From Mulberry Street to Market Street: childness matters

In 2016, Last Stop on Market Street, an American picturebook by Matt de la Pena, won the Newberry Medal, a Caldecott Honor, and a Coretta Scott King illustrator honor. In March 2021, Dr Seuss Enterprises, after working “with a panel of experts, including educators,” decided to cease publishing And to Think I Saw in on Mulberry Street (1937) along with five other books that “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” Both decisions seem to have been motivated by a strong commitment to a contemporary critical multicultural perspective (Yenika-Agbaw, 2022). In this paper, I will explore another perspective through which we might assess the quality and potential impact these and other texts might have on child readers. Drawing on Peter Hollindale’s (1997) contention that a children’s book acts as the vehicle for a reading event during which readers form or reform their ideas of the social construction of childhood and their place within that construction, I will examine how these books portray “childness,” defined by Hollindale as both a distinguishing property of a text and what a reader brings to the reading. As these texts offer snapshots of what it means to be a child in two different times and contexts, I argue that the constructions of childhood in children’s books have changed significantly in the twenty-first century. I will use multimodal discourse analysis and critical content analysis to query the degree to which these texts are “childly” (a term of respect for Hollindale, as opposed to childish) by focusing on notions of the imagination, diverse representation, and adult/child relations.

In 1937, Theodor Seuss Geisel published his first book for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.The picturebook features the experience of a young boy on his short trip home from school along the familiar streets of his town.In 2015, Matt de la Peña published Last Stop on Market Street.Like Mulberry Street, Market Street focuses on a young boy's experiences during a short, familiar trip across town, and both books explore the theme, at least in part, of how imagination can trump reality.Both books feature the relationship between a boy and his adult carer; both feature the children speaking in their own voices and dialects; and both books were reviewed very positively by professional (adult) reviewers when they were published.In fact, Market Street, illustrated by Christian Robinson, won the 2016 Newberry Medal, a Caldecott Honor, and a Coretta Scott King illustrator honor.As it is a picturebook, the Caldecott and King honors sparked no real surprises, but the Newberry award was unexpected.Market Street was the first picturebook to win the Newberry, which has historically been awarded to prose novels or narrative nonfiction for independent readers between the ages of eight and twelve.Seuss's book, however, has not fared so well in recent years.In March 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, after working "with a panel of experts, including educators," decided to cease publishing And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, along with five other books that "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."Both the decisions of the publisher and the awards committees seem to have been motivated by a strong commitment to a contemporary critical multicultural perspective, as one of Market Street's most lauded qualities in published reviews has been its positive visual depiction of an intercultural, intergenerational urban community.At any rate, both decisions have sparked conversation within academic circles and on social media in an era when we are actively, collectively, and on a global scale seeking to reexamine the ethics and effects of human action and interaction with other humans and the environment, to identify causes and imagine new cures for social inequalities.
As vehicles for moral instruction as well as aesthetic delight, children's literature has always played a key role in shaping attitudes about what matters, at least to their elders, in a particular time and place.Clearly, these attitudes change over time.As snapshots of how children and adults engage with their real and imaginary environs in different times and social circumstances, I would suggest that these two texts and their critical reception thus offer an opportunity to consider what matters most to adult readers, writers, and critics now about children, intergenerational relationships, and representation in children's literature.In what follows, I will explore various perspectives through which we can make sense of both the books themselves and their reception, starting from the premise that our responses to children's books vary according to our beliefs about what Hollindale (1997) has theorized as "childness."

Childness and the critical reader
Hollindale contends that a children's book acts as the vehicle for a reading event during which readers form or reform their ideas of the social construction of childhood.The degree of childness in any given text is thus evident for both children and adult readers; that is, childness is a quality inherent in a text.However, a reading event will be experienced differently depending on whether a reader is a child or an adult.For this self-perception, Hollindale gives a great deal of latitude: "A child is someone who believes on good grounds that his or her condition of childhood is not over yet" (Hollindale, 1997, p. 30), but he does indicate that there are social constraints on that belief: For the child, childness is composed of the developing sense of self in interaction with the images of childhood encountered in the world… For the adult, childness is composed of a grown-up's memories of childhood, of meaningful continuity between child and adult self, of the varied behaviors associated with being a child, and the sense of what is appropriate behavior for a given age, of behavioral standards, deals, expectations and hopes invested in the child as child.… This compound of cultural and personal attitudes is articulated in a text of children 's literature. (p. 49) On those grounds, we can argue that some texts are more "childly" than others, but we need to recognize how our positionality as adults will assuredly color our evaluations of a text.Childly is an old term Hollindale wishes to reclaim for its positive valence as opposed to the negative connotations of "childish"; as terms of art, childly situates the qualities of childness as recognizably different from the qualities a reader might associate with adultness, but in no way deficient or wholly other.He is critical about what he sees as the dangers of texts which are ostensibly written by adults for children but that may harm their developing sense of self by misrepresenting, in some vital sense, the expectations and aspirations children may have of and for themselves.As Clementine Beauvais (2019, p.2) warns in her introduction to a special issue of Children's Literature in Education devoted to Hollindale's work, adult readers and writers need to beware of romanticizing childhood reading and children themselves, as "entertaining such visions contributes directly and indirectly to the territorialization of childhood for the fantasies of more or less hidden adults (Nodelman, 2008), engaged in strengthening the normativity of adulthood (Nikolajeva, 2010)."Beauvais (2019, p.3) glosses the concept this way: "Where childness is different from childhood as a concept is that it is fundamentally a self-concept, experiential, lived from the inside; it characterises some degree of metacognition, though not necessarily consciously articulated, about childhood as a defining feature of the self.It is childhood looking at itself; taking itself as an object of interest; recognising itself."A truly "childly" text, then, is one that meets a child with the right degree of familiarity and challenge that respects a childly way of thinking without condescension, ridicule, or sentimentality.Most of all, it engages a child's "excited imaginative concentration" the quality that so impressed Hollindale when he caught sight of a picture of a child reading (Hollindale, 2011, p.13).

The texts and ways to read them
As adult readers, writers, educators, and critics, we need to be metacognitively aware of the ideas and ideals of childhood and children's literature because they frame not only our personal responses but also our research questions.I would also argue that being aware of our own perspectives enables us to be more sensitive and receptive to evaluations we do not share.I can, for instance, understand why the panel of experts objected to the representation of a person from China in And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.But I can also argue in favor of the book's appeal, longevity, and value as a multimodal aesthetic object that honors important aspects of childness that I do not find in Last Stop on Market Street.I can understand the sociocultural importance Patricia Enciso (2016) attributes to Last Stop on Market Street in her review for De Colores: The Raza Experience in Books for Children.In that review, she ably demonstrates how the book encourages readers to ask new and important questions when evaluating diverse literature.But while I concede the validity of these reasons for her warm enthusiasm for the book, I do not agree with her assessments of it as "a stunning contribution to the legacy and future of book art and storytelling for children."More importantly, I have some grave concerns about how a young child might transact with the author's representation of childness in the course of a reading event.In this section, then, I propose that we take a comparative approach to these two books under three different paradigms: as multimodal aesthetic objects, as sociocultural interventions, and as transactions that stage childness.

Multimodal aesthetic objects
As noted, the two texts I am comparing here have several similarities at the narratological level, but they also have aesthetically salient differences.Geisel's story features a White boy named Marco walking home alone from school.His father has admonished him to notice things along the way but offers a stern warning not to make things up.Marco has a very active imagination, though, and because the only thing he sees is an ordinary horse and wagon during his walk, he deploys his storytelling skills to create a cumulative tale that becomes increasingly complex and is supported by visual scenes becoming increasingly chaotic.The end papers, illustrated in monochrome blue against a white background, feature a diminutive Marco positioned in the lower left quadrant of the page in an unstable squatting position, knees bent, holding a large book, and facing right.The dominant objects in the opening are two huge banks of low-lying but lofty clouds shot through with horizontal lines that extend across the entire opening.That the street sign behind Marco leans to the left suggests that these lines represent a powerful wind.As a visual metaphor, the looming clouds blowing him and the sign backward might suggest an obstacle, but Marco is smiling, with a hand on his chin in a thinking pose and one foot slightly elevated, perhaps to indicate that he is poised to move forward.The sense, then, is that he is excited about entering the cloudscape.
The story proper begins with the third opening; here, Marco is wearing a red shirt and socks with blue shorts and carrying a red book.He is positioned in a walking pose in the lower right of the recto, under the words, and this time, the only cloud shape is behind him, indicating that he is moving forward quickly along an invisible road.The next opening shows a yellow horse and red wagon in the middle third of the recto against a plain white background.The eyes of both horse and driver are shaped like u's and there are no puffs of cloud under their feet or behind them.The cart itself holds three potted plants which are perfectly upright.These visual details are important as they imply the sense of slowness and complacency that Marco finds boring.As he reimagines the scene, progressively replacing the horse with a yellow-and-black zebra, a red reindeer with yellow antlers, and a blue elephant, and the cart with a chariot, and then a sleigh, the pictures become larger until they cross the gutter of the opening and force the words into couplets above and below the images to make room for the change.In addition, the clouds and motion lines following the conveyances become larger as well, and the vehicles and animals are going so fast that they no longer have contact with the lines that indicate the ground.In other words, as the story grows in Marco's imagination, so the pictures grow larger on the page.In addition, when Marco feels the need for an addition, the pace of the rhymed text slows down, with shorter lines and ellipses to indicate thinking pauses.The footstep-mimicking refrain that signals momentary satisfaction with his creation-"And that is a story that no one can beat,/ When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street."-repeatswith a difference at every escalation: "no one" becomes "no one" and finally "NO ONE." A single visual rest occurs when Marco reaches the crossroads of Mulberry and Bliss; the imaginary figures all disappear and are replaced by a large yellow street sign with blue accents positioned diagonally on a white background.However, Bliss Street is indicated by widely spaced diagonal lines moving from the bottom left to the top right of the opening; Marco (and the reader) might need a breather, but his story is by no means finished.Additions continue, with hordes of band members, policemen, and town officials who are grouped by types that share the same caricatured features, until by the 1 3 end of Marco's walk there is very little space on the pages that is not crowded with people, animals, and modes of transportation.In the penultimate opening, however, when Marco is about to meet his father at home, everything but a very excited Marco has disappeared.His exuberance is visually metaphorized by the illustration of him facing right in a running stance, trailing motion lines and a puff of smoke as he mounts a flight of stairs without touching them.The text of his speech is in all caps and punctuated by exclamation points until he is met with his father's look of disapproval, at which point the initial picture of the horse and cart, accompanied by a simple couplet acknowledging what Marco really saw rather than what he imagined, is repeated, the image a little smaller and a little further down the page than at the beginning.
As a multimodal object, Seuss's book successfully combines image and text to communicate the theme that what a child can imagine is fuller and much more interesting than ordinary reality.The colors as well as the caricatured images highlight the imaginary status of the human and nonhuman participants, while the compositions and rhyming text stage an affect that moves deftly between thoughtfulness, mounting excitement, and resignation.While the father is off-stage, as it were, his voice begins and ends the text with reported and direct speech to introduce conflict and showcase how Marco manages a contained form of resistance.In short, despite some problems that we will address later, this book works, aesthetically speaking, to entertain children while subtly but effectively conveying practical messages such as how to deal with existential boredom and how to navigate adult restrictions without losing one's autonomy or being openly defiant.
How effectively, then, does Market Street use the multimodal affordances of its form, and what messages are conveyed thereby?The main character, a young Black child named CJ, under some obvious duress, accompanies his Nana as they travel from their church to a soup kitchen on a city bus and then a short walk through an urban neighborhood.Throughout the journey, CJ asks questions about his circumstances: why do they have to wait for the bus in the rain; why do they not have a car; why cannot he play with his friends after church, etc. Nana responds with attempts to engage his imagination and redirect his thinking toward the positive aspects of those circumstances, but CJ is skeptical except for when he closes his eyes and imagines a scene very different from his present environment.Unlike the depiction of Marco's imaginative story that grows throughout the book, CJ's flight of fancy is a limited to a single moment after which his questioning stance returns.In the end, however, narrative closure occurs when both boys accede to their adults' actual or implied demands.
From an aesthetic point of view, the differences from Mulberry Street in narrative style and visual depiction of characters, setting, and a child's inner world are certainly evident.The most obvious difference is of course the language, with Mulberry Street written in Seuss's signature rhyme throughout (though the scansion is occasionally off), and Market Street featuring only two rhyming couplets that appear somewhat accidental.While Seuss's text includes the voice of Marco's father at the beginning and the end, the rest of the narration belongs to Marco himself; de la Peña uses a combination of call-and-response between CJ and his Nana, direct speech from other characters, third person narration, and free indirect discourse focalized through CJ.The latter two techniques are sometimes blurred; for instance, despite Nana's championing of the bus as a better alternative than a car, the bus itself "creaked," "sighed," and "sagged" when it stopped to pick them up, the narration seeming to share CJ's perspective of its inferiority.At one point, however, the narration itself is confusing.Unlike Seuss's story, where each escalation is easy to track through both words and image, the pronoun "their" on opening fourteen refers to specific people not mentioned after opening seven, making it feel as though one has missed a page where they had been reintroduced.Such a reintroduction of these people as particular friends of CJ's would have helped close the gap between his lingering sense of disgruntlement on the previous page, subtly indicated by the bus full of new friends that is now "out of sight," the "broken streetlamps" and the rather ominous-sounding "stray-cat shadows moving across the wall," and his change of heart to gladness upon seeing them.
Visually, CJ shares nearly every page with his Nana as they traverse a city peopled with figures that, while not strictly realistic, are not caricatured or uniform as they are in Mulberry Street.Importantly for the book's messaging, they feature different skin tones, body shapes, hair and eye color, and clothing styles.Enciso (2016) notes how the implied vectors between the people create visual metaphors of connection: "Eyes meet, hands touch, bodies tilt forward, lean over, straighten up, respond.The rhythm of people making room for one another and attending to one another animates every scene," all of which is important for conveying the theme of the importance of social interaction and care.Robinson also fills in relevant visual details of the setting to enable readers to see something of CJ's real world on the journey in addition to what he sees when he is finally able to use his imagination as Nana has instructed him.The illustrations alternate between full bleeds and inset images to focus attention on important spatial elements of the various scenes; the linearity of a city block dominated by tall structures, for instance, dwarfs and separates the human participants, which the intimacy of the bus's interior foregrounds their close interactions.Interestingly, the streets and sidewalks are bright white spaces with no shadows except when Nana and CJ are walking to the bus stop in the rain, where the surface under their feet is a soft gray and puddles reflect the bright colors of Nana's umbrella and CJ's clothing.This may indicate that the illustrations are meant to be more atmospherically suggestive than realistic; however, such color-indicated atmospherics do not rhyme consistently with each other or support the words throughout the book.Nonetheless, the fully saturated, high-contrast colors on individual pages are bold and captivating.Parravano (2015), writing in anticipation of the Caldecott awards about what might make this book a contender, notes, "The colors sing, with eye-catching blocks of color throughout, all in perfect accord with one another."She agrees with the Hornbook reviewer that the art hearkens back to that of Ezra Jack Keats; naïve images created with a mix of paint and collage keep the shapes of both figures and objects tidily distinct.
In fact, such tidiness of line and shape constitutes something of a broken link between word and image.Perhaps more importantly for an analysis of the book's effectiveness as a multimodal aesthetic object, there are both mismatches and continuity errors.For instance, while Robinson does provide some indicators of urban decay in the final street scenes, the illustrations of the neighborhood through which Nana and CJ pass do not seem to match CJ's observation that "it's always so dirty over here."The graffiti is minimal, there are no depictions of litter or grunge, and the bright white street upon which they are walking all seem to negate or at least challenge the veracity of CJ's utterance.Even the overloaded trolley (presumably meant to hint at its owner's homeless state?) is so abstractly and tidily rendered as to offer the possibility that he has just been shopping.The one commercial sign on the wall, "BATH AND SHOWER" could just as easily indicate a showroom as a shelter.Nor do the illustrations match the narration of "broken streetlamps still lit up bright and the stray-cat shadows moving across the wall."This mismatch is confusing considering that the action is taking place in the middle of the day and there are no cats or streetlamps in the picture.Other mismatches are notable for their departure from the reality of living with a disability.Robinson's depiction of a diverse cityscape can be credited for including two people in wheelchairs, a woman on the bus whose butterflies in a jar may indicate some kind of neurodiversity, and a blind man.Parravano (2015) queries, however, why able-bodied Nana and CJ are sitting on seats designated for people with disabilities and why the blind man has both a cane and a service dog, noting that the former seems out of character for "thoughtful Nana," and the latter is simply not credible.She points out that though the harness indicates that the dog is in fact intended to be a service animal, blind people do not use both a cane and a dog for practical reasons, and a service animal would not roam about on the bus as this dog definitely does.
Beyond mismatches between word and image, continuity errors in the illustrations abound once a reader starts to notice them.For instance, Parravano (2015) notes that Nana's knitting appears out of nowhere.As someone who carries her knitting projects with her, I would have to agree with Parravano that Nana's purse is too small for the project she is knitting on the bus.However, once readers notice this, they may also note that her purse appears and disappears; she is either knitting or she has her purse until both are evident on the last page as she and CJ wait for the bus to go home.And while her hands and lap are shown when she is clapping for the guitar player, neither knitting nor purse is depicted.The colors of a passenger's skirt, while consistent on the bus, are different than the one she was wearing before she boarded.The fence in the first opening that depicts Nana and CJ walking toward the soup kitchen has barbed wire on top; it is no longer there on the next page as they walk past it.In the same sequence of openings, the sky above and around a shorter building is bright white in the first image and cloudy gray with a rainbow in the second.To be fair, this latter discontinuity could be read as metaphorical for CJ's change in perspective; in the initial scene where the sky is white, the accompanying words are "She smiled and pointed to the sky," suggesting that the rainbow is there, but neither CJ nor a reader can see it until they use their imagination or turn the page.
Such details may seem overly picky, but they do matter from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis as they detract from the overall experience of the picturebook as an ecological whole.Deliberate mismatches between words and images can be successfully deployed to indicate irony and other forms of complexity.However, the narrative arc of this book is so clearly intended to shepherd character and reader toward a unified statement of seeing beyond one's present desires and serving others less fortunate than oneself that any irony or even complex affect in the conveyance of this message appears unintentional.

Sociocultural artifacts
While Mulberry Street may be more successful than Market Street as a multimodal aesthetic object, de la Peña clearly has much more to offer as a sociocultural artifact.In her glowing review, Enciso (2016) offers the following set of questions inspired by ones asked by CJ.For our purposes here, they draw attention to both the merits of Market Street and the limits or outright failures of Mulberry Street, but I would suggest that they are also incredibly useful when we evaluate and critique any children's book published in any era for its sociopolitical content.
• How is difference constructed, and what does it mean for a character's belonging inan unequal world?• How is material wealth acknowledged or taken for granted in a story, especially at a time of extreme poverty for fully a third of the children living in the USA? • How are characters' lives and perspectives interrelated and interdependent?How are these interconnections shown in text and image?
• How and by whom are perceptions of difference transformed, and with what implications for future relations?• How are disparities in the funding and support of community infrastructures acknowledged?Are inequities seen to have a material effect on children's opportunities to explore and become their fullest selves?
The figure drawings in Mulberry Street suggest a remarkable degree of homogeneity among the adult males; the only differences evident are facial hair and clothing, and the clothing groups the men according to occupation.The minimal facial details should, following Scott McCloud's (1993) logic, encourage a high degree of reader identification, but because they are exactly and only what they do, they function more as ideas rather than possible people.One could argue that the spatial arrangement and costuming indicate a hierarchical class structure, as the politicians don formal wear and perch high above the others, and there are some slight variations in age and portliness.However, their mass representation presents problems for the idea of difference in general; indeed, the book is emblematic of what Larrick (1965, p. 63) famously called out as the "all-white world of children's books," except for two stereotyped images: the man from China and the Rajah.There are neither other people of color, nor are there any women.A few years after Larrick's article, media critic Gerbner (1972, p. 43) made the claim that "representation in the fictional world signifies social existence, (therefore) absence means symbolic annihilation."But the mere presence of a representation has never been enough because representation is a double-edged sword.That is, representation in books and other media may signify social existence, but it also confers and reinforces somatic norms.If we accept the premise that in an image-saturated culture "children need to see themselves in books," then the representations they see of themselves and people who share their physical attributes must be positive or at least not stereotypical or normalized in negative or derogatory ways.Seuss's response to critics in 1978 was to change the word Chinaman to Chinese man and remove the yellow skin tone and the ponytail from the image.The slanted eyes, however, remained, indicated by a short diagonal line, and are markedly different from any other eyes in the book.For all of the other human characters, Seuss uses dots for open eyes and "u's" for closed eyes or to imply a kind of self-satisfied contentment; animal characters either have plain "u's" or "u's" enclosed by larger white circles.He refused, however, to address the sexist claim of Marco that "even Jane could think of" a story that contained a reindeer and a sleigh, and therefore such a story was hackneyed and inferior.
While Robinson also works with minimally rendered faces, he manages to tease out differences to create a remarkably diverse array of characters in Market Street.His pin-dot eyes come in different colors, for instance, and some characters wear glasses.Skin tones exhibit a wide variety of shades, as does hair color, though Nana is the only character with consistently grayish-white hair (the visible hair on the "old woman with curlers" is a different shade in each of the scenes in which she appears).Nearly all of the city folks are quite thin, but they are of different heights, and some have lines on their faces to indicate age.Even casual readers will get the impression that these are individuals, and that their differences, while important, do not impede their coming together as a community.
When we move to Enciso's other questions, however, some of the somatic norms in Robinson's illustrations merit more critical discussion.The only people in business attire or who have a car, for instance, are White.The only heavy-set woman is Black, as is the bus driver, and the tattooed White man with the shaved head never looks away from his phone.Perhaps these representations are what have led some readers on online review sites to object to the romanticization of poverty in Market Street.It is notable that nearly all the folks lining up and then eating at the soup kitchen, including the dog, are smiling and several are waving at each other, implying that accessing a food bank is more of a lifestyle choice than an indicator of economic injustice.There is also an implied conservatism in the book as Nana responds to CJ's wishes for a car and an iPod, for instance, by encouraging him to accept things as they are and see the good in the status quo.
Perhaps more subtly important for considering both books from a sociopolitical perspective, however, is that the relationships between the children and their carers can be read as quite conservative in the contemporary political sense of that word.Marco's father is authoritarian, and as such, he is Marco's antagonist.He expects a factual report, not a story, and Marco is shamed into compliance.We might even infer that Marco's relentless, competitive desire to craft "a story that no one can beat" is reflective of his father's ambitions for his son's worldly success; they just have different ideas about how that success will come about.By contrast, we do not need to infer anything beyond what the text of Market Street gives us: Nana has complete control over CJ's time and activities, and actively seeks to direct and control his thought life as well.Nana does not acknowledge or validate the desires CJ expresses through his questions, but instead responds to his real questions with rhetorical ones, several of which beginning with the belittling address "boy," that imply his wishes are illegitimate, wrong-headed, and selfish.Her words are dismissive, her actions authoritarian; she "made sure" CJ greets everyone on the bus politely and indicates with a meaningful look that he must give his coin gifted to him by the bus driver to the guitar player.And CJ, like Marco, gets it-by the end of the story, CJ is so cowed that he thinks his Nana will laugh at him for expressing his feelings, but of course she does not because he is expressing exactly what she wants him to think and feel.As a result, this narrative and character arc has led some readers on online review sites to view Market Street as a good book to use in Christian Sunday schools; others recognize it, for better or worse, as a sermon disguised as a picturebook.But the celebratory embrace of this book based on its visually diverse representation may point to an inherent contradiction when secular progressives decry similarly authoritarian messages in overtly religious literature for children.In other words, sermonic texts that treat children as morally deficient and in need of reform are acceptable as long as they avoid explicit references to religion, feature underrepresented characters, and highlight secular responses to sociopolitical issues.

Signs of childness in Mulberry Street and Market Street
The stance I have just articulated has resulted in a "new didacticism" in children's literature publishing and criticism.Given the zeal with which many readers and critics are willing to elevate currently fashionable messages above aesthetic quality or deeper structural issues, I have taken to calling the motivation behind it "hipster piety."Because hipster piety denies absolute or universal truths about children and childhood, approved content and critical frameworks for children's texts are a moving target, subject to whatever beliefs are trending about what it means to be ethical in our relations with the environment and with other human beings.Unfortunately, we currently seem to take it on faith that visual images matter so much to the formation of children's and adult's attitudes toward somatic differences and historical figures that we have in some instances resurrected a secular version of the iconophobia of the Second English Reformation; rather than critique or revise an image, or trust children to do so, it is better to remove it from sight altogether.Certainly, pictorial images are powerful, but they are not the only means by which we construct a sense of who we are, who and what we revile and reject, and who we ultimately aspire to be.As Hollindale notes, our images of childness are drawn from both personal and cultural inputs, and we do not just receive them; rather we transact with them in a reading event.
In my own first reading of Market Street in 2015, I was immediately bothered by the way the book, not the characters, treated the idea of CJ's childness.My initial reaction was that this was a book that showed an active dislike for childly ways of thinking.I found Nana rigid, mean, and condescending.Most of all, I wanted Nana to respect and acknowledge CJ's concerns and really answer his questions before encouraging him to see things differently.I was especially put off by her response to his question about why the man could not see.In my mind's ear, I heard her retort, "Boy, what do you know about seeing?", delivered in a sharp tone that covered her own embarrassment about his honest curiosity.By that time in my personal life, I had experience soothing parents' embarrassment when their children stared or asked questions about my elder daughter's disability, so I am sure that was at least partially why I heard Nana's response the way I did.In addition, I had another child who was a highly imaginative storyteller, so I really bristled at the idea that Nana was represented as having a better imagination than CJ.One time through, and I did not give the book further thought until it won the Newberry, at which point I was both puzzled by and disappointed with the committee's decision.When the news broke about Dr. Seuss Enterprises retiring five books, I was not surprised, but I was curious to see why each book was on the list as I had not read any of them in a long time.When I reread Mulberry Street, I was struck by the respect afforded Marco as a storyteller.Perhaps it was the similarity of the titular street names, or perhaps it was the celebration of a child's imagination, but I remember thinking at the time, "wow, we have come a long way from Mulberry Street to Market Street!"When it came time to present a paper at the symposium on "Stories that matter: the matter of stories" at UniSA, I realized that this would be the perfect time to critically analyze what was behind my transactions with these two picturebooks.After much thought, I realized that the key difference in my responses lies in the two books' very different ideas about childness.
Despite the fact that Marco is White and CJ is Black, they are both fictional children who represent to some degree what it means to be a child in the views of their authors, just as Marco's father and CJ's Nana represent adult humans.In both books, the adults attempt to exercise control over the children's imaginations.They each want their children to carefully observe the world around them, but whereas Marco's father mistrusts and wishes to curb Marco's flights of fancy, Nana wants to encourage CJ to be more imaginative.While we might be on Nana's side in this, we must look a bit more closely at what and who are portrayed as the source and direction of the imagination-that is, for Seuss, Marco comes pre-wired with the ability and the desire to imagine the world differently.For de la Peña, CJ needs his grandmother to teach him how and what to imagine; in fact, it is clear that CJ's not very good at it at first since he cannot see the tree drinking from a straw as instructed.Enjoined by his father to keep his eyelids up, we can presume that Marco never closes his eyes as he is walking home.CJ, on the other hand, is instructed by his Nana and the blind man to close his eyes.When he eventually does use his imagination, the illustration shows him with eyes shut, but continues to use sight words to describe what he imagines through the vehicle of music: "In the darkness the rhythm lifted him out of the bus, out of the busy city."Unlike Marco, it does not lead him to conjure fantastic, exaggerated, comical people and situations, but instead to imagine the freedom he associates with real, natural places: the seashore and the sky where birds and captured butterflies fly free.Whereas Marco imagines noise, excitement, and controlled chaos because he experiences his world as too mundane and sedate, CJ imagines freedom and a sense of peaceful plenitude in nature and within himself.
Marco's father is not only his antagonist, but the antagonist of imagination and fiction itself.In his way, then, Marco understands more about what is worth narrating than his father does.But what about Nana?CJ wants to know why his reality is the way it is.Instead of answering his questions in a straightforward way, Nana tells him his questions are not worth asking.So whereas Marco learns that he just needs to keep his fanciful ideas to himself in order to avoid being shamed, CJ learns that his way of seeing the world and his desires are wrong.The constructions of childhood in these books are thus very different.The constructions of adults, however, are oddly similar.Whereas Nana seems to value imagination, she is keen to deny CJ's childness-that is, his desire to play, his acquisitiveness, his sense of the unfairness of the world, his longing for freedom-whenever it conflicts with her sense of responsible behavior and adult quietude.Her attempts to channel his imagination keep CJ focused on how it can help him move past his dissatisfaction with his real world.Marco's father is similarly anxious to keep Marco focused on what it real and present rather than what might be different.
Both adults seem to have a deep distrust and even disdain for childly thinking, but in the end, Marco does have more autonomy.He is the source of his own imagination, and he does not have to change his attitude toward the mundanity of the world to conform to his father's wishes; he just has to keep quiet about his inner world.In the reading event, then, it seems to me that the childness of Seuss's text lies in Marco's heroic or aspirational defiance of adult norms, restrictions, and power, while de la Peña offers in CJ a model of someone with whom children might identify in his beleaguered, puzzled state, and whom they know they should admire in the end, but really do not, simply because they do not recognize their own childness in his final acquiescence.
I admit to being a bit gloomy about the return of the sermon masquerading as a picturebook that requires children to face up to some dismal feature of present reality and then guilts them into changing their perspective rather than conceiving of actions they might take against it.Is it going too far to posit that in Mulberry Street, the focus is on recognizing and enjoying the child's autonomous, rebellious imagination, whereas in Market Street, the focus is on the adult's responsibility to channel the child's imagination, to see imagination only as a way to escape rather than to find a way to change an unsatisfactory reality?A cynical view might even posit that the Last Stop on Market Street is aptly named in at least two ways: its adult-centric view and timely social justice message, more than its aesthetic qualities, enabled its awards, which in turn secured global publication and distribution as well as profits and guarantees of future work for its creators, while its romanticized view of diverse folks happily dining in a soup kitchen flattens more than awakens the appetite for genuine social justice.One of my students, who teaches in a mostly White rural district, assures me that her students responded very well to this book; that it reconfigured their ideas of what life in a city is really like.I wonder, however, if other children, with other kinds of experience, would recognize childhood looking at itself in this book or whether they would see themselves more clearly in the imaginative, rebellious childness of Seuss's vision.In the end, would those who consider that their childhood is not over yet prefer taking a trip from Mulberry to Bliss rather than getting off on the Last Stop on Market Street?