YOUR ROOM OR MINE? SPATIAL POLITICS IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Abstract

There is an expectation that the home in children's literature will be a sanctuary; a place of safety that can always be returned to, a place of love and warmth. Certainly, this is the image several presentations of the home in children's literature evoke. But by looking more closely at the construction of spaces in these homes I demonstrate that the home is actually a site of surveillance in which the child as the object of the adult gaze is in fact pushed to the margins of the family. The place of the child in the home in children's literature parallels the place of the child in the text; the child appears central and yet a closer examination reveals that it is the adults who are empowered. This paper examines the place of the child in the home in general; it incorporates a brief history of domestic space and then goes on to relate this to the presentation of space in children's literature. I refer to a wide range of primary texts in order to show the consistent patterns of the relationships between adults, children, spaces and power in children's literature from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.