Master Class: Kuznets on the Secret Life of Toys
1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.0.1116
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Economic Theory and Institutions
ResumoMaster Class:Kuznets on the Secret Life of Toys Susan R. Gannon (bio) Lois Rostow Kuznets , When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Reading When Toys Come Alive is like taking a seminar with a gifted teacher. The book draws its coherence not from the development of a single critical thesis but from the play of an alert and informed intelligence on a body of fascinating material seen from a variety of perspectives. Trained as a new critic, Lois Rostow Kuznets is a skillful close reader of texts who has come to see her own readings as neither privileged nor universal. Thus she chooses an intertextual approach to her subject, the role of toy characters in European and American animation, metamorphosis, and development ranging from familiar classics such as Pinocchio (1883) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) to the latest comic strips and science fiction. Her critical approach draws on her own experiences and ideas and on a potent mixture of feminist theory, neo-Freudian psychology, play theory, and literary criticism, including approaches borrowed from Northrop Fryc, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, W. R. Irwin, and Tzvetan Todorov. Kuznets begins with a survey of the way toys have functioned in human cultural history in order to show that literary toy narratives "embody many of the same ambiguities of role and audience as do toys themselves" (21), ambiguities she explores thoughtfully throughout her study in close readings of individual texts. The first of these texts is Rachel Field's Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929), perhaps one of the finest pieces in that odd tradition of autobiographical discourse supposed to be written by an inanimate object. Kuznets invites us to notice the way that "the contrast between the active minds" of such objects and "their passive matter generates a special subjectivity not unlike that of the oppressed human being." But of course the very act of narration and the adventures themselves "subvert the oppression of being treated like an object rather than a subject" and invite the reader to identify with this inanimate Other (24). Kuznets sees Hitty's history as "basically a subversive act with feminist implications," resting in her reversal of the proprietary human gaze. Hitty, of course, is not a threatening object; she is too much the lady, and her weapons are merely irony and ambiguity. Yet she is made, as she herself notes with some complacency, of durable mountain-ash wood, and Kuznets proposes boldly that for child readers she might represent a figure of power offering strength beyond the merely human and situated in a position to gaze at human life with something of the amused equanimity of the pagan gods. Kuznets contends: that animated toys in literature have often served to represent "not only human hopes, needs, and desires but human anxieties and terrors as well" (2). A particularly strong section of her book deals with the way they have been used to "embody human anxiety about what it means to be 'real'—an independent subject or self" (2). Her chapter "Coming Out in Flesh and Blood" examines The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), Pinocchio, and E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Nutcracker and the Mouse King" (1816), each of which discusses the coming alive of toys and also depicts "a young male at a level of human development where physical and emotional instability test his sense of being or becoming 'real'" (60). She notices the violence and pain in all these stories about the complicated process of growing up, observing that they "resonate with the suffering, confusion, and release of psychic energy that dominate the process of coming to feel independently real, a subject rather than an object" (75). Violence and brutality might seem inevitably linked with war toys, and yet, as Kuznets observes in her analyses of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" (1838), Lynne Reid Banks's The Indian in the Cupboard (1980), and Pauline Clarke's The Return of the Twelves (1962), tales about children and toy combatants tend to stress not the power or dangerousness of the figures, but their vulnerability. Kuznets quotes G. K. Chesterton on Andersen's soldier: "the dignity of the fighter...
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