her introduction to the Winter 2001-02 special issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly devoted to this topic, Roberta Seelinger Trites urges critics to recognize "the primacy of the unheimlich . . . in determining the form and content of much children's literature" (162). This special issue is evidence of a wider trend in children's literature criticism since the late twentieth century, positing the uncanny as one of the most useful theoretical tools for understanding children's fiction. Lucy Rollin and Mark West also emphasize the uncanny in their volume of psychoanalytic criticism, going as far as to assert that childhood itself is uncanny. For Rollin and West, classics of children's literature such as the Alice books provide "direct links to our uncivilized selves-to the uncanny that represents true childhood" (36). Within this critical discourse, Neil Gaiman's 2002 novel Coraline has rapidly achieved canonical status. Ostensibly a rewriting of Through the Looking Glass by way of Freud's essay "The 'Uncanny,'" Coraline offers champions of uncanny gothic children's fiction an overtly psychoanalytic fantasy narrative space, populated by symbols readily interpreted as infantile cathexes and repressed psychological material. As I have argued elsewhere, Gaiman's brand of "psychic Gothic both originates from and feeds back into a late-twentieth-century trend of rereading Golden Age fiction as both Freudian uncanny and Gothic" (257), a process that involves a blurring of those two terms.
Of course, the Alice books in particular have a long history of being psychoanalyzed, with Freudian readings of the text proving particularly popular. A. M. E. Goldschmidt's "Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalysed" (1933) is one of the first, but there are numerous subsequent examples of "case writing" on Alice that seek to draw out the unconscious of the text in a variety of ways. A number of critical narratives emerge from this psychoanalytic work, but one of the most dominant declares that Alice is about childhood subjectivity and maturation. In Robert S. Phillips's edited casebook Aspects of Alice, which demonstrates the extent to which literary criticism of the books takes its cue from psychoanalysis, William Empson writes that "the books are so frankly about growing up that there is no great discovery in translating them into Freudian terms" (400)....