In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that the history of double consciousness lies in childhood as the crisis that brings an end to the “days of rollicking boyhood.” Yet in his children's literature, written in the teens and twenties, Du Bois returns to the scene of double consciousness in an effort to transform this experience. In the children's numbers of the Crisis and in the Brownies' Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois's works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child's entry into double consciousness and to repurpose double consciousness as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.
Through an examination of two of St. Nicholas’s most popular departments, “Jack-in-the-Pulpit” and “The Letter-Box,” this paper explores the way the magazine and its editor resist conventions of adult-child separation and encourage instead generationally hybrid subjectivities, from the ambiguously aged “Jack” to the literate and literary child’s disidentification with childhood.
This essay examines the figure of the divided child in What Maisie Knew and its pivotal role in shaping James's emergently modernist method. The product of divorce, Maisie's is an unconventional interiority whose division the novel seeks to preserve in ironic contrast to the Victorian ideals of childhood unity. Subsequently, Maisie develops a method of sustained detachment and restraint, which the novel itself comes to embrace in the method of its telling. Silence, secrecy, and diversion characterize Maisie's method, but they also come to characterize the narrative technique of a novel that never, at last, reveals what Maisie knew.
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