Out of an Old Toy Chest-Marina Warner-2009

Out of an Old Toy ChestAuthor(s): Marina WarnerSource: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 43, No. 2, Special Issue on Children's Literature(Summer, 2009), pp. 3-18Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40263781 .Accessed: 24/02/2015 21:44

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Out of an Old Toy Chest

MARINA WARNER

The Soul of the Toy In Baudelaire's essay "La Morale du joujou," written in 1853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her "treasure store for children." Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind's eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor to ceiling that this "Fe du joujou" (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out "the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings." But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy.

The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a "teddy" or a "dolly"; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children's games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child's life.

That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire's lasting affection and reasoned ad- miration for toys. He called them "cette statuaire singulire" (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child's play - from tiny "diligences" or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children's ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas

Marina Warner is a writer, critic, and historian; her recent books include Phantas- magoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006) and The Leto Bundle, a novel (2000). She has written extensively on fairy tales, children's games, and nursery rhymes. She is a professor of literature at the University of Essex.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 43, No. 2, Summer 2009 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois


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through fantasy alone: "AU children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstrac- tion and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings."

Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: "[The child's] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spiritual- ity of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art." Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baude- laire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: "Isn't all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?"2

Yet Baudelaire's essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and pro- duces a primal encounter with mortality: "But where is the soul? It's here that bewilderment and sadness begin."3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough - it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled "Le Joujou du pauvre," published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has "a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter."4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat - "drawn from life itself."5

Baudelaire's sense of frustration at the inertia of toys was echoed with even sharper melancholy by Rainer Maria Rilke in his "Essay on Dolls," written half a century later. Reflecting on his own child's play, the German poet explores his conflicting feelings with compelling subtlety. He empha- sizes that play is a process of animation - of the doll and through the doll - of the child playing, dreaming the doll into life. But he too returns to the child's failure in this attempt. He broods on his memories of trying to feed and coddle and, yes, animate it. It became "a confidant, a confederate, like a dog, not however receptive and forgetful like a dog, but ... a burden." His efforts turned to fury when confronted by the doll's mute obstinate solidity, but he then invokes the onrush of compensatory fantasy:

[A doll] made no response whatsoever, so we found that we needed to split our personality. . . . The incomprehensible things which were happening to us we mixed together in the doll as in a test tube and


Out of an Old Toy Chest 5

saw them . . . change colour and boil up. Really, we invented the doll: a doll was so abysmally devoid of phantasy that our imagination became inexhaustible in dealing with it.6

These "Reflections on Dolls" end in tenderness, even rhapsodic nostalgia, with a prayer, a prose-poem. Rilke hymns: "O doll-soul, not made by God, you soul asked for capriciously from some thoughtless fairy, thing-soul breathed forth by an idol with mighty effort/' He then turns to a doll that he, like God, infused with soul. He takes it out of the toy trunk of his memory only to find it moth-eaten and "indescribably mortal."7 Rilke then passes on to other things that have become saturated with hopes and dreams and have through human handling and love acquired a soul.

This question of the real haunts the psychology of play and through play, the theory of fantasy: is the state of animation that the power of thought can conjure sufficient to make reality present? This question at first in- vites a quick dismissal. But when it comes to art and literature and to the imagination's activity in making works in words and pictures (sometimes both together, as in children's books), the efficacy of make-believe becomes a question far harder to analyze, understand, and answer. Many writers for children, following in the wake of many fundamental myths, have at- tempted to answer this question with a resounding "Yes!" and invented fic- tions that do bring toys to life in a parallel world where playing for real can indeed really work.

In Carlo Collodi's children's classic Pinocchio, Geppetto is a craftsman who brings the boy puppet to life through the skill of his hands and his intimate knowledge of and contact with the wood from which he is making him.8 In this role, Geppetto carries on the legacy of the craftsman god Hephaistos, who forged handmaidens of bronze in his underground smithy. In every respect his creations lived, except that they were not biological be- ings but machines - automata. Geppetto also acts in the tradition of Ovid's Pygmalion, who found the flesh of his statue warm to the touch, and of the esoteric magi, such as Rabbi Loew, who forms the Golem and brings him to life with magic formulae.9

In that most tender and thoughtful of children's stories, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), Margery Williams dramatizes in a memorable exchange the deep psychological connection of play with art, of touch with making up stories, and of both with emotions and hence with reality. She does so through characters who are stuffed toys:

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day. . . .

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.


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"Sometimes/' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." . . .

"I suppose you are Real?" said the Rabbit. . . .

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. The inner journey of a playing child takes shape in relation to the things

that her games animate, and sensory qualities of every kind - appealing to smell, touch, hearing, even taste, as well as sight - enhance the potential of becoming Real like the Skin Horse. In some of the earliest excavation sites, archaeologists have uncovered dolls with jointed limbs, intending to create an illusion of moving life and help the player's fantasy that the toy is animate.11 In the first period of mass-produced toys and games for children, the makers instinctively appealed to their market by giving children the chance to handle things, to alter, dress, color in, build, cut out, and operate all kinds of illusions of real presence. Publishers today often blur distinc- tions between toys and books when they produce simple stories in the form of bath toys or animals or teething rings. A pioneering crossover book/soft toy was Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown (1946), which was literally covered in rabbit fur when it first appeared, so that a child reading /cud- dling the book might feel in touch with the characters in its pages.12

The sensory appeal of such artifacts aims directly at perception to stimulate visualizations and, hence, cognitive knowledge; pedagogically, such toys and books select from the varied matter of the world to communi- cate its distinctive properties (bunnies are furry). But this enhanced physical knowledge cannot do otherwise than pass straight into the imagination, for neither imagination nor fantasy are segregated faculties neatly fitted into separate cabins in the brain, as so many philosophers, ancient and modern, have maintained, but rather form the mind itself and act as the vehicles for a prime mode of rationality.13 Toys in all shapes and sizes - as figures or tools, games boxes and kits, picture books and toy books, paper dolls and soft animals - all belong to this underlying union between learning develop- ment and fantasy processes.14 Also, the history of their manufacture reflects changing psychological and aesthetic theories from the eighteenth century through to the pioneering methods of Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, and the Bauhaus. Processes of playing increasingly involved haptic, messy, direct handling, which grasp at every variety of medium and material, no matter how humdrum or base or even trashy: for this reason so little of this kind of toy survives.15 Many of the Regency and Victorian ideas for children's activities are themselves ways of making visual images: cutting out, bricolage, assemblage, pricking, masquerade, origami, etc. Today, during this late era of mechanical reproduction, the body's imprint and presence in the artifact through direct marks of touch and action have become more



and more sought after, more and more cherished. Somatic traces preserve the mana of the relic, like the soul - the aura - struggling to manifest itself in the plaything, and they possess the power to stir empathy in the beholder. In stories that appeal to the playing child, writers have moved beyond sen- tient creatures or anthropomorphic creatures to animate machines - cars, of course, and tank engines, but also household appliances, as in the late Thomas M. Disch's delightful, eco-pioneering fable, The Brave Little Toaster (1986) and its sequels. Things may not actually spring to life in a game, but playing generates stories and turns the mute and inert expressive; handling a thing cannot animate it, but it can render it intelligible. Many stories do their very best to imitate this process.

In the Garden

The radical educationalist Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) developed an approach to playing that emphasized practical intelligence in relation to all phenomena. A German and a contemporary of the Romantics, he did not focus on the imagination in his attitudes toward child psychology but, like Rousseau, preferred to enhance faculties of observation and understanding. However, his interest in fostering these cognitive capacities in early learning nourishes the powers of visualization, empathy, and animation, as psychologists are now increasingly advocating. When he was seventeen, Froebel went to study natural sciences at Jena, itself formed under the direct influence of the Romantic poet and naturalist Goethe, and a strong force in German political radicalism as well as idealist philosophy; in 1805 he joined the pioneering educationalist Johann Pestalozzi at his school at Yverdon (Froebel walked there - it took three weeks). He found even Pestalozzi too formal and rigid and left his school soon after. Then in 1840, after numerous experiments, Froebel hit upon the word to characterize his new methods of teaching: "Kindergarten," or "garden for children."

In Froebel's view, children would blossom if they were attended to like plants, with the right amount of nourishing and watering. They would then develop from within their natural gifts and strengths. Lessons in the abstract would not do: long before the terms "hands on" and "interactive" became the jargon of outreach educators, Froebel stressed that "direct and indirect observation of things themselves, and of their actual living connection in nature . . . should awaken . . . the great thought of the inner, constant living unity of all things and phenomena in nature."16 This thought, Coleridgian in its Neoplatonist tendencies, does not invoke fantasies of narrative but of intensified understanding of inner significance arising in direct contact with outer qualities.

To raise his nurslings, Froebel created a series of playthings, which he called Gifts: these begin with a set of colored balls on strings, covered in knitted cotton; they then include wooden shapes - a cube, a cylinder, and a


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sphere - and continue through a range of more than a score of different sets of such aids growing organically in relation to one another. Froebel aimed to bring out natural dexterity and ingenuity through handicraft - his beads and grids, smooth wooden tablets and blocks, paper patterns and cut outs, the string and sticks and spills and bricks he manufactured for children - have became the stock of every upmarket catalog, naturalized, and marketed, in the huge industry of child products. But Froebel in his time was a real revolutionary: no "outward means," no times tables, no spelling lessons, no facts, no learning by rote - no stories, even. A child was to reach out and take the world by the hand and palpate its natural materials and laws, grav- ity and grace, pliancy and rigidity, to discover its harmonies and limits. For a time in Berlin he had studied crystallography, and his passion for the to- pology of phenomena infuses his teaching materials. Alongside the Gifts, he devised "Occupations": they too are graded in small increments of difficulty and include pricking patterns in cards; cutting out, folding, stitching, chart- ing on graph paper; and interlacing, plaiting, weaving, and molding.17 Yet he was also interested in what came to be called folklore and made an influ- ential anthology of songs involving finger movements and gestures, playing, and dancing.18 But his kindergarten contains no characters or stories, just checkered paper, colored squares, triangles, oblongs, and circles, and things like prisms, twine, pebbles, shells, and pic-a-sticks. These shapes were not stripped of reference, however, but symbolically packed with meaning - meaning that did not require book learning or experience to know. Of the sphere, the First Gift, Froebel wrote, "I wish to find the right forms for awak- ening the higher sense of the child . . . What symbol does my ball offer to him? That of unity . . . the Ball connects the child with nature."19

Froebel's "republic of children" (this phrase was echoed by Malinowski) stirred antagonism from secular and religious authorities alike, and finally, after the revolution of 1848 and its suppression in Prussia, the Kindergartens were all closed down in 1851. Froebel died the following year. He did not live to see how his movement migrated from Germany to Switzerland, France, Holland, England, and the United States and attracted liberal thinkers, especially women of growing restlessness who, training as Froebel teachers, found a means of self-expression (Frank Lloyd Wright's mother Anna was one).20 The influence of Froebel's educational vision spread vigorously and lasted - until recent revisionism and the return to exams and SAT tests for even very small children.21

The methods of Maria Montessori (1870-1952) in Italy also emphasized independent finding and making before and during the years when a child learns to read: he or she is cast as an investigator and explorer, learning through direct contact with living things and materials.22 The Montessori Method still recommends blindfolding pupils so that they can take in the properties of matter - stuff- through touch. Joan Miro remembers, for example, his "early education in the senses" when he drew from an experience



of touch alone, holding the object behind his back.23 This intense focus on shaping sensory experience enriches understanding when reading words and making mental objects and pictures in relation to them.24

Johannes Itten, drawing up the curriculum for the Bauhaus foundation year, laid a similar stress on play and improvisation: the rota or diagram of its components places glass, clay, stone, wood, metal, color, and textiles on the inner ring around the action of building: students were encouraged to use their intuition into affinities between materials and phenomena and to work with associations and memories through haptic processes - doodling, bricolage, assemblage, and collage.25 In New Jersey in the 1950s the daugh- ters of Tony Smith were kept busy making models for his abstract geometri- cal sculptures: Kiki and Seton Smith, both now artists themselves, remem- ber folding paper tetrahedrons and octahedrons at the kitchen table as he explored different possible angles and axes.26 The images of Kiki Smith in particular illuminate the ties between a cognitive grasp of physical phenomena and imaginative creativity: using an exuberant variety of media (fabric, glass, silver, hair, beads, tissue, paper, photography, as well as more usual paints, inks, and pencil), Kiki Smith explores stories known from her own childhood reading - from the Bible, fairy tales, saints' lives, and children's books - and reinterprets them in sculptures such as Daughter (a wolf-child, offspring of Red Riding Hood) and Mary Magdalene, and in series of engravings and drawings illustrating Alice in Wonderland, for example.27

Homo Ludens

Before children learn to read, they act like readers when they play with materials and objects like readers. In play, a child beams her projective imagination upon inert material things and animates them with fantasy, infusing objects with meaning. She thus renders the world of things intelligible, transforming them with her imagination and committing them to mind in this metamorphosed form. In playing, mental objects become real: the pebbles and grass make a delicious meal, especially served on a plate that's a leaf. A cotton reel can be a tank or a house. The clothes peg a wound- ed soldier or Mummy, a series of bottles a train.28 They read stories off the things they bring into play, while also writing the scripts that unfold the lives and dramas of their imaginary cast. In games of make-believe children create systems of communication; they symbolize their meanings with random objects and chosen toys and animate their private interior world by activating lifeless and sometimes even invisible or nonexistent things. They fill their immediate circumstances with a made-up story, play-acting the roles and turning the activity of "let's pretend" into presence and action. "The very young child," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, "acts upon the world from his bed by orders and entreaties. The objects obey these orders of consciousness: they appear."29 The poet and critic Susan Stewart takes this idea even


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further, writing, "once the toy becomes animated, it initiates another world, the world of the daydream. The beginning of narrative time here is not an extension of the time of everyday life; it is the beginning of an entirely new temporal world, a fantasy world parallel to (and hence never intersecting) the world of everyday reality."30

Playing acknowledges its own fabricated character: unlike a coronation, it accepts its fictional status, like a death on stage.31 To play means to pretend (play-acting), and it draws on dramatic and mimetic skills in ordinary social use. Reading involves analogous processes of imagination and projec- tion; both playing and reading may fill solitude and beguile empty days, but they both also weave the fabric of subjectivity, fastening the ties between self and other and patterning relations within the immediate group of kin and the more distant but no less demanding groups of society, tribe, nation, and even species.

Probably the best known child-authors are the Bront family - Charlotte, Emily, and Anne and their brother Branwell. As children, the Brontes were exceptional in the vividness of their imaginations and their energy in inventing stories, characters, settings, and images. But they also exemplify the vitality of children's fantasy in general and are emblematic of the child fantasist in everyone across time and cultures. Their activities illustrate well the close links between playing and the making of literature, between childhood and writing. When Branwell was given a box of twelve toy soldiers in 1826, the siblings began to make books tiny enough for the figures to hold and read; they filled them with microscopically written adventures of their heroes and heroines, dramatizing them against a richly imagined geogra- phy - Angria and its capital Glass Town (later Verdopolis) on the East Afri- can coast, Gondal and Sneaky's Land. The children added title pages, colo- phons, dedications, and printers' advertisements in scrupulous imitation of the magazines and journals to which their father subscribed. They drew freely on current events: their dastardly villains and dashing heroes were variations on the Duke of Wellington and other contemporary personalities, such as Lord Byron, whom they adored. They gave their cast far-fetched Romantic, aristocratic names, and, like science fiction writers today, showed a strong liking for scattering about diacritics and names beginning with Q and Z: the Duke of Zamorna, Quashia Quamina, Zorayda (maid of honor to Princess Irn), and Zenobia, Marchioness Ellrington, were featured among the dramatis personae.32

Extravagant as these flights of fancy are, they interpenetrated the reality of the children's lives and cannot be unravelled from the real work they all undertook to such dazzling effect later. Charlotte was still adding to the chronicles of Angria in 1839 when she was grown up. The continuity between the fantasies of childhood and the reality of later survival was really severed only in Branwell's case: with his toy soldiers, he had been the



catalyst of the stories, but he did not write and publish later as his sisters did and his career as a visual artist foundered.

Not only were the Brontes' lives formed by the imaginary worlds their playing magnified, but since then their particular, hyperactive faculty of make-believe has stamped the story of romance itself with incalculable effects - psychological, sociological, and cultural. Children playing are copy- cats, reproducing first, powerful impressions. But at the same time they ini- tiate meaning, setting off a chain reaction of mimesis in others: how many romances have been molded in the form of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights? But the reason for the lasting resonance of the Bront imaginary world has grown with the fresh value accorded over the last century and a half to a vision of humankind in an unadulterated, presocial state.

Looked at in their historical setting, the Bront siblings convey very clearly the tectonic shift in ideas about inspiration and creativity that was taking place in their youth. Grounded in the thought of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a kindlier and more optimistic psychology and philosophy of education was growing. A generation before the Bront siblings were born, Blake praised the symbolic child of innocence and spontaneous intelligence, who can catch a falling star, see the tiger's fearful symmetry, and laugh away the care of old John on the echoing green; Wordsworth imagined an infant as the messenger from a higher sphere filled with understanding and memories of enchantment: "not in utter nakedness, not in entire forgetfulness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come." Through her picture of Lowood and Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bront famously excoriated the terrifying cruelty toward children and the repres- sions routinely practiced in schools. Her novel is the earliest written in the first-person voice of a child (Jane is ten when the novel opens), and it repre- sents the new vision of childhood that she and her sisters and brother had helped to make through the free play of fantasy.

The Romantics' manifesto for imagination's truths and their belief in children's readier access to them sped on the extraordinary flowering of reading matter cast from a child's perspective, focussed on a child protago- nist, and destined for children to read. Set in Wonderlands and Otherlands, at the back of the north wind or under the sea, among the stars or on the icepack of the Arctic circle, the stories of Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Julia Ewing, and, later, E. Nesbit, J. M. Barrie, and many others formed the mother lode of children's literature today.

Through the persona of a child - Alice or Peter Pan or the Vivian Girls - the grown-up creator tries out possible personae in the same way as children try out stories for themselves and their friends (mostly imaginary) through unfolding narratives that gradually settle into their own language of the self, a kind of self-portrait in a rearview mirror. (In the United States


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wing mirrors on the driver's side are sometimes incised with the warning "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear." This phrasing offers a pleasing analogy for the artist's use of the child self, which is brought closer in the form of art's objects.)33

Child's play foreshadows adult methods of building fictional worlds peopled with figments in both writers' and artists' works. Even after the weakening of Romantic tenets in the more disenchanted movements that followed, the child remains the favored channel for summoning intense, personal fantasy. Games of make-believe with figures and models, or sometimes with nothing much (with sticks and stones and tin cans and pebbles), turn a key into the mind's intrinsic, unadulterated concerns - its default, idling state, if you like - especially with very young children, who have not yet been schooled in custom and opinion. In this way, a child's imagination presents a study of the unconscious, and children's rhymes and stories encapsulate a concept of fantasy in the raw before reason sets its wild phantasms to rights, or in the phrase of Angela Carter, before the real business of "taming the id" begins. For example, the Portuguese-born narrative painter and illustrator Paula Rego tells stories with prolific creativity; these are drawn on her childhood memories as well as inventions spring- ing from those memories, and in a series of engravings of fairy tales - of Jane Eyre, Peter Pan, and other literature and stories - she projects childhood personae, sometimes self-portraits but in other instances wholly invented. Angling self-searching portraits through reflections of wild boys and girls, Rego has always invoked the inspiration of Henry Darger (d. 1973), another artist-storyteller. Darger was a Chicago hospital porter, and in an astonish- ing chronicle in the direct tradition of the Brontes' chronicles of Angria, he dramatized in pictures and words the epic uprising of the seven "Vivian Girls," the Abbiennian Princesses, against their adult tormentors, the Glan- delinians. Entitled What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, his epic account of the children's wars fills thousands of drawings, notebooks, and water- colors; each page is thronged with regular soldiers alongside amazing drag- ons, recognizable schoolchildren in uniform alongside fantastical creatures, as Darger unfolds "the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion."34 Since Rego first responded to Darger in the 1970s and 1980s, several other artists have also found inspiration in his chronicles, which evoke a universe of incident that was undoubtedly real for him.35 His childlike belief in an imaginary world of his own creation offers a channel through which others can return to that state of creative play that initiates a child into storytelling's reality.

Writers often need to take that kind of detour through points of identification with others in order to enter the realm of representation and forge its reality for readers, and creators such as Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, and Henry Darger needed child alter egos to produce their inventions, their



imaginary and wonderful stories. Children become the pattern and promise of futurity - not for themselves alone but also for society as a whole as these author/artists would like to dream it into being.

Regaining the child's spontaneous and vital fantasy has never been as central to creativity as it is today - not even in the heyday of Surrealism's quest for a return to unfettered imagination. The links binding creativity to play have a history, and they are tightened and loosened to a beat that sounds more strongly during some periods than others. But more than ever, their perceived interrelationship gains in value. Writers and artists are cultivating themselves in the light of childhood as they conceive it and increasingly, through retrospection, as they have experienced it. "If, though, a modern poet maintains," asked Walter Benjamin (echoing Rilke), "that there exists for each individual an image around which the entire world appears to founder, for how many does that image not rise out of an old toy chest?"36

The great medieval historian Johan Huizinga, in his inspired book Homo Ludens (1938), defined the human species as a playing animal, and he characterized pinnacles of aesthetic culture, such as high medieval France and Renaissance Italy, as times when society dedicated its brightest energies to playing - through language, images, buildings, ceremonies, apparel, and exchanges of gifts and rituals. Huizinga suggests several axioms toward a definition of pure play: the activity is free, undertaken voluntarily; it is experienced outside the realm of ordinary life, in a fictive dimension of experience, which does not aim at any utility or necessity of survival; and it does not meet needs and appetites such as warmth and hunger but thrives independently from them - it is a diversion, an intermezzo. Huizinga goes on: playing does not aim at material good, at self-interest or profit (so he thought, then). It takes place in demarcated zones (playgrounds and hours of recreation - R & R, "Quality Time") purposely set apart or aside from the real life business of existence, and it requires rules that set up the illusory play world in the first place.37 So play takes place, however freely, within an arbitrary structure drawn up by the rules of the game: when these rules that are agreed upon but often unspoken are flouted, it becomes foul play, not fair play. Finally, Huizinga argues that play translates the player or players into a different consciousness for a time; it wraps them in a sense of mystery and apartness from daily life. The word "illusion" comes from "in-ludere," to play: the heightened consciousness he associates with playing arises in part from the all-involving spell of make-believe.

Playing includes mimicry and laughter, feigning and struggle, illusion and display, performance, masquerade, ritual, and ceremony; alongside a myriad dolls and toys, many other forms of play occupy us - games, sports and races, tumbling and juggling, guising and miming, flitting and flirting - even gambling ("gaming" - le jeu in French) all fall into its range of interests.


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The category of play is vast. Reading, however, rarely falls under the rubric of playing, and Huizinga does not include the activity in his account. Yet, we may assume, reading for pleasure (not study) surely meets Huizinga's criteria for pure play. There is an underlying assumption in his work and in others, however, that play involves groups, and so reading as a solitary activity falls outside its embrace - until "reading groups" attempt to return it to the sphere of play. But such a view overlooks the ways of a playing child, as so tenderly evoked by Coleridge watching his son Hartley:

A little child, a limber elf Singing, dancing to itself . . ,38

Paying enraptured attention to his children in intense lyric poems, such as "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge placed his own personal feelings as a new father at the center of a man's proper interests.39 Since then, a child began to mirror all the best possible dreams for the future person in potentia.

Huizinga's definition of play was challenged, for example, by Jean Piaget and D. W. Winnicott, the latter most radically, who maintained that "playing ... is a basic form of living."40 He insists on the connection with real life: playing is practicing for life itself and it lies at the heart of mental and social health (he even characterized psychotherapy itself as a form of play): "It is play that is the universal/' he asserted in Playing and Reality (1971), "and that belongs to health."41 But Huizinga still offers an original and sturdy basis for discussion. His insistence on play's separateness and strangeness reveals how the language of purity and danger pertains to this zone of pleasure: play magnifies values held in common, as well as limits and prohibitions, and this draws games of make-believe closer to magic. The invisible, regu- lated zone of play requires symbolic acts and mimesis: "You be He," orders one player to another in a game of tag, "This is Home," declares another. "Cruces," cries a third, crossing fingers and demanding - and receiving - mercy.42 "Play creates order, is order," writes Huizinga. He then draws attention to the affinity between playing and art: "The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, resolution etc."43 Again, reading remains a ghost presence in his thinking, yet the success of a story book's creation of illusion depends on aesthetic skills.

Aiming at fun (on the whole), playing by definition sets its face against tedium, solemnity, and grief. But it can inspire any number of moods, and these do not exclude real passions, as anyone who has ever played knows. For although playing implies that nothing real will leak from the game into life itself, gambling shows all too clearly that this is by no means the case.44 So does reading: it combines Huizinga's views of play as a different order of reality with Winnicott's practical perception of its relevance to that same



order. While the activity intrinsically assumes a divide between play and any real acts and real feelings, between something simulated and something undertaken for real, playing makes things happen. As Winnicott stated, "Playing is doing/'45

In one of the essays in Mythologies, Roland Barthes excoriated the toys of the time: "French toys are like a Jivaro head," he writes, "in which one recog- nises, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of the adult."46 For the toy industry, like children's publishing, always interacts with contemporary values and mores, instrumentalizing the psyche, as many crit- ics such as Jack Zipes have continued to deplore. In his rancor Barthes was expressing his generation's revolt against the ideal embourgeoisement children's materials aimed at - and he had not yet seen dolls like Barbie and Sindy and Bratz or American Girl, with their wardrobes and accessories and lifestyles, or boys' "role-playing figures" like GI Joe and Action Man. Im- aginative writers for children have responded vigorously, as is very well known, to the mounting critique of class - and gender - representations to which Barthes's diatribe made an early contribution; for while the toy industry continues unremittingly to put guns in boys' hands and jewels round girls' necks, authors as distinctive as Diana Wynne Jones, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen, Michael Morpurgo, Thomas M. Disch, and Philip Pullman have moved the social context and the characterization of their child protag- onists far from the world of Little Lord Fauntleroy or even The Little Princess (though I should confess the latter was a very favorite book of mine, its Jane Eyre /Cinderella fantasy arousing powerful dreams). The Utopian tendency of so much children's literature today, as writers recast traditional material or invent new worlds out of whole cloth, maintains intimate contact with the ideal futurity that children at play represent.

NOTES

This essay has been adapted from "Self-Portrait in a Rear- View Mirror/' an essay I wrote for the catalog of Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing, an exhibition I cu- rated at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, England, in 2005. 1 would like to thank very much the resident curators there, John Leslie and Antonia Harrison, for their help; the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, especially Clive Hurst and Julie Anne Lambert; the staff of the Froebel Institute, Roehampton, especially Jane Read; and Mariet Westermann, Sina Najafi, Claudia Swan, Mary Jacobus, Jacqueline Rose, and Paula Rego for inspiration and help. I am immensely grate- ful for the opportunity to rework the piece, which Ellen Handler Spitz in her generosity has given me, and her comments have been very helpful.

1 . Charles baudelaire, Morale du joujou, m bauaeiaire: ueuvres completes, ed. Mar- cel A. Ruff (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1968), 358-60 (translation by the author).

2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Baudelaire, Petits Pomes en prose, in Baudelaire: Oeuvres Completes, ed. Marcel

A. Ruff (Paris, 1968), 160.


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5. Ibid. 6. Rainer Maria Rilke, "Puppen: Zu den Wachspuppen von Lotte Pritzel," in Werke:

Kommentierte Ausgabe in 4 Bde., ed. Manfred Engel und Ulrich Flleborn (Darm- stadt: WBG, 1996), 4:685-92; compare with Rainer Maria Rilke, "Some Reflections on Dolls/' in Rodin and Other Pieces, trans. G. Craig Houston [slightly altered] (London: Quartet, 1986), 121-22.

7. Ibid. 8. The Pinocchio of C. Collodi, translated and annotated by James T. Teahan (New

York: Schocken, 1985); see chap. 3 for the bringing of the puppet to life as he is being carved.

9. See Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 213ff.

10. Margery Williams, The Original Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real ([original art by William Nicholson, 1922]; London: Egmont Books, 2004), 10-11.

11. For example, toys from the second and third centuries were found on the Via Cassia, Rome; they are now in Palazzo Massimo aile Terme (National Museums), Rome. See http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/doll_massimo.jpg.

12. See Carol Mavor, Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D. W. Winnicott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press., 2007), 111. She rightly comments, "there is a certain sadism, an unnerving childish sadism, to Brown's little book dressed in fur. Given that the first printing ran ... to more than 50,000 copies."

13. See Charles Fernyhough, The Baby in the Mirror: A Child's World from Birth to Three (London: Granta, 2008), 173-80, 207-8

14. See Ellen Handler Spitz, Inside Picture Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), passim.

15. I researched these rare, early survivors chiefly in the Opie and John Johnson collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

16. See Joachim Liebschner, A Child's Work: Freedom and Play in Froebel's Educational Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2001), 52-63; and Susan Herrington, "The Garden in Froebers Kindergarten: Beyond the Metaphor," in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes International Quarterly 18 (1998): 326-38.

17. See Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, Froebel's Occupations (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896); and Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Abrams, 1997), 58-88; see also Norman Brosterman, "Froebel and the Gifts of Kindergarten," Cabinet, no. 9 (Winter 2002-3): 51-57; and Peter Weston, Friedrich Frobel: His Life, Times and Significance (London, 1998).

18. Friedrich Froebel, Mother-, Play- and Nursery Songs (1844). 19. Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora S. Archibald Smith, Froebel's Gifts (London,

1896), 7. 20. Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, 139-45. 21. A powerful group of children s writers, including Philip Pullman, have been

campaigning in England against the growing emphasis on testing for numeracy and literacy for children under the age of five. See Pullman's letter to the London Times, July 24, 2008.

22. See James Hall, The World as Sculpture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999), 253-78, for a fine discussion of the influence of Montessori methods.

23. Ibid., 261. 24. See further discussion of this theme in Marina Warner, "The Word Unfleshed:

Memory in Cyberspace," Raritan (Spring 2006). This was originally a talk given to the Friends of the Bodleian Library in June 2005 and was reprinted in Wasafiri: The Book in the World, ed. Robert Fraser, No. 52 (Autumn 2007).

25. Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later, revised and updated by Anneliese Itten, translated from the German by Fred Bradley (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975); see also James Hall, The World as Sculpture, 268 ff.; and Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, 122.



26. Helaine Posner, Kiki Smith (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 11. 27. See Kiki Smith: Prints, Books and Things [exhibition catalog], ed. Wendy Weitman

(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003); Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 [exhibition catolog], ed. Siri Engberg (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2006). In- cluded in the latter volume is my essay "Wolf-Girl, Soul-Bird: The Mortal Art of Kiki Smith/' in which I explore her close relations with fairy tales (42-53).

28. See Ellen Handler Spitz, The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 2006), passim; and Fernyhough, The Baby in the Mirror, 173-80, 207-8.

29. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1991), 177.

30. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 57.

31. Caillois draws the distinction well when he writes, "Secrets, mysteries, indeed disguise certainly lend themselves to play, but it must be swiftly added that the activity takes place to the detriment of a secret or a mystery. It exposes it, makes it public, and, in some way, spends it." Roger Caillois, Les Jeux et les hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 33.

32. Their father Patrick Bront began the trend when he changed the family surname from Brunty in honor of the Admiral Lord Nelson, who became Duke of Bront after winning a victory near a town by that name in Sicily. See Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontes [catolog of first international exhibition of Bront art] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), passim; also Charlotte Bront, A Leaf from an Unopened Volume, or The Manuscript of an Unfortunate Author: An Angrian Story, ed. Charles Lemon (London: Haworth, 1986), xv.

33. The Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, which I drove very happily in California in 1987-88, had such a mirror.

34. Brooke Davis Anderson, Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum (New York: American Folk Art Museum with Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

35. For example, the Turner Prize-winning potter Grayson Perry has paid warm tribute to Darger 's influence.

36. Walter Benjamin, "Spielzeug und Spielen" [1928], in Uber Kinder, Jugend und Erziehung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 72, quoted by Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5.

37. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 1-27; and Caillois, Les Jeux et les hommes, 32-33, 42-44.

38. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Christabel." 39. See Robert Crawford, "'My babe so beautiful!': How Coleridge Circles the

Cradle in 'Frost at Midnight,'" Times Literary Supplement, November 26, 2004, 13-14, for a most sensitive reading of the new father-child sympathy evoked by Coleridge.

40. See Jean Piaget, La Construction du rel chez I enfant (Paris, 1937); and D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; reprint, Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2001), 50; see also Adam Phillips, Winnicott (London: Fontana, 1988); Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (New York: Pantheon, 1998).

41. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 41; emphasis added. 42. See Iona and Peter Opie, "Code of Oral Legislation," in The Lore and Language

of Schoolchildren (1959; reprint, New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2001), 121-53.

43. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10; see also Manet Westermann, Adriaen van de Venne, Jan Steen, and the Art of Serious Play," in De zeventiende eeuiu 15, no. 1 (1999): 33-47.


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44. Roger Caillois takes severe issue with Huizinga for leaving out games of chance and discusses American slot machines as well as other forms - for example, Russian roulette and "Chicken/' - in Les Jeux.

45. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 41; emphasis added. Winnicott also alludes to masturbation, which can hardly be said to be fictive and is known as "playing with oneself/'

46. Roland Barthes, "Toys," in Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 53-55.


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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 43, No. 2, Special Issue on Children's Literature (Summer, 2009), pp. 1-117Front MatterPrelude to the Special Issue of the Journal of "Aesthetic Education" on Children's Literature [pp. 1-2]Out of an Old Toy Chest [pp. 3-18]From Bookworms to Enchanted Hunters: Why Children Read [pp. 19-36]Philosophical Adventures in the Lands of Oz and Ev [pp. 37-50]Style and the Mole: Domestic Aesthetics in "The Wind in the Willows" [pp. 51-63]Ethos in Steig's and Sendak's Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely Child [pp. 64-76]Why Fantasy Matters Too Much [pp. 77-91]Radical Change Theory and Synergistic Reading for Digital Age Youth [pp. 92-107]Note to "Bucky Flies, Almost" by Govinda Srinivasan [pp. 108-108]Bucky Flies, AlmostBack Matter

Out of an Old Toy Chest-Marina Warner-2009

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