AJP:In Playing with Books, you use the phrase the “rhetoric of children’s play.”
What do you mean by this?
Morgenstern: I am referring to the formal elements found in the phantasmagoric
play of children. Early on in my research, I discovered the transcript
of a very humorous episode of play between two four-year-old girls who
are playing house. I love reading this in class because it always gets a laugh.
One girl plays the mother who is trying to give a bottle to a baby who keeps
denying it. A sociologist might assume that such episodes constitute practice
for future social roles. But it is quite clear that the mother is the victim
of vicious parody, and the relationship between the mother and child is
entirely unrealistic. Also the scene sets up a tension between the adult and
child subject positions. I wondered if these same elements could also constitute
the rhetoric of the children’s novel. Indeed, they reappear in chapter
6 of Alice in Wonderland in which we see the Duchess nursing her baby in
a manner likely to kill it until she flings it to Alice (who is clearly unhappy
to have to play the mother role) and so is relieved when the baby turns into
a pig. Now Carroll’s version is clearly an extended and exaggerated version
of the original, but it shares the same elements. I do not know if any child
playing house has ever conceived of the baby turning into a pig, but that is
a conceit that any child could admire.
