On Children’s Books, Home, and the Beginnings of Self: Tell Me a Mitzi and Little Boy Brown

ABSTRACT

By highlighting two classic children’s books in which the setting of New York City plays a starring role, Tell Me a Mitzi and Little Boy Brown, this essay explores ways in which childhood reading expands a young person’s nascent and burgeoning sense of self in part by elaborating the notion of home. Books such as those described here stand to enable young children to develop flexible ideas about the nature of home and to imagine what it feels like to live elsewhere and differently.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s books
• sense of self
• home
• secrets

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See “Children’s Rooms, Sites of Refuge, and Being Lost” in Ellen Handler Spitz, The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood, 2006, pp. 132–141.

² See “Art without History” in Ellen Handler Spitz, Image and Insight: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Arts, 1991. New York: Columbia University Press.

³ See Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education, 1960 (Harvard University Press) and Thomas Balmès, Bébés (documentary film, 2010).

⁴ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1964. Translated from the French by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

⁵ In A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, 2018, eds., Maria Popova and Claudia Zoe Bedrick, see pp. 190–191.

⁶ Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, 1963. New York: Harper and Row.

⁷ Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, 1972. New York: Simon and Schuster.

⁸ Lore Segal, Tell Me a Mitzi, 1970. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. See also my “Mitzi is Back. Tell Me a Lore.” Fuse#8, ed., Elizabeth Bird, March 9, 2018 (online), on which I draw in the current essay.

⁹ Lore Segal, Other People’s Houses, 1964. New York: The New Press.

¹⁰ See D.W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object” in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1969, No. 50, pp. 711–716.

¹¹ See Selma H. Fraiberg’s eternally brilliant The Magic Years, 1959. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

¹² See Fraiberg again, as in supra, note #x.

¹³ Ernst Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, 1963.

¹⁴ Isobel Harris, Little Boy Brown, 2013. New York: Enchanted Lion Books. Originally published in 1949, Philadelphia: Lippincott.

¹⁵ My host was the University of the South; the convener was Dr. Linda Mayes of the Child Study Center, Yale University, who originated an ongoing interdisciplinary program to study life in rural Appalachia.

¹⁶ See my Inside Picture Books, 1999, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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Notes on contributors

Ellen Handler Spitz

Ellen Handler Spitz, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale University, Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and Member of the Council of Scholars at the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center. She is the author of seven books: Art and Psyche, Image and Insight, Museums of the Mind, Inside Picture Books, The Brightening Glance, Illuminating Childhood, and Magritte’s Labyrinth, and she has published in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, among others.