"I double never ever never lie to my chil'ren": inside people in Virginia Hamilton's narratives.

Virginia Hamilton is the most important author currently writing for children in the United States.(1) The point is perhaps an arguable one, but I think few critics of children's literature would deny Hamilton's significance as an international author of children's books. Winner of the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal, presented by the International Board on Books for Young People based in Switzerland that is the field's equivalent of the Nobel, Hamilton has written more than twenty books for children since her first novel, Zeely, was published in 1967. She has a distinct style, one that is poetic, intricate, and political; indeed, all of her books are informed by her commitment to racial issues. She acknowledges that she began writing "at the time of 'Black is Beautiful' on through black power and throughout the Malcolm X time and all the disasters that befell this country" (Mikkelsen, "Conversation" 396), so her books resonate with her awareness of the centrality of African American culture to American history.

One of the most powerful recurring issues in the Hamilton canon that demonstrates this awareness is her emphasis on the social effects of inclusion and exclusion on people. For example, in Plain City, an African American girl who lives in her family's commune on the edge of town refers to herself as being "outside" to designate her otherness (15). Once the girl accepts what Mae Henderson would call the "plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of her subjectivity" (18), she comes to take pride in her family's uniqueness. She then proudly proclaims herself an "outside child," enjoying the double entendre of being someone who loves to be outdoors and one who also celebrates the difference of her otherness (169). When Hamilton depicts marginalized people transforming their otherness or "outsideness" into "insideness," she demonstrates their power to define their own position in life, and in the process she destabilizes the very concepts of inclusion and exclusion.

Hamilton's focus on the social effects of inclusions and exclusions also operates on a narrative level. Her interest in who is inside and who is outside of any given narrative leads her to develop a richly structured system of narrators, narratives, and narratees that asks us to question boundaries that have traditionally been used to demarcate otherness: boundaries between races, between genders, and between children and adults.(2) The result is a series of texts whose narrative structures paradigmatically interrogate racial identity, feminism, and the very definition of children's literature.

Two novels about girls who are storytellers most poignantly demonstrate Hamilton's ongoing concern with narrative stance and its effect on the reader: Zeely (1967) and The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1983) both employ narrative structure to communicate ideological discourses of race, gender, and age to the implied reader.(3) I understand these two narratives best when I look at them through the combined lenses of a number of critical theories: narratology, Marxism, feminism, children's literature theory, and reader-response theory. Narrative theory suggests to me ways to investigate narrative distancing in these books as a thematic issue; Marxism, the very study of the socially dispossessed, makes me aware of exclusion as a lack of social power; feminism helps me perceive gender exclusions; children's literature theory sensitizes me to issues of ageism at work in the texts; and reader-response theory requires me to be aware of how the transaction among author, text, and reader can affect the narrative positioning of the reader. The perspective of these combined theories helps to explain the continuum of inclusions and exclusions at work in Zeely and The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, for the degree to which characters are included or excluded from positions of power in these novels is determined by at least three factors gender, race, and age - each of which affects the character's differing degrees of interiority within or exteriority from her community.

I would like to begin my analysis of Hamilton's novels with a review of the critical theories that best help me to understand the narrative shifts, the ideological complexities, and the construction of the reader in her texts. Gerard Genette, for one, has codified ways of investigating narrative position employed successfully by children's literature critics such as Len Hatfield in his study of Ursula K. Le Guin. Genette identifies "author-narrators," those with a concept of the entire narrative structure, as "extradiegetic" narrators (229). Interior narrators, those with knowledge of only a portion of the narration, he calls "intradiegetic" narrators.(4) Extradiegetic narrators are those who have a connection to the "public" in the way that they address their story to a reader who exists outside of their own story, but intradiegetic narrators are connected only to other characters within the narrative (Genette 227-37).(5) Narrators are thus defined by narrative distance; that is, by the amount of knowledge they have about the events they are narrating. Since possessing knowledge inevitably affects power relationships, narrative distance is a key factor in inclusion and exclusion.

Susan Lanser complicates Genette's system by noting differences between public and private narrators in feminist fictions: Extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators' voices differ when they address a public audience within the text or a public audience, like readers in general, from those times when they address an audience of one reader or one listener within a text. Lanser's distinction between private and public narrators stems from her investigation of the relationship between rhetorical complexity and narrative circumstance at work in women's writing (355). She points out how much of women's writing is private, in the form of diaries and letters, and how these issues of whom one is addressing complicate the whole notion of narrator and of narratee (352). Since children's literature is like women's literature at least in being about repressed people who hold little cultural power, it seems only natural that the issues of public vs. private voice also inform children's literature.(6)

But Virginia Hamilton's novels offer one more layer of complexity to Lanser's narrative paradigm, for the novels I discuss here are narrated by an extradiegetic, public child narrator who listens to and is challenged by at least one intradiegetic adult narrator. That is to say, narrative theory leads us to investigate how the public child's voice that controls most of the narration is in both novels greatly affected by the voice of at least one adult narrator who tells her a story either publically or privately. Most significantly, the adults' embedded narratives often carry the ideological burden of the story.

Peter Hollindale is one of a number of critics who has brought the concerns of Marxism to children's literature; he asks us to look at who in a children's text exists excluded from power. His definition of ideology contains little that is novel to those familiar with Marxist theory, but his classifications are among the most accessible to students of children's literature. Hollindale notes that ideology in children's literature is not "a political policy, ... it is a climate of belief" (19), and it can be expressed by the text either explicitly in the messages the author intends to communicate or passively through the author's "unexamined assumptions" (Hollindale 10-15).(7) Hollindale does not clarify the obvious point that a text can communicate its explicit ideology either directly or indirectly, but in reading Hamilton, the distinction is an important one because, while all of her novels communicate fairly direct, explicit ideologies about race, the novels' ideologies about gender tend to be embedded in more indirect communication. It is in the transaction between the public child narrator and the private adult narrator, however, that Hamilton's implicit ideologies become a central concern for the reader, for the private-voiced adult narrator is invariably the person who communicates directly to the child narrator that she must feel racial pride and indirectly that women can be strong. But the fact that these messages come from an adult (who, having access to power over the child, information the child cannot hold, and control over the child's life, functions as an "insider" representative of adult culture) for the purposes of instructing a child (who is an outsider by virtue of the powerlessness of being a child) creates an ideological tension that is the result of Hamilton's narrative structure.(8) At issue is the implied reader these ideologies create because they are pitched to specific audiences ostensibly in need of learning these lessons. Molly Abel Travis observes that, although we risk essentializing the implied reader when we institutionalize her or him according to identity politics, we can learn much from studying the tension created by this very essentialism (179). Identity politics such as those of race and gender are even further complicated when we add the essentialized concept of the child to the matrix of subject positions available to the reader of Hamilton's fiction.

I would like to turn now to Hamilton's novels themselves to demonstrate how the implied reader created by the transactions between narrative structure and ideology extends her concepts of inclusion and exclusion. From her very first novel, Hamilton has engaged this pattern. Zeely is narrated from a third-person-limited point of view through the eyes of a young storyteller named Elizabeth, a girl who prefers to isolate herself from other people so that she can tell herself her own stories. One of Elizabeth's first narrative creations is to bestow new names on herself and her brother while they are traveling by train to spend the summer on her uncle's farm. Elizabeth makes up a more elaborate story when she and her brother spend the night sleeping under the stars; she tells him to beware the Night Walkers who roam at night, and her ghost stories terrify him. But her most significant narrative creation occurs when she becomes enamored with a local pig-farmer, Zeely. At six foot six, Zeely is indeed an imposing woman: "Thin and deeply dark as a pole of Ceylon ebony[,] she wore a long smock that reached to her ankles.... Geeder couldn't say what expression she saw on Zeely's face. She knew only that it was calm, that it had pride in it, and that the face was the most beautiful she had ever seen" (31-32). Zeely, whose "eyes seemed to turn inward on themselves" (32), is clearly an outsider from this community that ostracizes her, but she has such a sense of self-possession that Elizabeth wants to be like her.

Elizabeth's desire for Zeely helps transform the woman into an insider, at least for the purposes of Hamilton's narrative. The transformation becomes most evident when Elizabeth decides that Zeely must be the queen of an African tribe, the Watutsis, because the girl has seen a photograph in National Geographic that looks like Zeely. Elizabeth generally has little to do with the children in the neighborhood, but when she needs them to serve as an audience for her narrative, she gathers them together to tell them the important truth she has discovered: Zeely is a queen. Zeely eventually asks to meet with Elizabeth so that they can discuss what the truth really is. The two meet in a glade in the forest, and Zeely wears traditional African robes to their assignation, initially seeming to confirm Elizabeth's version of reality. But during their meeting, Zeely tells Elizabeth two stories in an act of private, intradiegetic narration that sets the ideological tone of the novel.

The first story Zeely tells Elizabeth is an African creation myth. "In the beginning," the few people in the world were to wait for a courier to come tell them their "station in life" (98). One young woman's courier was an eight-foot tall man "with skin as black as the darkest tree bark. Oh, he made a striking figure against the ice and snow!" (100). Zeely tells Elizabeth that the man did not know he was unusual since no one was around to tell him that being eight feet tall was different, but he does eventually find the young woman for whom he carries a message from the gods. When they finally read the message the courier has carried for her, it says this:

Young woman, you are of this man. You shall wed him and keep his house and bear his sons. You will trek many moons before you find people like yourselves. When you find them, you will join them and be good subjects to your king and queen. (106)

The story is one of insiders and outsiders: The woman and the courier are both isolated until they come together and form a community. Only within a community can they find happiness, just as Elizabeth needs to learn to participate in her own community. Zeely then says that she is descended from this courier and his wife, but Elizabeth misses the point about accepting her place in life because she has been expecting to hear that Zeely's forebears were royalty, not that they were subjects to another king and queen. Elizabeth dismisses Zeely's myth as "only a story" and assures the woman that she knew Zeely was "special" even before she decided that Zeely was a queen (108).

In response to this, Zeely tells Elizabeth a second story, about a time when Zeely was a child who believed herself to be a queen. When she was a girl in Canada, Zeely enjoyed swimming at night. An elderly woman who was perhaps a witch, perhaps insane, or perhaps only pretending catches Zeely one night and tells her, "You are the night and I have caught you!" (112). Zeely watches the woman touch a rock with her stick that then turns into a turtle and a vine that turns into a snake. Zeely feels transformed by the moment; it is an empowering one for her. But Zeely's mother convinces her that, "since the woman was not quite right in her head, she had decided that I was the night because my skin was so dark." Zeely feels deflated by her mother's words but comes to believe them and to recognize that "no pretty robe was able to make me more than what I was and no little woman could make me the night." Elizabeth, too, is disconcerted by Zeely's mother's pronouncement; the girl insists that Zeely is different and that she, Elizabeth, would like to be the same way. Zeely contradicts the girl, saying, "To be so tall that wherever you went people stared and questioned?" (113). Zeely does not wish her status as other on her young friend. She tells Elizabeth, "You have a most fine way of dreaming.... Hold on to that. But remember the turtle, remember the snake. I always have" (115).

After this, Elizabeth goes home to her brother and her uncle and tells them Zeely's stories. It is the first time in the text that Elizabeth has been more interested in participating in her community than she has been in immersing herself in her own private dreams. She has decided to quit being an outsider and become an insider. It is also the first time that Elizabeth acknowledges that the Night Walker stories she has been using to terrify her brother are really embedded memories from tales her uncle has told her about the Underground Railroad. The story is like the table they are all sitting around that has been polished to a sheen by the oil their family's hands have rubbed on the table for decades; the story and the table both represent the strength of African American heritage, history, and community. Thus, Uncle Ross is a second intradiegetic narrator with a private tale to tell that is ideological. His tale complements what Elizabeth has learned about identity from Zeely, for if Zeely advises Elizabeth to recognize her place in the world and not exaggerate its importance, Uncle Ross reminds the girl that she comes from a rich tradition of which she should be proud. She need not be royalty to be special because she has racial and cultural identities that make her unique.

The direct, explicit ideologies of these embedded narratives pertain clearly to racial pride. The indirect ideologies about gender are more mixed. Although Elizabeth grows stronger from her interaction with another woman, Zeely is still dominated by an abusive father and deflated by her mother's pragmatism. And the woman in her myth-tale is told, "You are of this man" (106), hardly a feminist sentiment. Yet since the novel was published in 1967, a time when the Civil Rights Movement was more established than the Women's Movement, I think the mixed-gender ideology is eventually less problematic than the age dynamics that lie at the heart of this - and so many - children's novels.

More troubling to me is the fact that the intradiegetic narrators, the adults, are the ones who have wisdom here. Wisdom, by its very nature, is the province of adulthood; children learn from adults because adults often do know more. So when Zeely occupies the position of insider-with-knowledge, is the woman reinforcing Elizabeth's powerlessness, or is the adult nurturing the child so as to empower her? Is Zeely an example of adults in a children's novel appropriating the positions of power, or is the novel simply reflecting a reality that allows children to grow? As Foucault points out, power can be both repressive and enabling (Sexuality 36-49; Discipline 195-228); it is from within the confines of powerlessness that people rebel and discover their own power. Thus, if Zeely is appropriating the child's power, is it possible that this repression is one avenue that will eventually force Elizabeth to discover what means of power are available to her? Must she, and all children, experience powerlessness as a necessary condition of growing into power? Whatever we conclude, whether we decide this power transaction is heinous or enabling or inevitable, the fact remains that the discursive practice of employing a wise adult to guide an innocent (or ignorant) child is so commonplace in children's literature that it is practically invisible even to many trained readers.

In a novel published four years later, The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), Hamilton reverses these traditional age dynamics. Since the narrative in this novel is more linear than those I am investigating closely here and since the protagonists are male and not storytellers, this novel does not necessarily demonstrate the connection between narrative structure and ideology as clearly as those that I have chosen to analyze. But The Planet of Junior Brown is worth mentioning for its ideologies. For one thing, everything colored white in the novel is ultimately evil, and everything colored black is ultimately good - a reversal of stereotyped Western color metaphors. Red, however, is the most important color in this novel because we are all red under our skin; red is the color of everyone's brain (140). But even more important, it is the children, especially Junior's best friend, Buddy Clark, who teaches the adults in the novel that children are sometimes smarter, more resilient, and more resourceful than adults. Fourteen-year-old Buddy articulates the novel's ideology when he claims, "We are together ... because we have to learn to live for each other" (217). I think The Planet of Junior Brown, albeit a fairly sexist novel, demonstrates that adultist discursive practices do not necessarily need to dominate every children's novel.

The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1983) extends Hamilton's exploration of inclusion and exclusion in specifically racial terms, for five distinct groups are defined in the novel along racial lines: African gods, black "inside folks" and black "outside folks," Native Americans, and European Americans. Of these five groups, European Americans are the only group that never has status as insiders; they are the other in this text.

Pretty Pearl is a "god-chile," the younger sister of the "best god," John de Conquer, and the oldest god, John Henry Roustabout (5-6); she serves as the third-person-limited narrator for most of the novel. As gods, these three figures are transcendent, so they exist outside of humanity and are clearly better than humans. In fact, John de Conquer reminds Pretty Pearl how horrible it would be for her to become human (9, 34). Despite his warnings that life outside of her home on Mount Kenya will be hard, she journeys with him to see what is happening to "de shackled crowd" who are enslaved in America (17). When John de Conquer decides Pearl should continue the journey on her own as a test to prove herself, he allows her to take with her a spirit friend named Dwahro. In a moment of duress, Pretty Pearl also discovers that she can split herself into two people, her child-self and her mother-self, Mother Pearl. The doubleness of Pearl's character gives the text a contradictory double-voicedness, for the reader can interpret Mother Pearl's existence either as proof that all children have an innate capacity for self-nurturance or as proof that all children need someone separate from themselves to nurture them. It is yet another issue juxtaposing interiority and exteriority, for the text destabilizes both the concept that children can take care of themselves and the concept that children need someone else to care for them.

Pretty Pearl, Mother Pearl, and Dwahro eventually discover a reclusive commune of freed slaves who live in the mountains of Georgia during Reconstruction. These people call themselves "the inside folks" to distinguish themselves from those who live "outside," where "they gone make you work and slave like you not free" (134). They forge from their otherness a sense of community. Furthermore, the inside folks depend on another group who are in hiding from white people the Real People, as the Cherokee call themselves - who have refused to participate in the Trail of Tears and so have remained on their ancestral lands. The Real People recognize Pearl and Dwahro as divine beings, although the inside folks do not, which implies something about the Native Americans' ability to recognize spiritual truths that those who have been deprived of the religion of their homeland cannot. But the inside folks are survivors because they

had grown tough and finely controlled within. Had not their old ones come the long way, the deathly way from Africa? The Africans had survived the slavers and their ships, and the long middle passage across a great ocean. And the inside folks, themselves, grandsons and granddaughters of Africa - had they not endured the field, the breaking back, the whip? ... Their hearts beat strong. (244-45)

Being one of the inside folks, then, is not only a matter of geography; the inside folks are also those with a strong internal sense of identity.

The Real People help the inside folks move to Ohio, where they will be free from persecution by racist white Southerners, but Pretty Pearl and Dwahro lose their divinity in the process because they have lived among people so long that they "commence actin' human" (9). John de Conquer has predicted this would happen, but he is wrong in the second half of his prophecy about those who become human: "Become either a slaver or de enslaved" (13). Pretty Pearl and Dwahro are neither at the novel's end. Both have found a place in their new communal society - she as a storyteller, he as a dancer, singer, and entertainer. And no one in their community is either a slave or enslaved.

But before Pretty Pearl can take her place in the community as a storyteller, she must serve as an apprentice narratee to several adult intradiegetic narrators: John de Conquer, Mother Pearl, and the leaders of the inside folks and the Real People. The leader of the inside folks publically states the novel's explicit ideology when he tells his people, "We all got a right to de tree of life" (131), a phrase which is repeated three times on that page and twice more later in the novel (208, 302). The leader of the Cherokee also makes clear in a public address that all people of color have historical reasons to fear persecution by European Americans: "Everywhere you have those who would enslave your kind and mine" (275). John de Conquer teaches Pretty Pearl a more subtle ideology when he privately instructs her that her power is internal (39). But when Pretty Pearl abuses that power in an act of hubris by scaring some of the children of the inside folks, he strips her of her divinity. John de Conquer rewards Dwahro, however, with his greatest wish - to become human - because of "de way you give to de people without no selfishness" (261). John de Conquer advocates social responsibility and punishes those who act otherwise.

The character of Mother Pearl complicates Hamilton's tendency to use adult characters to carry her texts' ideological messages. Mother Pearl is certainly an adult, but she is also a manifestation of the child Pretty Pearl, an aspect of her personality that lies intact within her. Since she becomes the incarnation of Pretty Pearl's wisdom, the character Mother Pearl seems to imply that children have wisdom within them that they cannot possibly access as children. This is reinforced when Mother Pearl and Pretty Pearl permanently split, Pretty Pearl to stay with the inside folks and Mother Pearl to return to Mount Kenya. Looked at one way, Pretty Pearl has failed in her quest: She set out to grow into her powers as a god and instead loses them. Looked at another way, Mother Pearl represents Pretty Pearl's success: The "god chile" has grown up and left her child self behind because she knows too much to be a child any longer. She has fulfilled her quest by helping people and by growing into her powers; she returns an adult god to the Mount. Either way, the message to children is that the only way to succeed is to grow up. The possible truth of this message is less important than is the fact that this sentiment inherently undermines the subject position of the child reader by reminding her of her powerlessness.(9)

As Mother Pearl tries to guide Pretty Pearl, the woman-god has much to say about words, language, storytelling, and truth. When she tells the inside children her first John de Conquer story, she assures them, "I may tell you all kinds of tales. But trust me! I double never ever never lie to my chil'ren!" (114). Although the inside children are the narratees of this statement, Hamilton's implied author seems to be directly addressing her implied reader with a statement about the veracity of her fiction. Before Mother Pearl's second John de Conquer tale, she says," 'Tell yall a story.... Tell you true,' said Mother. 'It be not scary'" (116). Her role as narrator is to assure her narratees of the truth of her words, an assurance that is at the core of much children's literature. Before Mother and Pretty Pearl make their final separation, Mother Pearl tells the girl all the stories she knows, which makes Pearl feel "good inside. It was as if Mother Pearl was giving her many, many lifetimes of talking and storytelling" (281). Even after Pretty Pearl has forgotten she was once a "god-chile," she never forgets her mother-self's stories (297), and she uses them to teach her community history, mythology, and pride. Whenever she stands before them to tell them a story, "She held herself most proud. But she held herself inward, and they were never sure just what would come out of her, how she would begin.... She did not look at them - she was seeing inward" (306, emphasis added). Here truth is an inward expression that moves outward from the narrator to the narratee, who may then internalize it. Truth is not a fixed entity; it is fluid and therefore subject to inclusion and exclusion, just as people are.

Hamilton calls The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl her most feminist novel (Mikkelsen, "Conversation" 396), and indeed, with its proactive mother figure who succeeds at her quest, the book does contain one of the most poignant depictions of strong womanhood in recent children's literature. Hamilton acknowledges that she created Pretty Pearl and Mother Pearl to offset the absence of female heroes from African American mythology (Mikkelsen, "Conversation" 394). In that sense, the book seems very much directed toward an African American implied reader who needs to know about black female role models to have someone to model herself after. But Hamilton is not completely successful in her feminist efforts, for although Pretty Pearl succeeds in finding happiness and community, she does so at the highest possible price, the loss of her divinity. By the novel's end, although she is one of the inside folks, she is excommunicated from the god-community into which she was born because she has failed. The story's success as a story of interracial harmony seems to come at the price of gender: If Pearl fails, it is because she has acted like a weak girl.

Ostensibly offsetting Pretty Pearl's fall from grace is the fall from grace of her brother and foil, the god John Henry Roustabout. Like the male character Dwahro and unlike Pearl, John Henry consciously chooses to shed his divinity and become man; he does so to provide African Americans with a folk hero who can defeat white men. He goes into battle with the steam drill knowing he is destined to die in the process. But he also knows his death will help redeem those who believe in him because it will give them hope in the face of oppression. The symbolism here is not particularly subtle; John Henry is meant to be a Christ-figure. But unlike other fantasy quests such as Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting or Hamilton's own The Gathering or Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, here it is an adult and a male who serves as savior, not a girl.

The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl is a novel of transformations: The inside folks, the Real People, Pearl, Dwahro, and John Henry Roustabout all make some sort of movement that involves their discovery that they can redefine their subject positions by recognizing their interior powers. But Hamilton's continuum of inclusion and exclusion once again divides itself along lines of race, gender, and age: Men are insiders in this novel; women are meant to be insiders, but ultimately fall short of full empowerment, and children end up, as always, outside positions of power.

Mother Pearl assures the children listening to her stories - all of whom are African or African American - that she never lies to them. Hamilton, like Mother Pearl, speaks unself-consciously to black children, creating a world largely devoid of white people. For the implied child reader, then, white culture becomes the culture of the outsider, the other, which affords children of color a position as inside readers, and which may also displace white readers, transforming some of them for perhaps the first time in their reading careers into outsiders.(10) Hamilton also emulates her character Mother Pearl in never lying to her readers about race, although she occasionally does mislead them about gender when she intends to establish strong female role models but subtly undercuts their power.

But whether or not Hamilton lies to her readers about age is a complicated matter. In textually reinscribing the powerlessness of the child within all cultures by depicting children who must learn from adults, perhaps Hamilton is being honest, even brutally honest. In these two novels, adults hold the knowledge that represents the highest goal: truth. The only way children can obtain that goal is to grow, to quit being children themselves, to become more like the insiders, the adults. Black is beautiful in these novels, and being female can sometimes be a matter of being strong, but children, by implication, will always be outsiders.

Notes

1. Perry Nodelman expresses a similar opinion in "Balancing Acts." See also the articles by Bishop and by Moore and MacCann, and the biography of Hamilton by Nina Mikkelsen.

2. Hamilton's novels problematize "racial difference within gender identity and gender difference within racial identity" in much the same way that Mae Gwendolyn Henderson demonstrates novels by Shelley Anne Williams and Toni Morrison avoiding reductive representations of otherness (17).

3. The same patterns occur in Hamilton's Arilla Sun Down (1976) and Plain City (1993), but space considerations preclude my considering them here.

4. For example, the unidentified narrator of Their Eyes Were Watching God who reports the conversation between Janie and Pheoby that occurs while Janie narrates her story is extradiegetic, and Janie herself is the intradiegetic narrator of the novel because she is talking specifically to her friend Pheoby.

5. Genette calls third-person narrators "heterodiegetic" narrators and first-person narrators "homodiegetic" narrators. Although his terms have subtle implications about the transaction between the narrator and the text, I fear that his jargon might unnecessarily obfuscate my own points, so I employ the more widely used terms "first-" and "third-person narrator" here.

6. For more on the similarity between children's and women's literature, see Lissa Paul's "Enigma Variations." For a critique of Paul's failure to distinguish that women's literature is peer-written while children's literature is non-peer literature and is therefore even more subject to disempowering the reader, see Lesnik-Oberstein 139.

7. Bob Dixon first asked scholars of children's literature to investigate textual ideologies in his two-volume work Catching Them Young. Bob Sutherland also classifies explicit ideology in children's literature as "the politics of advocacy [and] the politics of attack" and implicit ideological assumptions as "the politics of assent" (145), but neither Dixon nor Sutherland complicates issues of ideology as much as Hollindale does.

8. Other critics who examine the relationship between adult and child in children's literature include Perry Nodelman, Peter Hunt, and Jacqueline Rose.

9. Or then again, as Foucault might argue, that powerlessness might be a necessary precondition to empowerment.

10. Molly Abel Travis demonstrates a similar process at work in Toni Morrison's Beloved (182-86). Many critics have noted similarities between Morrison's and Hamilton's works. Two of the most trenchant comparisons occur in Mikkelsen's Virginia Hamilton (144-46) and Perry Nodelman's "The Limits of Structure" (45-48).

Works Cited

Bishop, Rudine Sims. "Books from Parallel Cultures: Celebrating a Silver Anniversary." Horn Book 69 (Mar.-Apr. 1993): 175-81.

Dixon, Bob. Catching Them Young 1: Sex, Race and Class in Children's Fiction. London: Pluto, 1977.

-----. Catching Them Young 2: Political Ideas in Children's Fiction. London: Pluto, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.

-----. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

Hamilton, Virginia. Arilla Sun Down. New York: Greenwillow, 1976.

-----. The Gathering. New York: Greenwillow, 1981.

-----. The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl. New York: Harper, 1983.

-----. M. C. Higgins, the Great. New York: Macmillan, 1974.

-----. Plain City. New York: Scholastic, 1993.

-----. The Planet of Junior Brown. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

-----. Zeely. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 16-37.

Hollindale, Peter. "Ideology and the Children's Book." Signal 55 (1988): 3-22.

Hunt, Peter. Criticism, Theory, and Children's Literature. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991.

Lanser, Susan S. "Toward a Feminist Narratology." Style 20.3 (1986): 341-63.

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin. Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.

Mikkelsen, Nina. "A Conversation with Virginia Hamilton." Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 7 (1994): 382-405.

-----. Virginia Hamilton. New York: Twayne, 1994.

Moore, Opal, and Donnarae MacCann. "The Uncle Remus Travesty, Part II: Julius Lester and Virginia Hamilton." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11 (1996): 205-10.

Nodelman, Perry. "Balancing Acts: Noteworthy American Fiction." Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature. Ed. Nodelman. West Lafayette: Children's Literature Association, 1989.3: 164-71.

-----. "How Typical Children Read Typical Books." Children's Literature in Education 12 (1977): 177-85.

-----. "The Limits of Structures: A Shorter Version of a Comparison between Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Virginia Hamilton's M. C. Higgins, the Great." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 7 (1982): 45-48.

-----. The Pleasures of Children's Literature. New York: Longman, 1992.

Paul, Lissa. "Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows about Children's Literature." Signal 54 (1987): 186-201.

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Roberta Seelinger Trites is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University, where she teaches children's and adolescent literature. She is the author of Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels (U of Iowa P, 1997). She would like to express gratitude to her colleague Rebecca Saunders for all of her comments and suggestions that helped to shape this essay.