Honeyman - Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature

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Consuming Agency in
Fairy Tales, Childlore,

and Folkliterature
Routledge Studies in
Folklore and Fairytales
Edited in collaboration with The Folklore Society in Britain, this series presents a
wide range of research into the literature and history of folklore and fairytales by
specialists in the field.
1. Tales of Bluebeard and his Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times
Shuli Barzilai
2. Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature

Susan Honeyman
Consuming Agency in
Fairy Tales, Childlore,
and Folkliterature
Susan Honeyman
New York London

First published 2010
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Honeyman, Susan.
Consuming agency in fairy tales, childlore, and folkliterature / by Susan Honeyman.
p. cm.—(Routledge studies in folklore and fairy tales ; v. 2)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Children’s literature—History and criticism. 2. Fairy tales—History and criticism.
3. Folk literature—History and criticism. 4. Food in literature. 5. Children in
literature. 6. Consumption (Economics) in literature. 7. Ideology in
literature. 8. Agent (Philosophy) in literature. 9. Power (Social sciences) in
literature. I. Title.
PN1009.5.F66H66 2009
809'.89282—dc22
2009030953
ISBN10: 0-415-80614-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-80614-5 (hbk)

Beatrice Boissegur, The Three Fairies, 2000. The Bridgeman Art Library, New
York.
Contents
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Material Youth 1
1 What Good Little Girls and Boys Are Made Of 25
2 Honey (cakes) 54
3 Sweet Teeth 77
4 Molasses 111
5 Muscle and Greens 140
Conclusion: Flesh and Blood 163
Notes 185
Bibliography 203
Index 221
Figures
Frontispiece
Beatrice Boissegur, The Three Fairies, 2000 The
Bridgeman Art Library, New York. v
1.1 Mary Liddell for Angelo Patri’s Pinocchio in America.

Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1928. 30
1.2 Johnny Gruelle, Raggedy Ann Stories. Simon and Schuster,

1918. 33
1.3 William Nicholson for Margery Williams, The Velveteen

Rabbit. Doubleday and Co., 1922. 38
1.4 John R. Neill for L. Frank Baum, The Patchwork Girl of

Oz. Dover, 1913. 44
2.1 Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwepeter. 1845. English

translation. Dover, 1995. 66
2.2 Ross Collins, Alvie Eats Soup. Scholastic, 2002. (By

permission of author.) 67
2.3 James Marshall, Hansel and Gretel. Dial Books for Young
Readers, 1990. (Used with permission. All rights reserved.) 73
3.1 Megan Kelso, The Squirrel Mother: Stories. Fantagraphics,

2006. 91
4.1 Brad Johnson, (untitled entry), Comix 2000. L’Association,

1999. 117
4.2 Edward Gorey for Ennis Rees, Brer Rabbit and his Tricks.
Young Scott Books, 1967. (By permission of Edward
Gorey Charitable Trust.) 120
x Figures
4.3 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, August 2,
1908. 137
5.1 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

February 26, 1932.* 143

October 25, 1930. 144

February 28, 1932. 152
5.4 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., May

21, 1932. 153

October 4, 1931. 154
5.6 Bobby London, Mondo Popeye, King Features Syndicate,

1987. 155

November 6, 1929. 157

January 4, 1931. 159

November 29, 1931. 162
*All Popeye images used by permission of King Features, Inc.

Preface
In “Kids and Commerce,” Viviana Zelizer explains that American house-

hold economies were
transformed between the 1870s and the 1930s in ways that revolu-
tionized children’s economic practices. Just as middle-class women
withdrew from paid employment, children were put out of wage work.
Increased attention and concern with the emotional value of children’s
lives led to a growing uneasiness with their practical contributions.
(2002: 390)
Dominant discourses of the twentieth-century followed suit in an increas-

ingly sentimental denial of children’s usefulness and need (despite children’s
increasingly disproportionate poverty). By the end of the century, children
would be culturally conscribed as consumer citizens, whether or not they
could afford it.
While Barack Obama’s 2008 election bespoke a political climate decid-
edly weary of the disingenuous social “reforms” that abandoned many of
the nation’s children to choiceless poverty1, in the same week Newt Ging-
rich would declare that
Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class

families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degener-
ated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has
produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human
history. (2008: 85)
Cringing a bit, I nonetheless found myself agreeing, as Gingrich’s

article circulated within the National Youth Rights Association and my
classrooms. Child-rights rhetoric makes for some strange ideological
pairings. But in the context of both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
golden ages of U.S. fi scal conservatism, the parallel makes sense. Like the
industrial capitalists who were influential a century before him, Gingrich
indulges in the sentiment of self-reliance, arguing for the same rights to
xii Preface
material gains under consumer capitalism that youth had before child
labor reform. To someone devoted to youth rights, this easily translates
into a defense of self-determination—a right that protectionism often
denies young Americans.
Fairy tales often depict this paradox of good intentions. Protectionism
can imprison, as Donna Jo Napoli demonstrates through her retelling of
the Rapunzel story, Zel (1996). In Napoli’s story, Rapunzel lives amidst
agricultural plentitude and economic ignorance, realizing, on a rare visit
to the contrasting center of trade nearby, that “Town is a place of give and
take” (27). But her adoptive mother is keenly aware of commerce, which
she has used to maintain control over others, even successfully bartering
for a daughter by manipulating the biological mother’s pregnant cravings
for leafy greens.
Rapunzel is the original material girl, controlled by the material relations
surrounding her and in fact named after the material for which she was
bartered. A prototype of the consumer child, she is at once excluded from
and defi ned by commodities—a commodity herself. Her story repeatedly
warns about the dangers of protectionism, smothering possessive love, and
our own vulnerable cravings. The sorceress-mother continues to control her
adopted daughter through appetite as well: “I will go to the candy shop for
the colored sugar balls with anise seed centers, the ones Zel loves. . . . Treats
bring a glow to her cheeks. I will bask in that glow” (19). Mother tries to
secure Zel’s loyalty with the offer of a magical ability to communicate with
animals. But Zel comprehends the moral responsibility demanded, asking
“Who would want such a power?” (140). Mother realizes, though too late,
that her own “gift for plants was not about understanding; it was about
control” (141). Paul Zelinsky highlights this controlling aspect of extreme
possessiveness guised as love in his 1998 Caldecott-winning illustrations to
the story by showing the sorceress at her most fearsome when she discovers
Rapunzel’s biological father stealing the garden greens (blooming the same
color as the girl’s dress in following frames) and when she discovers Rapun-
zel’s “betrayal” against fi lial loyalty (virginity?): both illustrations show the
sorceress in a gesture of enraged but desperate grasping—hands are clutch-
ing at the air, her eyes are threateningly wide and pained. Her power is all
the more frightening because it stems from some form of love.
Though not so diabolically, today’s parents who panic and track their
teens with GPS-loaded cell phones or outerwear cross the same fi ne line
between control and care. And I will argue in the following chapters that
alongside such technological tethers, we have developed more subtle yokes
to control children through protectionism and consumption. Such ideolo-
gies are not new; like Rapunzel they have premodern roots. Their persis-
tence in modern and post-industrial cultures suggests that as much as we
reinvent post-industrial childhood, we do so in service to adult needs and
consumer capitalism. Viviana Zelizer points out that most questions about
childhood consumption “are framed by an adult point of view, asking how
Preface xiii
children understand the adult economy, how they learn it, how they fit in
and how it affects them” (2002: 379). In another strange intellectual pair-
ing, marketers and ethnographers come closest to practicing child-centered
methods (Zelizer 2002: 378, 379). I hope to follow these oppositionally
motivated lines of understanding to their cultural intersection (as well as
to that of structure and simulacra in shared folkloric motifemes) in the lore
of luring children.
Raymond Williams warned that “All traditions are selective . . . Where
the poets run scholars follow,” especially when avoiding the investigation
of “what the country was really like: that is a utilitarian or materialist, per-
haps even a peasant response . . . It is time that this bluff was called” (1973:
18–19). In the interest of concretely contextualizing the childhood of fairy
tales, so enter material youth.
Acknowledgments
In my pursuits as a perennial student and scholar, I’ve benefited from the

unfailing support of my partner, William Avilés, and my family (grazie
mille to Richard and Bonnie Bing Honeyman, for helping me make my
dream sabbatical a reality). I owe hearty thanks to students and colleagues
for introducing me to exciting new sources and helping with the preparation
of the text: Anna Thompson, Erik Mortenson, Katherine Capshaw Smith,
Steve Warren, Jessica Isaac, Marguerite Tassi, Shaun Padgett, Rob Luscher,
Justin Sevenker, and John Damon. Donald Haase, foremost among them,
has answered my toughest fairy-tale questions via email with remarkable
grace and knowledge. The staff at Ryan library has cheerfully helped in
every way possible—thanks especially to Alta Kramer and Todd Jensen.
The Research Services Council at the University of Nebraska at Kearney
has graciously provided funding crucial in attaining copyright permissions
for illustrations (the pictures are what make this job so fun). My gratitude
also extends to Johns Hopkins University Press and Wayne State University
Press for permissions to reprint portions of my earlier work as follows:
“Manufactured Agency and the Playthings Who Dream it for Us.” Chil-
dren’s Literature Association Quarterly 31.2 (2006): 109–13. (Copyright
©2006 The Children’s Literature Association. Reprinted with permission
of the Johns Hopkins University Press.)
“Trick or Treat?: Halloween Lore, Passive Consumerism, and the Candy
Industry.” The Lion and the Unicorn 32.1 (2008), 82–108. (Copyright
©2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of
the Johns Hopkins University Press.)
“Gingerbread Wishes and Candy (land) Dreams.” Marvels and Tales:
Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 21.2 (2007), 19–215. (Copyright ©2007.)
Finally, my earnest appreciation belongs to fellow scholars in the field
who have welcomed serious interdisciplinary rigor to the too-long-dis-
missed body of children’s and folk literature.
Introduction
Material Youth
How does the present appropriate the past? . . . How do aspects of

culture become periodized in time just as under tourism they become
localized in space? . . . The reproduction of folklore forms by the liter-
ary tradition, particularly as practiced from the late seventeenth century

on, provides a deeply historicized set of answers to such questions.
Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing
However we construct it and whatever it stands for to us, body is

what we’ve got.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption
How are struggles of power historically written on the body? Can human
subjects act independently of the limiting logic and language of their social-
ization? Questions of bodily boundaries, expression, and agency pervade
ancient myth, medieval folklore, and industrial fairy tales, and are cer-
tainly no more satisfactorily answered today. Differing views on human
potential for individual action often stand between modernists and post-
modernists,1 structural determinists and post-structural constructivists,
and Marxists and post-Marxists in defi ning action. In this book I look at
manifestations of youth agency (and representations of agency produced for
youth) as depicted in fairy tales, childlore, and folkliterature, 2 investigating
the dynamic of ideological manipulation and independent resistance as it
can be read or expressed in bodies, fi rst through social puppetry and then
through coercive temptation (our consumption replacing the more obvious
strings that bind us). Through industrialization, capitalism, and consumer-
ism, folkloric agency has been reshaped from externalized representations
into an intangible yet consumable product—from a power simply imposed
upon the body to power operating on the subject from within.
Hans Christian Andersen can set a preliminary frame of reference for
this investigation—a writer of his own country’s industrializing age who
focused frequently on issues of agency. When I fi rst read Hans Christian
Andersen I was surprised to fi nd less triumph and hope (qualities added
later to many of his stories, passed down in sweeter, more familiar versions)
than I expected, and more physical suffering—for example, the “Ugly
Duckling” suffers far more than mere ostracizing, the “Little Mermaid”
2 Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature
is maimed, misunderstood, unnoticed by her prince, and fi nally reduced to
purgatorial vapor, the “Red Shoes” dance their wearer into self-mutilation
and near damnation—each reads more like a deterministic cautionary tale,
and most refuse to end happily or provide any dénouement that would
satisfy contemporary readers who fancy themselves free to act according
to their own wills.3 A sense of individual powerlessness pervades character
and plot. In his discussion of Andersen as a “failed revolutionary,” Jack
Zipes describes “The Little Mermaid” as
a religious and didactic tale that makes children responsible for the
moral well-being of their parents. . . . [C]hildren must exhibit a certain

purity of the soul and obedience to God’s laws to succeed in life and to
make their elders content. (2006a: 230)
Such an emotional burden without power or autonomy pervades bourgeois

constructions of child audiences.
Hans Christian Andersen seems to have been drawn, in particular, to
the question of free will, or to twist it into more contemporary terms, the
agency of social subjects in their ideological environment. In “The Stead-
fast Tin Soldier,” we follow the inner life of a tin soldier who loves a toy
ballerina, a theme that’s become a familiar device for fiction in which the
inanimate are secretly endowed with autonomous movement and/or sen-
tience: kept especially popular by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker (1816)
and Tchaikovsky’s ballet by the same name,4 taken up quite philosophi-
cally in Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child (1967), somewhat senti-
mentally in The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) and Alexander and the Wind-Up
Mouse (1969), then commercially in Toy Story (1995, 1999) and its ilk.5 I
used to think that the popularity of this secret vivification theme reflected
a reasonable but tired assumption about young audiences: they are strug-
gling with ontology, learning to discern “reality” from the “unreal,” which
includes discerning living things from representations. But after reading
Andersen I see a more concrete explanation based on the social positioning
of his young audiences. We want to imagine that an inanimate toy, which is
dependent on our own dramatics for animation, can, outside of our sight or
understanding, move and exist on its own terms (yet somehow exclusively
to our own imaginations, as if we are the Berkeleyan god of their dreams).
Andersen’s tales present youth as a position in which the subject is hailed
by power and at a disadvantage only for lacking socialized experience, but
it is also a position of potential agency in being ideologically overlooked
and thus able to operate freely of socializing constraints. Thus, it is a child
in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who can see and clearly state that the
king is naked. This is the secret wish of subversives—that such a safe, dis-
rupting social position exists to be fi lled. Especially so for all who would
romantically construct the young as potential leaders of invisible revolu-
tion, working within yet against the system, unsuspected because of their
Introduction 3
smaller size and presumed innocence. Brian Sutton-Smith sees recognition
of this radical potential for power as an important aspect of our study:
Children’s folklore as the struggle for power certainly has a different

ring to it, doesn’t it? If we studied children’s folklore as an account of
disempowerment and, at the same time, as an ecstasy of performance,
then children’s folklore, as contrasted with all the other scholarships
of childhood, would indeed be dealing with a most radical concept of
childhood. (1995: 277)
These dark and radical representations of youth, however, are tempered by

the oppressive in Andersen.6 As Zipes points out, child readers and charac-
ters have a presumed emotional responsibility to reciprocate love and earn
adult approval. Naomi Wood offers insight into this pressure to exercise
sympathy, which is particularly pertinent to enchanted fairy-tale objects:
“Andersen’s relentless personification of inanimate objects—tin soldiers,
rubber balls, and fi r trees—as well as his attribution of sentience to animals
and birds—ducks, storks, and nightingales—multiplies exponentially the
possibilities for pain in the universe” (2006: 196). But, Wood adds, this
burden of compassion comes without a sense of ability to change one’s
environment:
Rather than offering the comfort of endlessly supportive imaginary

companions, Andersen’s account of the thoughts and feelings of dolls,
toys, and china trinkets provides instead opportunities to experience
vicarious pain, frustrated desire, and death. . . . Andersen’s objects,
like people, may wish to establish their meaningfulness in the grand
scheme of things, but their efforts have only individual, microcosmic
effects. (196)
In “The Puppeteer,” Andersen dramatizes extremes of agency and poten-

tial pulls against it. A successful puppeteer confesses that he would prefer
his puppets were alive: “I would like to be a director of a real live troupe
of actors: real live ones!”(1983: 690). One might expect a little Nutcracker
magic, pathos, romance, and adventure. But when his wish comes true he
is distraught to fi nd too many wills pitted against him and each other: “The
actors were like flies in a bottle, and I was in the bottle too, for I was the
theater director” (691–692). In short, he discovers that it is more comfort-
able to pull the strings than be pulled.
It doesn’t take Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio long to realize the same thing,
and he resists being a social puppet as much as he can, though he is fre-
quently deluded about his ability to do so. His example also models how
malleable are the hungry, and how children are molded when disciplined
with food. Aware of the cultures of hunger that surrounded him, Collodi
made a didactic (or mock-didactic) example with one of Pinocchio’s many
character flaws: his over-particular appetite. When Pinocchio thinks he
will die he cries: “Oh, hunger is a dreadful illness!” (1996: 24). After Pinoc-
chio’s unsuccessful attempts at procuring a meal, Geppetto comes to the
rescue with the selfless offer, “These three pears were for my breakfast, but
I willingly give them to you. Eat them, and may they do you good!” (33).
Pinocchio’s sudden pickiness (even though he’s “dying of hunger”) begins
the classic struggle between adult economic, nutritional oversight and a
child’s appetite: he will not eat the pears unless they are peeled for him.
Geppetto admonishes him: “We should get used, from childhood, to eating
everything, and liking it; for one never knows what might happen in this
curious world” (34). Once he has devoured everything but the peelings and
cores, Pinocchio’s appetite tempers his taste into including what remains,
which he promptly finishes off. Pinocchio comes around to abiding by Gep-
petto’s standard of a pragmatic diet, not because didacticism triumphs, but
because he is hungry.
Jay Mechling has explained the potent centrality of such scenes: “So
much of the child’s biological and psychological developmental drama cen-
ters on the body that it is little wonder that no bodily function escapes the
child’s folk repertoire: sex, food, and excretions appear prominently in the
lore” (1986: 113). Marina Warner writes that
Control of food lies at the heart . . . of famous fairy tales, like “Hansel
and Gretel,” and less familiar ones that feature ogres and ogresses like
Baba Yaga. . . . Food—procuring it, cooking it, eating it—dominates
the material as the overriding image of survival; consuming it offers
contradictory metaphors of life and civilization as well as barbarity
and extinction. (1999: 12–13)
First noting that Melanie Klein believes “cannibalism is a phantasy univer-

sally experienced by infants,” Carolyn Daniel explains the prevalence of
the “eat or be eaten” confl ict:
Stories about monsters with abominable appetites have multiple func-

tions: they may reflect a desire for familial or social integrity; they
may reveal culture unease about social hierarchies; they may warn of
dangers and therapeutically rehearse the fears invoked by such threats,
wearing them out through repetition; they may explore issues regard-
ing intergenerational and familial rivalries, confi rming the individual’s
place in society; they may reveal society’s concerns about the need to
discipline the appetites and behavior of children; and they may reflect
social anxieties about enemy others, the identity of whom changes over
time. (2006: 141–142)
Much has been written psychoanalyzing the developmental significance

of eating in folktales and fairy tales, but Daniel also touches on social
Introduction 5
anxieties over power inequities experienced, presumably by the small and
young. Socio-historic realities, such as insecurities about social justice and
the unequal distribution of wealth and power, will be privileged in my treat-
ment over the dense symbolic readings of psychoanalytic criticism, which
often essentialize the young with universalizing phenomenological theories
of development. Jack Zipes suggests the need instead for direct avenues of
inquiry when he likens the widespread “eat or be eaten” dilemma in fairy
tales to the conformist socializing purpose of the tales themselves: “tradi-
tion feeds off the young to maintain itself and will do anything to preserve
itself” (2006b: 235).
Pinocchio has learned this fundamental principle of survival within net-

works of social power—illustrated frequently through his most basic need
(food) and gravest danger (hunger)—so that by the time he washes up on
the shore of Busy Bee Island, he asks a dolphin, “Would you be so kind as
to tell me if there are inhabited places on this island, where one may eat
without fear of being eaten?” (138). Unlike most artificial beings, Pinocchio
needs to eat—he embodies the ultimate weakness of flesh (vulnerability to
hunger) without the benefits of being ‘real.’ For this reason I begin my first
chapter with his example (to establish the complexities of ‘agency’ as well
as to theoretically situate the common histories of consumerism and child-
hood), but I close with a chapter on contrasting idealizations (fleshlessness
being more typically depicted as a strength) in cyborgs, robots, and even
magical/mystical creations, like the golem and homunculus, who made of
basic or even organic materials, are nonetheless invulnerable.
Consuming Agency concentrates on the agency of young subjects through
material relations, especially where food signifies the invisible strings used
to control them in popular discourse and practice, modeling efforts to
come out from under the hegemonic handler and take control, at least of
their own body spaces, but ultimately fi nding less power than the ideal
holds. Wendy R. Katz writes, “The plenitude of food in children’s books is
directly related to the essentially comic spirit of children’s literature. The
characters of comedy, like the characters in children’s literature, are quint-
essential earthlings, fleshly and vulnerable” (1980: 199). I propose that we
attempt to understand the dark side of being “fleshly and vulnerable.” Like
Pinocchio, children who necessarily depend upon adults for allaying their
own hunger are also vulnerable to what, even in the most benevolent cases,
can be considered ideological control.
My readings should invite inclusive understandings by focusing in a
historically anchored manner on similar material patterns—honeycakes
in “Hansel and Gretel,” candy in Halloween ritual and lore, molasses
in “Tar Baby,” and spinach in Popeye. First I socially, theoretically, and
historically contextualize the ‘ingredient’ chapters with an analysis of
Pinocchio and his American intertexts, arguing that with consumer capi-
talism child agency has diminished, even though sometimes it is framed
as empowerment. Then, I demonstrate that foods are constantly held up
as lures to children and bartered for agency. Finally I stress the socio-
political uses of hunger and nutritional reform to further indicate the
significance of structurally determined and resistant appetites. Like Vora-
cious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature, by Carolyn
Daniel (2006), my book closely analyzes the importance of food in the
representation of children; it focuses, however, on folk and popular cul-
ture in the U.S. rather than British children’s literature. Like Nicholas
Sammond’s Babes in Tommorowland: Walt Disney and the Making of
the American Child, 1930–1960 (2005), it greets the rising demand for
inter-disciplinary materialist scholarship on childhood discourses. Like
When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and

Development, by Lois Kuznets (1994), it will do so by focusing on rep-
resentations of material relations. However, unlike the psychoanalytic
leanings of this and other children’s literature criticism, my method is his-
torically materialist with a more explicitly child-rights-oriented purpose.
Though complementing the more comprehensive collection of approaches
to food found in Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard’s Critical Approaches
to Food in Children’s Literature (2009), my critical purpose is more nar-
rowly concerned with consumer culture. As my focal materials were cho-
sen for their folkloric relevance, my textual examples are not limited to
the indefi nite category of “children’s” literature.7
In my fi rst chapter, “What Good Little Girls and Boys Are Made Of,”
I concentrate on the material production of consumer childhood and the
folkloric recurrence of questioning (child) agency through tales. I describe
a demographic shift occurring from the mid-nineteenth century to mid-
twentieth (from the industrial age to the post-industrial), in which children
as a political group shrunk from being a majority in the population and
were marginalized to what Viviana Zelizer calls “sentimental uselessness.”
Concurrently, Americans appropriated and consumed international folk-
tales and fairy tales into their own social context. Continuing my analysis
of Pinocchio and its intertexts, with side-glances at such texts as The Wiz-
ard of Oz, The Velveteen Rabbit, Raggedy Ann, The Brave Little Toaster,
Corduroy, and Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I argue that the pervasive
themes of secret vivification (animism), imagined object sentience, and pup-
petry illuminate social challenges to children’s agency. Ultimately, I argue
that they also represent a “passifying” threat to children’s rights in a cul-
ture transitioning into consumerism.
In my second chapter, “Honey(cakes),” I hone in on issues of agency in
light of the ideological allure held by foods. Unfolding old and new visita-
tions of “Hansel and Gretel,” while making connections to narratives on
consuming like In the Night Kitchen, Bread and Jam for Frances, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, and the Candy Land board game, I give special
attention to gingerbread motifs to show the extent to which young people
are socialized (trapped?) by food, in this case prototypically through the
(folk)luring8 power of honeycakes or showy sweets.
Introduction 7
Using the case of Halloween rituals in my third chapter, “Sweet Teeth,”
I show how child resistance to the power of food socializing has been
brought under control by the majority adult culture (concurrently with
shifts described in Chapter 1). Through analyses of child consumer rights,
trick-or-treating rituals, and the candy industry, I hope to show that youth
have been “tricked” out of reciprocal social power with the rise of the mid-
dle class, capitalism, and eventually consumerism. Sample texts range from
traditional fairy tales and childlore to Malcolm in the Middle and the film
Hoodwinked.
Sharman Apt Russell writes, “Hunger begins your exchange with the
world” (2005: 230). “Molasses,” my fourth chapter, pries more deeply into
the social causes of our ideological identification with and malleability
through food, reminding us that in societies of extreme wealth inequality,
food utopias and dystopias emerge to reflect luxuriousness or basic hun-
ger. Gastronomic utopias are not just the product of hungry dreams; they
can be fantasies created to fool and control their listeners by inviting audi-
ences to concentrate on desires that cannot be fulfilled, ultimately deferring
power. Such intimate expressions are especially prevalent in cultural pro-
ductions socializing children, because food is one of the primary vehicles
of struggle and control in child culture. In this chapter I demonstrate the
political dimensions of collective hunger by looking at folkloric sources
for food utopias and dystopias in varied Brer Rabbit tales, especially “Tar
Baby,” with the aid of works by Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Virginia
Hamilton, and critic Andrew Warnes. By analogy I wish to consider how a
child’s cravings are likewise exploited and agency is deferred.
As an over-consuming nation, the U.S. has a unique history of nutri-
tional reforms motivated by class interests and food-marketing rather than
an earnestly applied concern for the health of the young. In my fi fth chapter,
“Muscle and Greens,” I look at the history behind Popeye and his diet in
this context, including a background in related pediatrics, nutritional sci-
ence, and agriculture, to consider the pugnacious “sailor-man” as an icon
for resisting gendered, classed ideologies of diet that Roland Barthes has
called the “nutritional rationalizing” of power. Through Popeye’s example
spinach becomes a lure for children, an appealing commodity that makes
power seem consumable. Agency canned for kids.
Explicitly referring back to my fi rst chapter’s focus on artificial life and
agency, I will conclude with “Flesh and Blood,” an investigation of hunger
as a weakness of the flesh along with countering representations of resist-
ing hunger in order to idealize potential power—from medieval golems and
blood-sucking vampires to Oz’s early industrial cyborgs and Scott West-
erfeld’s “specials” in the Uglies series. Such exceptions merely highlight
the rule that hunger is a symptom of the oppression of a social body, and
likewise, that individual appetites can be exploited. Ultimately, I want my
readers to more transparently observe the processes by which consumerism
reduces youth agency within the family and the larger social community.
EMBODIMENT, FAIRY TALES, AND FOLKLORE STUDIES
Each of the following chapters investigates a fairy tale, folk custom, or

child-figuration in popular literature from a materialist approach (probing
for socio-economic causes and influence) by concentrating particularly on
issues of materiality (objects, food, body). Thus, my focal subject is mate-
rial in two senses: a materialist history of youth as evidenced through the
material-relations of youth experience as represented in industrial and
consumer cultures. In the flood of attention to the body that has followed
in Foucault’s wake, it became necessary for materialists and historicists
to take embodiment into account, recognizing, as Sherryl Vint explains,

that “the distinction between the material and the discursive body is a
false one. Thus biopower is both the site of ideology’s acting upon the
body/subject and a potential site for resistance” (2007: 19). Though no
less ambiguous about individual potential for agency than previous theo-
ries, embodiment’s breakdown of yet another false binary is an impor-
tant caveat for my undertaking, because: “The body occupies the liminal
space between self and not-self, between nature and culture, between the
inner ‘authentic’ person and social persona” (Vint 2007: 16).
In the study of an already liminal social subjectivity (youth), atten-
tion to the body is necessary. The body, itself hinged between concepts
of cultural structure and base material, can reflect, even in its figuration,
something of unmediated experience. Karen Coats and Roberta Seelinger
Trites have recognized the important implications of this reminder to the
study of child culture: “how we live our embodied experience, including
such seemingly phenomenal occurrences as pain, gesture, growth, and
emotional response, will be greatly affected by our culture” (2006: 151).
Yet John Sanders has warned not to take this reasoning too far: “With-
out a great deal of explanation and qualification, embodiment comes
perilously close to sounding materialistic, or at least behavioristic. . . .
Materialism and behaviorism [however] . . . make people out to be too
mechanical, too passive” (1999: 121). My goal is to keep watch for where
and how agency can be squelched in an effort to recognize and defend its
potential.
As quoted in my epigraph, Susan Stewart describes the “reproduction of
folklore” as “deeply historicized” (1991: 68). Many scholars share nostal-
gia for the seemingly authentic opportunity for materialist discovery that
folklore and fairy tales can provide. But Stewart also warns that
Of all the ways in which one could evaluate the significance of the liter-
ary appropriation of oral forms, the most mistaken would be to assume
that literature thereby records the lost world of preindustrial culture. . . .
[W]hen oral forms are transformed into ‘evidence’ and ‘artifacts,’ they
acquire all the characteristics of fragmentation, symbolic meaning, and
literariness that are most valued by the literary culture. (1991: 68)
Introduction 9
Taking heed, I’d like to spin the ambiguous authenticity of folkloric appro-
priations as a great benefit to the materialist. Without any one clear, true,
identifiable origin, folklore and folkliterature are freed from the cult of
authorship and even historical periodization (layering over centuries). Peter
Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson wrote, “Those who claim an individual
origin of folkloristic creativity tend to see the idea of the collectivity as that
of anonymity” (1982: 37). In short, we don’t even need to argue the death
of the author to reflect upon historicity. In fact, any individualism might
prohibit understanding, as Stephen Benson explains
Just as the folktale fails to adhere to our notion of authorship, so the

characters within the tales are fundamentally at odds with our modern
conception of the narrative subject. They are ‘pre-individualistic,’ issu-
ing from a social world in which the psychological subject has not yet
been constituted as such. (2003: 40)
Instead, we can focus on what cultural figurations communicate about

historically relatable and collective material experience—ideals mod-
eled, lessons taught, childhood constructed, fears fictionalized. Zipes has
explained
The initial ontological situation in the tales generally deal with ex-
ploitation, hunger, and injustice familiar to the lower classes in pre-
capitalist societies. And the magic of the tales can be equated to the
wish-fulfi llment and utopian projections of the people, i.e. of the folk,
who preserved and cultivated these tales. (2002: 8)
Stephen Benson points out that while there is “no hierarchy of versions or
authoritative tellings” in fairy-tale study, “the lure of folk material lay in
part in its historical and social provenance” (2003: 20, 69). From a similar
perspective, historian Massimo Montanari treats food custom as a lore-like
language because it, like folklore, organically evolves with no perceivable
Ur-text (Ur-cuisine) and “[l]ike spoken language, the food system contains
and conveys the culture of its practitioner; it is the repository of traditions
and of collective identity. It is therefore an extraordinary vehicle of self-
representation and of cultural exchange” (2006: 134). This is yet another
reason I turn to folklore studies as a model practice for understanding folk-
lures in food-lore, as this field emphasizes the necessity of and depends
upon materialist analysis.
There is also a parallel in the ways by which literacy, folk custom, food
production, and childhood became standardized within the modern proj-
ect. As Susan Stewart reminds us, “The invention of printing coincided
with the invention of childhood,” so “the antique is linked to the childhood
of the nation. . . . Oral traditions were thus seen as the abstract equivalent
to material culture” (1993: 43, 142). Folklore encases various pasts in the
present, orally preserving an unwritten history, especially preserving traces
of the material heritage of those subjects (the poor, the young) held in check
by or unrepresented by greater powers. Holly Blackford has written, “The
role of the protagonist in the folktale became culturally linked to child
development in Western culture when these stories became the province of
children’s literature. . . . Folktales are also linked to the progress of Western
children from an oral to a literate culture” (2007: 78). Folklore is constantly
readapted technologically and ideologically, along with childhood.
The forms most associated with children are often the most commercial-
ized, evolving with industrialization and the marginalization of childhood,
perhaps best typified by television, which Linda Dégh has argued “is the
main dispenser of certain forms of folklore, including the tale” (1994: 36).9
Mikel Koven also addresses the consequent commercial fi xing of folklore
and childhood: “theorists, both folklorists and nonfolklorists, saw the cin-
ema, especially the Disney texts, as an attempt to become defi nitive, thereby
solidifying a single variant” (2003: 177). And a passifying, consumerist one
at that, usually. But Koven adds, “Contemporary models are likewise chal-
lenging the idea that film texts are ‘fi xed’” (2003: 185). One might think
of folkloric intertexts like Hoodwinked (2006) or its cartoon precursors as
examples of filmic folkloric forms remaining openly fluid, not fi xed.
Mikel Koven writes that “popular culture can behave like traditional
folklore forms” (2003: 179). Even so, much of popular culture tends to be
ignored in folklore scholarship, which is especially surprising in the case
of such a related form as the comic book. Adam Zolkover points out that
“while folklorists have been paying little attention to comic books, comic
book creators have been talking a great deal about folklore” (2008: 39).10
This neglect is especially unfortunate, as comics provide a rich territory
for folkloristic investigation: “comics . . . tend to integrate and reinterpret
folklore, or explicitly refer to literary renderings, especially of myths and
folktales, leaving the role of oral influences either irrelevant or impossible
to determine” (2008: 39). Like folktales, comics are fluid.
For what they lack in authorial authenticity, comics gain from concrete
approaches to compensation. Sherryl Vint has argued that “Human con-
cepts of intersubjectivity and agency rely on representation and language
to fill the space between one person and another; we have no concept that
allows for an intercorporeal sense of communication” (2007: 70). But the
comic uses two methods that compensate: folkloric content, in terms of
symbolic and iconic means of conveying moral or thrilling matter, and illus-
tration, which prohibits abstraction. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra describes
illustration as one “of the material ways by which a juvenile audience is
written into a book” (2002: 197).
In spite of the continued commercial viability of folklore (or perhaps
because of it), the close of the twentieth century brought with it much
gloomy debate about the academic field and its nineteenth-century method-
ologies. Western Folklore devoted an issue to “Current Problems and Future:
Introduction 11
Prospects of American Folklore Studies” in 1991, with editor Elliott Oring
explaining, “One of the reasons that folklore studies do not hold a promi-
nent place in the humanities or social sciences is that contemporary folklore
studies have yet to contribute a major theoretical perspective to the study of
human behavior and expression” and eschew “the mystification expected of
serious scientific discourse” (78). By 2004 Alan Dundes would address the
American Folklore Society with a troubling account of where folkloristic
rigor is being compromised: “we seem to be besieged by popularizer nonfolk-
lorists masquerading as folklore scholars” (2005: 392). Particularly to blame,
he claims, are those of us in the field of cultural studies, which “consists of
literary types who would like to be cultural anthropologists. I hate to think

of folklorists being grouped with such wannabees!” (2005: 385).
Perhaps part of the problem, aside from the typical attack on cultural
studies for its amorphous appropriation as it supposedly attempts to dis-
place social sciences, language, and literary purity alike, is the fact that aca-
demic folklorists don’t seem to agree on how to defi ne themselves and their
methods as a group. Consider the following pair of quotes from Rudolf
Schenda’s and Alan Dundes’ contributions to Ruth Bottigheimer’s Fairy
Tales and Society: Schenda writes, “Two misconceptions should be cleared
up. The fi rst is the orality of the ancient fairy tales and legends” (1986: 78).
Dundes, conversely, argues
The fi rst thing to say about fairy tales is that they are an oral form. . . .
Once a fairy tale or any other type of folktale . . . is reduced to written
language, one does not have a true fairy tale but instead only a pale
and inadequate reflection of what was originally an oral performance.
(1986: 259)
But those “pale and inadequate reflections” are what we nonfolklorists

(wannabees or not) depend upon to learn about folk sources of literary
tales, and we depend upon “true” folklorists to accurately provide such
valuable data (in written form), which I’ll argue is of great relevance and
use for any student of culture.
One difference between the vocabularies of scholars like Schenda and
Dundes stems from prioritizing form or context. Peter Bogatyrëv and
Roman Jakobson explain that folklore, studied as a whole, approaches an
abstract collective of potential forms, while literary works can be isolated
and studied as separate contributions: “A fundamental difference between
folklore and literature is that folklore is set specifically toward langue, while
literature is set toward parole” (1982: 39). In her own twist on Jakobson
and Bogatyrëv’s application of Sausurre’s terminology to folklore, Susan
Stewart touches on these differing emphases:
To privilege either view is to stop the vital movement of the sign. . . .

We can see in the structuralist’s assumption of an ideal language a
romanticism of apprehension, a romanticism to be fulfilled at the mo-
ment when langue is realized on earth. And in the contextualist’s privi-
leging of context of situation we see a romanticism directed toward a
lost point of origin, a point where being-in-context supposedly allowed
for a complete and totalized understanding. (1991: 18–19)
Folklore resists such tight, clear, and potentially reductive packages, as

Heda Jason remarks on another complication with applying structuralist
terms: “Langue and parole are thought of as existing synchronically; the
archetype and its variants are thought of as existing diachronically” (1991:
32). If synchronic, analysis discounts history, if archetypal, analysis gener-

alizes one’s own cultural interpretation (essentializing it as subconscious
or universal), but focusing diachronically and recognizing unknowns is at
least making a good faith effort.
We need to break the old binaries like a bad habit. If we enable the col-
lapsing of overly rigid distinctions like ‘oral’ versus ‘written’ and ‘collective’
versus ‘individual’ our critical receptivity can only be enhanced.11 This is
especially true with fairy tales—some of which may have had simultaneous
origins in both oral and written contexts, through the combined collective
efforts of isolatable individuals. Fairy tales comprise a genre in which the
critic is forced into the theoretically prime position of beginning without
presumptions of individual authorship (even where the author is known).
Ultimately, however, the difference between those folklorists who priori-
tize form and those who prioritize context may be simply a semantic split-
ting of hairs. For example, Schenda and Dundes agree on the inauthenticity
of the tales “transposed” by the Grimm brothers, as Schenda explains,
“whenever the Grimms note the original as ‘oral,’ they only mean that a
contributor had asserted . . . that such a legend had been told in his area,”
not that it hadn’t been written before or even that it originally reached that
area through a written text (1986: 79). Dundes remarks that
The Grimms . . . began to conflate different versions of the same tale

and they ended up producing what folklorists now call ‘composite’
texts.12 A composite text, containing one motif from one version, an-
other motif from another, and so on, exemplifies what folklorists term
‘fakelore.’ Fakelore refers to an item which the collector claims is genu-
ine oral tradition but which has been doctored in some cases entirely
fabricated by the purported collector. (1986: 260)
This usage is consistent with the term’s original coinage by Richard Dorson,
who argued that “a literary product passed off as folklore” is inauthentic,
including “rewritten, saccharine versions” and “children’s story collec-
tions” that “misled or gulled the public” (1976: 28, 5). In fact, fakelore can
be seen as a cautionary measure of folkloric purity: “one sign of a healthy
discipline of folkloristics will be its quickness to dismiss the scissors-and-
Introduction 13
paste, the jolly children’s books, the tourist-targeted legends, and similar
potboilers that swamp publishers’ lists” (119). But the market has prevailed
over scholarly preservation, and even some folklorists have abandoned the
false god of authenticity.
Surely much fakelore (appearing for analysis here) is straightforwardly
created by well-intentioned bricoleurs, as Kay Stone explains, “Folklore
scholarship reveals that oral tales are the products of chains of individual,
though usually anonymous, narrators. In the sense that each verbal artist
contributes to any single tale, this literature can be regarded as a commu-
nally created product” (1986: 17). Even the oral tradition requires dissemi-
nation and thus some standardization, to be “of the folk” as Bogatyrëv and
Jakobson say, “the work only becomes a fact of folklore once it has been
accepted by the community” (1982: 37). Stephen Benson has argued at
length that folkloric cycles, though literarily constructed, have a “residual
orality” by modeling storytelling contexts and so “are closer to the per-
formative nature of the material in framing the string of narratives with a
teller or tellers” (2003: 47, 44). Contemporary authors, like Francesca Lia
Block, for example, frequently weave mythic or fairy-tale elements through
literary works far removed from the oral tradition. Though not trying to
pass off such work as anonymous and originally oral, writers like Block are
working toward a similar community aesthetic to that which storytellers
use in adapting tales to suit their speaking context. Jack Zipes remarks,
“The appropriation of tales from the oral and literary traditions is nothing
new, nor is it to be belittled or condemned. In fact, the fairy tale thrives
on such appropriation up to the present day” (2006b: 226). The bulk of
what commercially passes as fairy-tale literature today probably qualifies
as fakelore by Dundes’s purist standards. Even if we agree to call it fakel-
ore, isn’t it also worthy of folkloric study (i.e., attention to motifs and their
relationships to each other and perceived socio-historic conditions)? If not
I should apologize for being a wannabee fakelorist.
Especially in consumer culture, the market guarantees an avid audience
for fakelore. William Fox has said, “There is no doubt that fakelore repre-
sents, in a most direct and literal fashion, the dominant culture. Cultural
hegemony is after all being advanced by fakelore” (1980: 252). Fox views
this process somewhat pessimistically:
Fakelore is the antithesis of folklore; whereas folklore exercises a criti-

cal function in large nation-states, fakelore contributes to social coor-
dination and ideological and cultural hegemony. The steady erosion
of folklore and its replacement by fakelore—a fakelore that buttresses
the social status quo—is a manifestation of an increasingly strong ten-
dency of advanced industrial society toward not simply the manipula-
tion of the past or a ‘rewriting’ of history—such tendencies have been
common enough in all societies—but rather toward a suppression of
the past and a destruction of history. (252–253)
If we allow some relaxing of the folk/fakelore distinction, we might dis-
cover that history is partially preserved under erasure and that in the study
of fakelore we can partly excavate it. We also need to let go of the impos-
sible critical morass of proving authenticity. When Dorson attacks “the
growing popularization, commercialization and resulting distortion of folk
materials” represented by such pseudo-legends as Paul Bunyan, arguing
that “capitalism distorts the social truths of tradition through chauvinistic
fakelore, communism through folklore tailored to the class struggle, and
the conscientious folklorist must avoid both ideologies,” he overlooks the
fact that neither are authentic or politically unbiased (1976: 5, 117). Post-
structuralist folklorists fi nd authenticity itself a construct, leveling both

types as equally manipulated and manipulative. In fact, Stephen Benson’s
revisitation of formalist theorizing through similarly informed hindsight
opens up rather than restricts narratological reading: “While the standard
collections of folktales are ostensibly authentic but implicitly literary, the
various cycles of unashamedly literary tales are structured, both implicitly
and explicitly, around a staged orality” (46). With such refocusing, authen-
ticity becomes a workably relative concept.
In this and other critical contexts, fairy-tale studies have much to gain
from exposure to folklore studies and folkloristics aside from raw data.
Without attention to folkloric source-speculations or an awareness of wide-
spread tale types, we lose an understanding of how democratic and fluid
tales can be. Rudolf Schenda rightly characterizes the resulting fairy-tale
criticism as ungrounded and impractical:
I . . . regard some of the psychoanalytic and pedagogic reverence for

the fairy tale as a kind of idolatry, as a veneration of a false deity, as a
denial of what the folk really recounted and what the actual psycho-
social requirements of the members of the lower class were. (1986: 79)
Alan Dundes’s later comments suggest his agreement on this contributing

aspect of folkloristics as well. He criticizes the popularity of essentializing
and totalizing approaches to fairy tales, including archetypal readings that
generalize the human psyche and overlook socio-historic factors: “there are
different myths in different cultures. The constants are not archetypes, but
human relationships. There are parent–child struggles in folklore around
the world” (2005: 400).
Within fairy-tale studies, at least according to the widely influential work
of Jack Zipes, differences between literary and folklore studies have not
prevented their complementary influence. What Clifford Geertz has said
of cultural anthropology is true of its sister fields ethnography and folklore
as well: “it is not a cold-fact discipline, and it should not aspire to become
one. . . . [it] produces a cacophony of opinions” (2003: 29). And the liter-
ary-academic mainstream seems to have resolved potential schisms, fi nd-
ing useful scholarship, data, and criticism for multiple audiences between
Introduction 15
competing perspectives, inviting scholars like myself from related fields to
become fairy-tale readers and students even of fakelore, at least informed
by previous work of folklorists.
Jack Zipes models a clear-cut and broadly applicable distinction in
defi ning folktales and fairy tales but remains flexible about the unknowns
of folkloric origins:
fairy tales have been in existence as oral folk tales for thousands of
years and fi rst became what we call literary fairy tales during the sev-
enteenth century. Both the oral and the literary traditions continue to
exist side by side today, interact, and influence one another. (2002: 2)
This continual coexistence and dialogue between oral (folk) and written
(fairy) tales, and between various written versions and motifs of tales, makes
it necessary for anyone in fairy-tale studies to study the work of folklorists
who provide the source-data that anchors the process. And though folklore
studies might utilize more “hard research” and “less theorizing,” there is a
common understanding within the field of how democratic a process this
can be. For this reason, folklore scholarship is of great importance to pop
culturalists, fairy-tale studies, and, of course, cultural studies too. Folklore
is inviting to nonfolklorists because of its democratic accessibility, as Elliott
Oring explains:
It is my guess that the bulk of scholarly writing in any field is over-

looked and ignored. While mathematics as a field is highly respected,
much mathematical research results in publications that perhaps a few
people in the world can read and understand. Can this be the ideal
folklorists should be pursuing? (1991: 77–78)
Gladly, I think not.

Though the link and indebtedness of fairy-tale studies to folklore appears
obvious, it is not always taken into account. Zipes has
lamented the manner in which other scholars approached the oral folk
tale and the literary fairy tale, collapsing the distinctions and dehisto-
ricizing the genres while generating fuzzy psychological and formalist
theories that lead more to mystification than elucidation in regard to
the interaction between oral and literary genres. (2006b: xii)
Some critics take advantage of the uncertain source genealogies of fairy

tales to impose their own hermeneutics, at the expense of overlooking his-
torical provenance: “there has been a strange avoidance to discuss social
class, ideological conflicts, and the false assumptions of numerous psycho-
logical approaches in a frank and straight-forward manner” (Zipes 2002:
ix). Historicizing is particularly necessary in light of many unknowns:
It is difficult to document exactly what transpired within the oral tra-
dition between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries because we lack
records, but one thing is certain: the folktales were widespread, told by
all classes of people, and very much bound by material conditions of
their existence. (2002: 9)
If we can better understand material conditions, we can better understand

the functions of ideology in relation to material experience. Louis Althuss-
er’s most famous premise bears repeating in this light: “Ideology is a ‘Rep-
resentation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real
Conditions of Existence” (1971: 162). Discerning “the real conditions” of

any context calls for practical attention to material relations, or “things”
(a term that becomes heavy with meaning from this perspective).13 Antonio
Gramsci broadens ideology to explicitly contain folklore:
all men are philosophers [of] spontaneous philosophy . . . contained

in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and
concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; 2.
‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; popular religion and, therefore also
in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing
things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the
name of ‘folklore.’14 (1980: 323, my emphasis)
Folklore is culture at its most comprehensive point of expression—collec-

tive, cumulative, and constantly changing.
The collective potential of folklore must be kept in the minds of critics
otherwise accustomed to reading entirely original narratives by identifi-
able authors. One thing we do know of folktales is that they tend to be
polyphonic:
Sociologically speaking the folk were the great majority of people,

generally agrarian workers, who were non-literate and nurtured their
own forms of culture in opposition to that of the ruling classes and yet
often reflecting the same ideology. . . . the upper classes cannot and
should not be separated from the folk because they intermingled with
the lower classes and were also carriers of the oral tales. Often they
retold tales they heard from peasants and workers without altering the
social class perspective very much. (Zipes 2002: 8)
Even if retold by one storyteller and statically reproduced in print, the folk-
tale carries with it a material history layered with many class interests.
Stephen Benson explains,
Folktales have no acknowledged author—beyond the myth of a

source—but rather a series of narrators whose relationship to the tales
Introduction 17
is both intimate and detached; the folktale is ‘extra-individual,’ that
is, it exists both within and beyond each individual and personalized
telling. (2003: 19)
Folktales and fairy tales also evolve in cumulative, intertextual contexts:
Each historical epoch and each community altered the original folk
tales according to its needs as they were handed down over the cen-
turies. By the time they were recorded in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries as literary texts, they contained many primeval
motifs but essentially reflected late feudal conditions in their aesthetic

composition and symbolic referential system. (Zipes 2002: 8)
Through individual retellings a communal layered history results. Cumula-

tively, bricolage acquires many contrapuntal referents.
In The Savage Mind (1962) Claude Lévi-Strauss fi rst defi ned the process
of bricolage by emphasizing its materiality:
in the continual reconstruction from the same materials, it is always

earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the sig-
nified changes into the signifying and vice versa. . . . [The bricoleur]
‘speaks’ not only with things . . . but also through the medium of
things. (1968: 21)
As some theories of child language acquisition suggest, children may be

natural bricoleurs with sounds, or at least cultural productions for them
might reflect assumptions about this manner of learning. Roman Jakob-
son’s description that “[t]he child creates as he borrows” seems a wonder-
ful articulation of the concept that can easily be applied to lore-keeping
(1980: 14).
On the cusp of the ineffable relation between studied object and studying
subject, Kenneth Kidd reminds us that our knowledge is still buffered (but-
tressed) by an “ethnographic imaginary,” which “refers to field research
with children and their materials, as well as the symbolic repertoire of
classic ethnography—the familiar language of observer and observed, the
practices of ethnographic writing that estrange as much as bring close their
subjects” (2002: 147). Bill Brown’s thing theory and material unconscious
suggest a sympathy between material methods and childhood study in light
of this gap:
I want to reprivilege the literary as that which—though assimilable to,

or illustrative of, a dominant logic—can also expose a particular logic,
a surplus materiality that frustrates any historicist desire to formalize
‘culture’ just as it once frustrated the desire to formalize ‘childhood.’
(1996: 171)
Materialist approaches prove necessary in engaging the unmediable posi-
tion of childhood.
Folklore, operating as bricolage, resists the critical pitfalls that result
from the cult of monistic authorship, remaining liminal to discourses posi-
tion the author as central to interpretive understanding or use. As Heda
Jason reminds us, even some literary fairy tales invite variation:
Fluctuation is not a quality of oral literature alone. It exists also in

written . . . cultures in which the concepts of the author having rights
to his product and being responsible for it do not form part of the
literary-cultural conventions, the works will be transmitted in a wide

range of variants. (1991: 34)
Students of fairy tales (literary or not), must be aware of such complicated

states of textness, balancing attention to distinctions between the brico-
leur’s art and the collective, cumulative sources woven into new forms with
awareness that the fluid, collective nature of such tales makes tracing influ-
ences difficult and at times impossible to do comprehensively.
ORALITY TO HYPERTEXTUALITY
Whereas oral tales are generally characterized as communal, fluid, and

reciprocally shared (with audiences actively participating in composition),
industrializing cultures with a growth of literacy (and literary trends of
replicating such tales or their style) are typically blamed for isolating static
versions and often, as in the case with Wilhelm Grimm, manipulating them
to conform to middle-class conservatism. Zipes writes,
the book form enabled the reader to withdraw from his or her society
and to be alone with the tale. This privatization violated the com-
munal aspects of the folklore, but the very printing of a fairy tale was
already a violation since it was based on separation of social classes.
(1994: 13)
Some argue, however, that the emergence of film, comics, and hypertex-
tual technologies (re)democratized the public use of fairy tales. As Eliza T.
Dresang puts it,
As story moved from oral to written, it became fi xed, externally

linear. The digital age has brought story back to the nonlinear,
sometimes nonsequential nature of orality. Because oral storytelling
continues to play a signifi cant role in various cultures, parallels ex-
ist between these cultures and the experience of story in the digital
world. (1999: 233)
Introduction 19
The fluidity and reciprocity of folk/fairy tale appropriation reemerges in
these mediums.
Walter J. Ong has written, “Electronic technology has brought us into
the age of ‘secondary orality.’ This new orality has striking resemblances to
the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its
concentration on the present moment” (1982: 136).
Written reweavings of once-oral tales become transformed into a static
and elite art with industrialization and increased literacy, but with the
development of visual communications, fluidity and communal reciprocity
can return to storytelling. Particularly relevant here is the concept of hyper-
textuality. Gérard Genette explains,
By hypertextuality I mean any relationship uniting a text B (which I

shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it
hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of com-
mentary. (1997: 5)
With oral, polyphonic folkloric forms serving as hypotext to multivocal,

multimedia hypertextual versions of fairy tales, the cumulative and com-
munal aspects of oral culture (granted an idealized one) can flourish. Mov-
ing beyond the critical necessity of recognizing sources and authorship,
folklore encourages shared use and understanding of tales.
Appropriations of folklore may be subtle or direct:
[hypertextuality] may be of another kind such as text B not speaking of

text A at all but being unable to exist, as such, without A, from which
it originates through a process I shall provisionally call transformation,
and which it consequently evokes more or less perceptibly without nec-
essarily speaking of it or citing it. (Genette 1997: 5)
Playful revisitations (Francesca Lia Block’s Rose and the Beast or Robert
Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice) are not adaptations but “transformations,”
a process-oriented term that more accurately expresses the fluidity of fairy-
tale hypertexts. George P. Landow writes that hypertext, as a multimodal,
multimedia, multivocal, and multilinear process, operates like bricolage in
the act of reading (especially in highly intertextual fiction like Coover’s):
“every hypertext reader-author is inevitably a bricoleur” (1992: 115).
In the study of folkloric appropriations, there is a temptation to marvel
and be content with demonstrating repetition of forms, resulting in what
Mikel Koven has called motif-spotting.15 Overemphasis on form (textual
structure), however, can lead to overlooking socio-structural evidence, as
well as imposing conclusions. Stephen Benson explains that narratology
(and structural formalism) “is built on this search for similarities, in the
process of which the manifold differences between, for example, the Walt
Disney account of a folktale and its seventeenth-century predecessor are
potentially silenced” (2003: 40). But these differences can teach us about
historical change and the social groups in which it takes place. I hope that
my historicizing agenda will prevent such a compromise.
CONSUMER CAPITALISM AND FAIRY TALES
While fairy-tale bricolage and hypertexts may have resisted stagnation, the
rise of consumer capitalism created a context in which commercialization
might more pervasively spread single, static varieties. Zipes writes of the
fi rst quarter of the twentieth century,
the domination of the word in the development of the fairy tale as genre
was about to change. The next great revolution in the institutionaliza-
tion of the genre was for film. . . . And here is where Walt Disney and
other animators enter the scene. (1994: 75)
Like Wilhelm Grimm in Germany’s industrializing age during the rise of a

dominant middle class, Walt Disney would almost single-handedly repack-
age fairy tales for generations of Americans as a part of the growing con-
sumer culture: “The great ‘magic’ of the Disney spell is that he animated
the fairy tale only to transfi x audiences and divert their potential utopian
dreams and hopes through the false promises of the images he cast upon
the screen” (Zipes 1994: 74). It was not the medium (film) but the corporate
institution (Disney) that would normalize fairy tales to suit middle-class
didacticism, and being consumer-driven, this didacticism targeted parents
as much as their children. Naomi Wood captures the resulting shift: “The
Disney Corporation’s appropriation of The Little Mermaid (1989) trans-
mutes Andersen’s bittersweet ichor into G-rated diet soda, with the osten-
sible goal of making it child-safe. Whose fears are being assuaged?” (2006:
194).
As filmic mediums were developing, so were comic strips and later comic
books, which often resisted commercializing impulses while maintaining
accessibility and widespread popularity: “as a medium the comic book
strives more than any other printed literature to create the intimate rapport
between producer and reader which is aimed at by the oral storyteller and
his listener-participants” (Scobie 1980: 73).16 Like the “second orality” that
Ong posits, Alex Scobie suggests that the genre’s fumetto (speech balloon)
and audience reciprocity (the tradition of publishing readers’ letters to writ-
ers/artists in the back of many comics) create a “simulated oralcy” (79).
Mainstream serial comics are also typically team produced (writers, art-
ists, colorists, and assistants), teams change over time, plots and characters
are formulaic and connect extra-diegetically, and the medium is inherently
polyphonic and layered as a form (through dialogue, image, written narra-
tive, and visual montage).
Introduction 21
These coexisting traditions, both reworking conservatively to conform to
ever-changing dominant views and radically altering them to uncover past
referents or question contemporary ones, will be the subject of my study.
Zipes sets the initial critical context: “the fairy tale reflected a change in
values and ideological conflicts in the transitional period from feudalism to
early capitalism,” creating historical layers that require informed reading
(2002: 10). Isolating folkloric traces in this cumulative historical palimp-
sest, I place the bricolage of folktales and fairy tales in the hyper(con)text of
consumerism. Attempting a history of the present via forays back to indus-
trial models of childhood agency and storytelling in Chapters 1, 3, 5, and
the Conclusion; and further through their material medieval provenance in

Chapters 2 and 4, I analyze how the culture industry continues to control
lore, arguing that public forums also critique that control and attempt to
dispel its ideological hold.
As always with a tradition from which we only have traces (not origi-
nal sources), hermeneutics come fully into freeplay. In Pinocchio in Ven-
ice (1997), Robert Coover’s century-old Pinocchio turned Nobel-winning,
emeritus professor Pinenut quips, “All great scholarship is a transcendent
form of autobiography!” (116). Folklorists’ and fairy-tale scholars’ dis-
agreements about field boundaries and method can at least be attributed to
the different personalities producing criticism. Pinocchio, like other liter-
ary fairy tales and any folk sources that may have preceded it, has inspired
an entire body of criticism that is itself a hypertext that Jennifer Stone has
called “Pinocchiology.” Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg has explained,
The real meaning of Pinocchiology lies in the text’s ability to both pin
the tale down to a moralizing ethic . . . and to generate a kind of hy-
pertext of proliferating meanings that have thereby permitted Collodi’s
classic to become absorbed into its mass (re)production as commodity.
(2007: 45)
Jennifer Stone argues that the symbolic nature of fairy-tale motifs makes
them particularly pliable, so that
The text challenges all and leads to readings of almost every conceiv-
able type, most especially of the religious, nationalist, and structural
linguistic kinds . . . Pinocchiologists generally highlight the redemptive
aspects of Collodi’s beautiful use of Tuscan vernacular to compare Pi-
nocchio with Adam or Christ at the expense of analysis of the darker
materials to be found there. (1994: 329)
Along the same lines, “Gepetto’s passive role17 is the biblical fabrication of
that other carpenter, Joseph” (Stone 1994: 335). Though interesting, fi nd-
ing such arcane or “archetypal” similarities does little to illuminate our
contextual understanding of a piece.
Robert Coover parodies these hypertexts of Collodi’s original—Disney’s
film and Pinocchio criticism—especially in the chapter on “The Movie of
His Life,” set in a manger, where Pinocchio, or Professor Pinenut, imagines
his school friends
tying strings to his hands and feet to make him dance, as though he
were still a puppet and without the dignity of flesh and history. This
is what it means, he realizes in his suffering, to be, of anything, incar-
nate. (1997: 83)
He imagines himself crucified by the control-rods to which he’s strung up,

with the following announcement to attract an audience:
The fi nal stirring episode in the Passion of Pinocchio! You will see
before your eyes the farewell dance of the world’s most notorious bad
boy, this improbable son of an impotent carpenter and a virgin fairy.
. . . Right this way! (1997: 83)
In contrast to symbolic decodings, Julie Sanders describes the possibility of

historicist readings through the example of intertextual fiction like Christo-
pher Wallace’s novel, The Pied Piper’s Poison (2000), which adapts a folk-
loric standard realistically: “Rejecting the fantasy element of the folk tale
as handed through the generations, its author finds a . . . material explana-
tion for the events suggested in the story” (2006: 84). Historical realism
has become a popular form of appropriation in post-modernist fairy-tale
intertexts like Louise Murphy’s The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
(2003). Material explanations also exist for Pinocchio’s unusual situation
of pseudo-agency that are far more concrete and relatable than religious
symbolism: “the figure of Pinocchio is born at an approximate midpoint of
a set of discourse about the modern subject whose privileged metaphor is
that of the puppet,” Stewart-Steinberg writes, demonstrating the same pos-
sibilities in criticism; “Pinocchio . . . is one site where the crisis of the liberal
subject comes to be thought and where the contours of what I have called
the postliberal subject find one form of expression” (2007: 22, 23).
Just as the fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers were utilized in
the effort to construct a unified German culture, Pinocchio came of age
in the context of Italy’s postliberal (1860–1920) search for a national cul-
ture (though unlike the Grimms’ tales, after unification). Suzanne Stewart-
Steinberg writes that
Collodi’s text is quintessentially Italian because it intuits that post-Uni-

fication Italy was living the drama of one who changes from puppet to
man and knows that this process is painful. Collodi’s is not, therefore,
a nostalgia for the old world order but, more universally, the nostalgia
connected to becoming an adult. (2007: 373, n. 1)
Introduction 23
In addition to explaining socio-historical factors, Stewart-Steinberg’s easy
conflation of a child’s position with that of a social puppet speaks to the
necessity of Pinocchio’s example in fi rst discussing child agency (as I do in
Chapter 1) before discussing how it is tempted and bartered away.
Pinocchio also serves as an excellent starting point for my following
study of food lures. Just as early folklore-collecting served nineteenth-
century efforts to fi nd common national identities, recipe-collecting was
utilized to strengthen regional unity by reinforcing shared tastes. Massimo
Montanari explains,
Regionalism as a system was, in this period of time, a reality in prog-

ress. An important means of transmission was the cookbook published
in 1891 by Pellegrino Artusi, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of
Good Eating, a work that had an extraordinary success, with doz-
ens of editions printed over more than a century. It ultimately became
(along with Pinocchio) one of the most enduring bestsellers of Italian
literature. . . . [Its] ‘declared purpose’ was to unite Italy as a culinary
‘state’. The historical moment for the development of cuisines that
today we call ‘regional’ (mistakenly attributing them to historical ar-
chetypes that never existed) was the nineteenth century, that is, to be
precise, the era of industrialization. (2006: 79)
Following the material culture (objects, toys, foods) appropriated from folk/
fairy tale traditions of medieval and industrial Europe or stolen through
slavery into U.S. consumer capitalism, I will argue that with the prosperity
of development came protectionism towards children and a larger arsenal
of consumer goodies with which to tempt them away from the little agency
they had in middle-class hegemony.
I also hope to establish that the fairy tale as a genre became instrumen-
tal to the development of consumerist childhood. As Marjorie Swann has
shown, premodern
fairylore was traditionally bound up with normative concepts of a

precapitalist social formation; thus, as England shifted from a rural
household-based mode of production to an urban, commercial, and
increasingly mercantile economy, fairylore became a particularly apt
vehicle for mystifying the profound socioeconomic changes of the early
modern period. (2000: 450)
In early fairy tales, children (and audiences of all ages) were cautioned to
know their place in terms of clear material values. Take as a characteris-
tic example “The Three Fairies,” in which the hard-working and humble
daughter is rewarded with “a splendid dress completely embroidered with
gold” after asking for the least valuable dress, whereas the ugly sister with
“vulgar manners” grabs “the most beautiful dress in the wardrobe” and
so is punished with rags (Basile 2001: 546, 547). In Perrault’s version she
is charmed with gems pouring from her mouth, in response to which the
prince “considered that such a gift was worth more than a dowry anyone
else could bring” (566). In other words, the tale promises upward mobility
but only to those who aspire to nothing more than the constraints of their
social class allow. This disabling logic of encouraging behavior by promis-
ing opposite or impossible rewards will be seen used to various ends as the
professed and real value of children within culture changes. But the bril-
liant catch of keeping the target audience in place will remain.
1 What Good Little Girls and Boys
Are Made Of
The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out

of it. Yet, for all that the table continues to be that common, every-
day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is
changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet
on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on
its head, and evolves out of its Wooden brain grotesque ideas far more
wonderful than “tableturning” ever was.
Karl Marx, Capital
“I’m sick of always being a puppet!” cried Pinocchio, slapping his

wooden head. “It’s about time I became a man, like other people!”
Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio
Before we can discuss how children are manipulated through their bodies
we must address the concept of agency and the materials of youth—that is,
object-relations from a materialist perspective. What are good children made
of? Moving parts and a bit of magic? Stephen Benson writes that “the fairy
tale is a medium for a putatively timeless message of good behavior” (2003:
155). Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg points out that Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio
learns from the blue fairy that he must be a good boy to become a man—the
Italian ragazzino perbene meaning “a real or proper, but also upstanding
boy” (2007: 21). In contrast, Disney’s Pinocchio is on a quest to become real,
reified as an eternal boy, not a man. Nicholas Sammond explains,
Walt Disney appeared as a combination of two of the characters

from Pinocchio (1940), Gepetto and Jiminy Cricket. He was part
good-natured toy-maker, providing simple amusements and asking
only that the children he helped to make become real boys and girls.
(2005: 77, my emphasis)
This impossible ideal of fi xed childhood, imposed upon children by the

Disney industry, is mocked in Bill Willingham’s comic, Fables: Legends
in Exile (2002), in which Pinocchio complains that he wants to fi nd “Blue
Fairy, who turned me into a real boy . . . and I’m going to kick her pretty
azure ass. . . . [because] Who knew I’d have to stay a boy forever? The ditzy
bitch interpreted my wish too literally” (87).
Ann Lawson Lucas points out that “there is no Fairy in [Collodi’s] first,
brief version of the tale: the embryo of the character, in his last chapter, is
only a ‘Little Girl’” (2006: 105). Stephen Benson clarifies,
the Fairy combines characteristics of the literary fairy tale stepmother

and godmother, an example of the story’s fusion of fantasy with a di-
dactic reality deemed necessary for educating the young in the newly
unified Italian state. Indeed, the fantasy element is given a markedly
un-Romantic reading in Pinocchio. (2003: 160)
In fact, for these reasons Nicholas J. Perella described the tales as distinctly
“anti-Cinderella” (qtd. in Benson 161). But in the U.S. we love a good Cin-
derella story, especially for the rags to riches possibilities so implausibly
seen in “The Three Fairies” as well. The quality Marjorie Swann highlights
in early folklore, in which “ordinary people could aspire to new wealth
not by engaging in protocapitalist trade or commerce, but rather by fulfill-
ing their humble social roles” (and wishing for a fairy’s help) has proven
popular and useful to Americans recasting old lore for kids (2000: 453). So
Pinocchio has been made over often.
In the capitalist U.S., where Pinocchio has been reshaped to fit into the
consumerist culture we know today, the socio-economic relations deter-
mining childhood as a generalized position have altered profoundly since
Collodi’s time, no less profoundly affecting the potential agency of that
position. Daniel Thomas Cook writes, in The Commodification of Child-
hood (2004), that “the trajectory of childhood, generally understood as [a]
movement from dependence to independence, makes the extent of a child’s
personal autonomy indeterminate at any given point” (13). Such conceptu-
alizing allows for many trajectories wherein “the child marks out a seman-
tic space where the question of the locus of power and volition, of who has
the right and wherewithal to make decisions, is continually negotiated and
renegotiated” (14). Thus, measured according to child autonomy, pedago-
gies are dichotomized as either child-centered or adult-centered; legal activ-
ism is characterized as defending self-determination rights or nurturance
rights; child-rearing philosophies fall somewhere between necessary wast-
age and selfless/disinterested parenting. Viviana Zelizer characterizes the
early twentieth century as a time when predominance noticeably shifted
from the former extremes to the latter in the United States, and she adds
another trajectory in economic terms: children losing economic value in the
public sphere but gaining sentimental value within the family (as opposed
to being unified by fi nancial interdependence):
The twentieth-century family was defi ned as a sentimental institution

. . . Yet, even the family seemed to capitulate to the dominant cash
What Good Little Girls and Boys Are Made Of 27
nexus, as the value of its most precious member, the sacred child, was
now routinely converted into its monetary equivalent. Had the child
lost its economic value only to become another commercial commod-
ity? (1985: 211)
Nicholas Sammond delves into this and other questions in his Babes in
Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child
(2005), where he argues:
The subtle relationship between the child and the things it consumes
is one in which the child appears natural in relation to the culture it

absorbs through media commodities, so that the values it imbibes may
appear in its adult future relatively unadulterated by rational apprehen-
sion. . . . Viewed in this light, both the child and its media are com-
modity fetishes, mystified tokens of powerful social forces, deployed in
a common metaphysical operation of ‘social construction’. (363)
Certainly the relationship between children and things has been explored
for centuries in toy fictions, and it is useful to superimpose these trajecto-
ries in reading the cultural shift from viewing children as self-learners to
recipients, responsible participants to innocents, potential workers to pro-
longed dependents. This shift has as much to do with class as history—as
the middle class grew in size and affluence during industrialization, so did
the hegemony of a protectionist attitude toward children. Susan Stewart
puts these narratives of control in the context of industrialization:
We are thrilled and frightened by the mechanical toy because it pres-

ents the possibility of a self-invoking fiction, a fiction which exists in-
dependent of human signifying processes. Here is the dream of the
impeccable robot that has haunted the West at least since the advent
of the industrial revolution. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
mark the heyday of the automaton, just as they mark the mechaniza-
tion of labor. (1993: 57)
From the height of industrialization in the U.S., through the first half of
the twentieth century, toy fiction could be seen as exemplifying the transi-
tion from this tradition/tendency, as the nation’s economy became increas-
ingly industrialized and mechanized for scale, then service-oriented. The
latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century
are marked by a pervasive post-industrial theme of manufactured agency
for commodified subjects-turned-objects (defi ned in contrast to objects-
turned-imaginary-subjects).
Toy fictions make these themes and consumer culture anxieties explicit
for an assumed audience of children. Puppets, enlivened toys/dolls, ani-
mated objects, all speak to needs for co-opting children into an ideology
of conditional empowerment and perpetual commodification as imagined
through a passifying gaze. Mikhail Bakhtin has written that the “theme
of the marionette plays an important part in Romanticism,” where “the
accent is placed on the puppet as the victim of alien inhuman force, which
rules over men by turning them into marionettes” (40). Suzanne Stewart-
Steinberg writes, “Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio directly engages Yorick’s1
claim that the modern mechanical age would both kill the puppet and give
birth to a new man so disciplined and manageable that he would be indis-
tinguishable from his wooden predecessor” (2007: 38). It is significant that
Collodi chose to represent such a malleable political subject in the figura-
tion of a gullible puppet-child. Stewart-Steinberg explains,
It is then no coincidence that the nature of Pinocchio’s movement is so

strange, for he is both a puppet who moves at the behest of another and
an autonomous being who has no strings attached. . . . his looseness
hinges on the construction of a social subject who is nevertheless con-
ceived in terms of his puppet-like status. In other words, such a subject
is nothing but an effect, bespeaking thus an anxiety about what may lie
inside the subject beyond a piece of wood. (19, emphasis in original)
Pinocchio’s transformation in American versions of his adventures remains

consistent with this passifying function in puppet motifs and a growing
protectionist outlook on childhood. In this chapter I will look at a broad
selection of animation narratives in order to show the expansive complex-
ity and pervasiveness of this theme, using Pinocchio stories as a framing
reference and contrast.
Jack Zipes’s characterization of the function of fairy tales in consumer
capitalism makes the focal context of my study:
[O]fficial traditions intended to celebrate nation-states, religions, legal

systems, and local customs . . . are set up to remain stable and eter-
nal, while people are conditioned to become flexible and expendable
to serve the needs of the advanced capitalist economic system. . . . We
are expected to hold ourselves together and to be held together through
artificial theme parks that make fakelore out of folklore . . . through
schools that foster rote learning and positivist testing; through story-
tellers who espouse the value of traditional tales without critically ex-
amining what tales they are telling and why . . . and through political
speeches that use false patriotic appeals to tradition so that the young
will sacrifice their minds and bodies for their alleged native country, as
though national identity were essential and innate. (2006b: 231)
As mentioned in my introduction, nationalism (even the false variety Zipes

describes) lies at the heart of early folklore scholarship and fairy-tale col-
lecting. Pinocchio was not only important to constructing Italian identity
in Italy, but the figure and his adventures have been used to address notions
of Americanness in the U.S., particularly for constructing immigrant
identity in the consumer age. Nicolas Sammond explains, “What makes
[Disney’s] Pinocchio (1940) an apt metaphor for the metaphysics of mid-
century American child-rearing” is that it is “ultimately an assimilationist
fable” (2005: 377). 2 The fi lm addresses an audience at the cusp of shifting
industrial consciousness and encourages assimilation to a particular view
of nationhood (especially for recent immigrants) as well as childhood (espe-
cially for those who were actually being replaced by adult immigrants3 in
the workforce, due to child-labor reforms and compulsory education).
Perhaps the most lasting indication of this assimilative function is Angelo

Patri’s star theme from his 1928 Pinocchio in America, which seems to
have been the inspiration for Ned Washington’s lyric “When you wish upon
a star.” Patri’s Pinocchio sees a star in a dream:
A star rose, a great burning star that called to him, ‘Pinocchio, I am

your star. Rise, follow me to the Western world where lies your fame
and fortune. Rise and follow me.’ An arrow came and fitted itself to his
hand, and he sped it toward the star. He struck it fairly, and a shower
of sparks fell about him, wrapping him in a mantle of light so that he
shone like a radiant spirit. (1936: 5–6; see Figure 1.1)
Likewise, Disney’s Pinocchio opens to Jiminy Cricket singing, “If your heart
is in your dream / No request is too extreme / When you wish upon a star /
As dreamers do.” These famous words have become the Disney anthem and
spell out a consumerist ideal of permitted passivity, where “Like a bolt out
of the blue / Fate steps in and sees you through.”4
The dominance of a passifying gaze is all the more transparent when
you compare the 1940 film to the original story as conceptualized in 1882
by Carlo Collodi, in which Pinocchio is carved from an already living
piece of wood that in its nascent block form speaks and even starts a fight
between Geppetto and Mr. Antonio by shaking loose to hit his creator in
the shin. The agency of Collodi’s puppet is unquestioned from (what is later
described as) his “birth” (204). Yet, in the Disney version, Pinocchio is sim-
ply a lifeless marionette until a proven “good” man makes a sincere wish
on a star that his lovingly crafted puppet come alive and be “a real boy.”
In fact, the film explains Pinocchio’s agency as a temporary magical condi-
tion granted by the Blue Fairy in order to test his suitability for becoming
real. Both Pinocchio’s sentient animation and, later, his authenticity, are
the focal points of the plot development, whereas in the Italian original,
such themes are less central, his agency being a foregone conclusion, and
his becoming real being just one of many picaresque events.
Robert Coover’s hypertext, Pinocchio in Venice (1991), is both a novel
about the older, sadder, and wiser Pinocchio (Professor Pinenut) and a
critique of the earlier Disney adaptation. The professor explains that
Figure 1.1 Mary Liddell for Angelo Patri’s Pinocchio in America. Doubleday,
Doran, and Co., 1928.
alterations to the story of his life were necessary for “the alleged infantil-
ism of the American public” (1997: 96). Of the most significant revisions
is the selfless depiction of his parental figures. To Pinenut’s memory, the
depiction of his “grappa-crazed babbo” changed from a “heavy-handed ill-
tempered father into a cuddly old feeble-minded saint. . . . The Disney fi lm
had captured something of Gepetto’s stupidity maybe, but not his malice”
(218, 96). For the last half of the novel Pinenut struggles with his mother
issues “toward the Blue Fairy, she who, whipping him with guilt and the
pain of loss, has broken his spirit and bound him lifelong to a crazy dream,
this cruel enchantment of human flesh. In effect, liberated from wood, he
was imprisoned in metaphor” (289).
Coover’s hypertext implicitly critiques Collodi’s original for an overdose
of didacticism. As Maria Tatar has described it,
Collodi creates a world in which children are inherently lazy, disobe-

dient, and dishonest—the same world we encountered in cautionary
reward-and-punishment tales. At every bend in the road, evil forces . . .
stand ready to seduce the child and to turn him into the little beast he
really is. (1992: 75)
She concludes, then, that The Adventures of Pinocchio was “designed more
to satisfy adults than children” (75). In contrast, however, Coover’s Pinoc-
chio shows how, far from being a naughty boy, he was manipulated into
paralyzing morality by a mother who played on his emotions—faking death,
pretending to be dying from starvation and disease, and sexually abus-
ing him: “Millions have read him, only because they too were all puppets
like himself, hapless creations of the insidious Blue-Haired Fairy” (289).
He remains boyish, still just as gullible and selfish, but his tale blames his
arrested development on abusive parents. In Pinocchio Goes Postmodern,
Wunderlich and Morrisey write,
Pinocchio-turned-Professor-Pinenut would be utterly detestable were it

not for the fact that his egotism has been nurtured by his environment,
and that he has carefully cultivated his self-image in order to compen-
sate for the humiliation he suffered as a puppet. (2002: 179)
Yet he is no more gullible or heartless than his young puppet-self—he’s the

reified “good” boy his parents constructed.
Coover ironically highlights what Disney quite earnestly altered in adapt-
ing Collodi’s Pinocchio, exemplifying historical changes in American cul-
ture (from industrial to consumer capitalism), particularly in productions
targeting children, wherein dependent passivity is encouraged over autono-
mous agency and an illusion of attainable authenticity is presented as more
desirable than challenging experience, responsibility, and opportunities for
independent decision-making. Agency (or lack of it) wasn’t the issue until
the cartoon version made it so. Whereas all of the puppets that Collodi’s
Pinocchio encounters are self-moving and sentient “wooden brothers”—
which is apparently nothing unique within this magic-satirical context
(48)—Disney’s Pinocchio is captured by a puppet-master, Stromboli, who
delights that “a live puppet without strings” is “worth a fortune” because
his stringlessness makes him a lucrative headlining act: “the one and
only Pinocchio.” Both Pinocchios are easily manipulated, but the Disney
incarnation seems to draw attention to the puppet’s strings (as Stromboli
does) even when they aren’t there. The film’s plot moves along as if by fate,
more because of a benevolent blue fairy than by the choices of a disobedi-
ent boy. Both his recruitment into Stromboli’s troop (where he is caged and
forced to perform) and his detour on Pleasure Island (a demonized version
of Playland) are largely involuntary compared to the case of Collodi’s boy-
puppet, who weighs decisions heavily and makes difficult, though usually
bad, choices to act as he does.
Disney completely externalizes the decision-making process by relocat-
ing Pinocchio’s conscience in another character, Jiminy Cricket, based on
just one of the faint and nameless voices who try to didactically guide Col-
lodi’s Pinocchio (though he generally chooses to ignore them, and in the
case of the cricket, actually kills him without a thought but later hears his
ghost-voice occasionally). Douglas Street describes the resulting contrast:
As developed by Collodi, the Italian marionette is a headstrong pivotal

figure, vibrant, active, powerful and charismatic. The narrative activ-
ity is initiated by him, for him, and because of him. He never sinks to
the simplicity of his cinematic alter ego, the childish pipsqueak pushed
around by a streetwise cricket. (1983: 53)
Jiminy Cricket takes all responsibility, actually blaming himself (while

provoking guilt) when Pinocchio is passively, innocently, led astray. And
though he is supposed to lead the puppet morally, his presence “protects”
Pinocchio from all opportunities for true challenges or triumphs, no mat-
ter how dangerous or potentially educational his adventures may seem.
Street points out that, between the mitigating blue fairy and cricket, “In
direct contention with the central theme of its European model, [Disney’s]
approach gives no credence to character enlightenment nor repentence [sic]
as alternative means for salvation” (51). Ironically, by protesting Pinoc-
chio’s special agency so much, the fi lm manages to entirely snuff it, ulti-
mately reaffi rming the wish-upon-a-star placation that one essentially has
no need or potential for action; just wishing (and somehow wishing right)
will make your dream come true.
Puppets and toys in fiction have long been used to question agency, often
indulging in empowering wish-fulfillments, but they pivot on issues that
stem from a lack of power. In “Battered Dolls,” Allyson Booth writes of
some early precedents which make passivity an explicit coping mechanism,
Johnny Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann Stories (1918) and Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her
First Hundred Years (1929), arguing that they created a “a convention of
female characters who are supposedly subjects but are actually objects and
who inhabit, furthermore, a context that teaches the best of them to accept
battering as the price not only of love but of life” (1994: 148). Raggedy
Ann’s defi ning feature is her malleable softness, which makes it seemingly
easy for her to fall (which she does often), be literally put through a ringer,
hang dry, lose body parts, and be resewn, all of which she endures with
the same, static, pleasant smile on her comforting face. Booth writes, “bat-
tered dolls in picture books seem—by their eloquent silences, their refusals
to reassure—to express some of our very real concerns about mute passiv-
ity” (151; see Figure 1.2). Susan Stewart writes, “The toy is the physical
embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy” and reminds the reader
that “To toy with something is to manipulate it” (1993: 56).
The tendency of post-industrial toy narratives is to idealize passivity by
romanticizing the object position. Take, for instance, the Toy Story films
(1995, 1999), where the toys prefer passively playing possum while being
played with (“loved”) by human children over moving freely as they do when
left alone. Or Leo Lionni’s Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse (1969), where
the real mouse would rather be a wind-up toy in the company of another
like himself than be real and self-propelled. Ultimately Alexander uses his
magic pebble to wish for Willy the toy to become real, but only when there
is no longer a point in being wind-ups because the child gets a new set of
toys.5 Is the hidden lure a desire for love, conformity, or as Lacan might say,
“recognition”6 from within a hegemonic, commodifying normative gaze? In
Toy Story 2, Jessie, the cowgirl-character from the toy set based on Woody’s
TV shows, might provide an answer when she describes a toy’s experience
in being played with by a loving child-owner: “Even though you’re not mov-
ing, you feel like you’re alive, ’cuz that’s how he sees you.” Apparently being
looked at is more important than agency when you want to feel alive.
Ellen Handler Spitz has provided accounts of reading Don Freeman’s
Corduroy (1968) that are particularly useful in trying to understand the
tendency to encourage passivity and conformity with an illusion of empow-
erment. Corduroy is a picture book about a stuffed bear in a department
store who discovers through a customer’s criticism that he’s missing a but-
ton, searches for one to replace it, and fails. The next day the daughter
returns with her savings to buy the bear, then fi xes his button and proclaims
Figure 1.2 Johnny Gruelle, Raggedy Ann Stories. Simon and Schuster, 1918.
they are “friends.” One student Spitz interviewed approached this book
with a liberating/empowering interpretation: “She emphasized that Cordu-
roy had tried and failed, and that he had not been content to await his fate
helplessly” (1999: 200). But most students Spitz interviewed not only failed
to recognize Corduroy’s agency as subversive or admirable, they actually
misremembered the plot. Spitz explains:
As they recalled Corduroy, these young adults thought that the little
girl returned to buy the bear precisely because he had succeeded in
fi nding his button and was therefore now whole and acceptable. The
message of the book in that case would have been something quite
different: love as conditional, as earned, as a result of meeting the stan-
dards of others. (202)
It would seem that this collective misreading reflects a collective under-

standing of genre that made it safe to assume the plot would be consistent
with the wish-upon-a-star (and-things-will-be-as-they-should) formula.
Although one might argue that in the latter interpretation Corduroy actu-
ally succeeds at fi nding his button and thus is more empowered, the point
of difference in the interpretations is that those who saw him as succeeding
did so only by identifying with the consumer who defi ned how he should
be. They didn’t see Corduroy as a model for independent action but as one
who successfully conformed to a normative market demand.7
However, the empowering reading of Corduroy as one who acts
alone suggests the subversive potential of using puppet/toy characters to
illustrate doing your own thing—a potential Susan Gannon alludes to
in describing the original Adventures of Pinocchio: “Pinocchio’s story
shows how a puppet—an instrument designed to be manipulated by oth-
ers—can become a powerful independent source of life” (qtd. in Street
1983: 7). It is a narrative of conditional empowerment, though, in that
we remain aware that a puppet is still a puppet. Both Collodi’s and Dis-
ney’s Pinocchios sever any linkage of the puppet self to real boy by con-
cluding the narratives with the puppet slouching lifeless as the new, real
boy looks on. Likewise, those works that briefly (though conditionally)
enliven toys do so simply to reify a standard of passivity through contrast.
Perhaps this is why Lois Kuznets found most toy literature to be surpris-
ingly conservative.
In her comprehensive study, When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of
Animation, Metamorphosis, and Development (1994), Kuznets writes
that
Toys, when they are shown as inanimate objects developing into live
beings, embody human anxiety about what it means to be ‘real’—an in-
dependent subject or self rather than an object or other submitting to the
gaze of more powerfully real and potentially rejecting live beings. (2)
When you consider that the creators of these fictionally live toys are adults
writing for children, this anxiety seems more pointed. Aren’t children like-
wise objectified as the target market for writers, publishers, and toy manu-
facturers? And are they not frequently objects in relations with parents?
Both David Hamlin and Stephen Nissenbaum argue that gift-giving at
Christmas exemplifies such power relations. Hamlin (speaking of Ger-
many) and Nissenbaum8 (of the U.S.) demonstrate that as middle-class
parents in the nineteenth century rose in affluence they tended to keep chil-
dren indoors and separated by class: “replacing playmates with playthings”
(Hamlin 2003: 859). Thus, they suggest that toys became bribes for control
but also reaffi rmed the “domestic ideology” and mystified the commodi-
fication of childhood by protesting, ironically, that a “parental love could
bear no price tag” (Hamlin 2003: 861).
Kuznets further explains the significance of power in toy literature:
“According to theories of the gaze, mastery over objects of desire, people
as well as things, is achieved by looking at them without acknowledging
their independent power of looking back” (5). The new, real boy Pinocchio
becomes entirely so by looking at his puppet, or unreal, self. He gains the
power of a gaze the puppet cannot meet. As in play therapy, young audi-
ences can gaze at their own toys as objects, imagining them subject only
to their own agency, but if they identify with a conditionally enlivened toy
character in fiction, they might perceive themselves likewise gazed/acted
upon, depending upon whether that character is presented as a subject with
their own agency or the object of another’s.
In Pinocchio in Venice, old Pinenut tells the Blue Fairy,
What bothered me was that the wooden puppet I once was was still
there, outside of me, the old Pinocchio, I saw him, collapsed against a
chair in my father’s workshop with his legs doubled up under him and
the rest unstrung and dangling. (326)
In this sense the object turning subject negates the object thus challeng-
ing the contrastive measure by which subjective authenticity is constructed.
Pinenut insists that he would rather the puppet, his original and apparently
separate being, live than his fleshy and false self: “I want you to let that
puppet live again,” he tells the Fairy (326).
In his development of “thing theory,” Bill Brown has written in particu-
lar about ventriloquist puppets in fiction: “the popularity of ventriloquism
. . . may result from its capacity to literalize . . . the human animation of
the material object world with autonomous agency” (943). The ventrilo-
quist’s dummy
appears as an object of media projection, conveniently materializing

the hyperpresence and hyperactivity of things that come to dwarf the
human subject. . . . The point is less that the object assumes priority
over the subject, and more that the humiliated subject has become a
kind of subject-object; it is as though the human being has become the
object’s sujet petit a, perceived and longed for as the missing/complet-
ing component of itself. (1998: 947)
The complex pun of a sujet petit a is worth serious application here—it

refers to the toy/object-as-subject that the subject projects in order to imag-
ine being imagined through the gaze of the objet petit a (or should I say
objet petit s?). This process is repeatedly demonstrated in Thomas Disch’s
The Brave Little Toaster (1980), where the title character’s ‘face’ is merely
a reflection of anyone who looks at him. Disch complicates this theme even
more by appearing on the back cover of the book as reflected in a photo of
his toaster.
Of course, there are more materially illuminating ways of approaching
the reflecting and externalizing properties of toys in use and in relation to
the self. As Roland Barthes points out in Mythologies, in relation to toys,
“with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only
identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the
world, he uses it” (1972: 53–54). This is precisely the point being made in
Margaret Wise Brown’s My World (1949), in which a child/bunny com-
pares his toys to the real-world objects they imitate, usually fi nding his less
authentic: “Daddy’s boy./ Mother’s boy. / My boy is just a toy / Bear. // My
car. / Daddy’s car. / . . . My car won’t go very far.”9
Toys are presumed functional in a developing person’s assessment of
what is real and what is not, as well as what is self and what is not. Most
developmental models assume that children must destroy (or modify) fan-
tasies they impose on the real in order to gain an accurate and sociable
concept of realness, thus reality. D. W. Winnicott writes of the importance
of object-relations in this process,
the object develops its own autonomy and life, and . . . contributes-in
to the subject, according to its own properties. . . . The subject may
now have started to live a life in the world of objects . . . but the price
has to be paid in acceptance of the ongoing destruction in unconscious
fantasy relative to object-relating. . . . This is a process that can be
arrived at by the individual in early stages of emotional growth only
through the actual survival of cathected objects that are at the time in
process of becoming destroyed because real, becoming real because
destroyed. (1982: 90)
Or, to attempt putting it in simpler terms, Pinocchio cannot be his puppet-

self because it is of a visibly separate substance, thus, if he is real he is not
himself.
Anxiety about authenticity is both symptomatic of reality-testing and
relativist tendencies associated with post-industrial ontologies. On fi rst
glance, one might argue that Disney’s Pinocchio shifts attention from the
puppet’s potential agency in order to emphasize the more subtle issue of
authenticity. Certainly the film’s most memorable theme is a puppet want-
ing to be a “real boy,” whereas Collodi’s Pinocchio decides, only after more
than half of the tale is told, “It’s about time I became a man, like other
people!”(147). He is considering here the need to act responsibly rather
than the need to be authentic. Being real is less important to him than free-
dom and fun. Just hours away from his guaranteed opportunity to become
a “real” boy, he makes the choice to go instead with Lampwick to Playland.
But in the 1940 film authenticity is Pinocchio’s burning desire, and his
autonomous will is as invisible as his strings.

A crisis of authenticity alone cannot explain the externalization of
agency so prevalent in post-industrial American dealings with this theme.
Jack Zipes points out that the film does not convincingly deal with what it
means to be real anyway, because “the unreal puppet who was believable
becomes a boy too real to be true” (1996: 11). Perhaps the toy version of
“realness” is something that real (in this sense, sentient and living) young
audiences are meant to aspire to—reaffi rming, quite illogically but some-
how acceptably, that they, like toys, aren’t real enough.
The success (and strangeness) of The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) pivots on
the same (il)logic. The rabbit wants to be not simply “real” but, as Steven
Daniels says, “really Real” (1990: 24)—the distinction being that to be real
is to be loved and immortal (i.e., inanimate), to be really real is to be loved
and self-propelled (thus alive and sure to die), but only if, as with Alexander
the mouse, one is no longer needed by a child (see Figure 1.3).10
The rabbit faces a lose-lose situation—sure, he can get hind legs and be
a true, living animal, but in doing so he gives up the make-believe but more
absolute reality the boy offered him in loving him. The Skin Horse has told
him that “once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for
always” (20). The kicker is that, in contrast, becoming “really Real” (alive)
lasts only until you die. The larger message here is that it’s better to remain
immortal in being and having been loved than to live or love for oneself.
What disturbs me here is that in all this sentimentalizing on the value of
love, the audience (targeted, at least, as children) is encouraged to embrace
an object position, not to love better but to better please those by whom
they wish to be loved.
Post-industrial American toy narratives appear to be encouraging the
opposite of what they promise. As Kuznets describes their appeal, “One
seductive motif of toy narratives reflects the struggle of both children and
adults to feel ‘real’—become a conscious, powerful subject rather than an
object dependent upon others,” but such stories entice with a promise of
empowerment and deliver models of passive complacency (1994: 61). Her
reference to the need for feeling “real” evokes adult nostalgia more than a
child’s desire. Kuznets explains that an initial draw to her subject was nos-
talgia, which lessened while reading toy narratives, because
Anxious Times
Figure 1.3 William Nicholson for Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit.
Doubleday and Co., 1922.
with a few notable exceptions [they] have missed many opportunities

that objects becoming subjects offer for going beyond simple mimesis of
prevailing cultural constructs. Thus, I frequently ask my readers to take
a good hard revisionist look at longings of and for the past excited by
many toy texts, and to consider whom such longings really benefit. (8)
Clearly adults benefit from the push for children’s unquestioning obedience
and gratitude found in these productions. But so do toy manufacturers who
benefit from children being guilt-tripped into cherishing toys in order to
reciprocate their supposedly unconditional love (not just by playing with
and taking good care of them, but by collecting more).11 The texts also
construct future consumers to be loyal from childhood.
Coover’s Pinocchio realizes that his belief in the magic fairy (whom he
imagined out of desire) has entrapped him: “It’s our own creations that
most possess us” (97). His desire to be magically transformed put him at
a manipulative other’s mercy: “Flesh has made a pestilential freak out of
me!”(312). Once he relinquished his agency to her he had no choice but to
conform. Likewise, when he tries to conform to the aesthetics (and lack
of ethics) that characterize Eugenio’s pleasureland he is doomed: “He has
asked for it, it is true. . . . Bluebell had abandoned him so abruptly, drop-
ping him in the palazzo doorway like an old unwanted toy” (272). The
analogy is apt.
Consider the holiday TV special, Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
(1964). On the Island of Misfit Toys, Rudolf finds toys that, like Corduroy,
are broken or dysfunctional: a bird that swims instead of flying, a train
with square wheels, a spotted elephant, and a boat that can’t float. The king
of the island tells Rudolf and crew that “a toy is never truly happy until it
is loved by a child,” urging us to assign limited agency to such playthings
so that we can imagine them needing our love. A reason for this complex
precondition might be explained in the presence of one toy, the Charlie-
in-the-Box, who is fully functioning, like any Jack-in-the-Box, in terms of
springs and hinges and timing. His problem, it appears, is how he’s been
misnamed, or more specifically, how he’s been marketed. Couldn’t he just
change his name to please consumer expectations? The overriding push for
acceptance is also revealed in the fact that when Santa does pick up the toys
to give them homes, their defects are partly erased, or, at least the audi-
ence is invited to politely overlook them—for example, the swimming bird
actually flies from Santa’s sleigh to his newfound home. Ultimately, like
Corduroy, whether or not they are loved for more than mere appearances,
those appearances are shown to be crucial. It seems an intentional ploy to
construct children to unquestioningly accept absolute norms of consumer-
ship and conditional love, but within their own imagined gaze.
Consumer culture thrives on a myth of manufactured agency (useful to
adults managing children or corporations managing cultural productions),
preserved by the distracting promise of authenticity, which is more or less a
panacea for feeling real without the risk and responsibility that comes with
true agency. By embracing the inauthentic, we unload the burdens of desiring
agency. Kuznets describes the theme of Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio:
“Simplicity over conspicuous consumption is exalted; hard work over play”
(68). If this is true, the very opposite stands for Pinocchio’s filmsake and many
other consumer-culture productions for children.12 In fact, while rendering
hard work or play useless and dull, they encourage good consumership and
even cultivate consumability. This particularly struck me when I read Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory (1964) as an adult and realized how different it is
from the film adaptation I’d seen as a child. The original (book), which is a
satiric cautionary tale on consumption vices (eating, spending, watching tele-
vision), underwent an infantilizing revision during film-adaptation despite its
screenwriting by Roald Dahl. For one thing, the title, Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory (1971), refocused on the adult entrepreneur, not the poor
marginalized boy who had been the primary agent in the novel. More disap-
pointing than the implied focal shift, however, is the reduction of agency and
depth in Charlie’s character. Though not a puppet, he hardly seems real. He’s
no longer a potential chocolate aficionado who promises to bring artistry and
appreciation to the business but a whining crybaby who expects to get what
he wants simply because he wants it. When only two golden tickets to visit the
chocolate factory are left, wish-upon-a-star-ism takes the stage.
Mom: Wonder who the lucky ones will be.

Charlie: Well, in case you’re wondering if it’ll be me, it won’t be; just in
case you’re wondering, you can count me out.
Mom: Charlie, there are a hundred billion people in this world and only
five of them will fi nd golden tickets. Even if you had a sack full of
money you probably wouldn’t find one, and after this contest [is
over] you’ll be no different from the billions of others who didn’t
fi nd one.
Charlie: But I am different—I want it more than any of them!
Did Charlie fall under the spell of Jiminy Cricket? Certainly his presumed
audience had been for thirty years already. Fast-forward another thirty
to the latest box-office embodiment of Pinocchio in A. I. Artifi cial Intel-
ligence (2001). The ethic of surrendering agency has been reduced to
desperate pleading. The most dramatic line David (played by Haley Joel
Osment, who’s proven elsewhere he can handle challenging dialogue) gets
is “Please, please make me a real boy,” which upon much repetition gets
no more original or deep, but once varies by beginning, “please, please,
please.”13
So, how did we come from work-ethic didacticism to sniveling passive
consumerism in practically less than a century? (Even Pollyanna had a pur-
pose.) Cultural productions for children, those with fictional toys/puppets
in particular, reflect a shifting economic ontology. Puppet-like characters
once reflected concerns of industrialism and the automation of labor in use
of machinery and mass production—anxieties about becoming social pup-
pets or beasts of burden, as Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg has comically put
it: “Collodi’s Pinocchio thus constitutes a critique of ideology and state,
both of which require subjects to live their lives either as puppets or asses”
(2007: 39). Pinocchio and playmates become donkeys only when they’ve
been idle. But in the nineteenth-century shifts towards mass industry, pup-
pets were also used to imagine and reflect a more complicated emerging
selfhood. Corona Sharp reports that
For some eighty years before World War II, Europe witnessed a culmi-
nation of puppetry, both as an age-old folk art and as a newly invented,
sophisticated theatre art. . . . The revolt against naturalism evoked a
new interest in the mask and the marionette, both of which became
props and symbols in the new Symbolist drama. (1988: 26)
In the U.S., toys effected the same representation, according to Bill

Brown:
The automaton’s segmented, repetitive movement reproduced, as a

scene of delight, the rationalization of the worker at the site of produc-
tion, affi rming, within the realm of childhood amusement, the frag-
menting rhythm of machine discipline and the automatization of the
body. (1996: 181)
Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) literalizes the

existential crisis of realizing artifice when a stage manager coaches the
players, “today, as things go, the playwrights give us stupid comedies to
play and puppets to represent instead of men” (4–5). This situation fully
explores the potential of puppet metaphors, leading the manager to advise
the lead actor “you who act your own part become the puppet of your-
self. Do you understand?” (2). Unaware of his own irony, he replies, “I’m
hanged if I do” (2).
Alienation in representation echoes a transition from identifying as
worker to consumer not just for adults but also for the portion of the popu-
lation that was increasingly being redefi ned for childhood. In The Mate-
rial Unconscious, Bill Brown parallels the beginnings of the American toy
industry with sentimentalized/useless childhood: “the American child’s
relation to the modern toy takes place within inequitable property rela-
tions. . . . the object may exist for the child as little more than a commodity,
at most a child’s version of cultural capital” until
Such commodities became integral to American childhood only during

the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when their mass manufac-
ture suddenly transformed the “American child’s nursery” into what
one writer called “a Barnum’s museum of novelties—toys on wheels,
toys run by clockwork and steam, musical toys, mimic tools and fur-
niture.” (169)
Like Pirandello’s players, these novelties often moved on their own and
brought their own questionable authenticity to the foreground in play: “the
modernity of the inventive toy, in other words, threatens to modernize
childhood prematurely” (Brown 1996: 191).
Brown concentrates in particular on a toy that seems an exception to this
rule—the title toy stove in a story from Stephen Crane’s The Whilomville
Stories (1900)14—fi nding that “Crane’s text anxiously bids us to imagine,
over and against the discursive production of childhood, a production of
objects that can effectively emancipate children as desiring subjects” (1996:
170). If we contrast Brown’s reading with a related sample from the earlier
Little Men (1871) by Louisa May Alcott, girls’ new spending power seems
only a slight concession in the transition to “the new materialism of child-
hood” (Brown 1996: 198). When Daisy gets her play stove, it is clearly a
gendering and domesticating tool:
Not a tin one, that was of no use, but a real iron stove, big enough to
cook for a large family of very hungry dolls. But the best of it was that
a real live fi re burned in it, real steam came out of the nose of the tea
kettle. (Alcott 67)
Unlike the unrealistic replicas in Margaret Wise Brown’s My World, Daisy’s

“toy” is depicted as valuable to her for its usefulness, not its safe but arti-
ficial resemblance to the real thing. In contrast to such utilitarian toys, Bill
Brown reminds us, the bulk of gilded-age innovations came in moving forms
that encouraged spectatorship, not action: “if the modern toy thus enacted
the rhythm of modernity, it most often nostalgically represented traditional
forms of entertainment—above all, circus and minstrel acts” (1996: 181).
I’ll get back to these particularly classed and racialized means of othering
in Chapter 4, but for now I’ll concentrate on how the modern toy industry
“seems to participate in a production of the child that denies the production
of the toy, that occludes the colonization of childhood” (Brown 1996: 191).
Beryl Langer reminds us that the production of consumer childhood first
required a leisure culture: “The elision of childhood with play, fun and toys
situates toyshops and toy makers as part of the enchanted landscape of child-
hood, which naturalizes and sacralizes the children’s market” (253).
Alienating individuals from labor or controlling the consequences
of their labor also leads to idealizations of robotic life assembling tools
and magically gaining control in response. Nathalie op de Beeck notes in
her discussion of Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery, “Independent-minded
machines became a trendy topic in children’s literature during the late
1920s and especially the 1930s” (2004: 79, n. 8). However, artificial life in
post-modernist science fiction, comics, and film tends to express alienation
from society and even self—accepting displacement of agency and ideal-
izing its relocation in assembled or man-made powers. Bill Brown writes of
Toy Story (1995):
If Adorno and Benjamin once imagined toys as a repository where
children might discover the autonomy of things, then it hardly seems
surprising that autonomous toys attracted Hollywood precisely when
things were beside the point. . . . The uncanniness of the everyday in
postmodernity would seem to have more to do with the autonomy
achieved by computers. (1998: 962)
I feel like I’ve given my computer eyes by hooking up a scanner—am I now

a potential object in relation to its gaze? Brown’s point is that many cul-
tural productions foreground the answer—yes, tools can be autonomous—
merely because it is already obvious. The real anxieties of consumer culture

run deeper.
U.S. experience with capitalism has evolved from thematizing a worker’s
estrangement from the product of their labor to near-complete alienation
from production itself in a largely service-sector and technologically depen-
dent economy, which we try to console through a false sense of agency in
consumerism. Some artists, like L. Frank Baum, anticipated this shift with
cynicism. Vivian Wagner writes that “Oz sublimates fears of technology,
capitalism, consumerism, a coming Fordist corporate economy, and unfair
labor practices—and of what happens to the material human body as a
result of these practices” (2006: 27).15
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Baum created surrogate
selves in the American landscape who could posit questions of agency
and authenticity. In The Wizard of Oz (1900) characters have to travel
to Oz to fi nd their authentic selves (or have them recognized in the hege-
monic “gaze” of the wizard). Like Pinocchio, many of Baum’s charac-
ters are man-made (inauthentic) objects-made-subjects: Scarecrow, Tin
Man, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Sawhorse, the Gump, the Patchwork girl,
and Glass Cat. Some are made from discarded refuse. In The Marvel-
ous Land of Oz (1904), the Gump, an “aerial machine,” is made from a
“queer assemblage of materials”—two old sofas, feathers, and the head
of a Gump, some kind of antlered animal (126). Once sprinkled with the
Powder of Life, the machine establishes his identity in terms foreground-
ing that he was made to be exploited: “As I am not a real Gump, I cannot
have a Gump’s pride or independent spirit. So I may as well become your
servant as anything else. My only satisfaction is that I do not seem to
have a very strong constitution and am not likely to live long in a state of
slavery” (133).
In The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), the title character, literally named
for her scraps (see Figure 1.4), is made from a multicolored quilt, “perfect
for a servant girl, for when she was brought to life she would not be proud
or haughty, as the Glass Cat is, for such a dreadful mixture of colors would
discourage her from trying to be as dignified as the blue Munchkins are”
(32). The Glass Cat, incidentally, another vivified object, is an unsatisfac-
tory servant because of her heart: “the next Glass Cat the Magician makes
Figure 1.4 John R. Neill for L. Frank Baum, The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Dover,
1913.
will have neither brains nor heart, for then it will not object to catching
mice and may prove of some use to us” (30). These characters, like puppets,
are made to be controlled, but that does not mean they surrender control
in the name of desire.
In contrast, consider the appliances in The Brave Little Toaster, who
happily exist solely in order to be functional for their adored “Master,”
even setting out to fi nd him when left alone but nonetheless animated
in a country cabin. Their fear is not to be used (which they desire above
all) but to be used badly, which simply reaffi rms their master’s greatness:
“once an appliance has been spirited away by a pirate, it has no choice
but to serve its bidding just as though it were that appliance’s legitimate
master” (48–49).
Baum’s earlier examples suggest more realistically the trouble we all
have in maintaining control due to the invisible strings of our socialization
and responsibility. For example, Nick Chopper’s story of a cursed axe that
slowly cut off each part of his body to be replaced by tin parts (Baum 1900:
46) is an exaggeration of repeated injuries possible during assembly-line
work, and his eventual reconfiguration into a Tin Man suggests prosthetic
solutions and foresight to bionic rebuilding—he is a cyborg prototype. But
his waning authenticity never stops him for searching for that last replace-
ment, a heart; nor does the servitude and exploitation of the aforemen-
tioned figures keep them from acting on their awareness of it by resisting.
Baum uses more than magic (Powder of Life) to give his man-made char-
acters agency; he also uses technological augmentation, or at least depen-
dence on tools or familiar objects. Adult nostalgia for control and sense of
reality seems to have logically led to this technique for reassigning agency
and escaping into an illusion of power. Kuznets connects this desire to child
psychology, explaining that the
urge to make toys come alive . . . harks back to an incompletely real-

ized stage when transitional objects fi lled the space between the “me”
and the “not me” in a struggle to maintain the infantile sense of the
ability to incorporate and control the universe. (1994: 189)
We are tool-users even in infancy, and we use tools to define and empower
ourselves. Toys in literature take the place of our own transitional objects
(blankies, teddy bears, favorite clothes) but they also mirror for young audi-
ences, as through a legitimizing gaze, the bonding process we go through
with them. For example, David’s sidekick (or conscience, like Pinocchio’s
Jiminy Cricket) in A. I. is a robotic teddy bear who admires David just as
David admires his ‘real’ mother. Such characterization mirrors the fawning
construction of toy myths as in Toy Story and The Velveteen Rabbit where
kids can imagine that toys live for their love and ask nothing more. To create
the illusion of such security, technology and transitional objects can actually
replace human beings, who are unpredictable and more conditional in their
behavior. Thus, David, a robotic boy who wants to be real, wakes up thou-
sands of years in the future to find that he is now considered, like Disney’s
Pinocchio, “one of a kind.” The difference in fantasies presented here is that
David outlives humanity—technologically supplanting “real live boys.”
Holly Blackford characterizes the sharp irony of this process: “Spielberg’s
cyberchild story features the question of individual identity the same way as
Disney/Pixar’s children’s film Toy Story (1995), in which characters who think
they are unique discover that they are mass produced” (2007: 79). But this
moment of realism is eclipsed by the sentimental complication in such themes:
The lesson of Margery Williams’s stuffed rabbit and Collodi’s Pinoc-

chio is that somehow the next generation holds the key to a real un-
derstanding of life. . . . Ironically, we prefer to romanticize the real
child and symbolize the struggles of child development in the machine.
(Blackford 2007: 90)
Through the machine analogy, children are held fi xed in an ideal of inau-
thentic invulnerability. Blackford explains this as a result of the double
purpose toys serve:
As animals and folk heroes have traditionally functioned, toys are simulta-
neously child characters and more than children. They stand for children
when they embark on journeys to understand their relationship to their
creators and develop their own sense of consciousness and agency. (76)
Susan Stewart again provides a historicized manner for contextualizing an

understanding of this function: “the toy moved late into the nursery . . .
from the beginning it was adults who made toys; and not only with regard
to their own invention, the child” (1993: 57). Like children’s literature, the
toy industry is controlled by and mediated by adults, reflecting adult spend-
ing agendas. Stephen Kline describes the encoded ideologies behind the toy
industry shifting from early to late capitalism:
the gradual industrialization of toy-making over the last hundred years

has enscripted industrial forms and functions and the meanings and
uses of marketing into the realm of playthings. . . . the Victorian world
of child’s play was not a world of manufactured things: sometimes it
included found and discarded objects (wheel hoops, sticks, rags) and
very occasionally folk toys. (144)
Bill Brown writes that in the U.S. a transition paralleled industrial devel-
opments (in making more complicated toys with moving parts) and mass
production,
hastily translating the luxury of playthings into the need for toys, ex-
emplifying capital’s requisite multiplication of fantasized needs. . . . The
extension of the production–consumption circuit to the recreational, the
capitalist conquest of leisure space, had become a familiar mode of per-
petuating the relations of production. (1996: 180)
As a result, “Consumerism gave all objects, but particularly toys, new
meaning within the practices of socialization. . . . Toys embodied the idea
that successful families consisted of children who were thoroughly con-
tented in their idle or leisure moments” (Kline 1993: 162). The glamoriza-
tion of leisure and conspicuous consumption creates a passified ideal of
childhood, thus demanding surrendered autonomy from children. Thus,
Holly Blackford writes of A. I., “The technological child evokes our sibling
rivalry; once we recognize its independence as a created being, we seek
to disconnect it” (2007: 75). As a result, “The child as a machine has no
agency” and “the young person affected by technology becomes an inno-
cent product of good or bad design” (2007: 82, 83).

One might say that technology has estranged us from ourselves, or that
we’ve displaced or disguised ourselves through it. In response to Lucy
Sprague Mitchell’s The Little Engine That Could, Kay Stone has argued,
Is it not more dangerous to teach children that machines have a life

of their own and could, by logical extension, take over the world? Is
it possible that the popularity of living machines familiar from child-
hood reading leads to adult misunderstanding of technology because
such childhood books have violated all the laws that can be violated in
regard to inanimate machines? (1981: 236)
Similarly, H. Joseph Schwarcz writes that
stories about animated objects written by adult writers for children

are a medium through which adults unconsciously communicate to
children their own repressed anxieties. If this is so, then this type of
literature unwittingly prepares the child for acquiescence to . . . life in a
society whose members experience an unconscious inferiority vis-à-vis
machines and make an effort to adapt to them. (94)
But I prefer the language of Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, who puts a similar

idea into more concrete, material terms:
Pinocchio is a transitional figure, for he represents, on the one hand,

the universe of the master puppeteer or the King; on the other hand, the
universe where the King is dead and where power must be exerted in
the form of an inner mechanics or of what Michel Foucault has called
the disciplinary economy of the body. In this latter sense, Pinocchio has
abolished the gap between the puppet and the puppeteer. (52)
When the gap between tool-user and tool is obscured, control becomes
less detectable—we internalize someone else’s rationale. However, In
“Manifesto for Cyborgs”, Donna Haraway interprets our dependence
on tools and technology not as fragmenting selves but extending them
to incorporate inorganic material. She provides an emancipatory model
of subjectivity (cyborgian) and agency (writing) that best explains this
phenomenon:
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-
upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man.
Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of origi-
nal innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world
that marked them as other. (175)
When young readers themselves are defi ned as others, they can relate to
mutant superheroes and be encouraged to “seize tools” that are inacces-
sible to them. These techniques are exemplified in comics like X-Men, The
New Mutants, Power Pack, Teen Titans, and Machine Teen, which create
vicarious illusions of empowerment through young superheroes but might
be said to encourage passivity by empowering fictional characters primarily
through means inaccessible to their audience—bionics, genetic mutations,
and powers endowed by alien creatures. This could feed an impossible con-
sumer need in the audience for transitional objects with which to enact the
fantasy they see, so that they may imagine seeing themselves (gazing) at and
from within an empowered position.
Perhaps the most concrete proof of Haraway’s thesis is in the success
of the 1980’s Transformer toy concept. Transformers are tools and tool-
users at once. Based on a Japanese model and tied in to American culture
through movie/television back-stories, Transformers are cars and airplanes
(later trucks and other vehicles) that transform into “semi-human robot
warriors,” exemplifying the safety in being presumed an inanimate (human
controlled, overlooked) tool while having the ability to transform—turning
tools against the gaze that defi nes them as such.
According to Gary Cross,
Action figures rose when video games fell in the 1980s. They were part
of the same play complex. Action figures largely replaced traditional
toy guns (reaching twenty-three times the wholesale value of toy weap-
ons at the peak of the action-figure craze in 1985). . . . The clash-of-
powers play of the 1980s was never really challenged. It simply shifted
from one play form to another. (1997: 226)
The difference in these methods of play, however, which appear to be inter-

changeable to the same players and for similar means, is that by playing
with (ironically named) action figures, kids can only imagine themselves as
the toy-with-tool, as gazed upon and requiring another’s movement accord-
ing to a prescripted plot (as Barthes said, they are users, not creators here).
When the tools themselves are the toys, for example, a weapon (otherwise
used by the action figure), at least the player is imaginatively filling the
subject position. In his reading of Action Man toys Jonathan Bignell makes
a similar point:
there are some Action Man branded toys made exclusively for the
child’s use (and not the figure’s) like a dart gun or plastic hunting knife.
Here, there is a leap from child to Action Man without the intervention
of a physical surrogate in the form of the toy figure. . . . The range of
Action Man toys, in their material form, allow for and supply tools for
a variety of identificatory relationships. (2000: 238)
Though the range of possible uses and contexts might be prescribed, “iden-
tities are negotiated by the child’s relationships with others, who can either
recognize him in an imagined heroic role . . . or refuse to do so” (Bignell
2000: 241). However, the direction of play ultimately comes down to the
player’s motives: “Heroes cannot be heroes outside of a narrative context”
(Bignell 2000: 241). Gerard Jones makes this distinction in his defense of
interactive “fi rst-person shooter games” (which peaked again in the 1990s)
as empowering: “the example of video games suggests that kids’ ability
to write their own ‘scripts’ and build their own ‘maps’ gives them more
control over those images” (2002: 181). Bignell and Jones both provide an
empowering spin on play, which Bignell describes almost in Pirandellian
terms: “toy play is like staging a drama in which the playing child is at once
the director, all of the actors, and the audience” (2000: 237).
What determines which form will be the craze—playing with tools or
playing with the dolls that use those tools? Perhaps one’s interpretation of
who holds the gaze might affect young consumer’s choices. Particularly
where tie-in toys are concerned, one can only imagine that the treatment
of agency in the movie, book, or comic would affect methods of play—
whether the text favors pretending one is in the other’s subject position,
or pretending one can only manipulate and watch the doll-subject holding
the tools of empowerment. Tie-ins can seem empowered by their narra-
tives (as we will debate in my reading of Popeye’s spinach in Chapter 5),
but they also obscure the unreality of toys and the possibility of discerning
“true” agency from the manufactured sort. Russell Hoban’s The Mouse
and His Child (1967) demonstrates this ambiguity repeatedly through its
title characters, who together exist as one wind-up toy sharing (until the
end) one “motor.” For them, true agency exists in self-winding. When “they
reasoned their way through the clockwork that had driven them on their
journey out into the world,” the formula itself is ambivalent. “‘Key times
Winding equals Go,’ said the child. ‘Go divided by Winding equals Key,’
said the father” (217).
Their dialogue suggests practical limitations of toy agency—or condi-
tional agency within “perpetual commodification” (Sammond 2005: 78).
The father and son can be conscious but unable to move (unless wound
after midnight?) and they can move without being conscious, as when
Manny the Rat is repairing them (221). Is this a realistic reminder that
all social beings have limited, conditional agency as well? When his self-
winding mechanism breaks down, the father tells his son, “I don’t sup-
pose anyone ever is completely self-winding. That’s what friends are for”
(241). But even so the father waits to be rewound, wanting to rest a bit
from the burden of free will. Once again, agency seems less desirable than
passivity. Sammond’s point is applicable here: “Pinocchio is animated at
the fi lm’s beginning, not its end, and is told quite specifically that to be
animate does not mean to be human” (2005: 378). To be authentically
human must one be “adult”? Are agency and authenticity mutually exclu-
sive for youth?

On this darker note, Anthony Burgess has provided commentary in A
Clockwork Orange (1962), in which he essentializes youth as violent and
violence as a youthful phase determined like clockwork in the human sub-
ject. In his own teleology of development he ended his novel with Alex
growing out of that phase to realize: “youth is only being. . . . like one
of these malenky toys you viddy being sold. . . . made of tin and with a
spring inside . . . Being young is like being like one of these malenky toys”
(190). Alex realizes that the trick to not being subject to the determinist
clockwork of development is to become a parent himself. To be adult is to
be an authentic agent of one’s own will. To be a parent is to make another
an agent of oneself. This is, naturally, what inspires some kids to play at
parenting with their dolls.
Those in the toy business today recognize this more practical side to
child-consumers’ demands. Rachel Geller, chief strategic officer of The
Geppetto Group, writes about the shift in toy marketing and use from rep-
licas to “kidult” tools, advocating research into authentic youth needs for
“kidcentric retail”:
In the 50s and 60s, childhood came into its own. Parents valued and
cherished that time of life as it had never been before. So kids were
given replicas of adult life, like kid record players, and kid phones, kid
cameras and kid meals. Kids now own their place in the life cycle; they
are celebrated, and catered to, which means they no longer want repli-
cas. They want “the real thing.” (2004: 8).16
But toys in post-industrial texts for youth perpetually commodify the

young in order to make them more manageable. They promote passivity
in the guise of power to fan hopes for a totalized future based on adult
nostalgia for an impossible return to less responsibility. Frequently this
seems to be done by reaffi rming the nuclear family, not children or even
individuals, as the primary source of power and protection. Reviving the
zeal of the 1950s and 1960s “family focus,” there is a recent trend of
fi lms centering on a family-as-superteam theme. The Lost in Space televi-
sion series (1965–1968) and remake movie (1998), Spy Kids and sequels
(2001, 2002, 2003), The Incredibles (2004), and Sky High (2005) could
be seen as offering empowering narratives in which kids discover super-
powers or “seize the tools” of power that their parents have kept hidden
from them. Yet, frequently in these narratives messages of empowerment
are mixed with romantic nostalgia for absolute innocence. In Spy Kids,
for example, after Carmen has uttered such lines as “Never send an adult
to do a kid’s job,” or even “You’re strong, Juni, you’re strong,” Floop
sums up Juni’s heroic success as a karmic sort of beginner’s luck: “You
won today, Juni, and not because you were the biggest or the strongest but
because you were pure of heart and of mind.” Certainly a claim to power
that is an assumed right in a grown man, at least as would be reified

through Floop, is not granted a possibility to Juni. The adult moral center
of the piece seems to protest romantic innocence in order to confi rm adult
supremacy.17
Until we abandon our mythologizing of children into innocents who
cannot be responsible for what they don’t understand, who must be as
dependent and carefree as Hollywood promises they can be in the end, we
cannot escape the pull of our rhetoric to hailing neediness and surrendered
agency. Daniel Thomas Cook addresses a need for vigilant self-criticism on
the part of adults and those involved in cultural production:
Those who claim to speak for children or a child can usually be re-
futed only by other non-children (adults) who compete to make similar
claims. The uncertainty of children’s agency renders defensible all sorts
of claims and counterclaims about who children ‘are’ and what chil-
dren ‘want,’ allowing most anyone to frame the child in any number of
ways—for example as a competent social actor, as deserving of rights,
as needing protection and guidance. (15)
In the following two chapters I will consider all three of these tendencies
in folktale and fairy-tale motifs as well as holiday ritual. But there are
also alternate constructions that set up an impossible ideal of invulnerabil-
ity through artificial enhancement, imagining agency in fantasy worlds,
through fantasy heroes and the safe hypothesis of artificial life—these will
be the focus of my fi nal chapters. The following scene might suggest an
underlying link between them all.
In Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio, the puppet has been turned into
a donkey, sold (to make a drum from his skin), and thrown into the sea,
anchored and sure to die, until “an immense shoal of fish” begin to eat
away his donkey flesh:
naturally the bones remained—or, to be exact, the wood; for, as you

see, I am made of very hard wood. But after the fi rst bite, the fish saw
that there was no more meat to eat and, disgusted by such indigestible
food, they swam off in all directions. (1996: 228–229)
Though technically Pinocchio (in my examples here and in the Introduc-
tion) both eats and is eaten, he survives because his flesh isn’t real—he is not
edible. He escapes the needfulness of basic human survival—dependence
upon food. But that doesn’t stop the appetites of others from threatening
him, such as the fisherman who thinks he’s a fish (172–173). In Coover’s
revisitation of the scene, Professor Pinenut is literally baked into a pizza
donkey costume for his humiliation and the enjoyment of a hungry crowd
at Carnival: “He can feel the crust, like fate itself, hardening around him”
(273). Perhaps all that agency comes down to is having control over one’s
food supply. After all, food is agency. Food is fate.
By harkening back to the Carnival roots of Pinocchio, Robert Coover

recarnalizes the puppet with the long nose18 as part of a larger critique that
Stephen Benson describes as
writing against the moral edifice of traditional children’s literature,

represented in the sedimented, layered history of Pinocchio itself.
Against the cleansed truth of the fairy tale dénouement he mus-
ters a formidable arsenal of mischievous excess. . . . energetically
dismantle[ing] the ideological certainties of Disney by historicizing
its sources. (2003: 164)
Like the puppet-turned-professor baked into a pizza-donkey, we are what

we are consumed to be. Massimo Montanari mentions that “[a]ccording to
Mayan legend, the gods built and sculpted man himself out of corn flour,
as if to say that without corn there would be no men” (2006: 11). Our
corporeality is foregrounded in tales where youth spring from the material
they or their parents consume (think Rapunzel again), but the reverse holds
true as well, the inorganic materiality of invulnerable but not really real
animated beings is a snake-oil swindle made to look like authentic agency.
Nevertheless, the impetus of industrialism, capitalism, and consumer-
ism keeps us drooling over the uncanny ambiguity of consumable authen-
ticity. Professor Pinenut’s experience in a donkey-suit of pizza literalizes
the meaning19 of “Carnival,” which, Edward Muir explains, is “the taking
away of flesh,” and mimics the related ritual inversions of the Roman Sat-
urnalia, Feast of Fools, and Cockaigne (to be discussed further in Chapter
4), as Herman Pleij explains:
food fantasies were found here in concrete form. Tables were loaded
with truly edible structures consisting of meat pies, pâtés, cakes, and
ingeniously dressed animals . . . All the food had moving parts, and
automatons even directed the antics of walking, fighting, and singing
food . . . offering themselves up for consumption. (2001: 22)
In such feasts, “The edible nature of things even extends to children’s toys,
which are manufactured entirely as delicacies” (Pleij 2001: 283). This
celebration of plentitude and artifice pivots on the uncanny union of auton-
omy and edibility, desiring and passive giving, animal and human, alive
and constructed:
A well-known number was the seemingly live peacock, roasted and

carefully sewn together again, with lit camphor and wool in its beak to
make it spit fi re. Another popular treat was a variation on this theme
using a pig: when it was cut open it spewed forth an avalanche of blood
sausages, each one wreathed in an array of tiny sausages. (137)20
The modernizing touch of appetizing artifice (food formed as non-food and

the reverse, the living presented, like Pinenut, as food) will be explored in
the next chapter as I focus on the most famous edible architecture of folk
and childlore: gingerbread constructions.
2 Honey (cakes)
Understand the relations between the labourer and the means of pro-
duction, says Marx, and you understand the workings of society;
understand the relations between the child and food, I suggest—and
only half-facetiously—and you understand the workings of the world
of the young.
Wendy R. Katz, “Some Uses of Food in Children’s Literature”
The ever-present hunger in ogre stories, those recurring pots of por-

ridge and pudding, sausages and pies, haunches and joints, cakes and
gingerbread, currants and berries, communicate a world of literally
frustrated physical appetites. . . . When shortages and illness deeply
imperiled infants’ lives, and material scarcity shaped dreams and
drives, the world of stories was one in which glowing, ripe plenty
beckoned elsewhere.
Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman
Food is the fi rst and most personally powerful object of barter. Atalanta
lost the race for a few gold apples. Paris gave the coveted apple to Venus,
unleashing a chain of events that would wreak havoc on Troy. Judeo-Chris-
tian myth has it that innocence was bartered for an apple and paid in full.
Apparently for Adam’s and Eve’s sinful bites, parents have to keep that
“bun in the oven,” “earn the daily bread,” and “bring home the bacon.”
Baby is just supposed to learn how to chew and swallow. Myth reflects that
the most vital, and thus powerful, means of manipulating human bodies
is through food. Food is also the currency of childhood, our fi rst initiation
into the string-pulling power of parenthood. And we start pulling strings
from day one.
Fairy tales enable tellers and audiences to air historical baggage and
symbolically address shared anxieties, but some tales, like “Hansel and
Gretel,” have been reproduced in written and pictorial texts for almost two
centuries with surprisingly few changes. Even Joan Walsh Anglund’s sen-
timental, cherubic images for Nibble, Nibble, Mousekin (1962) are paired
with a tale very like the Grimm version. Jack Zipes explains:
If we simply repeat and literally translate the Grimms’ text as it was

. . . we remain bound by the past. . . . We do not overcome the past to
start a new approach to similar experiences of starvation, abandon-
ment, and survival. . . . To translate “Hansel and Gretel” freely for
Honey(cakes) 55
contemporary readers and spectators entails a careful historical reex-
amination . . . and a conscious decision to alter the past text somewhat
to make people’s experiences of need and want more accessible to con-
temporary audiences and to show a link between causes of pauperiza-
tion in the past and its consequences today. (2006b: 203)
In this and following chapters I will attempt to provide “a careful histori-

cal reexamination” of childlures in food-lore, and in Chapter 4 I’ll look
more closely at “causes of pauperization . . . and consequences” behind
food lures in folktales.
As Claude Lévi-Strauss writes in From Honey to Ashes, “the world of

mythology is round, and therefore does not refer back to any necessary
starting point” (1973: foreword). In this spirit I intend to navigate a playful
genealogy of food lures (especially gingerbread), skipping about in order to
demonstrate range of relevance.1 Gingerbread represents just one of many
food lures symbolically prevalent in folk, fairy, and cautionary tales, one
for which a material history is known, and one that can serve as analogous
to all symbols of temptation in industrializing and consumerist cultures,
which create a cultural climate that is protectionist, passifying, and infan-
tilizing towards children.
Food lures convey cultural expectations and challenges, providing fic-
tive opportunities for self-expression or disempowerment. Their power
to manipulate becomes more subtle in industrial and post-industrial tales
where child characters are held even less accountable for controlling their
consumption. Whereas premodern stories indicate that blame, thus agency,
resides with the kids lured (as clarified by their responsibility to resist temp-
tation), consumerist revisions of such stories involve relocating agency in
the lure itself—it is not that the tempted subject succumbs to temptation but
that the object of his or her desires can be blamed that matters. Consumers
are increasingly depicted as dupes of a manipulation wherein deeper struc-
ture is concealed, agency being reimagined as externally located (impos-
sibly) in ephemeral confections.
Revisitations of “Hansel and Gretel” from this angle concretely rehisto-
ricize our understanding and help trace a pattern to this tendency. It is not a
consumerist cautionary tale about curbing one’s sweet tooth but originally
a premodern story about controlling basic hunger. The mother (a “step”
in later versions) who plans to abandon her children is actually proposing
what historians tell us was not unreasonable prioritizing in times of famine,
to preserve food for working adults by unburdening themselves of helpless
dependents. This is a lesson to be learned from another Grimm tale, “The
Children Living in a Time of Famine,” in which a mother
fell into such deep poverty with her two daughters that they didn’t even
have a crust of bread left to put in their mouths. Finally they were so
famished that the mother was beside herself with despair and said to
the older child: “I will have to kill you so that I’ll have something to
eat.” (Tatar 2004: 379)
This tale seems to beg sympathy from children for their helpless parents,
and ask for selfless sacrifice in thankful return. The children’s solution to
the (mother’s) dilemma and starvation is to “lie down and go to sleep, and
we won’t rise again until the Day of Judgment” (379). This resolution sets
up an ironic inversion of what Rebekka Habermas has called “disinterested
parenting,”2 according to which parents put the needs of the child fi rst.
“The Children Living in a Time of Famine” draws attention to the per-
ceived needs of parents and illustrates a cultural climate in which putting

them fi rst might be justified. Unlike the children who somehow disappear
into eternal sleep, however, Hansel and Gretel escape. Their error (and
a cause of plot conflict as crucial as their abandonment) is to use bread-
crumbs for a trail on the second outing rather than pebbles—a waste of
food. That Hansel wastes breadcrumbs and they fi nd a bread house is no
coincidence—it presents a test not of greed but of how one can strategize to
allay hunger. In Giambattista Basile’s “The Three Fairies,” bread indicates
the respectively spoiled and humble personalities of the tested daughters,
whose (step)mother “gave her daughter white bread from a bakery, and her
stepdaughter, stale and hard crusts” (2001: 545).
As Piero Camporesi explains throughout his Bread of Dreams: Food and
Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, “Bread—a polyvalent object on which
life, death, and dreams depend—becomes a cultural object in impoverished
societies” (17).3 Camporesi’s entire analysis centers on a material history
that can illuminate the Hansel and Gretel tale. According to Camporesi,
for the poor experiencing famine in early modern Europe, sleep, and even
illness, was desired over intense hunger (1989: 37).4 In an effort to induce
sleep, ‘witches’ specialized in treating bread with herbs, including poppy as
a narcotic (1989: 124–125). Gingerbread is one such early common medic-
inal food—ginger to calm the stomach, and heavy seasoning to revital-
ize otherwise stale bread (Rudnay and Beliczay 1987). Honey, the central
sweetener in honeycakes (including gingerbread) was considered a “celestial
medicine” (Camporesi 1989: 31). These historical insights provide a more
practical basis for understanding the tale than psychological or moralizing
traditions might allow.5
When Hansel and Gretel fi nd the witch’s bread house they continue to
eat even after the owner inquires from within. Bruno Bettelheim, then,
interprets this as a cautionary tale on oral greed. Both Garry Kilworth
and Vivian Vande Velde revise the tale for contemporary adult audiences,
amplifying this possibility for interpretation: the children are the evil ones,
plotting murderers rather than self-defending killers. The adults are vic-
tims and innocents. Amusing, but simultaneously disturbing to contempo-
rary sentimentality (and perhaps, thus, the popularity of the theme),6 the
similarity suggests a shared assumption of an audience who easily accepts
Honey(cakes) 57
blaming the children—the kids shouldn’t have taken dessert because they
hadn’t eaten their green beans, so to speak, or in less bourgeois versions,
earned them yet.7
The children are burdens who have to learn the economy of food, to con-
trol their desires and earn the means of satiating them. And adults can use
their economic power to manipulate child hunger into desirable behaviors.
For Jack Zipes, this exploitation constitutes abuse: “‘Hansel and Gretel’
has always minimized and will continue to minimize that degree [of abuse]
in all societies. . . . [It] rationalizes the manner in which men use the bonds
of love to reinforce their control over children” (1997: 58). This kind of
barter is far more complex than simple hunger and earned satiation. Implic-
itly it is not just hunger for food that makes children obey; it is hunger for
acceptance, even love. Which is why Hansel and Gretel’s (step)mother must
be eliminated for a happy ending—once the hunger pains subside, family
sentimentality can reemerge. But this consolation cannot cover up another
equally crucial stipulation: the children have come back with riches from
the witch’s house. They’ve learned the economy of food and security, and
even love. They’ve earned their keep.
Literary food symbolically surrogates unmet needs. The extent to which
food represents security and love is a key motif in Rachel Cohn’s Ginger-
bread (2002). Teenaged narrator Cyd names her doll (which she carries
with her most of the time) “Gingerbread” after a memorable sample of the
confection that her father (“real-dad”) shared with her once in an airport.
The witch-figure in this novel is in fact a kind soul-food cook and baker
who owns her own shop, “Miss Loretta’s House of Great Eats.” The doll
represents Cyd’s need for love and acceptance from her biological father,
a need that she must realize is already met reliably by her more available
stepfather. She, like Hansel and Gretel, journeys away from home, meets
the master-gingerbread-baker, only to return for a better bonding with an
estranged parent (in this case the mother).
Just as food lures exemplify the disempowerment of children who have
surrendered their agency, child characters’ use of food can harness a power
that at least enables the young to defi ne themselves. Carole M. Counihan
writes, “Because eating involves the fi rst experiences of love and autonomy,
the fi rst awareness of pleasure, the fi rst expressions of aggression, and the
fi rst dimensions of frustration and rage, it is a rich domain for children’s
self-expression” (1999: 134). Food is a central aspect of identity throughout
Gingerbread: most of the characters who form Cyd’s inner-circle of friends
are named after or closely associated with food items: Shrimp, Sugar Pie
(whose best friend was “Honey Pie”), and the sibling she identifies most
with during her journey to meet “real-dad’s” family is Danny, “a baker and
cake decorator” (94).
Gingerbread (the edible) aids in digestion by soothing the stomach. Gin-
gerbread (the doll) signifies both nurturing sustenance and excessively sac-
charine sentimentality (a contradiction delicately held in balance by modern,
protectionist constructions of childhood). According to the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary, “gingerbread” has been used for centuries as an adjective
synonymous with “unsubstantial and showy.” Gingerbread is the cultural
prototype for “sweet words like candy, marshmallow, saccharine and con-
fection,” which “are often employed to describe something as insubstantial,
shallow, or dishonest” (Richardson 2002: 296). Like synonyms for youth,
these often convey condescension as well. In a particularly relevant usage,
Herman Melville associated children’s reading itself with gingerbread when
frustrated by the juvenilization of his novels as adventure stories:
When I speak of posterity, in reference to myself, I only mean the ba-

bies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing
upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to some of them, in all
likelihood. Typee will be given to them, perhaps, with their ginger-
bread. (Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851)
Gingerbread is the prototype folklure and itself represents illusion and

temptation. Richard Brautigan wrote: “I have always wanted to write a
poem about Hansel and Gretel going through a forest, leaving behind them
pieces of apple pie to form a sort of bridge between dream and reality”
(1959). And if the house they discovered were covered with pies, this func-
tion would remain intact (though perhaps with an Americana flair).
Gingerbread can also represent the marginalizing manipulation and dis-
empowerment inherent in saccharine concepts of childhood. The witch’s
house in “Hansel and Gretel” is a lure for tender young things with a sweet
tooth. The Gingerbread Boy is the bait of his own story, simultaneously rep-
resenting a shallow flash of tasty temptation with childlike vulnerability. In
Gingerbread, Cyd Charisse’s mother tries to starve Cyd’s younger sister with
controlling and intrusive demands to diet, but Cyd’s doll and imaginary nur-
turer, Gingerbread, functions like comfort food—offering security and com-
panionship on her journey, much like the gingerbread boy in the fifty-fifth
anniversary edition of the Candy Land board game (2004), which shows
young players how at each stop (Gingerbread Tree, Peppermint Stick Forest,
Lollipop Woods, Gum Drop Mountains, and the Candy Castle) that every-
thing is consumable and seemingly delicious. Industrial and post-modern
food lures generally emphasize their own desirability over the desiring sub-
ject’s agency involved in either resisting, taking pleasure, or setting the trap
in the first place (thus obscuring the identity of those responsible).
Whether the food is a lure to danger or simple wastefulness and
unearned comfort, gingerbread becomes a symbolic vehicle for lessons in
personal food-economizing through being an irresistible lure that must be
resisted. This seemingly contradictory message endures in folklore because,
like myth, lore has no end and so can elide resolution, all the while gain-
ing legitimacy through pervasiveness. As Roland Barthes has explained,
“Myth has an imperative, buttonholing character” (1972: 124). Yet,
Honey(cakes) 59
mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked
on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because of all the
materials of myth (whether pictorial or written) presuppose a signify-
ing consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting
their substance. (1972: 110)
Myth and folklore absolve accountability by burying contradictions and

referents.
Take, for example, a commercial reference to Hansel and Gretel that
lacks any sense of the tale’s substance: Perkins, a national chain of break-
fast restaurants, donates pancakes to ill children at the Give Kids the World
Village in a “gingerbread house” with an exterior dripping in pink icing,
candy-cane columns, pretty much edible simulacra everywhere you look.
In spite of that charitable gesture, I can’t help wondering at the choice of
marketing image—do they serve or eat children there?
This mystifying ambivalence conceals the affect of such discourse, the
sweet side of which is protectionism; the savory side is a tough ideal of
independent self-preservation—the former, which offers little autonomy,
is often presented under the guise of nurturing in policies governing the
young, as Nancy E. Walker et al. argue: “Whereas the nurturance orienta-
tion may be considered, albeit simplistically, to be ‘giving children what’s
good for them,’ the self-determination perspective argues for ‘giving chil-
dren the right to decide what’s good for themselves’” (1999: 50). On the
scale of children’s rights, from nurturance to self-determination, older ver-
sions of “Hansel and Gretel” could be seen as presenting children who
have the right to determine what is best for themselves in order to survive,
whereas contemporary uses of the tale and its motifs turn toward prescrib-
ing limited agency, under the influence of more than a century’s bourgeois,
infantilizing protectionism, which we have trouble escaping even in empow-
ering, child-centered readings. For example, U. C. Knoepfl macher writes:
If the survivorship of Hansels and Gretels is to be refigured in narra-

tives that promote the transformation of thinking children into think-
ing adults, such a narrativizing must presumably comfort, however
indirectly, the childhood trauma induced by parental desertion and the
threat of annihilation. (2005: 176)
But by focusing on trauma, and not the children’s overcoming of it or the

poverty initializing their problems, Knoepfl macher follows the nurturance
tradition in which we focus more on the vulnerability of children than their
potential strengths—more on the irresistibility of the lure than the triumph
of resisting or the pleasure of choosing indulgence.
We have to think from outside the bourgeois-bound rhetoric of “selfless
parenting”8 of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to admit less
room for infantilizing tales and interpretations. Why sugarcoat possible
dangers and ugly truths? Knoepfl macher writes that “according to Bet-
telheim, Hansel and Gretel . . . merely think that their parents want to
starve them” (2005: 177), selectively focusing on the parents’ desertion as a
source of trauma rather than a goad to learning self-sufficiency, indicating
that the parents are starving the children. Villainizing the parents helps the
story’s audience build empathy for a potentially scared child’s perspective,
but not for a child’s triumph in overcoming painful challenges (earning or
stealing their keep, escaping or killing their captor). Anyway, the parents
aren’t actively forcing Hansel and Gretel to starve so much as they are sav-
ing themselves and leaving their children to do the same or die. This action
makes more sense within the now-dated, much-maligned paradigm of nec-

essary wastage than selfless parenting.9
If we materially contextualize our understanding of Hansel and Gre-
tel, as well as its gingerbread hypertexts, moral outrage or projection of
trauma gives way to a more nuanced perspective. First, we have to con-
cretize the tale’s origins in cultures of hierarchically imposed hunger and
changing family/community politics. Mathew Kuefler has convincingly
demonstrated that “the sale of children was a regular part of medieval
life,” and a desired alternative (considered lucrative to parents and child) to
abandonment when available: “use of domestic slaves, including children
and most purchased from impoverished rural households, continued, and
even flourished, at the end of the Middle Ages” (2009: 21–22). Nonethe-
less, Alan Dundes explains that we resort to denying shocking realities of
the past by redirecting blame in storytelling:
This psychological process of ‘blaming the victim’ is also found in fe-

male terms. A girl would like to remove or kill her own mother. . . . So
in fairy tales, it is invariably the mother who tries to remove or kill her
own daughter. (2007: 395)
Marina Warner explains this process of projection as one expression of

power inequity:
Appetite defi nes bogeys, and many myths explore obsessively a deep
and insistent fear: that the thing that comes in the dark wants to gobble
you up. Much of this lurid cannibalistic material acts as a metaphori-
cal disguise for issues of authority, procreation, and intergenerational
rivalry. . . . The changing character of such diabolical or monstrous
beings as infanticides reveals ideas about authority in the family and
beyond it. (1999: 10)
As authority over children becomes more observable within the family

but mystifying from without, the greatest power inequities are less visible,
enabling the convenient scapegoating of those in the liminal social territory
between family and community. The preconditions for modernization in
Honey(cakes) 61
medieval Europe necessitated a shift from localized barter towards central-
ized labor organization based on exchange in a phase of primary accumula-
tion, which, Silvia Federici argues, resulted in the marginalization of single,
elderly women with extrafamilial power: “Historically, the witch was the
village midwife, medic, soothsayer or sorceress” (2004: 200).10 She was
the folkhealer who knew how to use herbs, especially dangerous to the idea
that “a large population is the wealth of the nation” held by the new order
(2004: 181). Federici argues
The criminalization of women’s control over procreation is a phenome-

non whose importance cannot be overemphasized, from the viewpoint

of its effects on women and its consequences for the capitalist organiza-
tion of work. As is well documented, through the Middle Ages women
had possessed many means of contraception, mostly consisting of herbs
which turned into potions and ‘pessaries’ (suppositories) were used to
quicken a woman’s period, provoke an abortion, or create a condition
of sterility. (2004: 92)
Such women were demonized as the cannibalistic monsters of the folk-

lorically manipulated (and mediated) fears that Warner describes, result-
ing in cautionary characters like Rapunzel’s mother, who threaten a more
figurative cannibalism, or the adversaries of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack
(of Beanstalk fame), Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White, who to differ-
ing degrees threaten actual cannibalism. Even when the hungry villain is
a wolf, as in the case of Little Red, he dresses as her Granny, evoking the
maternal murderer complex anyway (I’ll get to variations like Jack’s giant
shortly). Federici explains
By the 17th century witches were accused of conspiring to destroy the

generative power of humans and animals, of procuring abortions, and
of belonging to an infanticidal sect devoted to killing children or of-
fering them to the devil. In the popular imagination as well, the witch
came to be associated with a lecherous old woman, hostile to a new
life, who fed upon infant flesh or used children’s bodies to make her
magical potions—a stereotype later popularized by children’s books.
(2004: 180)
The popularity of witch-figures in folklore indicates how useful they were

considered didactically; as John Widdowson has pointed out: “Like other
threatening figures such as the ‘bogie-man,’ witches are threatening in a
general way to discourage misbehaviour of various kinds and encourage
obedience within the family unit and also within the surrounding culture”
(212–213). As the nuclear family became isolated from community and
alienated from land (not to mention labor), “there was marked deteriora-
tion in the condition of old women, following the loss of the commons and
the reorganization of family life, which gave priority to child-raising at the
expense of the care previously provided to the elderly” to the point that
by “the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a growing preoccupation among
the well-to-do with the physical intimacy between their children and their
servants, above all their nurses, which was beginning to appear as a source
of indiscipline” (Federici 2004: 200, 215, n. 34). Think of Juliet Capulet’s
nurse as a more realistic but equally devalued counterpart to the “witch”
who threatens Hansel and Gretel.
Depicting how the scapegoated witch-figure was useful for scaring chil-
dren into obedience through fear of being eaten, one folklorist reports a
recorded threat: “The witches are going to change you into gingerbread”
(Widdowson 1973: 213).11 This very specific motif of cannibalism by inte-
gration is quite common and contextualizes Mickey’s plight in Maurice
Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (1970) as part of the tradition. Mickey in the
night kitchen, like Jack in the giant’s pantry, must preserve himself from
being confused for and used as an ingredient in making bread. The fol-
lowing chorus has simply been somewhat comically adapted by Laurel and
Hardy look-alikes who prepare the morning cake:
Fee-fi-fo-fum
I smell the blood of an Englishman
Be he alive or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
Mixing Mickey in the bowl, they hum,
Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter!

Stir it! Scrape it! Make it! Bake it!
I’ll address the related anti-Semitic blood libel that charged Jews with kill-
ing Christian children to use their blood in making Passover matzohs in
my concluding chapter, but here let it suffice as an example of stranger-
danger related to food supply, and more or less directly to the fear of being
consumed.
In a romantic effort to cover up this historic and economic ugliness,
food is often modernized into a surrogate reward for something less basi-
cally necessary to survival (instead of the other way around). For example,
In the Night Kitchen begins with Mickey feeling lonely and excluded from
his parents’ bedtime conversation and such, embarking on an adventure by
himself, which leads to a superhero-style struggle to understand the nature
of his relationship to food (parents?): he is in the dough but not part of the
bread, and, as he says, “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me!” In other
words, he goes through the same object–subject separation that psycho-
analysts like to pin on a generalized model for mother–child relationships,
expressed in terms of food dependence. In satisfying the need caused by his
Honey(cakes) 63
temporary separation from parents, milk surrogates their love and atten-
tion, but in going alone, he learns the importance of supplying his own
sustenance. He, like Hansel and Gretel, earns his keep by supplying milk
for the morning bread. Ellen Handler Spitz suggests that in Mickey’s case,
and others like it, the experience is, in fact, individuating:
milk appears often . . . as a feature of narratives that turn the tables. In

other words, instead of parents giving milk to their children . . . in these
narratives children display their nascent maturity and independence by
supplying it for themselves and for their parents as well. (1999: 62)12
Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard conclude likewise, and more so in the case
of Henrik Drescher’s The Boy Who Ate Around (1994), in which the main
character, Mo, refuses to eat his string beans and soufflé, eating around
them instead to the point that nothing else is left (not even his parents or
the earth):
Mickey is in danger of being baked into the anonymous material of

commodity culture, but instead of being baked he becomes a supplier
to the cooks. And Mo uses the act of eating to radically remake the
world, yet he changes the world only slightly. These characters learn
to master food’s signifying regimes rather than be mastered by them.
(1999: 141–142)
For Keeling and Pollard, then, Mickey and Mo exemplify successes at

individuating—achieving autonomy and agency in spite of simultaneously
being socialized by food rituals (symbolically into commodity culture). But
in their analysis they show how fi ne a line there can be between empowering
and defeating (or simply indoctrinating) narratives of consumption, using
the contrasting example of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), in
which Max is ultimately subdued not by the wild things he has tamed, but
by the aroma of his dinner waiting: “Conversely, for Max, food is a tool
through which he is mastered, and mastered expertly enough to feel wholly
satisfied” (1999: 142).
John Clement Ball might disagree on the general affect of the latter text
when he argues, “In creating a paradigmatically colonial story, Sendak
presents his readers with a time-honoured narrative of empowerment”
(1997: 177). But Ball’s reading is in keeping with Keeling and Pollard’s
demystification of a false or ephemeral achievement:
[Max] moves forward and back in time; like many an imperialist be-
fore him, he becomes the “adult” leader of purportedly childlike or
backward human beings living in a primitive state. That he does this
so easily and non-violently marks the degree to which Max’s colonial
fantasy is a fantasy. (1997: 169)
And if this isn’t proof enough, the fact that Max’s dinner is still warm when
he returns home prompted by the aroma should be.
Ball’s analysis, however, draws out another similarity between Keeling
and Pollard’s primary picks—Henrik Drescher’s The Boy Who Ate Around
could just as aptly be titled The Boy Who Ate the World. Whereas Max
brings the wild things to submission with his imperatives and charm, Mo
literally dominates the world by engulfi ng it: “For a midnight snack he
rolled South America up in Africa, swallowing them whole like an enchi-
lada.” Empowering, yes, but as Ball has pointed out, it doesn’t particularly
draw on the most politically sensitive rhetorical tropes to create the effect.
In The Empire’s Old Clothes, Ariel Dorfman explains (concerning

Babar),
Even before he can read . . . the child has come into contact with an
implicit history that justifies and rationalizes the motives behind an
international situation in which some countries have everything and
other countries almost nothing. The child may also be overcoming
his infantile traumas. Or again, he may not. Such a process is dif-
ficult to verify. But what is defi nitely happening is that the reader is
being handed an easy-to-grasp, easy-to-swallow historical version of
the incorporation of Africa (and, by analogy, that of other out-of-
the-mainstream continents, namely Latin America and Asia) into the
contemporary world. (23)
Food lures can seemingly uncomplicate situations of power inequity by

conveniently essentializing national identities. According to Shannan
Peckham,
Stereotypes of national characters are often evoked in relation to na-

tional cuisines. To the Greeks, the Italians are Makaronades, to the
French, the British are Rosbif; to the British, the French are Frogs and
the Germans, Krauts. Food can become a powerful metonym for na-
tional cultures. (171–172)13
Perhaps Roald Dahl was satirizing this tendency when the title giant-char-
acter of The BFG (1982) describes the flavors of “human beans”: “Turks
from Turkey is tasting of turkey. . . . Greeks from Greece is all tasting
greasy” (26).14 How better to represent the world as domitable than to
reduce each country to a helping of its national cuisine? This is precisely
what Drescher’s hyperbole achieves: “First he gulped down China, wall
and all, then India. (Spicy!) He feasted on a smidgen of Holland, fricassee
of France, slice of Italy. (Gooey!) Around the world he chomped, and the
smaller it got, the fatter he grew.” Mo grows fatter and fatter, implicitly
gaining power (but he’ll right his imperialist wrongs by purging at the end
of the story).15
Honey(cakes) 65
Ariel Dorfman writes that behind imperial discourse, either in Victorian
Britain or the globalizing U.S., “there is an idea of development and growth,
the idea that ‘young’ economies need only mimic ‘older’ ones. In more or less
sophisticated form, it is this belief which permeates all developmental theory”
(1983: 42). Developmentalism conflates imperialist interest in “younger,”
“developing” countries with interest in domestically growing young bodies.
The young grow so that the nation can grow. Bill Brown explains how/why
this process is inherently gendered: “Authorities like Boas, Lombroso, and
Topinard had theorized woman as fundamentally childlike, thus restricting
the child/adult opposition to gender. . . . the female subject was also taken to
be more cross-culturally and cross-racially generic, so that girls could hardly

serve the same generic function as boys in the nationalizing project” (1996:
177). Global appetites appear in masculinizing and nation-building tales as
a reflection of this presumed common interest in growth. In fact, many of
the examples I provide in this chapter show the most exaggerated forms of
consumption in imperialist, warring, or globalizing contexts. Perhaps it is in
resistance to such trends that more recent narratives on dominating appe-
tites, like Ana Juan’s The Night Eater (2004), Kevin Henkes’s Kitten’s First
Full Moon (2004), and Souther Salazar’s The Monster that Ate Stars (2006),
turn toward the celestial sphere instead.
It is not surprising that ideologies of domination, confl ict, and absorp-
tion invite extremes—both binge habits and food rejection. Allen, “The
Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker” in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1947), is a “striking
literary depiction of an eating disorder resembling anorexia nervosa”
(Gainor 1992: 29) until the healthy stimulation of caring for Spotty the
horse (not Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s tricky dishes of decreasing size) shakes
him into realizing the necessity of eating: “Allen did as he was told. My,
but he was feeling strong!” (104). Here is a simple equation of food with
strength, not unlike the exaggerated moral of “The Story of Augustus
Who Would Not Have any Soup” (see Figure 2.1) from Heinrich Hoff-
mann’s Struwwelpeter (1845). Such stories hearken back to an early tra-
dition in stories for children, like the 1541 farce called “‘Hans the Sweet
Tooth,’ written by the renowned Antwerp rhetorician Jan van den Berhe,”
which “presents a fatso called Hans—as spoiled as he is fond of food—
who is regarded with envy by a friend whose scrawniness puts him at a
serious disadvantage. Hans goads him into feigning illness, so that he
will be mollycoddled and fattened up” (Pleij 2001: 98). This tradition
of stories encourages all and any consumption. Likewise, even though
Mo eats the entire world, the message of The Boy Who Ate Around is to
not be so fi nicky and to simply fi nish his plate. Mo is not chastised for
overconsumption but for eating around (avoiding) his green beans. In
contrast, the title character of Ross Collins’s Alvie Eats Soup (2002), an
inversion of Hoffmann’s Augustus, will eat nothing but soup (see Figure
2.2). Alvie also succeeds in getting his way, resisting a consumer aesthetic
that dictates variety.
Tim Lang points out that
far from food being a sector of modern life that late capitalism has
resolved in a remorseless march of progress, one set of food problems
has merely been replaced by another. Western food culture has moved
from an era of scarcity to one of surfeit. The dynamics of today’s food
7. THE STORY OF AUGUSTUS WHO WOULD NOT HAVE

ANY SOU3
Augustus was a chubby lad;

Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had;
And every body saw with joy
The plump and hearty healthy boy.
He ate and drank as he was told,
And never let his soup get cold,
But one day, one cold winter's day,
He scream'd out—"Take the soup away!
O take the nasty soup away!
I won't have any soup to-day."
Next day, now look, the picture shows

How lank and lean Augustus grows!
Yet, though he feels so weak and III
The naughty fellow cries out still—
"Not any soup for me, I say:
O take the nasty soup away;
I won't have any soup to-day."
The third day comes; Oh what a sin!

To make himself so pale and thin.
Yetr when the soup is put on table,
He screams, as loud as he is able.—
"Not any soup for me. I say;
O take the nasty soup away!
I won't have any soup to-day"
Look at him. now the fourth day's come!

He scarcely weighs a sugar-plum;
He's like a little bit or thread.
And on the fifth day, he was—dead!
Figure 2.1 Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwepeter. 1845. English translation.

Dover, 1995.
Honey(cakes) 67
system can be better understood as an attempt to control the tendency
to over-produce than to under-produce. (1998: 14)
Affluence minimizes the need to chastise wastefulness or encourage thrifty

eating habits, usually reducing messages of food economy for children to a
simple demand to eat, which might be why Keeling and Pollard found few
works that deal with children rejecting food:
They tried tricking him.

I only eat
soup-not goop.
Eventually they gave up.
We give up.
Figure 2.2 Ross Collins, Alvie Eats Soup. Scholastic, 2002. (By permission of
author.)
As we reviewed texts for this paper, we were amazed at how small a
part revulsion plays in children’s literature. Characters like Max and
Mickey never eat, so they never risk even the possibility of a pure,
physiological rejection of food. (142)
Even in the cases of Max and Mickey, two of Sendak’s characters whose
conflicts center on eating themes, we never see them eat. And rarer is the
more true-to-life spitting out, refusal, or throwing (except in the case of
the latter, the cliché food fight scene, where food is not so much rejected as
shared in a different kind of bonding).
This point immediately made me think of another exception and a telling

one: Russell Hoban’s Bread and Jam for Frances (1964). Surely the entire
plot revolves around revulsion (though never showing it directly), down to
the many verses (published separately too!) that Frances sings about her
absolute disgust toward eggs: “I do not like the way you slide, / I do not
like your soft inside” (6). But I also see a pattern here, a gendering one: isn’t
Frances (and the audience-child who chooses to identify with her) being
socialized to consume delicately, moderately, in a balanced and tasteful
way? This message is far from the masculinized aforementioned subtext:
eat for strength. It is about taste, not strength or even sustenance. Frances
is supposed to be a conspicuously tasteful consumer.
Is the difference between the messages to Allen versus Frances one
that can be explained simply by gender expectations? Consider this
prototype:
Early in the morning

When the fi rst cock crowed his warning,
Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,
Laura rose with Lizzie:
Fetched in honey, milked the cows,
Aired and set to rights the house,
Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,
Next churned butter, whipped up cream,
Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;
Talked as modest maidens should. (Rosetti 1994: 6)
Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862) serves as an important

anchor point and contrast for many of the aforementioned texts: it is a
highly imperial text, gendered, and neurotically focused on food produc-
tion and consumption (and like Allen’s tale, has been interpreted in terms
of anorexia16). Unlike all the boys mentioned, and like Frances (a badger
but nonetheless feminine), Lizzie and Laura are given and relay a far more
complex message about food than it is simply good and necessary to eat.
Just as in the passage I’ve quoted here we can see many themes implied:
Honey(cakes) 69
that the girls must be busy doing their chores, that they must be produc-
tive in a decorative, not necessarily substantive way, and that the foods
they make are indulgent but not necessarily nutritional. The cakes are
“dainty” and made with oxidized (bleached, processed) flour, which is an
important contrast to the otherwise natural fruits “to fi ll your mouth”
unnatural men will tempt them to devour. Michael Symons points out
that the chores mentioned in the previous lines
are the jobs of the traditional kitchen, reliant on immediate resources . . .

The sisters would have obtained fruit from their own orchard. Neverthe-
less, at the time of writing, the impersonal food industry, “that unknown
orchard,” was taking over. (2000: 325)
They are being tempted as shoppers, not just eaters. Holly Blackford
describes the theme “of bad food available in a patriarchal market place,
contrasted with the wholesome world of the homemade and housekeeping,
where Laura and Lizzie ‘should’ stay and work” (2009: 47).17
In marked contrast, in Ted Naifeh’s revisitation of “Goblin Market,”
Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things (2002), the spunky main char-
acter not only embraces the dark and magic world, but subdues one of
the goblins. In a scene particularly relevant to my argument, she casts a
“Beguiling Glamour” spell using herbs that “were surprisingly common,
and Courtney found many of them in her mother’s handsome but unused
spice rack” (issue 2). Laurie Taylor describes the effect: “Courtney Crum-
rin’s revisioning of one of Rossetti’s tales to empower a young girl and to
critique the world in which the girl lives harnesses the subversive power of
Rossetti’s story for a modern day mass-audience” (2008: 203). Courtney
shows just how far Laura and Lizzie have to go to be subversive. Through
Crumrin, Naifeh simply inverts the gendering of dietary scripts.
But even degrees of consumption can be reduced to gendered patterns,
as Pierre Bourdieu puts it,
This impression of abundance, which is the norm on special occasions,

and always applies, so far as possible, for the men, whose plates are
filled twice . . . is often balanced, on ordinary occasions, by restric-
tions which generally apply to the women, who still share one portion
between two, or eat the left-overs of the previous day; a girl’s ascension
(accession?) to womanhood is marked by doing without. It is part of
men’s status to eat and to eat well. (1984: 194–195)
In “Goblin Market,” this double standard becomes more complicated in

light of other (vying) cultural referents of abundance. Michael Symons
admits that “[t]he poem has usually been taken to be almost embarrass-
ingly allegorical. . . . However, let us not get carried away with symbol-
ism. Crucially, let us assume that it is real food, that an apple is an apple”
(2000: 324). Where does the goblins’ (literal) fruit really come from? Rich-
ard Menke explains that the plentiful and varied fruits of the goblin men
demonstrate the colonizing commercialism of Rossetti’s time:
a yen for exotic fruit seems a classic imperial taste. But England also
imported more familiar varieties of fruit, to help satisfy an immense
and growing domestic demand. . . . Like so many goods in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, fruit was an item that, once considered
a luxury, was gradually becoming a staple for middle-class consumers.
(1999: 115)18
Lizzie and Laura are being taught to deny themselves the satisfaction of
certain bodily urges—but to conspicuously consume by indulging in
others—particularly what are presented as unnecessary, nonsubstantial
sweets. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra indicates that when “Goblin Market”
was revised into a text to be marketed to children, it became “little more
than a mouth-watering list of tasty treats,” emphasizing the “sugar-baited
words” of the goblin-men (2002: 194).
Critics have also noted the overlapping interpretations of diet economics
with drug addiction in “Goblin Market”—particularly concerning absinthe.19
Usually, consuming “dainty cakes” or saccharine sweets keeps children more
tamable than wild (or hothouse) fruits would. But in most productions for
children, it is sugar that acts as a drug—both luring and ensuring repetition of
desire. What Piero Camporesi writes of opiate-laced spiced bread20 rings true
of the symbolic weight of sugar and honeycakes for children:
Used to dampen the frenzy of the masses and lead them back—by
means of dreams—to the ‘reason’ desired by the groups in power. . . .
Capitalism and imperialism have utilized mechanisms which induced
collective dreaming and weakened the desire for renewal by means of
‘visionary trips,’ in order to impose their will. . . . The pre-industrial
age, too, even if in a more precise, rough and ‘natural’ manner, was
aware of political strategies allied to medical culture, whether to lessen
the pangs of hunger or to limit turmoil in the street. (1989: 137)
Children’s hunger was exploited in the development of both didactic stories

and capitalist profit, made possible by the structural instability21 experi-
enced by most in the Middle Ages. Herman Pleij confi rms that
In preindustrial Europe a large part of the population was thought to be

walking around in a half-drugged state much of the time. The reason for
this was not only lack of food, which produced hallucinatory dreams,
but also the necessity of eating nutritional substitutes with bewitching
effects. An overdose of spoiled food, leaves, bran, and fermented drinks
could easily give rise to protracted fantasizing. (2001: 125)
Honey(cakes) 71
This is not to say that food lures in folklore are a result of one big high,
but the combination of “poppy extract,” “hemp-seed,” “mushrooms, toad-
stools, and grasses of all kinds,” might have altered the ambiance for sto-
rytellers and their audiences (2001: 125). In short, if the only accessible
foodstuffs keep you stoned (do I even need to say the literal “opiate of the
masses”?), you are easier to control.
Pleij explains both the delirious appeal of food plenty and the didac-
tic tradition that emerged combining elements of the Carnival, Cockaigne,
and religious dogma:
At the end of the sixteenth century the Lutheran preacher Johannes Math-
esius recommended talking to children about the hereafter. . . . Children
should be presented with a picture of the hereafter as a heavenly play-
ground, to be enjoyed by those who behaved piously in life. . . . sugared
almonds and many more delicious snacks grown on trees. . . . The houses
are roofed with custard tarts. (2001: 237)
The result was Luilekkerland, a cautionary destination for “spoiled,

good-for-nothing children” to learn to resist the temptations of idle con-
sumption (notice that for industry and early capitalism to flourish, fi rst
the labor of all citizens was needed, while under the consumerism of late
capitalism, children must be passified as consumers fi rst, workers later).
Luilekkerland was a “child’s paradise, with heaps of candy as high as
houses and roof tiles made of pancakes. . . . [and] literally means ‘lazy-
luscious-land’” (Pleij 2001: 500). Luilekkerland, like Pinocchio’s Playland,
springs from the same tradition as the land Cockaigne (to be discussed
at greater length in my fourth chapter), where “[t[he biggest lazybones,
who do nothing but sleep and daydream, are looked up to as nobles”
(Pleij 2001: 366). Silvia Federici explains the didactic agenda behind such
compensatory fantasies:
The idea of transforming the lazy being, who dreamt of life as a long
Carnival, into an indefatigable worker, must have seemed a desperate
enterprise. It meant literally to ‘turn the world upside down,’ but in a
totally capitalist fashion, where inertia to command would be trans-
formed into lack of desire and autonomous will. (154)
Like the lazy children of Luilekkerland, Hansel and Gretel must learn to
earn their keep. In many versions, the (step)mother or the witch, or both,
call them “lazybones.” But as their labor becomes less essential to progress,
and less desirable to those who would control them and their social sphere,
children had fewer tangible reasons to resist temptation. This would explain
the shift in “Hansel and Gretel” tellings toward focusing on the object
and moment of their temptation, heightening its sugary affect. Carolyn
Daniel writes that, “historically, versions of the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ story
have become sweeter and sweeter,” suggesting that this could be a result
of Europe’s enormous increase in sugar consumption in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries (2006: 223, n. 9). But it also reflects shifting attitudes
towards childhood, indicated in particular in the tale’s illustration history.
Rachel Freudenburg explains, “During the nineteenth century, the most
popular images by far are the confrontation between children and witch in
front of the candy house and the siblings alone in the forest” (1998: 269).
Focusing on the lure (originally a house of bread, then gingerbread, and
eventually a candy cottage) rather than the children’s moment of abandon-
ment or triumph shifts the didactic effect as well. Freudenburg ties this shift
to changing views of childhood and child-rearing:
Even a tale such as “Hansel and Gretel,” in which juvenile incarcera-

tion, abandonment, and child labor figure prominently, has spawned
many an illustration of carefree, innocent children. In fact, nineteenth-
century illustrations for this tale deflect attention away from child
abuse and instead concentrate on issues which were more attractive to
a contemporaneous readership, among them, the image of the Roman-
tic child. (264)
So, perhaps even more than gender, national ideologies of diet, economics,
and child-rearing explain the differences behind tales that caution to gorge,
abstain, or conspicuously consume. With Romantic childhood new parent-
ing sentiments arose (transitionally coexisting in extremes of selfless par-
enting and necessary wastage), just as with agricultural stability attitudes
towards eating grew more discriminating. According to Stewart Lee Allen,
Victorians were “sadistic” in child feeding, following the spiritual pedagogy
of John Wesley and nutritional advice of Pye Henry Chavasse to develop a
pleasure-free cuisine that some claim helped create the stoic Victorian
personality that led to Great Britain’s domination of the world. It also
explains why Victorian brats were so fond of American children’s lit-
erature. It was the scenes of kids gorging on buckwheat pancakes with
maple syrup, eggs, and sausage that they really liked. (2002: 121)22
Certainly this kind of indulgent gorging continued to be depicted in the

twentieth century and today, exemplified by James Marshall’s version of
Hansel and Gretel (1990), described by Virginia A. Walter:
Marshall’s witch house is an obscenity of sugar confections. Although

the text describes the children’s activities in the usual way, with Han-
sel breaking off a piece of the roof and Gretel eating a piece of sugar
window, the pictures present another story. Hansel appears to have
a stomach ache, and Gretel is eating her candy as if under penalty of
death. (1991: 329)
Honey(cakes) 73
As in the Romantic illustrations Freudenburg examines, Hansel and Gretel
are presented as vulnerable innocents—but now to the point of being vacu-
ous dupes (see Figure 2.3).
Surprisingly few American food tales preach moderation, unless for
reasons of maintaining physical appearance. Certainly moderation is not
typically advocated for the good of the community (as it is, for example, in
the Italian “magic bowl” story Tomie de Paola adapted in Strega Nona) or
for the family (as in another “magic bowl” story from Palestine, “Tunjur,
Tunjur”). 23 Again the explanatory variable that makes the most sense here
is that of economic prosperity and global expansionism.
In Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America,

Harvey Levenstein investigates a central paradox in U.S. economic and
food culture: coexisting extremes of “starving amidst plenty.” The contra-
diction becomes clearer in times of budgetary crisis when surplus is wasted
or destroyed, or from the perspective of the poor, or anytime in an economy
Figure 2.3 James Marshall, Hansel and Gretel. Dial Books for Young Readers,
1990. (Used with permission. All rights reserved.)
that favors mass production and profit over equal distribution. It is also
continually visible in thin body ideals held by such an overweight and over-
indulgent food culture, like diet ads juxtaposing food porn. One text that
exemplifies this paradox is Gary McKenzie’s The Gingerbread Kingdom
(2004), which idealizes a land in which everything is consumable and sweet
(a candyland, in fact), but triumph comes to an orphan hero who practices
moderation throughout his journey. In contrast, and striking a didactic bal-
ance in such an indulgent and tempting candyland, fat jokes make up the
bulk of verbal bullying and satiric descriptions (59, 68, 84–85, 166, 202).
One relevant example is, as usual, at the arch-villain Queen Bee’s expense:
Spotting the top of the Gingerbread Castle in the distance, an evil smile
formed on her chubby face. She waddled over to her closet and pulled
out a furry black robe with thin yellow stripes on it, then put it on.
“Ahh!” she said to herself. “I just love the smell of burnt gingerbread
in the morning.” (165)24
Queen Beatrice manipulates the supply and prices of sugar (47) to put a
crunch on the production of just about everything in Gingerbread Kingdom
(which is ironic but appropriate considering that gingerbread is authenti-
cally a honeycake, and of course, bees produce that sweetener). Her foiled
scheme was to monopolize the kingdom’s sugar supply: “She would keep
it all for herself and have a monopoly on all of the Gingerbread Kingdom.
She could, and I’m sure she would, make people do whatever she wanted
for the smallest cup of sugar” (214). Like Roald Dahl’s industrial spy Mr.
Slugworth in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), the Queen Bee
draws attention to the threat of capitalist greed (or, more simply put, the
dangers of not sharing).
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is both indulgent and didactic.
Through contrasting characters Dahl tempts and teaches, advocates both
an appetite for chocolate and restraint, all the while tying in an idealized
capitalist work ethic (alongside what appears to be slave labor in the fac-
tory). Just as the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” uses sweets to lure her
would-be victims, Willy Wonka lures, tests, punishes, and rewards through
candy, in the end modeling moderation, obedience, and willingness to work
as good child behavior through Charlie’s example.
Each child who visits the chocolate factory represents a temptation that
they (except for Charlie) then fail to resist. Augustus Gloop (satiric descen-
dant of “Augustus who would not have any soup”?) is punished for glut-
tony and Veruca Salt for greed. Violet’s temptation with the newly invented
gum that’s “not ready for eating!” didactically represents a struggle similar
to Laura’s in “The Goblin Market”—she is addicted to an un-substance,
signified by her lack of resistance to gum that is a meal, or, simulated sub-
stance (96). It is also a comment on capital. Why is Violet’s passion for
bubble gum any worse than Charlie’s aesthetic, albeit remote, appreciation
Honey(cakes) 75
of chocolate? She chews but doesn’t work for or consume substance—a
point well made with gum, which one does not ingest or digest, mimicking
an entire meal (which reminds us that Charlie and his family do need sub-
stance, something other than cabbage and water soup). Charlie, however, is
looking for work and willing to support his family. Like Hansel and Gretel,
he’ll bring home the goods. His winning the factory signifies a reward at
once tempting and well earned. It is both exemplary of consumerism and
an exception to the passifying rule.
Willy Wonka, a kind of consumerist witch-fairy figure, also has control
throughout the story. In much the same way, fairy tales typically exter-
nalize agency as an adult power exercised to punish the bad or protect

the good children and manipulate future decision-making with threats and
bribes. Robert Coover foregrounds this function in his retelling of “Hansel
and Gretel” in “The Gingerbread House” (1969), wherein the father tells
his children a story overemphasizing the rewards of humility so lauded in
tales like Pinocchio, “The Three Fairies” and “Cinderella”:
The old man tells them a story about a good fairy who granted a poor
man three wishes. The wishes, he knows, were wasted, but so then is
the story. He lengthens the tale with details about the good fairy, how
sweet and kind and pretty she is, then lets the children complete the
story with their own wishes, their own dreams. (69)
What happens to a dream deferred? It can keep you from taking control.
The manipulation inherent in the lure of fictional food for children
is often masked by narratives that justify that manipulation. Food lures
function as socializing agents to encourage feminine purity (as in “Goblin
Market”), aesthetic taste (as in Bread and Jam for Frances), weight control
(Gingerbread), masculine vigor (“The Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker”), an
imperialist appetite for domination (Where the Wild Things Are), global
consumerism (The Boy Who Ate Around), or consumption for consump-
tion’s sake (in the Candy Land games). Most of these texts socialize their
audience as consumers fi rst and workers incidentally or not at all. Few
depict children as possibly productive, contributing members of family and
community. 25 This is a bad combination—and a telling one. Whereas Han-
sel and Gretel were originally facing possible starvation, child characters in
consumerist cautionary tales warn, if at all advocating moderation, against
overindulging in nonsubstantial foods like candy. But even so they tend to
gloss over causal realities like the fact that one usually needs to work hard
to afford consuming much, and that overindulgence can lead to real bodily
and fiscal dangers. Buying power is illusory without autonomous earning,
so why would so many children’s texts advocate such an impossible moral
code if not to simply passify them?
Kids are more controllable (and consumable) when passified, which is
merely one accomplishment of capitalist development—the representation
of power is also transformed. Marina Warner writes, “Cannibals, who are
ubiquitous in Western folklore, are removed to the periphery at the start of
the imperial enterprise and excluded from the record of European fact and
fiction” (1999: 336). Menacing power simply replaced the witch/monster
image with a corporate smile, as we shall see in Chapter 3. Monsters moved
within, as Marina Warner explains:
Although much of the material that echoes to the bogeyman’s tread is an-
cient . . . the insistence of monsters in children’s lives presents a new de-
velopment in their entertainment: their affinity with monsters has grown
with the stresses modern childhood puts on parents. . . . The emphasis

has shifted: from a threat to the child from outside forces to the threat-
ened and threatening quality of child-rearing and the conflicts between
parents and children. The question is not only “who eats and who gets
eaten?” but “who consumes and who is consumed?” . . . The cluster of
meanings around the idea of consumption (devouring, swallowing, wolf-
ing down, bloodsucking, to name but a few) communicates struggles
about separate identity, filiation, and personal autonomy. (14–15)
Where can the child of late capitalism eat and be eaten? The witch’s house
is just next door.
3 Sweet Teeth
Let him [a child] choose his foods, not for what he likes as such, but
for what goes with something else, in taste and in texture and in
general gastronomic excitement. It is not wicked sensuality, as Wal-
ter Scott’s father would have thought, for a little boy to prefer but-
tered toast with spinach for supper and a cinnamon bun with milk
for lunch. It is the beginning of a sensitive and thoughtful system of
deliberate choice, which as he grows will grow too, so that increas-

ingly he will be able to choose for himself and to weigh values.
M. F. K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf
Saturday, 3 May 2003 Baghdad

I saw an American talking to a little boy; the boy didn’t speak English
and the American didn’t speak Arabic, so they were communicating
with gestures. The boy wanted the American to give him some drink-
ing water, but the soldier didn’t understand and in the end gave him
some sweets and shook his hand. The boy went away happy all the
same.
Thura Al-Windawi, Thura’s Diary: My Life in Wartime Iraq
As we saw in the last chapter, children’s initiations into the power relations
of consumer society are particularly apparent at the subtle level of appe-
tite, because, as Holly Blackford has put it, “Foodchains of power are con-
structed and expressed by activities of food consumption and production”
(2009: 41). As the contrast of my epigraphs suggests, hierarchies of feeding
can create the illusion of but actually diminish choice, especially in the case
of the young sweet tooth. To my mind a most interesting background for
exploring this issue can be found in the commercialization, urban legends,
childlore, and rituals surrounding Halloween, a holiday that ranks second
(after Easter) in the U.S. for candy consumption (Pottker 1995: 204) and
no doubt as such plays an important role in socializing young children as
future consumers. I am interested in showing how such socialization oper-
ates within the body, ideologically initiating children into consumer culture
through the development of taste.
In this chapter I will investigate issues of nutrition and consumer choice
(continuing with the irresistible example of sweets) as they complicate
arguments for and against children’s self-determination rights. Consumer
choice has become a greyer child-rights issue than initial sentiments and
political passions often recognize. It is an area of debate in which it is
unexpectedly difficult to distinguish the rhetoric of a self-determination
vanguard from protectionists or exploiters—perhaps, because ‘consumer
rights’ as such are systemically justified within falsely totalizing capitalist
ideologies. From the nineteenth century onward, ‘choice’ has increasingly
been defi ned (especially for middle-class children) in terms of an idle con-
sumerism that has pacified and robbed the young of reciprocity in family
and public power, ultimately tricking them out of power with treats.
Sweetness has always been used as a way of making both the physical
and ideological palatable—a process that seems especially relevant in child-
rearing and, as I hope to show, commercial child culture. Tim Richardson
writes that “Sweets have always been the currency of children” (2002: 54).
Certainly the rituals that surround children serve as an introduction to
communities of consumption. Trick-or-treating, in particular, is the only
major American holiday ritual that is communally enacted for and by
children,1 and as such it would seemingly allow us to factor out parental
influence in a study on the commercialization of childhood. Yet, in the
late capitalist experience, parental and corporate controls have operated
in similar ways. While some family entertainment celebrates the empower-
ing potential of Halloween rituals, commercial and protectionist practices
pacify the young (preparing them to become unquestioning consumers),
and frequently Halloween stories reflect this reality, helping to co-opt their
audience in the process.
PROTECTING ADULTS FROM THE PROTECTION RACKET
Changes in the tradition of “trick-or-treating” exemplify the power swindle

of protectionism on a structurally deep ritualistic level—often invisible in
its infantilizing socialization. Gary Cross writes that many commercialized
“holidays, but especially Halloween, have become occasions for confl ict
between appeals to childhood wonder (as with trick-or-treating) and con-
cerns about protecting children from desire (particularly among religious
conservatives)” (2002: 445). According to Steve Siporin, tricks were once
widely tolerated as part of a permissive holiday that ritualized an aggressive
outlet for the young, and have been preserved longer in rural areas, where
“the ‘treat’ part seemed like ‘begging’” (1994: 46–47). Some of Siporin’s
rural U.S. informants still referred to Halloween as “Beggar’s Night”
(1994: 46). Even in a Halloween episode of Reno 911 (2003), Deputy James
Garcia quips, “children begging is just setting them up for welfare.” The
perception of trick-or-treating as begging exposes the problem of replacing
aggressive tricks with passive “treats”—it encourages unquestioning con-
sumerism rather than the empowering play of tricking.
Sally Benson’s account of “October 1903” in her novel Meet Me in St.
Louis (1941) captures a Halloween quite different from that experienced by
most (suburban and urban children, at least) later that century and today.
Sweet Teeth 79
Children are shown blissfully divvying up “victims,” burning property,
punishing cranky neighbors who nonetheless seem to tolerate the pranks
(clearly all in good fun). In the film adaptation community acceptance is
emphasized more by showing even the most feared targets secretly antic-
ipating and permitting the pranks, whereas in the original text, a clear
contrast is made between the permissive Mrs. Wagner, who anticipates
her hammock being taken and so leaves it “laid invitingly folded on the
floor” (112–113) and grouchy Mr. Waughop, who “never hung a Christmas
wreath on [his] door” and hides outdoor furniture from the pranksters
(116). Either way, no adult protests the young ones’ right to prank. Hallow-
een served as an outlet for otherwise disempowered youth that was safely
limited to one night.
Marina Warner stresses the importance of the holiday scare operating
cathartically for youth:
The magical attempt to secure safety takes two predominant forms:

either the participants impersonate the danger itself, as in the carnival
masks and fancy dress of Halloween, and thus cannibal-like, absorb its
powers and deflect its ability to inflict harm; or they expose themselves
and by surviving the ordeal, prove their invulnerability. (112)
But communal tolerance of pranks would change. As Tad Tuleja has

explained, “as urbanization increased the opportunity for anonymous
mayhem and householders became more nervous about its potential, the
traditional forgiving attitude began to change” (1994: 88). David J. Skal
tells us, “Sometime in the middle of the 1930s, enterprising householders,
fed up with soaped windows and worse, began experimenting with a home-
based variation on the old protection racket practiced between shopkeepers
and Thanksgiving ragamuffi ns” (2002: 52).2 Most often the fi rst citation
given for recommending this strategy was in Doris Hudson Moss’s article
for American Home in 1939: “if you provide food and a hearty welcome,
you can be sure that the little rowdies from the other side3 of town will
join the party spirit and leave your front gate intact” (qtd. in Skal 2002:
53). Moss describes the success of this strategy in her own home: “When
they learned that it was treat at our house they came smiling shyly into
the dining room where other children were nibbling at doughnuts and sip-
ping cider—and there were no tricks” (qtd. in Skal 2002: 53). This idea
of pacifying youth with sweets to deny their annual outlet for permitted
aggression, rule-breaking, and ritualized expressions of power reveals the
way in which adults systematically dismantled the obvious threat of earlier
traditions.
In 1950s Britain, Peter and Iona Opie observed several instances of rit-
ual threats recited by young people at Halloween and Mischief Night (the
eve before Guy Fawkes Day). Here’s an example of the “protection racket”
variety:
Please can you spare me a copper or two?
If you haven’t got a penny a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny God bless you. (2001: 276)
The Opies explain, “And if money is not given they make a practice—despite
the geniality of their verse—of returning the next night and doing mischief”
(2001: 276). In 1974, the Eugene Register-Guard reports some Oregon teens
selling “spook insurance” against trick damage, but in the U.S. Halloween
as an entirely youth-centered, youth-controlled, and ritualistically empower-
ing holiday has pretty much vanished, though so gradually as to escape great
notice. In 1959, sociologist Gregory Stone would write of U.S. practices:
[W]e can apprehend the ‘trick’ as a production; the ‘treat’ as a consump-

tion. Just twenty-five years ago, when I was an urchin, Halloween was a
time set aside for young tricksters—a time for creative productions. . . .
We had no conception of being treated by our victims, incidentally, to
anything except silence, which we hoped was studied, irate words, a chase
(if we were lucky), or, most exciting of all, an investigation of the scene by
the police whom we always managed to elude. Our masks, we believed,
did confound our victim’s attempts to identify us . . . [Now] [i]nstead of
protecting the urchin, the costume is more akin to the Easter bonnet, de-
signed to provoke the uncritical appreciations of the audience. (374)
Stone concludes from an informal survey of trick-or-treaters, “at least two-

thirds of the children like those who visited my house on Halloween prob-
ably have no conception of producing a trick! They aren’t bribing anybody.
They grace your and my doorsteps as consumers, pure and simple” (375).
From his small sample of eighteen trick-or-treaters, he writes that most
seemed not to understand the call as a question, let alone threat: “Was
there a choice at all? No. In each case, I asked, ‘Suppose I said, ‘Trick.’
What would you do?’ Fifteen of the eighteen (83.3%) answered, ‘I don’t
know’” (375). My own informal surveys indicate that Stone’s 1959 experi-
ence fairly predicted the future erasure of the authentic trick. I, for one,
certainly enjoyed trick-or-treating in suburban Kansas in the early 1970s,
and if I ever wondered what the ‘trick’ referred to, I figured it was like a
magic trick—yet another kind of treat for the children. Today the children
who come (if at all) to the door often simply shove an open bag out for the
expected goods. Many forget to sing out the false threat altogether.
TRANSFERS OF ECONOMIC POWER
According to the timeline I’ve pieced together from scholars’ previous work
in folklore, cultural geography, and anthropology, the shift from a prank-
ster-run holiday celebrated by children and adolescents to an adult-run
Sweet Teeth 81
holiday produced exclusively for younger costumed “treaters” is particu-
larly noticeable in light of economic changes. First, and most obviously, is
simply the increased commercialization of all holidays. Leigh Eric Schmidt
writes:
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, commercial notice of any

of the other holidays was sparse. . . . The great expansion of the culture
of consumption in the last decades of the nineteenth century helped
shift this basic socioeconomic perspective. Long thought to be impedi-
ments to industrial production, holidays were found, on the fl ip side,
to have all kinds of possibilities when it came to consumption. . . . holi-

days could provide the orderly timing of consumption, a ritual cycle in
tune with commerce. (1991: 889)
This led to more industrial efforts to control and exploit the holiday mar-
ket. The National Confectioners’ Association tried in 1916 to promote
national Candy Day but failed until they used the strategy that had worked
for the floral industry with Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day: “The candy
industry, like commercial floriculture, was deeply interested in promot-
ing new holidays as well as in linking up with old ones” (Schmidt 1991:
913). Schmidt explains how this was ideologically attempted by pulling
on paternal heartstrings: “Efforts in Candy Day advertising to evoke ‘fi ner
sentiments’ and ‘tender feelings’ of familial love and to suggest the need
to show love ‘in a material way’ by buying boxes of candy seemed to miss
the mark” (1995: 295). But such a method would eventually succeed with
Halloween.
The fi rst three decades of the twentieth century found conditions right
for the transference of power in Halloween’s shifting ritual. For the fi rst
time in American history, adults were the majority population by age (see
Macleod 3). By the thirties, children were so in the minority that power
shifts became visible even in the public sphere. Tad Tuleja explains how
Halloween became “sanitized”:
That this should have occurred in the 1930s will surprise no one who
recalls the disruptions of that period . . . It disguises public disorder
by making it a semiprivate ritual4 —by making it, after the standard
formula of American holidays, commercial in intent and infantile in
appearance. At the same time, it teaches good capitalist values—specif-
ically, the value of consumption—at a historical moment when the urge
to accumulate is in jeopardy. (1994: 89)
It also coincides with the delegitimizing of child work by labor reformists

who appealed to family sentimentality in order to get kids out of the work-
force. Zelizer indicates that reform was initiated to make way for more
exploitable sources in new waves of immigration (1985: 63), resulting in loss
of family reciprocity and power for child workers, and allowing for more
widespread (and often disingenuous) protectionist ideological consensus.
More important for the lasting growth of the new taming ritual was the
growth of the industry, secured in following decades:
It is the postwar years that are generally regarded as the glorious hey-
day of trick-or-treating. Like the consumer economy, Halloween itself
grew by leaps and bounds. Major candy companies like Curtiss and
Brach, no longer constrained by sugar rationing, launched national ad-
vertising campaigns specifically aimed at Halloween.5 (Skal 2002: 55)
Another factor in the ritual shift could be that in the 1930s and 1950s
kids were gaining more noticeable independence, though in very different
ways: fi rst through a return to more reciprocal financial power in the fam-
ily sphere by working outside the home, then through sheer numbers and
increased expendable income.
Elizabeth Pleck provides a timeline of predominant attitudes toward
family ritual and holidays, explaining that for centuries before industri-
alization, holidays were “characterized by either a carnivalesque, outdoor
form of celebration or lack of attention to ritual” (2000: 1). But industrial-
ism and wealth changed custom more variously and rapidly:
The second phase, dating from the early nineteenth century, saw the
rise of the sentimental occasion, a family ritual either inside or outside
the home that centered around consumerism and a display of status
and wealth to celebrate home and family. (Pleck 2000: 1)
However, the loss of subversive outlets for aggression in private, affluent

spheres didn’t completely quiet trickery on the street. The correlation of
affluence and sentimentality has concurrently shown its fl ip side—poverty
and practicality, desperation, and sometimes rage.
Like trick-or-treating, other Halloween rituals emerged during the eco-
nomic toil of the 1930s. For economically desperate youth in the thirties and
onward, Halloween could provide an outlet for aggression and social disil-
lusionment. Experiences in Detroit, Michigan, dramatically demonstrate
the need for such a ritual in the practice of Devil’s Night (the night before
Halloween), which peaked in the 1980s, when (mostly young) Detroiters
lit up the plentiful, once beautiful homes left abandoned by white flight in
the decaying city. Ze’ev Chafets has called the event an “orgy of arson,”6
explaining that “[b]y 1986, Devil’s Night had become a prelude to Hallow-
een in Detroit in the way that Mardi Gras precedes Lent in New Orleans”
(1990: 4). An extreme example of the massive buildup and fall of industri-
alization, Detroit is a city with a troubled history,7 and as Nicholas Rogers
writes, “Detroit’s Halloween continued to register the alienation and ano-
mie of its inner-city youth” (2002: 100).
Sweet Teeth 83
In Oren Bell (1991), a Halloween-season mystery by Detroiter Barbara
Hood Burgess, these social realities are honestly painted into the back-
ground. Oren and Blue say, “Sirens never keep me awake” and “A night
don’t go by but that there’s fi res around the neighborhood” (14). Their
friend and schoolmate who is relatively homeless, Fred, sleeps often in one
of Detroit’s many abandoned homes and dies when it is torched. Their cur-
rent teacher, Ms. Pugh, engages the students critically on topics that protec-
tionists might want to “protect” children from (at the expense of keeping
them ignorant and vulnerable). The class discusses race hatred and violence
openly. When the class is interested in why so many homes are abandoned
and tempting vandals as potential kindling, Ms. Pugh explains white fl ight:
“‘You ask, Why?... Detroit’s wonderful old houses are getting all boarded
up, rejected and neglected, because people move out of Detroit into good-
for-nothing, look-alike houses in the suburbs’” (42). Not a protectionist
text at all, the kids have the agency to study Detroit history by looking into
city records during a field trip and solve a mystery. Blue even leaves a mes-
sage critiquing protectionism when trying to save their school from closing.
He complains about the school they would have to attend without it: “How
’bout that teacher who pops candies in your mouth when you come up with
a right answer? Jefferson teachers accept all answers as right answers. They
want us to develop tooth decay and a [sic] have good self image. Who needs
a self-image?” (153). As with trick-or-treating, such an approach tricks kids
out of generating their own ideas with quick-tempting sweets.
CANDY SHAKEDOWN
So are kids being treated or tricked (out of their right to trick) by treats?
Lois Phillips Hudson would say “tricked.” According to Hudson, the shift
represents cultural ignorance in a loss of ritual and power: “children who
come to my door will remember All Hallow’s Eve as a night when they sold
their right to rebellion for some sugar in expensive wrappings” (1962: 98).
Nicholas Rogers would clearly agree:
trick-or-treating sought to marginalize adolescent pranking and to defuse

the antagonism inherent in the festive tribute, transforming the exchange
into a rite of consumption. In this new convention of festive doleing, chil-
dren dressed up and unreflexively requested candies from local neighbors
with little sense of what “tricking” might mean. (2002: 87)
Stephen Kline describes the treat as a tricky attempt to reinforce adult

authority:
The subtle skills of negotiation and guilt, of love, and its withdrawal,
lay at the roots of bourgeois family practice, which was embodied in
the “treat.” With the decline of authority, the contemporary parent
was forced to substitute force with new psychological instruments
for rewarding appropriate conduct: snacks, sweets, toys, and televi-
sion-viewing privileges became the tangible negotiated rewards—the
reasons for channeling immediate desires into parentally accepted con-
duct. (1993: 162)
In Helen Borten’s 1965 book for children, Halloween, the shift from trick-
ing to being passively treated is glossed over as if it is an inevitable result of
progressive modernization:
In the early days of our country October 31 was a night for bonfi res
and hayrides, parties and practical jokes. . . . Mischief-makers changed
house numbers and street signs. They took off gates so that cows and
pigs wandered into the streets. The next morning wagons were some-
times found on barn roofs, and rocking chairs in trees. Today on Hal-
loween American children dress up in funny costumes and masks. They
go begging and say “Trick or treat!” at each door. Neighbors fi ll their
bags with candy, cookies, apples, and popcorn. (24–28)
The following year a television program was introduced that still remains a
part of Halloween custom through annual viewings—It’s the Great Pump-
kin, Charlie Brown (1966). This text entirely obscures the threatening tone
of trick-or-treat’s protection racket. It is Sally’s fi rst time to trick-or-treat,
so she asks Lucy and Charlie to explain the ritual to her. Lucy says, “All
you have to do is walk up to the house, ring the door bell, and say [not ask]
‘tricks or treats.’” Sally asks, “Are you sure it’s legal? I wouldn’t want to
be accused of taking part in a rumble.” Linus is even more tamed by the
holiday ritual. In a strange conflation of Halloween and Christmas beliefs,
Linus believes in the Great Pumpkin, who is simply the squash version of
Santa Claus, a specter who watches over children to reward the obedient
and disappoint the unruly: “The Great Pumpkin knows which kids have
been good and which kids have been bad.” The poor kid is so riddled with
anxiety from his desire to be “good” and thus rewarded with “lots of pres-
ents” that when he accidentally says “if he comes” instead of “when,” he
is beside himself, moaning “I’m doomed.” This slip, to Linus, indicates a
breach in his sincere and total loyalty. He has never seen the Great Pump-
kin, but he believes, resonating a common theme imposed on children: piety
is achieved through earnest acceptance of unknowing faith. Elizabeth Pleck
explains how prevalent such an element of lore is in her analysis of Easter:
The Easter Bunny was to Easter what Santa Claus was to Christmas,
a symbol of festivity and abundance, which encouraged adults to buy
toys and candy for children. Both figures transported magical objects
to children, whether toys made at the North Pole or colored eggs. Both
Sweet Teeth 85
characters became kinder as they Americanized and took on middle-
class attitudes toward the innocence of children. Santa and the rab-
bit once punished disobedient children; during most of the nineteenth
century Santa put coal in their stockings, and the rabbit placed pellets
of manure in Easter baskets. By the late nineteenth century these folk
figures were bestowing gifts on all children, regardless of their child’s
behavior. (2000: 80)
Children today are less likely to get coal in a stocking, but the threat to
believe and behave still lingers in their entertainment.8 As Charlie discovers
after “tricks or treats” in It’s the Great Pumpkin, “All I got was a bag of
rocks.”
In Marc Brown’s Arthur’s Halloween (1982), the only threat apparent
is that against the children as they trick-or-treat. Through his character,
Arthur, Marc Brown dredges up lore in which children are tricked and
threatened with starvation rather than passively receiving treats. Most rel-
evant here is Arthur’s fear of witches like the one in “Hansel and Gretel.”
When D. W., his little sister, goes to the “spooky old house” that they
call the “witch’s house,” Arthur is terrified but follows behind. His friends
remark, “She’ll probably put Arthur and D. W. into her oven, just like Han-
sel and Gretel.” But this tale’s twist seems intended to make the audience
more sympathetic to their elders—the “witch” is a very kind, elderly widow
who has simply had trouble keeping up the house since her husband died.
Mrs. Tibble uses the old strategy that Doris Hudson Moss recommended
in 1939: “I hope you won’t leave without some cider and doughnuts fi rst.”
The kids even leave agreeing to help her out around the house and rake her
leaves. A sweet story, but it certainly doesn’t celebrate the child-centered
and empowering potential of Halloween ritual.
Many Halloween texts reflect the dominant cultural message that kids
should be controlled, or “protected.” Fortunately others continue the tradi-
tion of at least representing resistance to the passifying potential of “treats.”
Norman Bridwell’s Monster Holidays (1974) retains some trickster behav-
iors of the past without apology—perhaps even reaffi rming a child’s right
to both tricking and being treated. Written as a guidebook for children and
their pet monsters, Monster Holidays reminds child readers of their right
to ritual trespass while at the same time preaching the wisdom of going
with a chaperone: “Your monster will be a big help when you go out trick
or treating. A vampire can get you into those houses that have locked gates
and mean dogs” (10). An even older association with the holiday, a right to
retribution, is suggested: “If somebody is mean to you when you ring the
doorbell, your mummy can give him a mummy’s curse. That should make
him change his mind—or change, anyway” (12). Bridwell’s trick-or-treaters
are empowered, not just because they can tame and befriend the monsters
in their closets, but because those monsters act out their will to power
within the larger public and adult-dominated community.
Even in contemporary television,9 the pranking tradition is at least
vicariously retained in the family comedy Malcolm in the Middle. In the
episode titled “Halloween” (2005), the protection racket is in full effect.
While trick-or-treating, Dewey and Reese ring at a house and get no answer
(because the elderly homeowner is using a walker). Reese assumes no one
is home or someone is not answering, so he beams, “Sweet! No answer.”
Turning to his youngest brother, he explains, “Now you get to experience
the true spirit of Halloween, Jamie.” They egg the door just as the owner
opens it. Of course, later the man gets them back through cunning, trap-
ping and egging them as he says “trick.” The tricked man’s revenge is con-
sistent with the “true spirit of Halloween” that all of the brothers embrace.
The holiday is about vandalism, retribution, and simply getting candy. As
Reese complains, “God, I hate it when they want to talk about your cos-
tumes. They know what we’re here for, so why don’t they just pay up so
we can go?” Apparently Reese has even taught Dewey the joys of taking
advantage of younger trick-or-treaters: “Hey, you’re right. The candy you
steal off other kids really does taste better.”
Better yet is the motivational speech that Francis, the eldest brother, gives
when he misses Halloween but visits the family one week later in “Halloween
Approximately” (2000). Determined to celebrate Halloween anyway with
his brothers, he urges: “Guys, Halloween isn’t a date on the calendar . . . No,
Halloween is in your heart. Every time a little kid cries in fear, that’s Hallow-
een. Every time something repulsive ends up in a mailbox, that is Halloween.
As long as you carry the spirit of destruction and vandalism in your hearts,
every day is Halloween.” They proceed to launch every runny and repulsive
thing they can from a giant slingshot on the roof. At one point, as if not to
miss a golden opportunity, Dewey blurts out, “I see an old lady!” and they
rush to launch something from their arsenal of disgusting goo at her. In one
episode, “Traffic Jam” (2000), the brothers even take advantage of an elderly
woman who is clearly senile by trick-or-treating when it isn’t Halloween.
A common issue in Halloween fiction seems to be intragenerational
hostility and anxiety. Whereas in Arthur’s Halloween, Arthur and D. W.
learn compassion for the elderly, those texts that resist protectionism, like
Malcolm in the Middle, are more likely to engage in a little age warfare.
Their treatment of the elderly suggests that Halloween rituals in part reflect
generational confl ict or youth resentment toward older adults.
These indulgences in the cultural legacy of resistance are at odds, how-
ever, with the larger reality of parental and protectionist Halloween expec-
tations for children. Trick-or-treat is about give-and-take where, as with
selfless parenting, adults who treat seem to be giving more than would-
be tricksters. But what exactly are adults getting? Gary Cross asks and
answers this question in his book, The Cute and the Cool:
What was the appeal to parents in dressing their children in costumes

that seemed to be anything but innocent and encouraging them to
Sweet Teeth 87
do the normally unacceptable—knock on neighbors’ doors and beg
for far more candy than they would be given in a year of pestering
parents at the grocery store checkout line? Candy was a reward not
for good behavior but, on the surface, at least, for ‘naughtiness,’ for
being a little devil or witch. The old social inversion of the mumming
rite10 has been redefi ned as a holiday from responsible parental au-
thority, but done in an innocent, harmless, and, of course, cute way.
(2004: 105)
Trick-or-treating, then, becomes a safety valve11 for controlling children’s

daily impulses with a yearly binge for which the community, not the parent,
must be invisibly responsible.12 The selfless ideal of the bourgeois private
family endures (though now relegated to semi-public oversight) and chil-
dren remain controlled.
THE RAZOR IN THE APPLE
Apple, sweet apple, what do you hide?

Wormy and squirmy, rotten inside.
—Eve Merriam, Halloween ABC
In the U.S., where child-care culture is marked with an almost perverse

fear of relinquishing private control of one’s children,13 trusting the com-
munity, no matter how conditionally, comes with its own neurotic back-
lash. Fears of strangers bearing apples are as old as the myth of Eve, but
they reached hysteric levels when Halloween trickery was losing ground in
young memories and treating was no longer a necessary control. The focus
of anxiety shifted: “Halloween, the one major holiday that was unofficial,
and therefore uncontrolled, was a natural magnet for American anxiet-
ies about social disconnections,” expressed in urban legends about razor
blades in apples, drug-dusted candy in the 1960s and 1970s (Skal 2002:
163). David Skal writes, “Somehow, Halloween no longer had anything
to do with extending latitude or license to children. It was more about the
reaffi rmation of parental control, a ceremonial reassurance of the family’s
integrity and stability in an uncertain world” (2002: 2).
Fears about this integrity and stability form the context of Patricia
Elmore’s children’s mystery, Susannah and the Poison Green Halloween
(1982). When two characters come down with a mysterious case of poison-
ing on Halloween, the reasoning used to catch the poisoner reveals one cul-
tural fear after another. The most prevalent, however, and in the end most
relevant to catching the suspect, is the fear of structural family changes
(mixed families, single parenting). Visiting her friend Knievel, one of the
poisoning victims, in the hospital, the narrator admits,
Seeing our parents together never does much for my mood, or Kineme’s
either for that matter. The one thing Knievel and I have in common is a
burning ambition never toend up brother and sister. Single parents, let
me tell you, can be a problem. (45)
Ultimately, when one of the victims is found to be the culprit, her revealed
motive is surprisingly family-related. Carla and Nadine are stepsisters who
have several problems to work through: one problem is that Nadine had
drug-related problems in the past for which she still reports to a social
worker, and now she is ill; Carla envies the attention Nadine gets from
both her own mother (as well as Nadine’s father and social worker) and is
convinced that her stepsister’s illness is “fake”—that Nadine is simply still
doing drugs. When the mystery is solved, the logic follows:
Maybe if Carla had known all the facts, she wouldn’t have hated Nadine
so. But the way she saw things, Nadine was a rotten junkie her mother
paid more attention to than she did to her. So when Carla found the pills
in Nadine’s drawer and made a wrong guess about what they were, she
decided to show everybody what Nadine was really like. (100)
This conflict apparently has nothing to do with Halloween, and yet it is

linked throughout the book with the holiday and its rituals.
First, there is an understood ban on unwrapped treats from strang-
ers, so the list of suspects begins with “the only people who gave us stuff
that wasn’t sealed” (31). The only exception to this rule is Mrs. Sweet,
otherwise known as the Candy Lady, because “She’s been giving kids
cookies and candy for ages, and I never heard of anybody even getting a
stomachache” (31). However, when we discover the method of poisoning,
not only is the poisoned food an unwrapped dessert for the family and
social worker (not trick-or-treaters), it is a health food—granola bars. In
Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Indus-
try, 1966–1988, Warren J. Belasco describes the health food craze of that
period as a consumer revolt countered into inaction by constant backlash.
Halloween myth of the same period is rife with backlash messages. In
Susannah and the Poison Green Halloween, an undercurrent of suspicion
toward natural foods is clear.
Take Mr. O’Hare, the rabbitish neighbor-suspect, “some weirdo” who
“looks like he’s a vegetarian” (15). He presents a consumer critique of candy,
its industry, and “treating” when he offers, “Lime honey delights from the
natural food store . . . Better for you than that machine-made poison they
teach you to eat” (15). But O’Hare’s input is muted when Susannah and
Lucy spy on his health-food store with “jars of dried seaweed and pine-
apple, and the open bins of brown rice and sprouted wheat. . . . ‘What kind
of nuts eat this junk?’” (50). Susannah and the Poison Green Halloween
carries many irrational dietary biases of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly
Sweet Teeth 89
as they are heightened at Halloween: against unwrapped, unprocessed, and
even natural food.
The contradiction between Halloween lore and history is especially stark
in light of the fact that no children have been reported to have died from
candy or anything else tampered with by a stranger on Halloween. Marina
Warner writes
Today, the ‘Hallowe’en sadist,’ who conseals pins and razor blades in
candy or poisons apples with drugs, has become a new urban myth, ter-
rifying parents into keeping children indoors. Yet a survey conducted
in four cities in the United States found not a single verifiable case in
twenty-six years’ reporting such incidents. (382).
Though there have been a few incidents involving tampering and poisoning,
only two child deaths on Halloween were suspected as a result of tampering
(both later proven to involve family members exploiting the myth to cover
their own crimes) and the only seemingly intentional poisoning between
them—that of Clark O’Bryan murdering his own son in 1974—was done
by inserting cyanide into a giant Pixy Stix, nothing detectable, unwrapped,
or uncommercial (Skal 2002: 10). An exaggerated reflection of this danger
might be seen in the evil plot of Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1983), in which
the title characters plan to buy up all the country’s sweet-shops, and, as
one enthusiastic witch puts it, “The children will come flocking to my shop
and I will feed them poisoned sweets and poisoned chocs and wipe them
all out like weasels!” (80). The real possibility of tampering with com-
mercial goods proves even more frightening because it is less detectable,
as Americans discovered during the tainted Tylenol scare of 1982 and as
the British must have realized when the Animal Liberation Front claimed
to have poisoned Mars bars throughout the country in 1984 (see Pottker
1995: 111–115).
We also remain in denial about the less visible but ironic truth behind
children’s products. Beryl Langer writes that adult nostalgia “met through
children’s delight in toys and treats, is inherently precarious. It rests on
children’s ignorance of how their toys and treats are made” (262). Creating
greater demand for products in the children’s culture industry instead of
enlightenment about the child labor used to produce and distribute at low
cost keeps “children constituted by such a culture . . . coded to be on the
side of the oppressed and exploited” (262).
The real and most deadly threat to children has always come from far
more organized and legitimated strangers in the candy industry, not blood-
thirsty for little boys and girls, but simply aiming for profit. Tim Richard-
son writes, “Accidental poisoning was a serious problem with sweets in
the nineteenth century” (2002: 302). Bee Wilson expounds on this danger
with her account of British Chemist Friederich Christian Accum, who “fi rst
opened the eyes of the British public to the extent of food adulteration” in
the early nineteenth century (2008: 6). Wilson reports that Accum wrote
“about these sweets in the same fearful terms that modern mothers might
use to warn children against strangers. Children were tempted to buy these
candies by the bright colours. . . . ”—which were often created with poi-
sonous minerals (2008: 28). In 1831, another scientist, Dr. O’Shaughnessy,
“toured the streets of London collecting numerous samples of sweets, bon-
bons, and sugarplums and submitting them to chemical analysis. . . . Of
the samples collected, the red ones were often coloured with lead or mer-
cury; the green sweets, with copper-based dyes; and the yellow, with . . .
chrome yellow of lead” (Wilson 2008: 113–114). In spite of these efforts
to inform the public, two decades later an anonymous source described

Victorian confectioners’ “windows filled with sugar compounds, many of
which have been moulded into fanciful and highly coloured forms. Some-
times the image represented is a mutton chop, or rasher of bacon; onions
and potatoes are very popular; and eggs and oysters, dogs, shoulders of
mutton, pears and mackerel are also much esteemed by the youthful cus-
tomer” (Wilson 2008: 114). Wilson adds, “A candy mutton chop is a pretty
frightful idea, particularly if you consider the fact that the red grain of the
meat was almost certainly painted on using lead-based colouring” (2002:
114). Sometimes children died or became quite sick directly after consum-
ing such dangerous treats.
So why are the fears and urban legends about homemade treats so wide-
spread? Clearly it is not impossible to tamper with commercial products,
nor is it easy for a consumer to detect such tampering in spite of safeguards.
Yet, according to Joel Best, “Children are urged to refuse homemade treats
and accept only coupons or mass-produced candy with intact wrappings,
as though commercialism offers protection” (1985: 497). As consumers
we are dependent upon various industries to ensure the safety of products.
Perhaps Halloween lore simply focuses on the less frightening of two dan-
gers—strangers bearing homemade treats can be avoided; family members or
strangers tampering with seemingly innocuous products are far more danger-
ous (and, historically speaking, far more deadly to children). In the myth, not
realities of consumer culture, consumption replaces both the outlet for the
chaotic behavior of pranking youngsters as well as the remedy. Gary Cross
remarks, “Merchandisers instructed parents on how consumer goods could
displace and defuse children’s desires without repressing them” (2004: 190).
Would-be tricksters still have a child-centered but now market-controlled
experience, and placating adults no longer have to make special treats but
can simply buy them.14 Misdirecting attention from threats of family violence
and industry, the treats themselves become the source of the scare. Megan
Kelso makes this moment in cultural history the subject of her 2006 graphic
short on Halloween in The Squirrel Mother (see Figure 3.1).
The lore of razor-filled or poisoned apples has long reflected fears of
others who might harm us by taking advantage of our innocent trust of
nature. As Brenda Ayres explains in the case of Snow White: “Snow White
Sweet Teeth 91
Figure 3.1 Megan Kelso, The Squirrel Mother: Stories. Fantagraphics, 2006.
is portrayed as both the daughter and mother of nature. Of course she

would trust an apple, a natural product, would not harm her . . . ” (2003:
44). Halloween lore is not so much a response to real dangers as much as it
reflects cultural fears for innocence exploited in this mythic sense. In a con-
sumer culture, in which consumers, and even laborers, are only remotely
aware of the larger process of production, do consumers, especially “pro-
tected” children, have the knowledge necessary to make free choices? After
all, exploitable innocence is exploitable ignorance.
Even the choices consumers are allowed to make are prelimited by the
market. Marilyn Strathern writes
The producer manufactures according to the consumer’s choice, and

the consumer purchases according to the choices the manufacturer lays
out. Choice has become the privileged vantage from which to measure
all action. Yet choice is by defi nition destabilizing, for it operates as
much on whim as on judgment. (1992: 36)
Knowledge becomes obscured in the process of production, so the freedom

to choose wisely for oneself is forfeited:
to choose responsibly, our active citizen must know what is being offered,
much of this knowledge being fi ltered through appearance: things must look
what they are supposed to be. Apples must look like apples . . . varieties are
selected for marketing which have the most apple-like qualities. Qualities
essential to the realization of choice become displaced, as it were from the

product onto what is presented for the consumer’s discrimination. (38)
As consumers we are at the mercy of the industrial decisions of others, just
as trick-or-treaters display trust in their community by eating shared foods.
But, whereas neighbors might profit in intangible and social ways (fostering
neighborly relations, protecting their property), moguls of the candy indus-
try have a bottom line that rarely includes the welfare of communities.
RELATED LORE: LA BEFANA, THE TOOTH

FAIRY, AND THE DAY OF THE DEAD
Perhaps a few words are in order concerning those mysterious, all-impor-

tant, ever-present figures associated with both malice and fun, Hallow-
een witches. Related witch-lore suggests common sources and highlights
revisions unique to consumer culture. John Widdowson has described the
didactic functions of witch-figures as falling
into four categories: General threats to discourage misbehaviour and

encourage obedience; specific threats to get children indoors before
dark and discourage them from going out at night; specific threats to
keep children away from dangerous or forbidden places; miscellaneous
threats involving other specific prohibitions. (1973: 212)
But Halloween traditionally reversed these priorities, allowing the young

to stay out later, blow off a little bit of steam, and even visit haunted
houses. As concerns this holiday the witch-figure takes on contradictory
functions, as multifaceted as the fairy. She is no longer simply a cannibal-
istic threat still lingering from medieval folklore but a holiday commod-
ity—iconographically simplified for kid’s costumes, recast, like Harry
Potter and his friends, in friendly form. On Halloween we are invited to
reconsider the positive role that “witches” may have had in communities
that scapegoated them. One of Widdowson’s 1970s Newfoundland sur-
vey subjects reported such a figure: “the granny witch: an old woman who
lived several streets away from us. She spent all her afternoons sweeping
Sweet Teeth 93
her front stoop” (1973: 210). This gesture, though not believably sus-
tained for entire afternoons, every afternoon, has been one commonly
associated with witches good and bad.
One folk figure who combines both traditions is the Italian Befana,15
who “may be best described as a sort of ‘Mother Christmas’ . . . chil-
dren’s presents are brought, magically, by La Befana” (Gee 1982: 94).
The legend incorporates many familiar elements, making the connections
between them more explicit. As with Santa Claus, the chimney plays a
central role: “the children wait at home and are busy writing their wishes
on bits of paper which are then allowed to float up the chimney” (Gee
1982: 94). Philip Brown points out the connection of brooms herein: “The
custom of sweeping chimneys on New Year’s Eve seems to be only a vari-
ant of the notion that Santa Claus comes down the chimney on Christ-
mas Eve” (1960: 189). Another feature that explains the link between a
benevolent figure, holiday ritual, and the iconography of witchcraft is the
blackened face of la Befana, who is imitated with the application of burnt
cork or carbon to the skin: “Blackening of the face seems to have been
used, at least to start with, by those who could not get or afford animal
masks” (Brown 1960: 189). I’ll look further into blackface in Chapter 4,
but la Befana, “whose age, sharp features, and broomstick suggest her
kinship to standard witches,” also exhibits functions similar to external
agents we’ve discussed elsewhere: fairies, Santa Claus, Jiminy Cricket,
even: “more of a benign witch than a conventional fairy, though she has
something more in common with the well-known figure of the fairy god-
mother” (Lucas 2006: 106).
Like trick-or-treating or the Christmas tradition of leaving cookies for
Santa near the fi replace, Befana imitators go door-to-door like mummers16
(or perhaps bearing gifts): “Having done this, the Befana and her company
receive a glass of wine or a bite to eat or a little money from the house-
holder, and then continue to the next house” (Gee 1982: 96). Like Santa, la
Befana reinforces and extends middle-class parental power:
She rewards good behavior and punishes naughtiness. . . . In the real-

ity underlying the pretence, the children’s parents control these things
while hiding behind the mythical figure; indeed it could be said that
they exploit the innocent credulity of the young in relation to tradi-
tional beliefs in order to reinforce their teaching of their children, and
the parents’ natural power is thus redoubled. (Lucas 2006: 108)
La Befana, then, is yet another fairy figure who has greater didactic pow-
ers hidden behind the kind maternal pose. Benevolent witches, like fairies,
“served to regulate personal behavior in an era prior to systematic surveil-
lance: the fairies punished delinquent householders, rewarded cleanliness,
and ensured attentive care for infants” (Swann 452). Folklore provided
education on how to personally economize the use of the body. And even
such early folk figures presocialized children into economic conformity, as
Marjorie Swann has argued:
Both folkloric and courtly representations of fairies were rooted in vi-

sions of an unchanging, precapitalist society: traditional fairylore de-
picted agrarian householders whose well-being depended upon their
attention to domestic duties . . . economic exchange was depicted as
something magical, and the fairies were portrayed as agents of precapi-
talist economic transactions. (2000: 451)
The economic agenda of fairylore couldn’t be more explicit than in the

example of the American tooth fairy. In the context of (late) consumer
capitalism, Tad Tuleja writes, “As an embodiment of magical munificence,
the tooth fairy is second only to Santa Claus in the folklore of American
childhood” (1991: 13). As socializing ritual, the tooth fairy is uniquely
developed to suit consumer capitalism: “The process of market cooption
has long been understood with regard to everybody’s sugar daddy, the
American Santa,” but whereas
Santa still brings presents . . . the tooth fairy translates everything into
cash. . . . The tooth fairy’s message is more direct: anything—even
your own body—can . . . be turned into gold. That, in its fi nal, reduc-
tive wisdom, is precisely the necessary magic of free enterprise. (Tuleja
1991: 20)
Though related stories and customs appear in nineteenth-century England17

and France,18 the custom as it is known today in the U.S. didn’t flourish
until the 1950s, which Tuleja causally interprets as evidence that the par-
ents who pushed it had economically didactic motives:
It seems likely that the greater availability of discretionary income

during the postwar boom may have contributed to the spread of the
custom. . . . The ritual ‘models’ economic behavior. . . . it is supervis-
ing parents, not peers, who introduce the belief to young children. . . .
the economic message of the custom is . . . ‘Produce and Sell.’ (1991:
18–19)
So as to leave no room for confusion, the custom was “managed by par-

ents who understand the importance, in a market economy, that their
kids know the value of a buck” (Tuleja 1991: 20). Again we see the mid-
century shift towards passification discussed in Chapter 1, reinforced in
its simplified, idealized, and explicitly Hollywood form: “the decade[s]
immediately preceding the proliferation of the tooth fairy custom saw the
release of four feature films in which female pixies played a central role”
(Tuleja 1991: 18). These include Glinda in The Wizard of Oz (1939), the
Sweet Teeth 95
Blue Fairy in Pinocchio (1940), the fairy godmother in Cinderella (1950),
Tinkerbell in Peter Pan (1953), and, I might add, the triple-fi x at the end of
the 1950s: Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather in Sleeping Beauty (1959). All
fairies indoctrinate, some are just sweeter about it than their cautionary
forerunners.
Indoctrinating consumers, Tuleja writes,
the tooth fairy custom, like any other free-market ritual, is constantly
affected by free-market forces. Nothing so clearly shows how the ritual
models behavior than the fact of tooth exchange inflation. . . . [That]
the fairy’s bill consistently rises along with the consumer price index
suggests an integration of the custom into domestic economy. (1991:
20)
One of my nieces established a written correspondence with her tooth fairy,

bargaining for a higher price, other sales, and at one point, getting her
tooth back. We have yet to see if she’ll major in business.
Though la Befana is frequently a commercialized figure, she is hardly
the material queen that the American tooth fairy appears to be. In the U.S.
rampant consumerism has necessitated commercializing for the survival of
ritual, which is why, like the profitable exchange of baby teeth for money,
trick-or-treat was eventually translatable from give-or-I’ll-take to simply
“gimme.” Halloween has become so commercial that the functions of its
folkways are unclear. They become clearer in contrast to Mexico’s Day of
the Dead.
Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree (1972) ties in related customs and
illuminates the historic and mythic reasons behind Halloween ritual for
child readers. In it, the mysterious neighbor Moundshroud teaches some
trick-or-treaters
Lesson Number One about Halloween. Osiris, Son of Earth and Sky,
killed each night by his brother Darkness. So it goes on in every coun-
try, boys. Each has its death festival, having to do with seasons. Skulls
and bones, boys, skeletons and ghosts. (53)
Elizabeth Carmichael and Chlöe Sayer report,
From at least the eighteenth century, and perhaps before then, wooden
images of Death personified as a skeleton were carried in procession
through the streets, riding triumphant in carts and carriages. These
took their descent from the images of Death of medieval Europe,
brought to the New World. . . . They appeared on playing cards, in
books and tracts and in the nineteenth century . . . As toys, with nod-
ding heads and dangling limbs, they have danced their way into the
modern world. (1991–1992: 11)
Consider that among Emily Dickinson’s many poems marketed to chil-
dren in the past century and a half was “Because I could not stop for
death,” which somewhat playfully courts Death as in a similar procession.
The stunning collection of Dickinson poems for young readers, My Letter
to the World and Other Poems (2008), illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault,
surprised me with a selection of mostly death-focused poems, which
many Dickinson critics have noticed reflect her own familiarity with pub-
lic loss.19 But, though American children’s literature has slowly admitted
formerly taboo topics, such as divorce, combined families, drugs, disease,
and homosexuality, death and grief are still not proportionately covered
or at least are prescribed more than leisurely read.

It is an understanding and respect for death that Moundshroud tries to
instill in the boys he takes through time around the world to see that, for the
Egyptians, “Death was at the very heart, gizzard, light, soul, and body of
their life!” (59). This lesson is connected with food and community in ritual,
as with the Greeks, who jump “out on porches to bring food,” Moundshroud
explains, to discourage “tricks from the dead if you don’t feed them. So treats
are laid out in fine banquets on the sill!” (65–66). But Bradbury privileges
Mexico’s Day of the Dead, as do his trick-or-treaters, who claim
Mexican Halloweens are better than ours! . . . For on every grave were
plates of cookies shaped like funeral priests or skeletons or ghosts,
waiting to be nibbled by—living people? or by ghosts that might come
along toward dawn, hungry and forlorn? (112)
Offerings to the dead seem selfless compared to the barter behind leaving
cookies for Santa or even la Befana, and like the fantastic banquets inspired
by the Cockaigne tradition and Carnival, 20 an almost literal culinary transla-
tion is made into edible architecture. Unlike the witch’s gingerbread house,
this edible simulacrum is made to honor memories, not ensnare the body:
And each boy inside the graveyard, next to his sister and mother, put
down the miniature funeral on the grave. And they could see the tiny
candy person inside the tiny wooden coffi n placed before a tiny alter
with tiny candles. (113)
Like la Befana, the origins of the Day of the Dead are clearly Latin 21: “The
custom of making sugar figures for the Day of the Dead has certainly sur-
vived in Palermo in Sicily to the present day and the custom seems there-
fore to be of European origin” (Carmichael and Sayer 1991–1992: 46).
The sugar skulls (calaveritas de azucar), recently given foodie attention
by Rick Bayliss for the tourist taste buds of Saveur readers, involve ritu-
als like the begging-threats of Mischief Night and trick-or-treating. As
Arsacio Vanegas Arroyo explained to Carmichael and Sayer, “As a small
boy, I would say ‘Calavera . . . Give me my calavera.’ We made holes in
cardboard boxes and lit candles inside; then we would walk through the
Sweet Teeth 97
streets, asking passers by for money” (130). But Arroyo rues the infi ltra-
tion of U.S. customs: “Children today still ask for money, but many now
put their candle in a hollowed-out pumpkin, with holes for nose, eyes
and mouth. No longer do they ask for their calavera; instead they want
money for Halloween! . . . our roots are being attacked by business inter-
ests, and our heritage is being undermined by advertising and television”
(130). Carmichael and Sayer report that even the traditional calaveras
are threatened with commercialization, epitomized in a candy “skull face
emerging from a pumpkin. Nothing more graphically expresses the merg-
ing of the traditions of Halloween with those of the Day of the Dead”
(116).
One problem with this blending and erasure is that ritual function
becomes eclipsed by consumption for the sake of consuming. As Ray Brad-
bury’s Halloween mouthpiece, Moundshroud, explains, even Halloween
was originally about rituals for dealing with loss:
That’s what Halloween is, all rolled up in one. Noon and midnight.
Being born, boys. Rolling over, playing dead like dogs, lads. And get-
ting up again. . . . And you begin to live longer and have more time and
space out deaths, and put away fear. (138)
With a decline in child mortality over time, we have sugarcoated and put
away fear of death, with the result of also disarming the threats of empow-
ered youth.
Candy-gourmand Tim Richardson’s comments on the commodification
of Halloween echo this sentiment:
the practice of giving sweets out at Hallowe’en was a simple market-

ing ploy that emanated from the city’s confectioners. The large-scale
candy retailing trade, an American innovation, came out of Chicago,
with Brach’s from 1904 and the deliberately old-fashioned Fannie May
sweets . . . from 1920. (2002: 211)
He explains:
The problem is, a good proportion of confectionery is aimed at chil-

dren. This seems to be almost a taboo subject in the sweets business.
Perhaps it is hard for a grown man to accept that he is trying to ma-
nipulate the mind of a child to make a profit. (2002: 36)
PROTECTIONIST SENTIMENT AND CHILD CHOICE
Halloween, as a holiday of pranks and scares, often provokes a protec-

tionist backlash enabled by capitalist development, commodifying off-
spring within social systems designed to preserve increasingly privatized,
patriarchal property22 (typified by the bourgeois family episteme). Rebekka
Habermas explains the emergence of a bourgeois notion of “selfless parent-
ing” that emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany with the affluence
necessary to afford a protected childhood for one’s offspring. A protection-
ist attitude emerged among the middle class toward youth, who were no
longer working as they had within a “reciprocal” family model (financially
contributing and thus interdependently empowered). What results, Haber-
mas explains, is a “selfless” ethic of parenting that ideologically disguises
self-serving motivations for childbearing and child-rearing:
no matter how hard [parents] tried to have the reciprocity of parent–

child relations superseded by giving a one-sided emphasis to parental
love, and no matter how unequivocally they saw themselves as devoted
benefactors concerned only with the child’s own welfare or . . . as com-
mitted champions of children’s rights, the rhetoric of disinterestedness
in actual fact helped them to bring about some changes in their own
situation in life. (1998: 50)
To recognize these benefits one need only think of clichéd parental motives
common even today: children bring the parents closer, give a domestically
bound mother greater power (though limited to the private sphere), and
provide both parents a living trophy for their accomplishments. In fact,
with modern advancements made in reproductive technologies, Marilyn
Strathern argues that parental power over children increases with power
over reproduction, bringing the very issue of their existence fully into the
domain of parental choice: “The child will embody the desire of its parents
to have a child” (1992: 32). Children, like the middle-class, non-working
women Thorstein Veblen analyzed during the Golden Age, could function
as status symbols for a family unit. They can also represent choice itself,
becoming repositories of value.
Nicholas Sammond writes, “In the post-Enlightenment notion of person-
hood beginning with the precapitalist and prelapsarian child . . . All is self-
making, all is accumulation—of knowledge, of experience, and ultimately,
of value” (2005: 377). This colder reality behind the sentiment of childhood
innocence is captured in a Grimms’ tale called “How Children Played Butcher
with Each Other,” when one boy slaughters another like a pig and is brought
to the town councilors to be judged for his (play?) crime:
One of them, a wise old man, ventured the opinion that the chief judge
should put a nice red apple in one hand and a guilder in the other and
that he call the child in and stretch both hands out to him. If the child
took the apple, he would be declared innocent. If he took the guilder,
he would be killed. This was done: the child, laughing, reached out for
the apple and was therefore not subjected to any kind of punishment.
(Tatar 2004: 371)
Sweet Teeth 99
This news legend carries with it the seed of paradoxes that have come to
characterize the absolutist cult of innocent childhood in consumer cul-
ture: fi rst, that a child is either knowing and therefore completely guilty of
misdeeds or completely unknowing and therefore innocent. Second, that
innocence can be best detected through a display of ignorance concerning
abstractions necessary within discourses of power such as, in this case,
symbolic money, or more precisely, the exchange value of a guilder over the
more immediately obvious use value of an apple (which is, ironically, a typi-
cal Western symbol of temptation and dangerous knowledge itself).
Less obvious and more puzzling is the tale’s implicit, oversimplified equa-
tion of an understanding of commodity value (determined by exchange, not

simply use) with an understanding of mortality, or the “value” of a human
life.23 However, the logical leap may seem small to scholars who argue that
childhood is not only socially constructed but a commodity itself.24 Accord-
ing to many accepted genealogies, industrial prosperity and the cult of true
(bourgeois, protected, separate, and surveilled) childhood emerged as ideo-
logically linked to a common family episteme.25 Because within consumer
culture children are socialized as consumers early26 while at the same time
being constructed as passively consumable and consumed, the link between
these ideologies becomes obscured and unquestionable at the same time.
Proprietary strings still come attached in custody policies. American
custody law has always favored, with some exceptions indulging in notions
of innocence, the idea that children are property who need a parent with
property, chosen by adults who know better than they what is good for
them. Nancy Walker et al. write: “the nurturance orientation is essentially
paternalistic (or maternalistic), in that what is good or desirable is deter-
mined for the child by society or some subset of society; not by the child”
(1999: 47). Children are property of the father or mother, and their choice
is conditionally relative to parental or societal opinion. “Best interest”
functions rhetorically in the fi nancial sense. In the U.S. the concept plays
out almost entirely in this abstract domain, where children are rarely asked
for their own opinion (Walker et al. 1999: 45, 76–77). Hillary Rodham
(now Clinton) has explained,
The best interests standard, initially followed in most state interven-

tions and explicitly used as a standard for adjudicating children’s inter-
ests in proceedings evaluating parental care, is not properly a standard.
Instead, it is a rationalization used by decision-makers justifying their
judgments about a child’s future, like an empty vessel into which adult
perceptions and prejudices are poured. (1973: 515)
Michael Freeman might explain “best interests” as another example of

protectionism breaking down: “Protection as rights is, of course, a highly
paternalistic notion. We do not ask children whether they wish to be pro-
tected” (Freeman 1983: 44).
But our denial of this economic possession and control is as strong as
our sentimentality, a result of bourgeois guilt over the very thing the nation
is built upon—capital, as Nicholas Sammond points out:
In the democratic capitalist social imaginary . . . the idea that anyone

is or will be a commodity is ontologically irreconcilable with concepts
of personal freedom and individual integrity. It is useful to conceive of
children as affected by commodities rather than as occupying the same
systems of exchange, because this maintains the illusion of a humanity
separate from and vulnerable to the social and material practices and
discourses embedded in the things they consume. (2005: 361)
Made to cohere with palatable sentiments without threatening to expose

biases, rhetoric on children and consumerism surfaces as interpretations of
well-intended adults.
In such a rubric, a child remains the vehicle of parental rights, parental
self-expression, and a mouthpiece of the parent’s interests. Michael Free-
man describes this paradox of protectionism: “tying rights to relationships
is nothing more than a ‘sophisticated’ version of the argument that children
should not have rights because of their incompetencies” (1998: 441). The
business of defending rights is often thought of as protective, clouding even
more the distinction between the self-determination rights of a child and
the power of parents or state to protect, so that we indulge in narratives of
individual autonomy and agency—much like the freedom of competitive
markets where nothing is free—that actually allow us to defer accountabil-
ity or knowing resistance.
Can children really have a fair and free choice in purchasing foods such
as sugary sweets, if the industry and advertising knowingly exploit their
inexperience and misrepresent their products? If yes, then self-determina-
tion is possible; if no, tighter controls need to be set on offending busi-
nesses, not child-consumers. Reexamined in this light, children’s consumer
rights demonstrate the dangers of selectively granting autonomous agency
without transparency.
CONSUMER POWER: A REVISITATION TO RECIPROCITY?
If we go back to the children’s liberation movement, empowering children

seems straightforward: advocate self-determination. Classic voices from a
self-determinationist perspective understandably view a child’s autonomy
and equal rights as contingent upon their fi nancial independence. John
Holt has argued:
I want more for the child than the right, in spite of being a child, to
have all the protections of the law granted to adults. I want in addition
Sweet Teeth 101
the right to decide not to be a child, not to be dependent any longer on
guardians of any kind, but to live as an independent, fi nancially and
legally responsible citizen. I want the right, in all respects, to escape
from childhood. (1995: 183)
Of course children pose a particular challenge in terms of their relative

inexperience and diminished hirability, and Holt realizes that this might
have to be compensated in the form of an automatic stipend high and equi-
table enough to be impractical for hand-outs. Lest a defense of children’s
purchasing autonomy be confused with downplaying exploitation, Richard
Farson says: “children must act against their exploitation as consumers.

They must change the ways they are treated in stores where adults are served
fi rst while they are made to stand and wait, or are shortchanged because the
storekeeper takes advantage of their naiveté” (1974: 166). Holt and Farson
were writing in the 1970s before kidcentric advertising boomed and credit
cards and the Internet loosened practical controls on child spending, which
perhaps Holt was predicting when he admitted, “A child’s credit would not
be very good because his earning power would not be” (1995: 184). The
bottom line again is the need for a child’s right to financial independence
through equal reciprocity, not another form of dependence.
However, since the 1980s, businesses have exploited child powerlessness
with claims of empowerment through consumer choice. In fact, much of
their rhetoric disjointedly echoes that of the children’s rights movement.
Take the following statement given by Jennifer Goodman, managing direc-
tor of The Geppetto Group, on the “power” kids have exercised in respond-
ing to products with what the industry calls “play” value:
Kids are becoming more powerful from a consumer perspective. . . .

Toys and candy used to be the only categories that talked about fun.
Now they’re getting fun from green ketchup. Fun is everywhere. In
fact, there are few categories that haven’t been penetrated by kids yet.
Kids used to be just a vehicle to speak to through mom. More recently,
they’re being respected on their own—more companies want to talk to
them. And the more that talk to them, the more choices they’ll have—
just like in our adult culture. (2003: 22)
Goodman suggests that directly appealing to the child customer is more

respectful than indirect protectionism, while glossing over the fact that
there are limits to children’s resources and the necessity of “fun” products
like green ketchup. “Play value” is conspicuously useless value with very
real pocketbook repercussions.
In response to the building efforts of advertisers to label a wider range
of products as marketable to the young, anti-consumerist rhetoric usually
emphasizes child powerlessness to resist their appeals rather than problems
with the products or appeals themselves. Focusing on child vulnerability
only aims at treating symptoms through protectionism, with the uninten-
tional consequence of enabling continued exploitative business practices.
Thus, again we have the complication of conflating rights rhetoric with con-
sumer protection discourse (as well as familial protectionism). Consumer
capitalism and the commodification of childhood rupture the seemingly
unconditional defensibility of autonomy rights if we unquestioningly accept
the “conceptual gulf” between youth and their elders in what amounts to a
blind justification of adult power.
Anti-consumerists often fall back into the moral convenience of protec-
tionism, even if only in arguing that businesses take advantage of children—
but extremists have also taken advantage of children, as in the Animal

Liberation Front cells responsible for the “poisoned Mars bar”27 hoax and
recall of 1984 (Pottker 1995: 111–115). Either way, the sentimental rhe-
torical power of the phrase “exploiting children” instead of “exploiting
people” or “humans” depends upon children’s continued marginalization.
The imposition and misdirected power of protectionism become blurred
in consumer culture where child rights can be dismissed by rhetoric sound-
ing very like children’s rights activism—commodifying passivism disguised
as empowerment, socializing childhood as absolute dependence. The U.S.
can represent itself as a society made up of freedom-loving individual-
ists who believe that child-rearing is not the responsibility of the state but
“nuclear” families, yet U.S. social and economic policies, as Cornel West
and Sylvia Ann Hewlett have argued in The War Against Parents, and Mike
Males reports in Scapegoat Generation and Framing Youth, have eroded
family support. In past decades, in those nations with higher commitments
to the “free market” and low social spending, relative child poverty is sur-
prisingly high. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty among
the wealthiest industrialized countries, second only to Mexico (UNICEF
2005). This trend extends worldwide in globalizing labor markets: we
imagine that parental or cultural devaluing of children and education is to
blame for child labor without giving attention to the need for a living wage
for parents that might help their kids out of work and into school.
Nicholas Sammond shows how the paradox of protectionism is linked to
the myth of a public-serving but privately competitive market:
The social construction of a generic American child susceptible to me-

dia effects persists not merely because of the investment of a variety of
institutions and individuals in its verity, not merely because it provides
an illusion of (eventual) personal control over large and impersonal so-
cial forces, but because it speaks very directly to understandings of per-
sonhood and agency in a democratic capitalistic society. (2005: 388)
The internal logic of capitalism justifies irresponsible competition for profit,

developing products that will sell easily rather than meeting a reasonable
need, all the while veiling mechanisms of control that limit free choice in
Sweet Teeth 103
free markets. Michael Symons argues that even for adults, choice is a fic-
tion of consumer power: “We have sold our birthright for a mess of glob-
ally market pottage. We have participated in the complete manufacture
of choice” (2000: 339). No choices are “free” in free markets; likewise,
protectionism is a dangerously delusional kind of disempowerment.
I’d like to agree with Alison James when she argues,
Food belongs to the adult world and is symbolic of the adult’s control
over children . . . By eating that which is ambiguous in adult terms the
child establishes an alternative system of meanings which adults can-
not perceive. It is this which allows the culture of childhood to flour-

ish largely unnoticed by adults and, at the same time, to exist largely
beyond their control. (1979: 95)
But in a globalizing economy in which fewer corporations hold greater

power, can we trust children’s appetites with nutritional decisions? Can we
trust our own? The problem is with an industry, not the age or vulnerability
of perspective buyers, parental rights or choice, or even child empower-
ment. All of these debates are irresolvable and draw attention away from
the real problem—allowing bad business to go unchecked.
Illustrating this point are the glib comments of James Morgan, president
of Philip Morris Co., in defense of the cigarette industry:
“If they [cigarettes] are behaviorally addictive or habit forming, they

are much more like caffeine, or in my case, Gummy Bears,” he said. “I
love Gummy Bears . . . and I want Gummy Bears, and I like Gummy
Bears, and I eat Gummy Bears, and I don’t like it when I don’t eat my
Gummy Bears, but I’m certainly not addicted to them.” (ASH 2003)
Ironically, Morgan is drawing attention to the fact that arguments against

cigarette advertising might be reasonably applied to sweets. More impor-
tantly, his position reminds us that we can’t trust our businesses to do what
is best for our bodies.
In dealing with kids’ products or products advertised to children, the
protectionist urge is naturally provoked to its breaking point for many who
are concerned for child welfare. If children have the right to free consumer
choice, adults and businesses should be ethically and legally bound to full
disclosure about products and an equal commitment to nutrition educa-
tion. The problem is that businesses cannot be expected to be forthright
or even concerned about child nutrition when it is so far from the impulses
of the consumers they are trying to profit from (not to mention their own
primary goal to profit). As is made clear in the history of baby formula
and baby bottle disease, treated extensively in The International Journal of
Children’s Rights special issue on nutrition rights, irresponsible advertising
can have the potential of fatally misinforming consumers. Alison Linnecar
writes of the tragic corporate abuses of third-world women (and their starv-
ing infants) who would otherwise be breast-feeding,
Advertising has been portrayed as a service, providing necessary in-

formation and enabling the consumer to make better choices . . . It
is often misguiding and misleading for parents, and it is their babies
which suffer the consequences. It does not help parents make a real
choice, because there are no promotional gimmicks, no glossy adverts
for breastmilk, which is in fact the far superior product, as well as be-
ing cheaper and readily available. (1997: 479)
Far from offering nutritional education, advertising to children actual lim-

its consumer knowledge (and freedom) in the guise of choice. Designed to
sell the product, advertising presents an argument for its sale—one that
must be presented as such and in light of a continuing critical counterargu-
ment from children.
The possibility for fatal misinformation is particularly alarming in light
of the fact that there are more ads targeting kids for food than any other
product category (Childs and Maher 2003; Toops 2001). Much in the same
way that Gerber imposed unaffordable baby foods on Guatemalan mothers
(Marguiles), or Nestlé28 got poor infants worldwide dependent upon formula
their now non-lactating mothers could not afford (Linnecar 1997; Nestle
2002), candy companies have attempted to not only cover up the detrimental
qualities of their products but to present them as healthy. The two largest
candy bar producers in the U.S., Hershey and Mars, each have their interest-
ing histories of deception: Milton Hershey didn’t even want to call products
“candy” for fear of consumer awareness; the Mars family reputedly funded
research to prove that chocolate prevented tooth decay—thus provoking the
ALF hoax (Pottker 1995). Just because these risks to consumers are not as
great as in the earlier examples does not mean controls and structural eco-
nomic changes are not necessary. In the U.S. child obesity and type 2 dia-
betes have become epidemic because children choose (regardless of class) to
consume candy, chewing gum, soft drinks, ice cream, salty snacks, fast food,
and cookies over any other foods (Nestle 2006: 178).
Lois Lowry satirizes this duplicitous culture of sweets in The Willough-
bys (2008) when the Nanny says of Mary Poppins, “It almost gives me
diabetes just to think of her: all those disgusting spoonfuls of sugar!” (101).
And of course there has to be a candy magnate, Commander Melanoff,
the inventor of a fortune-making candy, the Lickety Twist, who admits, “I
never eat it myself, and when Ruth is old enough to chew well, I’ll see that
she has only apples and an occasional ginger cookie. Never will she have
Lickety Twist” (122). When his neighbor Jane asks, “But what about all
the poor children who eat it and rot their teeth?” he responds with a sigh,
“that is how we billionaires exist. . . . We profit on the misfortune of oth-
ers” (123).
Sweet Teeth 105
Industries that shape and feed these appetites know how to cater to a
unique aesthetic that appeals to many kids. Alison James discusses one
example, “kets” (or, the particularly gooey and super-sweet treats that most
adults lose a taste for)—today’s equivalents can be found in the many forms
pure sugar can take, often looking like inedible toys (a chewing gum cell
phone) or even intentionally disgusting (gummy worms, Bertie Bott’s Every
Flavor Beans—including spinach, compost, diesel, and dirt). James writes:
“By eating that which is ambiguous in adult terms the child establishes an
alternative system of meanings which adults cannot perceive” (1979: 95).
This is an important reminder of the exclusive consumer aesthetics that can
be simultaneously speaking separately to kids and adults. Kids have the

right to make informed decisions when they cultivate their own aesthetic by
fi nding their preferences and shaping their overall dietary lifestyles.
In The Rights and Wrongs of Children, Michael Freeman writes that
“protectionist intentions can backfi re” (1983: 43). Indeed, this is the heart
of the problem: one cannot protect without limiting. Freeman explains:
“the very concept of intervention itself is problematic. Whom does it pro-
tect and against what?” (43). Marion Nestle demonstrates this problem in
the case of children’s consumer rights and nutrition:
The astonishing rise in children’s purchasing power and influence can

be attributed to a variety of societal trends. The decreasing size of fam-
ilies permits parents to devote more attention to individual children.
Older parents are wealthier and more indulgent. Working and single
parents delegate more responsibility to children by necessity. Putting
those trends in old-fashioned terms, children these days appear to be
‘spoiled.’ In other ways, however, they are less independent. Concerns
about neighborhood safety, mean that fewer children walk to school,
play in parks, ride bicycles, or explore cities on their own. . . . Changes
in society discourage out-of-home activities and encourage television,
video games, and Internet surfi ng. And, of course, these activities not
only keep children sedentary but also expose them to countless adver-
tisements for purchasable products. (2002: 177)
Those of us engaged in efforts to enlighten others about children’s rights

always have to check our own protectionism (and unintentional ageism)—
isn’t the deeper cause of child exploitation the lack of controls checking
business practices (which really affect consumers of every age)? If parents
have a living wage, mightn’t they afford better foods and nutritional educa-
tion for their offspring? Even so, something as basic as a right to nutrition
should be protected for all, not earned.
Marion Nestle appropriately begins her chapter from What to Eat entitled
“Foods Just for Kids” by reminding her reader, “You would never know it by
going to a supermarket, but children are supposed to eat the same foods their
parents eat” (370). So much focus on difference can divert our focus from
what really needs to be changed. Protesting child vulnerability to the influ-
ence of television, the internet, or other kids (as ‘walking billboards’) draws
our attention from the fact that nutrition misinformation (like school lunches
counting ketchup, red or green, a vegetable29) is not just the exploitation of
children’s impulsive dietary habits but a nutritional lie that finds no justify-
ing logic except in reducing educational food budgets and increasing business
profits. School reforms are necessary and should be funded more seriously—
and this cannot just operate on an educational or business level (as cola com-
panies have found ways to infiltrate U.S. schools to create a captive consumer
base). Even at higher academic levels of responsibility, health professionals’
efforts to properly inform the public are surely diverted: “Sponsors of nutri-
tion journals include such companies as Coca-Cola, Gerber, Nestlé, Carna-
tion, Monsanto, Procter and Gamble, Roche Vitamins, Slim-Fast foods, and
the Sugar Association . . . ” (Nestle 2002: 113). What we need are struc-
tural economic and business reforms, not simply reforms that seem to put an
impossible burden of self-education on each consumer, young or old.
Our tendency to overemphasize age in any issue glosses over these struc-
tural problems. For example, discourse on child labor often stresses that a
person is too young to work, while overlooking their employer’s low wages,
regardless of age. If parents had available employment offering a living
wage, there would be fewer children pushed out of school and into work
or debt-slavery. Likewise, we cannot deal with child obesity without revis-
ing the implicit question, “what’s wrong with our kids?” to “what’s wrong
with our culture?” I don’t mean that to be a facile refutation of a child’s
unique rights but rather I’m trying to point out that, as with any rights
struggle, the fact that all children should be born with recognized human
rights has to come before structural inequities and biases can be rectified.
Protectionism merely enables this debate to be endless.
Choice is an expression of individual values in the increasingly consumer-
directed ideologies of capitalist nations. Consumers, regardless of age, lose
control when ‘choice’ is ‘free’ only to the highest bidder. Choice, like mar-
kets, is never simply free. Marilyn Strathern describes this paradox: “If we
are to look for what is ‘rigid’ about the Enterprise Culture, for what stifles
Enterprise, for the new givens of our existence, it lies in the hidden prescrip-
tion that we ought to act by choice,” yet
the sense that one has no choice not to consume is a version of the feel-
ing that one has no choice not to make a choice. Choice is imagined as
the only source of difference: this is the collapsing effect of the market
analogy. (36, 37)
By “collapsing” alternatives and deceptively prelimiting choice, consumer

capitalism presents a great threat to child rights. But this is not simply
because they are children; they are human. Maybe our choices aren’t always
in our ‘best interests,’ regardless of age.
Sweet Teeth 107
No matter how good the intentions of protectionism are, it ironically
enables businesses to exploit the “protected.” In the representation of chil-
dren, protectionist consumerism translates into increasing displays of vul-
nerable impressionability—prelimiting their range of choice and action to
consumption-oriented behavior. One contrastive literary example in point
would be considering L. Frank Baum’s unsentimental turn-of-the-century
Dorothy Gale, who responsibly eschews fantasy life to go home and do
practical work, “for Aunt Em will surely think something dreadful has
happened to me, and that will make her put on mourning: and unless crops
are better this year than they were last I am sure Uncle Henry cannot afford
it” (1992: 212), whereas in a similar case more than half a century later,
Roald Dahl’s surprisingly American-styled hero Charlie Bucket (who is also
motivated by reciprocal family need) seems to be the exception to the pro-
tectionist rule that kids require vigilant guidance in consumer affairs—a
rule illustrated multiple times by other golden-ticket winners who prove to
be less obedient to Wonka’s warnings, falling for the tempting influences of
television, advertising, novelty, gluttony, and greed (1998a: 96, 130, 133).
However, when Charlie wins the factory, he is being rewarded for his con-
sumer aesthetics (i.e., desire for and appreciation of Wonka’s sweets) more
than a work ethic.30 Wonka also reveals that his plan was to look for a child
because a child is more malleable:
Mind you, there are thousands of clever men who would give anything
for the chance to come in and take over from me, but I don’t want
that sort of person. I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grown-up
won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way
and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good sensible loving
[and desperately poor?] child, one to whom I can tell all my most pre-
cious candy-making secrets—while I am still alive. (151)
Though he seems to have landed a position of ultimate power, Charlie actu-

ally reaffi rms the protectionist rule more persuasively (and subtly) than his
cohorts through the factory.
This subtle shift from focal issues of labor, autonomy, and responsibility
to consumerism, control, and obedience indicates the extent to which con-
sumer culture disguises the commodification of childhood. Protectionist
sentimentality obscures its own disempowering effect.
SWEET SWINDLE
The candy industry’s hold on Halloween guarantees much commercial con-

trol. Schor’s reticence toward product-relations cited earlier is particularly
relevant in the case of sweets, where the product itself is not altogether
trustworthy. When Allison James asks why manufacturers don’t produce
miniature versions of adult sweets for kids, her implied answer is that kids’
tastes determine the market. Children may display a different aesthetic in
their tastes for sweets, but that aesthetic might also be part of a consumer
complex in which producers fi nd they can profitably make quite different
candies for kids more cheaply. These “kets” generally have fewer or no
“fi ne” ingredients (for example, no chocolate or nuts)—the main ingredi-
ent being sucrose in its varied glorious forms: simple syrup hardened at
different stages (jelly beans and chews), even simple powder form (Pixy
Stix and Pop Rocks). In “kets” the variation comes not through ingredients
but theme—candies, reminiscent of the poisonous Victorian confections
Bee Wilson describes, looking like something else, as in candy necklaces,

gummy worms, bubblegum tape, candy cigarettes, and lipsticks.31 But the
one constant is a high concentration of refi ned sugar, addictively ensuring
repeat customers.
In Candyfreak, Steve Almond characterizes often-ignored truths about
candy production:
I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is

basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome
ways, and given that much of our citizenry is bordering on obesity (just
about what we deserve), and given that most folks who grow our sugar
and cocoa are part of an indentured Third World workforce who earn
enough, per annum, to buy maybe a Snickers bar and given that the
giants of the candy industry are, even as I write this, doing everything
in their considerable power to establish freak hegemony over what they
call “developing markets,” meaning hooking the children of Moscow
and Beijing and Nairobi on their dastardly confections. (2004: 8)
Though Almond admits that those of us who consume sweets as adults

continue to delude ourselves about certain producers (and even his tirade
fails to conceal his own guilt), his point is that some version of his scenario
undoubtedly exists, especially for multinational corporations. Sucrose
has addictive qualities, modern methods of extracting it exploit develop-
ing nations, 32 and means for maintaining a market often make unwitting
pawns of children. Henry Hobhouse maintains that “sugar, after the illegal
drugs, and tobacco and alcohol, is the most damaging addictive substance
consumed by rich, white mankind” (2005: 59). What makes it even more
dangerous, perhaps especially to those who can neither support the ‘habit’
nor easily resist its appeal, is that we humans are hardwired to recognize
that which is sweet as good, like mother’s milk: “where food is scarce,
sweetness helps keep babies alive” (Richardson 2002: 50).
In Late for Halloween (1966), Camilla Fegan touches on the difficulty of
controlling our own appetites when Judy’s witch-friend Murgatroyd saves
her (in tones echoing “Goblin Market”) from licking a concoction off her
fi nger without wearing her charmed ring: “Well put it on, you silly child!
Sweet Teeth 109
Goodness, what a lot of stuff you still have to learn! That stuff is my own
brand of witches’ ambrosia, and once humans have tasted it they never stop
wanting it again and then they waste away because they can’t have it” (49).
A more recent variation can be humorously seen in the Bad Bunny’s evil
plot revealed in the concluding scenes of Hoodwinked (2006). Disguised
as the “goody bandit,” the Bad Bunny steals goody recipes and plans to
monopolize the market. In order to ensure cradle-to-grave brand loyalty
in the forest, he plans to add a secret ingredient, “Boingonium,” which
instantly addicts each child eating the treats.
Funny but far from fantastic, such scenes reflect systems of power ineq-
uity as they are maintained by certain industries. It should be no surprise

that the vehicle of control is sweetness. In his Sweetness and Power, Sidney
Mintz explains:
All over the world sugar has helped to fill the calorie gap for the labor-
ing poor, and has become one of the fi rst foods of the industrial work
break. There is, moreover, at least some evidence that the culturally
conventionalized pattern of intrafamily consumption—with the costly
protein foods being largely monopolized by the adult male, and the
sucrose being eaten in larger proportion by the wife and children—has
wide applicability. Maldistribution of food within poor families may
constitute a kind of culturally legitimized population control, since it
systematically deprives the children of protein. (1985: 149)
The history of rationing sugar for children in need (usually under the guise
of treating, not compensating) is echoed in Louise Murphy’s holocaust-
set The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (2003) when food rations are
so sparse that each child in a Polish village gets a little fat but must eat
their sugar fi rst. A Nazi clerk instructs Gretel: “One level spoonful for each
child. In their mouth. Not in their hands. Put it in their hands and the little
cockroaches sell it” (72). Once the children have the sugar in their mouths,
however, this possibility seems forgotten, as Hansel’s
eyes grow round as the pure sweetness, so much fuller than the sweet-
ness of saccharin with its metallic taste afterward, fi lled his mouth. . . .
he crunched the rest between his teeth and licked the edge of the jar to
take off any crystals that clung. (72–73)
Though Hansel’s vulnerability is more extreme and physiological, this scene

depicts how the appeal of sweetness and the quick, false energy boost of
sucrose don’t give most of us a fair chance to make a free and easy choice.
Anti-consumerists like Schor might argue that this is even truer for inexpe-
rienced consumers like children, regardless of level of need. 33
I began this chapter with two epigraphs, one from M. F. K. Fisher and the
other from Thura Al-Windawi, to demonstrate that a child’s right to free
dietary choice is class-contingent and prelimited by conditions of power. If
you are hungry or thirsty, you will be more tempted and tolerate less choice
than those who are not (in fact, Fisher is talking about privileged taste more
specifically than rightful choice). Because of the consumerism and global-
ization of late capitalism, inequities have become greater between child and
adult, rich and poor, developing and developed nations. The role of food
and nutrition in these changes can be seen in the American phenomenon of
“starving amidst plenty” (see Levenstein) and the obesity crisis (see Lovett;
Nestle). Children should be protected from deceptive advertising, but not
by falling back on the convenient old protectionist agenda of keeping them
ignorant (and thus more vulnerable). Kids should have their “ket” culture
but also be given due respect in honestly talking about nutrition with an
eye for knowing that if the food pyramid was drawn up by McDonald’s, it
is probably suspect. If we have to grow up in a culture in which corpora-
tions make and limit choices for us, we still have the right to question such
practices and educate against them.34 Beryl Langer asks, “Might the roots
of anti-corporate global activism be found in the ‘enchanted garden’ of
global children’s culture?” (270). In the next chapter we’ll look more closely
at the enchanted gardens that lure agency, with the hopes of stimulating
such roots.
4 Molasses
The starting point of all economic activity in a consumer society

depends on the principle of scarcity or insufficient material means,
the underside of capitalism is that it is always doomed to incorporate
deprivation.
Gail Turley Houston
When we have few things we make the next world holy. When we
have plenty we enchant the objects around us.
James Twitchell
Roland Barthes wrote that “The appetite is a creature of the dreams,”

and certainly the reverse is true: dreams are creatures of appetite (qtd. in
Appelbaum1 2006: 118). Gastronomic utopias reflect the tastes and urges
of the hungry or vicariously gluttonous whole. Hunger and the tempta-
tions of indulgence are pervasive in childlore, often shown controlling the
powerless. In this chapter I will examine gastronomic utopias in African-
American lore fi rst with a broader literary, geographic, and historical con-
text and then through their appropriation into mainstream literature, song,
and comics to demonstrate how these sources reveal underlying relations of
power in cultures of hunger. Ultimately, I do this to demonstrate how chil-
dren are manipulated in adult-dominated culture through similar cultural
mechanisms as those through which the poor and racially marginalized
have been exploited in the development of imperial, racial, and capitalist
Western wealth.
One the most influential hungry heroes is Brer Rabbit. Versions of Brer
Rabbit tales involve Brer Rabbit stealing from fellow critters or Mr. Man’s
garden, getting caught like Potter’s Peter Rabbit, and being threatened with
punishment by those he victimizes. But like his cartoon offspring Bugs
Bunny, Brer Rabbit outwits those he steals from, again and again, usu-
ally escaping punishment and succeeding at the difficult task of procuring
a feast for himself and his family. In a 1946 Walt Disney comic called
“Uncle Remus and his Tales of Brer Rabbit,”2 the hungry rabbit visits a
“new world” where there is a “Garden of Eatin’”—a seeming food utopia
full of baked “hams, a chicken gravy river, hotcake plants, and a pork
chop tree;” although, the enticing “poke chops” are forbidden (Del Giudice
2001: 13, 39). While at fi rst glance Brer Rabbit has found a place where
food is literally dripping from the landscape ready to eat, he discovers that
“Temptashun is sumpin’ whut shakes hands with you . . . then leads you
straight into trubble” (Del Giudice 2001: 39). In this case, Brer Rabbit
is duped, but in spite of Disney’s corporate commercialism and question-
able identity politics, the strip manages, like many of the folktales that
inspired it, to politically satirize an existing domestic culture of hunger
often ignored and perpetuated under U.S. capitalism. The “temptashun”
of the pork chops proves an effective lure to manipulate Brer Rabbit right
back into a hierarchy that will deny him food unless he works exactly as
demanded by an exploiting pig they call “Brer Big Boss,” who manages to
withhold wages so the only way his workers can actually make money is if
they are already rich, as the guide explains: “You is rich if you can break
even!” (Del Giudice 2001: 38). Brer Rabbit makes the comparison to U.S.
capitalism explicit: “Sumpins tryin to tell me this world aint much different
frum the other one!” (38).
Luisa Del Giudice writes that “Gastronomic utopias reflect culturally
determined tastes and shared cravings” (2001: 13). When an entire culture
shares tales of food utopias, it is a good guess that their beginnings were in
hunger. Such tales constantly reflect the unreliability of sating the most basic
desires for sustenance. Piero Camporesi describes their originating contexts
as “cultures of hunger” that encourage escapist dreams as a coping device:
“The most effective and upsetting drug, bitterest and most ferocious, has
always been hunger, creator of unfathomable disturbances of the mind and
imagination. Further lifelike and convincing dreams grew out of this forced
hallucination, compensating for the everyday poverty” (1989: 125).
The most famous and widespread gastronomic utopias in Europe were
stories of the land of Cockaigne—the most consistent motifs being no work,
roasted birds ready to fly in your mouth,3 rivers of wine4 or syrup (and, sig-
nificant to the following analysis, molasses), and pancake or bread5 houses
(especially the roofs). Such motifs have been best preserved in childlore.
Frederick B. Jonassen explains,
It used to be thought that the Cockaigne themes had faded out from
English tradition after the Renaissance period, but as J. B. Smith6
showed in a more recent study, some motifs persisted in later nursery
lore as formulaic elements in nineteenth-century fairytales. (1990: 59)
One such collected instance was preserved in an opening to “Jack the

Giant-Killer” as follows:
Once upon a time—and a very good time it was—when pigs were swine
and dogs ate lime, and monkeys chewed tobacco, when houses were
thatched with pancakes, streets paved with plum puddings, and roasted
pigs ran up and down the streets with knives in their backs, crying, “Come
and eat me!” That was a good time for travellers. (Leather 1912: 174)
Molasses 113
Cockaigne also became popularized and more didactic when adapted for
children (for example, in the Dutch tradition of Luilekkerland), especially
in written7 forms that socialized norms: “By the sixteenth century, Cock-
aigne had become a paradoxical place of instruction aimed at the acqui-
sition of middle-class ideals. . . . After the sixteenth century, Cockaigne
devolved into a diffuse Luilekkerland. . . . a fairy-tale candyland for today’s
toddlers” (Pleij 2001: 85, 6).
Not only did such utopias remain in European childlore, they appear in
various forms in the United States, reformed to reflect the particular cul-
tures of hunger historically existent there. Marina Warner isolates a com-
mon cause: “When shortages and illness deeply imperiled infants’ lives, and
material scarcity shaped dreams and drives, the world of stories was one
in which glowing, ripe plenty beckoned elsewhere” (1999: 136). Likewise,
the cultures of hunger brought about by American enslavement of Africans
shaped didactic dreams of escape from misery and need.
John Minton compares the similarities of Cockaigne motifs with Diddy-
Wah-Diddy,8 which according to Zora Neale Hurston is
the largest and best known of the Negro mythical places. . . . A very
restful place where even the curbstones are good sitting-chairs. The
food is even already cooked. If a traveller gets hungry all he needs
to do is to sit down on the curbstone and wait and soon he will hear
something hollering “Eat me! Eat me! Eat me!” and a big baked
chicken will come along with a knife and fork stuck in its sides.
(1949: 479)
Minton adds to the study of gastronomic utopias by focusing on exam-

ples in the United States, particularly in African-American lore, connect-
ing them with the larger tradition. He points to how power manipulates
poverty and hunger: “The theme is best documented among American
blacks, curiously, the ex-slaves who relate the story uniformly place it in
the mouth of a white character” (1991: 41). Considering the power rela-
tionships behind hunger and poverty in contrast to supply and wealth, it
makes sense that the powerful, exploiting figure would make false prom-
ises to lure the vulnerable. Certainly this is suggested by food-utopia
sources found in slave narratives collected in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. One formerly enslaved informant recalled this story
from his mother:
Mammy say when dey starts for here [from Virginia to Texas] in de
wagons, de white folks tell de po’ niggers, what was so ig’rant de ’lieve
all de white folks tell ’im, dat where dey is goin’ de lakes is full of syrup
and covered with butter cakes, and dey won’t have to work so hard.
(Minton 1991: 42)
Another formerly enslaved man, Charlie Smith (born Mitchell Watkins),
from West Africa recalled “two white strangers” on board a foreign
ship:
Dey wuz wavin’ their hands fo’ us to come on boa’d. They not only
waved, they pleaded wid us, “Come wid us and see what we got in
America! It’s a country where you never have to work.”
“What do you do when you gets hungry?” we axed.
“In America we grow fritter [pancake] trees.” (Minton 1991: 42)
Mitchell Watkins was caught. Minton explains that
the Africans were taken below and presented with an artificial tree
hung with pancakes and covered with syrup; they fi nished their meal,
then returned to deck, only to discover that the ship was well out to
sea and on its way to the New Orleans auction block, where Mitchell
Watkins was sold to old man Charlie Smith from Texas, whose name
he then assumed. (42)
Apparently the same application appears in one version of “John Henry”

(which I was unable to find directly). A. L. Morton reports that in it, John
Henry “fi nds a tree made of honey and another of fl itterjacks” with the fol-
lowing description: “after eatin’ honey and flitterjacks an’ brown roast pig
an’ biscuits, still he’s hungry yet. An’ so he goes down to git drink water
an’ fi nds lake ain’t nothin’ but honey” (1968: 39). Even in this instance the
dream destination is revealed as a duplicitous danger.
Much about food utopias in children’s literature in general can be learned
from Brer Rabbit’s “Garden of Eatin’” and the lore-luring of Mitchell Wat-
kins, who was twelve years old when he fell for the promise of unlimited
pancakes and was trapped into slavery. Gastronomic utopias are not just
the product of hungry dreams, they can be fantasies created to fool and
control their audience. This might explain why so many food utopias exist
in children’s literature and lore: because food is one of the primary vehicles
of struggle and control in child culture, gastronomic utopias are lures that
invite audiences to concentrate on desires that cannot be fulfi lled, ulti-
mately deferring (even if only symbolically) their power.
Gorman Beauchamp writes, contrasting escapist gastronomic utopias
to politically reconstructive ones: “The utopia of escape represents, I sub-
mit, one of man’s ways of remembering, of extending, of vicariously reliv-
ing the idealized life of childhood” (1981: 349). It is possible that adults
weaving utopian tales have indulged in fictional feasts specifically for an
audience and with a cast of children. Consider the resonance in the open-
ing to the Grimms’ “The Tale about the Land of Cockaigne”: “In the days
of the land of Cockaigne . . . . I saw a young ass with a silver nose chasing
after two quick hares, and a large linden tree grew hotcakes”; or “A Tall
Molasses 115
Tale from Ditmarsh,” which begins, “I saw two roasted chickens flying
swiftly” (Zipes 2003: 474). “The Sweet Porridge” appeals to hunger by
imagining a magic bowl that can sate its owner with an endless supply
of food (Zipes 2003: 345–346). The magic bowl is a frequent motif in
tales for children; to name just a few variants: “Tunjur, Tunjur,” Strega
Nona, and The Full Belly Bowl.9 The similarities between the cultures of
hunger depicted in African-American folklore and children’s literature in
general are striking, suggesting hunger as a common political theme for
marginalized groups.
Perhaps the significance of the connection will be clearer with a look at
a comic strip that predates Walt Disney’s clip of Brer Rabbit in the Garden
of Eatin’ by almost thirty years, and so draws more directly from folk
culture unadulterated by the narrowly acculturating view of that corpora-
tion. Winsor McCay adopted food mirages several times in Little Nemo in
Slumberland’s fi rst decade, when the serial strip received massive exposure
in newspapers nationwide (Nemo was written for and particularly popular
among child readers). For example, in 1908, Nemo and his bad-boy friend
Flip take a walk in the family garden, which grows by proportion in each
frame, ultimately crushing the boys by raspberries twice their size, as if
their desires are too great to be self-managed. More related is the “Island
in the Sky” episode from 1912. The island, like Brer Rabbit’s tempting
garden, has trees dripping with prepared foods. In this case, temptation
comes in the form of “cookies and puddin’s” or “pie an’ dough-nut” trees.
To a reader in 1912 the reference would likely remind them of Joe Hill’s
Wobblie song, “The Preacher and the Slave” (1911), a song parodying the
Salvation Army’s “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” which encouraged its listen-
ers to concentrate on the rewards of an afterlife (by giving money, which is
of this one!). The phrase “pie in the sky,” used as a light expression alone
today, carries a frequently ignored angle of political seriousness in its origi-
nal usage by Joe Hill:10
Long-haired preachers come out every night,

Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They answer with voices so sweet.
[chorus]
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.11 (Sayers 2002: 331)
In connection with Hill’s song, Nemo’s food mirage takes on a heavier

meaning, reminding us that the promise of “pie in the sky” usually isn’t
“easy as pie”—in fact, at times it might be a delusional decoy, as Malcolm
X told Alex Haley,
The day was to come when our family was so poor that we would eat
the hole out of a doughnut; but at that time we were much better off
than most town Negroes. . . . who would shout, as my father preached,
for the pie-in-the-sky and their heaven in the hereafter while the white
man had his here on earth. (1999: 6)
This motif appeared in a 1921 issue12 of The Brownies’ Book for children
with the poem, “Lolly-Pop Land,” by Minna B. Noyes: “In the fields there
grow fi ne things to eat, / In Lolly-pop Land, I know. / Cakes grow on stems,
with muffi ns and gems, / And pies on bushes grow!” (113). Noyes’s account
lacks the irony of Hill’s song, but even the most classic food mirage in child-
lore could be said to convey the same message. In “Hansel and Gretel,” the
tempting bread house (varying in its roof of gingerbread, icing, pancakes,
candy, etc.) hides a witch who wishes to lure them into eating in order to
eat them herself. As Robert Appelbaum puts it, “elements of the myth of
Cockaigne are used to deconstruct the myth. The house of plenty houses a
cannibal” (2006: 128). Robert Coover’s “The Gingerbread House,” high-
lights both the Cockaigne ancestry and cannibal-threat of the tale:
There is, even now, a sunny place, with mint drop trees and cotton
candy bushes, an air as fresh and heady as lemonade. Rivulets of honey
flow over gumdrop pebbles, and lollypops grow wild as daisies. This is
the place of the gingerbread house. Children come here, but, they say,
none leave. (1969: 64–65)
Brad Johnson, an American comics artist, uses the gingerbread house motif
in his visual critique of the hypocrisy of U.S. immigration policy in light
of globalization. His gingerbread house has stars on the roof and striped
candy canes surrounding the house, reminiscent of the U.S. flag, hinting at
the dangerous inhabitant—Uncle Sam (see Figure 4.1). He tempts two chil-
dren with the “American” dream of prosperity in the form of candies and
cakes, which seem to be drugged.13 The children wake up in a desert scene
bedded with the remains of immigrants who tried the dangerous passing
before them, also tempted by the dream of prosperity.
Johnson’s variation on the deadly food mirage does not seem like such
a stretch when one considers Charlie Smith’s experience. Many uses of the
food mirage appear in folklore luring immigrants (see Sayers); even Brer
Rabbit applies the familiar term “new world” to the Garden of Eatin’. Jac-
queline Dutton writes:
the dreams of alimentary excess and abundance that underpin the Cock-
aigne myth are not, in fact, simply the result of compensatory projections
of the peasantry. Ancient Greek satirists also describe rivers of soup in
which float great lumps of sausage, ham and cheese as a humorous re-
sponse to other more nostalgic visions of the Golden Age. (2002: 25)
Molasses 117
Figure 4.1 Brad Johnson, (untitled entry), Comix 2000. L’Association, 1999.
Herman Pleij supports this point with his argument that Cockaigne is
“mocking fantasylands and dreamworlds from classical antiquity onward.
. . . poking fun at the torrent of medieval accounts of paradises, golden
ages, and travels to parts unknown,” as such functioning like “the tradi-
tion of social criticism” (2001: 281).
Yet, Pleij elsewhere counters this satiric interpretation with another:
Cockaigne and Luilekkerland are concerned not so much with satire—

and certainly not with revolution—as with the cathartic compensation
aimed at allaying fears arising from the existing order, without any
thought of doing away with that order. (2001: 294)
Like inversion ritual, such myth pleases while making a critical, political
point about culture. Like the pastoral, which can contain a counterpastoral
perspective within it, the gastronomic utopia continues to impossibly tempt
while critiquing and temporarily subverting. Raymond Williams describes
the resulting complexity within Edenic varieties:
This country in which all things come naturally to man, for his use
and enjoyment and without his effort, is that Paradise. . . . Here the
enjoyment of what seems a natural bounty, a feeling of paradise in the
garden, is exposed to another kind of wit: the easy consumption goes
before the fall. And we can remember that the whole result of the fall
from paradise was that instead of picking easily from an all-powerful
nature, man had to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. (1973:
31–32)
Labor (or lack thereof) is elemental to gastronomic utopias, indicating the

centrality of production14 anxiety to the cultures in which they evolved,
perhaps also countering the stolen, forced, or exploitative work of those
who create or indulge in such stories. But they also reinforce the expecta-
tion for those disempowered to obey:
Via their images of a topsy-turvy world, Cockaigne and Luilekkerland

drew a satirical picture of excessive consumption and a total lack of
productivity that no longer had a place in the modern world. . . . The
compensatory dream of the olden days, still present in unabridged form
in the Cockaigne material, was now used as a didactic method, espe-
cially valuable in educating the children of the rich and other good-for-
nothings. (Pleij 2001: 388)
Thus, in the Italian tradition (drawing on the Paesi di Cuccagna), Pinoc-

chio is lured to Pleasure Island in Disney’s Pinocchio only to be turned into
a beast of burden (donkey), presumably to serve as cheap labor.15 Called
Playland in the original, Pinocchio’s dream destination is explicitly a child-
space and echoes Cockaigne in its playful chaos:
Playland was like no other country in the world. The population con-
sisted of children. . . . The merriment and shouting and noise in the
streets were maddening. There were children everywhere. Some were
playing skittles, some quoits, cycling or ball, some were riding on
wooden horses. (Collodi 1996: 200)
As in most Cockaigne landscapes, there is no work in Playland—most

importantly, to Pinocchio, no homework. Hal Rammel places Pinocchio’s
fall within the context of controlled hunger: “Thus, a children’s utopia falls
victim to the same subversion that often befell the Land of Cockaigne16
when its liberatory comedy was used to present the authoritarian message,
You shouldn’t have enough because you’ll take too much” (1990: 113). The
same “moral reprobation can be seen in Charles Kingsley’s. . . . Happy-go-
lucky Mountains” in The Water Babies (1863), A. L. Morton points out:
[Doasyoulikes] sat under the flapdoodle-trees, and let the flapdoodle

drop into their mouths; and under the vines, and squeezed the grape
juice down their throats; and, if any little pigs ran about ready roasted,
crying, “Come and eat me,” as was their fashion in that country, they
Molasses 119
waited till the pigs ran against their mouths, and then took a bite, and
were content, just as so many oysters would have been. (qtd. in Morton
1968: 35)
The warning against idleness and losing control in the face of plenty reflects
a visceral understanding of privation. A natural result of having too little is
to overindulge and hoard once there is enough.
Brer Rabbit tales typically reveal these contrasting codes of desire as a
double standard for haves and have-nots. Andrew Warnes writes that when
Brer Rabbit secretly steals from Brer Fox’s garden,
Brer Fox interprets these nocturnal incursions as a threat to the un-

equal land distribution from which, as the sole food producer among
the folktale’s creatures, he so visibly benefits. . . . He fashions a manne-
quin from some viscous substance and christens it Tar Baby. Drawing
on a heterosexuality that Brer Rabbit’s masculinization presupposes,
Brer Fox then identifies this mannequin as a “she,” confi rming that,
unlike a scarecrow, the function of this particular sentry of food is to
attract rather than to repel.17 (Warnes 2004: 124)
The resemblance of the Tar Baby’s function to a scarecrow’s is usually sug-

gested visually in many illustrated versions by a hat (as in Edward Gorey’s
images in Rees) or old clothing (as in James Ransome’s pictures for Ham-
ilton; see Figure 4.2). Trickery through attraction rather than repelling
cautions against being outwitted because of needful vulnerability and cor-
responds to the fear of losing control in the face of plenty. Although Brer
Fox is punishing Brer Rabbit for stealing food from him, Brer Rabbit’s
stealing is not the focus of the cautionary tale—the dangers of “temptas-
hun” are.
The interpretation of class confl ict and unequal distribution suggested
by Warnes earlier seems even more explicit in variations like a Biloxi ver-
sion of the Tar Baby tale, in which Rabbit’s competitor and social “better”
is a Frenchman:
But the Rabbit did not wish to work any longer with his friend. Said
he to the Frenchman, “If you wish to dig a well, I shall not help you.”
“Oho,” said the Frenchman, “you shall not drink any of the water
from the well.”
“That does not matter,” replied the Rabbit. “I am accustomed to
licking dew from the ground.”
The Frenchman, suspecting mischief, made a tar baby, which he stood up

close to the well. (Erdoes and Ortiz 1998: 182)
Rabbit resents his friend’s unequal share but also makes clear that he
is accustomed to making do with less. Brer Rabbit’s experience in dealing
Figure 4.2 Edward Gorey for Ennis Rees, Brer Rabbit and his Tricks. Young
Scott Books, 1967. (By permission of Edward Gorey Charitable Trust.)
Molasses 121
with hunger seems to briefly give him the upper hand, but the involuntary
cycle of Brer Rabbit’s fasting and feasting on the loot of others conveys a
shared attitude that only the cleverest eats because there is not enough to
go around. Laura C. Jarmon explains the significance of pervasive plot
elements of hunger: “The widespread tale of the tar baby traditionally
represents a situation of scarcity in a community: famine or drought may
motivate a collective effort to acquire food or water” (2003: 1). Another
version, presented by Dora Lee Newman from West Virginia, expands on
this context:
Once upon a time there was a water famine, and the runs went dry and
the rivers went dry, and there wasn’t any water to be found anywhere,
so all the animals in the forest met together to see what could be done
about it. (1979: 109)
The tales presume an audience familiar with scrimping and scrounging, or

at least their characters are used to sharing, working hard, and making do.
In the Tar Baby tale presented by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps,
Brer Rabbit puns, “I don’t need no water, I kin drink dew” (1958: 1). Even
Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus hints at a context of inequities—of
power, money, freedom, and food supply. The blackface narrator could be
said to operate subversively in telling a white boy tales of rebellion, bend-
ing rules, and the small guy winning. But he also works for food—the
tales themselves are barter, and in the framing narrative that surrounds the
tales Harris took from African-American tellers, Remus reminds us of the
underlying culture of hunger when he talks to the boy about Christmas:
Honey, you mus’ git up soon Chris’mus mawnin’ en open de do’; kase
I’m gwinter bounce in on Marse John en Miss Sally, en holler Chris’mus
gif18 des like I useter endurin’ de fahmin’ days fo’ de war. . . . I boun’
dey don’t fergit de ole nigger, nudder. (1982: 74)
The former slave doesn’t just hint at past famine and his “endurin’” hunger,
he barters:
Don’t you pester ’longer Brer Rabbit, honey, en don’t you fret ’bout ’im.
You’ll year whar he went en how he come out. Dish yer cole snap rastles
wid my bones, now. . . . en I gotter rack ’roun en see if I kin run up agin
some Chris’mus leavin’s. (76)
No wonder the boy soon brings him “a huge piece of mince-pie” and left-
over cakes when he can (84).19
Reflected in these moments is a culture of hunger that permeates—
culture that explains an ethos of oppressive experience. Ashleigh Harris
writes
In each transformation of the Tar Baby tale, it appears that the trick-
ster’s significance, or what the trickster signifies, is reliant on external
conditions. In the Ashanti version of the tale the trickster compromises
his community, and is shamed for the trick. . . . In the African-Ameri-
can version of the tale the trickster maintains moral integrity through-
out the story. The trickster in this version of the tale is forced into
tricking in order to survive the threatening environment in which he
fi nds himself. (61–62)
We can read the tale as exposing external conditions and its variations
as indicating changes in communal security—in the case of Brer Rabbit’s

stealing food, we could conclude that the sanctioning of his theft indicates
the more pressing issue of food insecurity. Thus, in relief, the tales express
the culture of hunger in which they were transformed.
Disney’s transformation of Brer Rabbit makes significant use of fairy-
tale technique to adapt the wily hero for an audience of consumer-children.
Most notable and out of place is the addition of a good fairy, in keeping
with the deluding function Marjorie Swann describes: “fairies were vehicles
of non-commercial acquisition, magically bestowing gifts upon deserving
mortals” (2000: 453). The insistent combinations of traditional lore and the
easy fi x of friendly fairies (especially via Disney) suggest “this traditional
association of fairies and economic exchange, but also reveal a heightened
sense of disjunction between the rural household economy assumed by folk-
lore and the dynamics of a developing urban market society” (453–454).
Disney’s Brer Rabbit tells the good (white) fairy, “The biggest concern I has
is a food supply!” (“Cornucopia” 1968: 89). When she gives him a magic
cornucopia, rather than hoarding “he hustles about replenishin’ the raided
pantries of all his neighbors,” who exclaim, “Thanks to Brer Rabbit, we
won’t starve now!” (90).
But authentic Brer Rabbit tales have a far more complicated morality.
Though, as Ashleigh Harris argues, this trickster “maintains moral integ-
rity throughout the story,” it is not, as she suggests, so easy to see him as
being forced to steal—his (a)morality is just one of many possible responses
to an unjust system of economic and gastronomic oppression. In many ver-
sions Brer Rabbit chooses not to help his fellow critters dig a well to remedy
the water famine: “they decided to dig a well, and everybody said he would
help—all except the rabbit, who always was a lazy little rascal, and he
said he wouldn’t dig” (Newman 1979: 109). In fact, the Tar Baby is often
constructed as a device to punish the rabbit for his failure to contribute to
the community welfare (not only does he fail to help, he steals water from
their well once it’s constructed). Brer Rabbit’s punishment is appropriate
to the eat-or-be-eaten scenario: “So they put the rabbit into the cupboard
and they fed him pie and cake and sugar, everything that was good; and by
and by he got just as fat as butter” (114). As in “Hansel and Gretel,” the
hungry is fed to be fattened up for eating but outsmarts his captors. The
Molasses 123
moral message here is not that he’s forced to steal so much as that his pri-
oritizing of self-preservation over altruism succeeds. Dr. Trefusis explains
this trickster morality to Octavian in The Astonishing Life of Octavian
Nothing: “Altruism . . . is the kind of pie best eaten with a lot of gravy and
little inspection of the kind of kidney it’s stuffed with” (Anderson 2008:
101). In fact, if we look at the motivations of Disney’s seemingly idealized
Brer Rabbit, with a “little inspection” we can see that he generously shared
the fruits of his cornucopia so that his “nocturnal neighbors” would not
interrupt his sleep for “midnight munchin’.”
The growing pains of primary accumulation affect the poor the most,
especially in rigidly creating cultures of hunger accompanied by compensa-

tory denial. Raymond Williams writes
A sanctity of property has to co-exist with violently changing property

relations, and an ideal of charity with the harshness of labour relations
in both the new and old modes. This is [a] source of the idea of an or-
dered and happier past set against the disturbance and disorder of the
present. An idealization, based on a temporary situation and on a deep
desire for stability, served to cover and to evade the actual and bitter
contradictions of the time. (1973: 45)
Both this change and desire for stability can be challenged and affected
through foods, as Massimo Montanari explains of medieval feudal lords
who “controlled the nexus of the economy and production of food” and
peasant “protests happened, in particular, when lordly prerogatives tended
to exclude collective use of forest privileges by reserving hunting and graz-
ing rights for the nobility” (2006: 24). Silvia Federici has explained that
“the transition to capitalism inaugurated a long period of starvation for
workers in Europe” in the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries, so that the
struggle for food was fought by other means, such as poaching, steal-
ing from one’s neighbors’ fields or homes, and assaults on the houses
of the rich. . . . But the main weapons available to the poor in their
struggle for survival were their own famished bodies, as in times of
famine hordes of vagabonds and beggars surrounded the better off,
half-dead of hunger and disease, grabbing their arms, exposing their
wounds to them and, forcing them to live in a state of constant fear at
the prospect of both contamination and revolt. (2004: 80, 81)
Thus A. L. Morton would claim that “fantastic as its form may have been,
Cokaygne does anticipate some of the most fundamental conceptions of
modern socialism” (1968: 43). The escape from oppressive hierarchy, the
threat of hunger, the looming toil without direct reward—these ideals are
a direct critique of the surprisingly non-progressive side effects of capitalist
modernization. Federici explains:
Land privatization20 and the commercialization of agriculture did not
increase the food supply available to the common people, though more
food was made available for the market and for export. For workers they
inaugurated two centuries of starvation, in the same way as today, even
in the most fertile areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, malnutrition
is rampant due to the destruction of communal land-tenure. (2004: 70)
In fact, the conditions that prompted the compensation of Cockaigne and

tested Hansel and Gretel resemble those that tormented enslaved Africans
on U.S. soil. In contrast, Cockaigne, Diddy-Wah-Diddy, and gastronomic
utopias for children remain. A. L. Morton reminds us, “Government and

private property was considered to have been the inevitable result of the
Fall and of man’s sinful state” (1968: 27).
A similar transition from communalism to private property (that is inversely
disguised by Disney) is admitted into children’s literature through legends of
Robin Hood or even Roald Dahl’s Danny Champion of the World (1975), in
which Danny and his father poach Mr. Hazell’s pheasants—communally jus-
tified by the victim’s greed and their poverty—but such awareness is notably
unrepresented in Cockaigne. Herman Pleij argues that “[t]he absence of pri-
vate property and the acceptance of communally owned possessions” suggest
that Cockaigne is not a utopia: “In utopias . . . new laws are intended to call a
halt to inequality,” but in Cockaigne, they aren’t even necessary (2001: 294).
In “Cornucopia,” Disney’s Brer Rabbit submits to the needs of his community
by sharing, but the folkloric rabbit would do no such thing—outsmarting oth-
ers, even stealing from them when necessary, means survival.
What interests me most about the Tar Baby stories, however, is the
nature of the lure that temporarily captures the clever trickster. Brer Rab-
bit is rarely tricked when stealing food, yet the tar trap fools him. In
medieval and early modern tales, tar often signified and branded punish-
ment, as in the Grimms version of “The Three Fairies” entitled “Mother
Holle,” in which the ugly, lazy (and so clearly punishable) daughter fails
the fairies’ tests of character and so “a big kettle of pitch came pouring
down over her instead of gold. . . . The lazy maiden went home covered
with pitch,” which “did not come off the maiden and remained on her as
long as she lived” (Zipes 2003: 574).
Andrew Warnes has explained (and Toni Morrison has demonstrated
in her novel Tar Baby) that although the sticky substance that traps Brer
Rabbit is literally tar, its connotative connection with molasses has been
established, especially in African-American and children’s literature. 21
On a basic level of phrasing, molasses usually signifies trouble, as in the
phrase used by Harris’s Uncle Remus in “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story”:
“Right dar’s whar he broke his merlasses jug,” meaning, this is the pivotal
moment at which Brer Rabbit is stuck, caught (1982: 58). Carl Sandburg
utilizes this association in his nonsense cautionary tale from the Roota-
baga Stories (1922) called “Three Boys with Jugs of Molasses and Secret
Molasses 125
Ambitions,” in which each gets caught in the spill of a molasses jug that
breaks (86). In Julie Baker’s children’s novel set in a mining town in West
Virginia called Up Molasses Mountain (2002), Grandma uses molasses to
indicate trouble and sorrow: “Overcoming heartache is sort of like climb-
ing a mountain of molasses. Sometimes you feel stuck there, with the
darkness surrounding you, tugging at your feet and pulling you down”
(125). Even in the Candy Land game, the Molasses Swamp traps a player
“stuck until a blue card is drawn” (while all of the other sweet stops are
attractive and non-threatening).
As far as food-lore is concerned, molasses appears to be one of the most
prominent and multifaceted symbols of Southern, poor, and especially

African-American culinary subcultures. Kathy L. May’s picture book,
Molasses Man (2000), demonstrates the centrality of sorghum molasses
to Southern culinary cultures, rural communities, and one Afro-Ameri-
can family in particular. A boy admires the molasses his grandfather, the
“Molasses Man,” makes and sells, even implicitly identifying with the
molasses racially: “It’s darker than honey, brown as the earth, brown like
my skin.” There is nothing new, but certainly something direct, about this
identification. Consider Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Little Brown Baby,” who
is lovingly described by his father:
Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes, . . .

What you been doin’, suh—makin’ san’ pies?
Look at dat bib—you’s es du’ty ez me.
Look at dat mouf—dat’s merlasses I bet; . . .
Bees gwine to ketch you an’ eat you up yit,
Bein’ so sticky an sweet—goodness lan’s!
The racial identification with foods is well known in the adage “the blacker
the berry, the sweeter the juice,” but also by symbolic internalizations of
the maxim, “you are what you eat.” Both are repeatedly applied in Joyce
Carol Thomas’s picture book, The Blacker the Berry: Poems (2008), in
which children’s skin tones are glowingly illustrated and versed in flavors
of honey, fruits, brown biscuit, and toast. The most familiar included (and
celebrated here) is the idea that “Coffee Will Make You Black” (I’ve heard
Indian students express the same idea with tea).22 On a literal level, black-
strap molasses is related to “blackness,” just as dark foods are used to
analogize one’s degree of ethnic identification or marking. In Wallace Thur-
man’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), Emma Lou Morgan23 is described by
lighter Harlemites as “dark meat” (69, 138), and in a description that fore-
informs some of the following examples, Thurman emphasizes the surface
artificiality of racialism:
Not that she minded being black, being a Negro necessitated having a
colored skin, but she did mind being too black. She couldn’t comprehend
the cruelty of the natal attenders who had allowed her to be dipped, as
it were, in indigo ink 24 when there were so many more pleasing colors
on nature’s palette. (21)
The flip side, bathing in or drinking milk to become white, is ritually prac-
ticed by Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Such textual moments remind us that race itself is a construction, and
an often oppressive one. In Incognegro (2008), Mat Johnson and graphic
artist Warren Pleece develop an elaborate plot of strategic passing:
That’s one thing that most of us know that most white folks don’t.
That race doesn’t really exist. . . . race is just a bunch of rules meant to
keep us on the bottom. Race is a strategy. The rest is just people acting,
playing roles.
What Corona Sharp has said of puppet characters applies to socially con-
structed identity as well: on a “metaphoric level, man can be seen as an
imitation of a puppet, namely his public mask, or it is constructed for
him by others” (1988: 28). Within historically white-dominated culture,
race becomes a mask, but unlike the power-rituals imitated by puppets,
the power enacted in imposing masks cannot be so easily reduced to
object-relations. As Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “The mask never becomes
an object among other objects” (1984: 40). Unlike Pinocchio, who has to
shed his old “body” to become real to himself and others, race becomes
constructed not only as a mask involuntarily placed on a social subject
but as a commodity itself—this is especially clear in the case of black-
face, prominent in the nineteenth century. Eric Lott writes that “many
minstrel performers began their careers in the circus, perhaps even devel-
oping American blackface out of clowning (whose mask in any case is
clearly indebted to blackface)”25 (1993: 24–25). Janet Davis accounts for
the importance of the travelling circus in the development of burgeoning
child culture: “The diversity of the audience at the turn-of-the-century
circus was amplified by the presence of children. 26 This development was
especially striking because the antebellum circus had been primarily an
adult entertainment” (2002: 34–35).
Aside from masks and symbolic ingestion, however, there are more direct,
material reasons for the significance of molasses in African-American lore.
The association of poor and Southern, especially African-American, cui-
sine with molasses comes, like soul food, from its status as a cheap and
undesirable cast-off from richer (often white) cuisine—molasses is a by-
product from making white sugar.27 Even so, as Andrew Warnes points out,
“cheap foods are not necessarily inferior foods. Rather, they have merely
been rejected by the group holding the greatest purchasing power” (2004:
155). The cultural dimension to food valuation is classically demonstrated
in the case of molasses, for which exchange value (culturally defi ned within
Molasses 127
a racist market) is prioritized over use (nutritional) value as part of the
legacy of racial capitalism. As Cedric Robinson has explained, “The devel-
opment, organization and expansion of capitalist society pursued essen-
tially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then,
it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social
structures emergent from capitalism 28” (1983: 1–2). Of the many cultural
factors determining exchange value is the concept of race; African slaves
became integral to Western development at a time when the by-product
from refining sugar was in surplus and many of its uses stigmatized or not
widely known:
Molasses in the eighteenth century had an economic importance to

the sugar industry which has since disappeared in the face of techno-
logical improvements in the sugar refi ning process. Modern refi ning
methods produce eight to eleven parts of sugar to one part of molas-
ses . . . The manufacture of molasses for kitchen use and rum is now
a specialized industry. Under eighteenth-century refining methods, on
the other hand, as much as three parts molasses was produced to four
parts sugar, and on average it was estimated that the ratio of molasses
to sugar was about one to two. . . . Thus profitable disposal of the mo-
lasses was a major consideration for eighteenth-century sugar planters.
(Ostrander 1956: 77)
One solution (less wasteful at least than dumping millions of gallons per
year as the French sugar colonies resorted to29), was to push it off on the
hungry and literally captive market of slaves. Wayne Curtis explains: “In
the mid-seventeenth century, molasses was a nuisance: It was too bulky to
ship economically, and there was no demand for it anyway. Some could be
mixed with grain and fodder to feed the cows and pigs, and some could be
fed to slaves to supplement their meager diets,” adding the particular that
slaves on sugar plantations in the West Indies were “given about a gallon
and a half of molasses each year, although that ration was gradually elimi-
nated as molasses became more valuable for export and distillation” into
rum (2006: 25, 124).
Enslaved laborers throughout the Southern colonies received molasses
as a regular part of their food rations. Frederick Douglass Opie explains
that “[m]olasses, like cornbread, was considered by most to be among
the ‘roughest of food,’ suitable for slaves and poor whites,” for whom the
three Ms—molasses, (corn)meal, and (hog)meat—made up the dietary
staples (2008: 84). These staples were not culturally valued but would
do as fuel (Opie reports that some have called blackstrap molasses “mule
blood”). In her Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet A. Jacobs tells how “[l]ittle
attention was paid to the slaves’ meals in Dr. Flint’s house. If they could
catch a bit of food while it was going, well and good” (2000: 10). Dur-
ing the distribution of rations, she witnessed “a very old slave, who had
faithfully served the Flint family through three generations. When he
hobbled up to get his bit of meat, the mistress said he was too old to have
any allowance; that when niggers were too old to work, they ought to be
fed on grass. Poor old man! He suffered much before he found rest in the
grave” (93).
Frederick Douglass frequently mentions being manipulated through his
hunger, as when he agrees to work for a “nigger-breaker” because “I was sure
of getting enough to eat, which is not the smallest consideration to a hungry
man”30 (1963: 59). In Richard Wright’s Black Boy, hunger is an explicit means
of control, division, and degradation. In his orphanage, “just before bed each
night we were given a slice of bread smeared with molasses. The children were
silent, hostile, vindictive, continuously complaining of hunger. There was an
overall atmosphere of nervousness and intrigue, of children telling tales upon
others, of children being deprived of food to punish them” (2005: 29). Later
the young Wright is hired in a white family’s home, where the mistress of the
house feeds him “a plate of thick, black molasses and a hunk of white bread.
. . . Would I get no more than this? They had eggs, bacon, coffee . . . I picked up
the bread and tried to break it: it was stale and hard. . . . I lifted the plate and
brought it to my lips and saw floating on the surface of the black liquid green
and white bits of mold. . . . The woman had assaulted my ego” (147). The
coarse syrup was used to degrade and keep the poor and black in their place,
in this example requiring no eating utensils and sufficing as “mule blood” and
reifying the white supremacist view of primitive others.31
Ironically, molasses is nutritionally superior to other “fuels”; both sugar-
cane molasses and sorghum molasses have a slightly lower glycemic index
than granulated sugar and contain essential minerals (and antioxidants)
that it does not. As Frederick Douglass Opie puts it,
Although upper-class whites in colonial America considered molasses

fit only for slaves and preferred refi ned sugar for themselves, the irony
is that sugar is full of empty calories while molasses is rich in minerals
and vitamins. . . . blackstrap molasses provides more iron for fewer
calories than red meat—and it is fat-free. (2008: 85)
Not only were slaves rationed the nutritionally valuable product from the
brutal West Indies, they benefited from its healing properties:
In many parts of the South, people without access to affordable medi-

cal care did what they could on their own to maintain their health and
cure ailments. . . . some apparently learned from Native American that
molasses, in addition to the vitamins and minerals it provides had other
medicinal qualities. (Opie 2008: 93)
With its magnesium, calcium, and potassium, molasses is said to strengthen

bones, and was routinely used in warm water for cough and colds.
Molasses 129
Molasses infuses M. T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian
Nothing with historically accurate flavor, demonstrating just how John
Adams could have quipped, “I know not why we should blush to confess
that molasses were an essential ingredient to American independence” (qtd.
in Curtis 2006: 92). Anderson’s fictional account of the American Revolu-
tion is as well researched as it is written. Take, for example, the detail of
everyday behaviors: “near us, soldiers played a game, measuring out seeds
in divots in the dirt, as others around them squatted and offered advice . . .
chewing upon sticks, drinking fl ip” (2008: 409). Flip, a drink with molas-
ses and its liquor when fermented and distilled, rum, was
perhaps the most famous early American rum drink. . . . The fi rst ref-
erences crop up around 1690. . . . After two decades, flip’s popularity
bordered on a mania and would remain in demand for more than a
century.32 (Curtis 2006: 83)
Ken Albala’s analysis of pancakes helps to explain flip as the etymological

source for John Henry’s flitterjacks:
the practice of making pancakes out of ‘flip,’ which is a mug of beer

with molasses and a glass of rum, heated with a hot poker until it
foams, then thickened with flour (showing a possible connection to
flip-jacks or flapjacks). (2008: 40)
Flip would become “a symbol of the new order displacing the old in the colo-
nies” (Curtis 2006: 68). For colonists and rebels, rum lubricated the shift:
“Rum not only appealed to the colonists’ love of speedy inebriation, but also
brought a measure of status and suggested the first steps toward cultural
independence. It also marked an increasing independence from the old order”
(Curtis 2006: 85). Slave labor made an overexpensive enterprise affordable
and productive to nations willing to enslave others. And when sugar-refining
methods improved, rather than improving conditions for workers, sugar col-
onists became competitive. In 1733, England attempted legislation to enforce
their own monopoly in the North American colonies, but
The Molasses Act remained generally unenforced and was therefore

tolerated; the Sugar Act [a modified version of the Molasses Act but
passed in 1764] was to some extent enforced, and it drove the colonial
merchants to united defiance of British rule in the fi rst major imperial
crisis of the pre-Revolutionary era.33 (Ostrander 1956: 77)
The Molasses Act was so important to motivating the American Revolu-

tion that Albert Southwick describes it as “if not quite the dress rehearsal
to the main performance, [it] was the next thing to it” (Southwick 1951:
389). To slaves, however, molasses and rum could represent life and death,
control or freedom. Frederick Douglass reports how liberally slaves were
supplied with liquor (as opposed to food): “allowing the slaves to equate
freedom with an incapacitating hangover” (paraphrased in Curtis 2006:
125). Likewise, Octavian reports that he and the other black soldiers “have
a head-ache from double rations of rum and half-rations of beef” (2008:
268). Like molasses, rum can be used to delay hunger, or in extreme cases,
dilute the rebellious spirit. Caught in a cycle of production as nefarious as
the triangle trade, “Slaves made the rum, and rum made the slaves” (Curtis
2006: 123). Wayne Curtis explains,
If not for slavery, sugar might have been a minor economic footnote
in the rise of North America. . . . Without the slaves, sugar would not
have been produced in such heroic quantities; and without the molasses
from the sugar, rum would not have become such a vital instrument of
exchange between the colonies and Africa. (2006: 123)
When sugar-refi ning techniques improved, much molasses was redi-

rected to the rum industry34 and the slave trade slowed, surplus molasses
decreased and cooking sorghum molasses in home enterprises became
widespread in its place. But the art of cooking homemade sorghum
molasses declined in the twentieth century, as Ben Austin explains,
“Around the turn of the century over 16 million gallons of molasses
were produced in the United States. By 1949, production had declined
to about 6 million gallons” (1992: 105–106). However, the popularity of
all types of molasses in U.S. culinary culture at large, for nutritional rea-
sons, increased while home production was dying out (its exchange value
boosted by demand). Warren J. Belasco explains this change in popular-
ity as a result of racialized discourse during the health-food trends of the
1960s and 1970s:
Whiteness meant Wonder Bread, White Tower, Cool Whip, Minute

Rice, instant mashed potatoes, peeled apples, white tornadoes, white
coats, white collars, white wash, White House, white racism. Brown
meant whole wheat bread, unhulled rice, turbinado sugar, wildflower
honey, unsulfured molasses, soy sauce, peasant yams, “black is beauti-
ful.” (1989: 48)
There is even, of course, a Brer Rabbit brand of unsulfured molasses.

Andrew Warnes believes that the cultivation and higher cultural valuation
of soul food today is an example of subversive survival, not unlike the
clever strategies of Brer Rabbit: “the fruition of the brier, like a prefer-
ence for molasses, undercuts America’s white supremacist superstructure
with permutations of the course by which black hunger can be overcome”
(2004: 163). Opie writes of this transition:
Molasses 131
Although some uses of molasses—to sop with cornbread, or as a tonic—
are still stigmatized, the exigencies of wartime sugar-rationing and the
talents of African-American cooks eventually reintroduced molasses
to the diets of upper- and middle-class white southerners. . . . And so
humble a liquid serves to illustrate an important process of cultural dif-
fusion in which enslaved Africans not only adapted to the life imposed
on them by their masters, but influenced their masters’ lifestyle as well.
(2008: 94)
One pervasive and sometimes culturally neutral use of finer-grade molas-

ses (from earlier in the refi ning process and so lighter in color, higher in
sugar content) is on pancakes, 35 which I would be remiss to overlook in this
context. Related references in picture books are too many to recount here,
but the most relevant to this chapter might be the pancake roofs in Cock-
aigne and its intertexts and the pancake supper in The Story of Little Black
Sambo (1898). Ken Albala has written a history of the pancake, in which
he explains its prevalence in kid culture:
pancakes are one of the fi rst foods given to children after they are
weaned from pap and mush and thus are indelibly association with
childhood. . . . Not surprisingly they also feature prominently in chil-
dren’s books. Among the foods mentioned by children’s authors, none
is more pervasive than pancakes. (2008: 48)
Pancakes make the perfect comfort food,
warm and fresh and preferably laboured over by a loved one. . . . This
is how the witch in Hansel and Gretel is able to lure the children into
her house: not only is the roof made of cake and the windows of sugar,
but she feeds them milk and pancakes, and only after gaining their
trust by cooking for them, does she lock up Hansel and reveal her plan
to eat the children. (2008: 49)
The association of blackface with pancake products (self-rising flour, syrup)

was commercially inspired at the turn of the century by minstrel shows and
the happy, nurturing slave stereotype like that in Little Black Sambo, where
the title character eats 169 flapjacks dripping with ghee, served to him by
Mumbo donning a head-kerchief. Tracy Morgan satirized these associations
and Disney’s depiction of the blackface Uncle Remus (from Song of the South)
with his Saturday Night Live sketch advertising “Uncle Jemima’s Pure Mash
Liquor”: “Black folk aren’t exactly swellin’ up with pride on account of you
flippin’ flapjacks,” he imagines saying to his wife, “the pancake lady.”
On a darker level, molasses more often foreshadows trouble and reflects
an undeniable past culture of hunger. Andrew Warnes reports how Booker
T. Washington “looked forward to the distribution of molasses ‘once a
week from the big house’” (2004: 100), and Richard Wright’s orphanage
diet consisted of morning mush and a nightly “slice of bread smeared with
molasses” (2005: 94). Opie reports that “Louis Armstrong recalled living
for six months on a ‘supper of black molasses and a big hunk of bread’ at
the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys in New Orleans” (2008: 89). The sig-
nificance of this diet (as Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy, originally
titled American Hunger, confi rms throughout), Warnes argues, is that “the
racialized relationship between white sugar and brown molasses” is not
simply symbolic (2004: 100). As I’ve noted, molasses is the cheaper by-
product of white sugar, so there are factors of class accessibility behind this
identification too.
More importantly, “molasses is bound up with the economic histories
of U.S. and Caribbean slavery—as deeply steeped in these histories as cot-
ton and tobacco” (Warnes 2004: 99). Henry Hobhouse writes of the sugar
industry, “Sugar remains one of the great moral mysteries,” and gives his
own account of “how an unnecessary ‘food’ became responsible for the
Africanization of the Caribbean” (2005: 57). Molasses production and
sale, in particular, are bound to the fate of African slaves in the U.S. and
the continuation of slavery itself. The “great triangular trades”—slaves
from Africa, molasses and rum from the Caribbean, guns and cloth from
Britain—“were to be the making of the northern colonies,” especially via
Boston (Southwick 1951: 390).36 This triangle of dehumanizing commerce
exists as a menacing backdrop to much literature and lore concerning the
lives of African-Americans and melts down to the fact that sweet-tooth
consumers contributed to the brutalization of innocent Africans:
The sugar addiction in 1801, wherever it existed, killed proportionately

more people than the drug trade does today. The drug trade differs, of
course, in that it kills those hooked on the product, while the sugar
trade killed mostly slaves. Sugar, then, is the most notable addiction
in history that killed not the consumer but the producer. (Hobhouse
2005: 78)
Overlooking South American fatalities bound to the trade of cocaine, and

that sugar consumers have had to deal with rotten teeth, impaired diges-
tion, nervous dependence, obesity, immunity deficiency, and inclination
to alcoholism, all as a result of sucrose dependency, Hobhouse otherwise
makes a useful point that remains relevant today: the sugar industry, and
its by-product molasses, were used to directly enable and attempt justify-
ing slavery and the brutalization of workers, in the interests of a consumer
who had no life-enhancing need for the product. Like Jared Diamond, in
his Guns, Germs, and Steel, Henry Hobhouse argues that essential charac-
teristics of certain plants enabled particular material relations to develop:
“Any crop except sugar could have been grown without slave labor” (2005:
Molasses 133
74). Once rationalized by racial capitalism, slavery and terribly exploitative
labor practices could continue in the sugar colonies of England, France,
and Spain even after sugar-refi ning technologies improved: “These Negroes
were only necessary to the agricultural economy of Spain because of sugar”
(Hobhouse 2005: 67).
M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing books highlight the additional irony
that molasses could be tied to freedom:
In the midst of a long silence, Will asked our mess whether, if we win,
the slaves down in the Sugar Isles going to be freed. No one ventured a
reply . . . he laughed without mirth and said that it was a funny name,
the Sugar Isles, because it sound so sweet. (2008: 308)
Anderson keeps the triangular trade in the foreground of his pre-revolution-

ary Boston setting with ominous references to the dangerous West Indies.
When Pro Bono is “given away as a Christmas gift” and forced south, he
tells Octavian, “I’ll be one skip closer to the West Indies. . . . Where they
don’t bother to feed a man because they don’t bother to keep him alive”
(2006: 178). Hobhouse confi rms,
Life expectation in sugar slavery even in the year before the Civil War
was only half that in other forms of field slavery, and the prospect of
working in the sugar estates, even as freemen, was not attractive to the
blacks of the Deep South. (Hobhouse 2005: 99)
Which explains why Sip, a black freeman Octavian works with in the Royal
Ethiopian company, worries that rebels will take over Boston: “They take
this city . . . Don’t bear thinking on. Jesus God. I ain’t going to be taken for
a slave and sold to the Indies” (2008: 65). A soldier in Octavian’s company
gets captured by the rebels and “sold at the foreign ports in the West Indies,
the Sugar Isles” to set an example to other escaped slaves who’ve joined the
King’s forces in exchange for manumission:
They wish to show us where we all shall be conducted: those colonies

we weep to hear named, where . . . it is far less expense to work slaves
to death and buy new, imported from Africa’s shores, than to care for
those already there. (2008: 196)
Octavian and others know of the “fields bleached with sun and hacked
cane; the scalding steam of the boiling-houses drifting through the brake;
the eternal rows of men scything in gangs” (2008: 197). He recognizes
the connection between sugar and slavery, and also constantly reminds his
readers of the hypocrisy of American independence for white enslavers who
not only profit from slave labor but promise freedom to slaves only if they
fight for American “freedom”:
As if in a vision, I saw the coasters and Guinea-men upon the ocean,
plying the waters for transmission of goods. I saw the West Indies,
where bonded men slashed at the cane, that we might eat our sugar
dainties. . . . And upon these scenes remote did rum distilleries here
depend. (2008: 500)
This is the remarkable history of molasses and slavery that forms the back-
drop of African-American folklore, slave narratives, and even fictional nar-
ratives like that of Octavian Nothing.
As a sidenote, it is at least nice to know that there was public “opposition
to sugar and slavery,” especially among the romantics, abolitionists, and

Quakers by the late eighteenth century (Hobhouse 2005: 88). Appealing
to consumer ethics, “a certain English china warehouse’s advertisement for
sugar basins in the early 1880s exploited the contemporary wave of liberal
thinking” by printing pots with the phrase “East India Sugar not made by
Slaves” (53). Consumers were encouraged to buy from the (technically) non-
enslaving East Indies instead of the known brutal enslaving West Indies: “A
Family that uses 5lb of Sugar a Week. . . . for 21 months” will “prevent the
Slavery, or Murder, of one Fellow-Creature!” (Hobhouse 2005: 53). But
even ethical consumers, especially in Europe, consumed sugar in increas-
ingly greater volume. Its addictive qualities guaranteed sales regardless of
the ethics of producers or welfare of workers.
Though it has a lower glycemic index, “like the equally calorific white
sugar from which it is separated during sugar-cane processing, molas-
ses produces an intense rush of energy that rapidly induces a craving for
more. Molasses concentrates the mind on hunger” (Warnes 2004: 99).
Despite its nutritional superiority to white sugar, molasses cannot substi-
tute proteins, though its sweetness might distract the appetite and more
easily appeal to consumers. In this way molasses both literally and figu-
ratively traps the one who touches or ingests it, which is emphasized in
literature and lore. Toni Morrison expands this rich tradition of symbol-
ism in both The Bluest Eye (1970) and Tar Baby (1981). In The Bluest
Eye, Pecola Breedlove, the tragic girl who cannot love herself and adores
the hegemonic standard of white beauty instead, drinks white milk in a
Shirley Temple cup and consumes Mary Jane candies in her efforts to con-
sume their images. The Mary Janes combine Southern fl avors of molasses
and peanuts while pushing an image of whiteness that excludes the avid
black consuming child that Pecola is, and for this reason, they make her
want them even more:
Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary
Jane, for whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in
gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean com-
fort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply
pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy
Molasses 135
is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary
Jane. (50)
Historically, particularly among the impoverished, women and children

have been nurtured on and by sugary foods, while protein is reserved more
for male providers (Mintz 1985: 149). As Andrew Warnes has suggested of
dependence upon and cravings for molasses, Sidney Mintz warns of sugar in
general, “Where the need for calories, let alone other food values, is a serious
problem, sucrose may not be a good nutritional answer (in large quantities,
I think it is a terrible one)” (1985: 192). Sugar leaves one wanting more, thus
prolonging and intensifying hunger. Toni Morrison has also used the oppres-
siveness of a sugary diet to depict racial self-hatred and desperate consumer-
ism. To twist a concept from bell hooks slightly, Pecola Breedlove is eating
the commodified white other: “The commodification of Otherness has been
so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satis-
fying than normal ways of doing and feeling” (1992: 21). Pecola tries to exist
through ingesting sweets, lured by elusive images, and so she is trapped by
her hunger (for escape, happiness, recognition, security).
Morrison shows how complicated this trap becomes in the process of
personal identification within what Shirlee Taylor Haizlip calls “Ameri-
ca’s pigmentocracy” of “intraracial colorism” (Thurman 1996: 14). In her
Tar Baby (1981), the white patriarch of the piece, Valerian, is identified so
closely with candy by his parents that they name one of their gooey prod-
ucts for him:
And just to show how much they loved and anticipated him, they
named a candy after him. Valerians. Red and white gumdrops in a
red and white box (mint-flavored, the white ones; strawberry-flavored,
the red). Valerians turned out to be a slow but real flop, although not a
painful one fi nancially for it was made from the syrup sludge left over
from their main confection. (50)
Another sweet and sticky by-product cast off by white mainstream culture,
but taken up by black consumers, as one salesman remarks: “‘Jigs buy ’em.
Maryland, Florida, Mississippi. Close to the line” (51).
If we think of a tar baby constructed from molasses, the sweet and sticky
bait metaphor demonstrating the dangers of desire and entrapment becomes
clearer. Morrison literally dips one of her characters, Jadine, in “moss-cov-
ered jelly” that “looks like oil” or “pitch,” thus making a real-live tar baby
who will attract the novel’s hero, Son (182, 184, 185). As she sinks into a
tar pit she imagines the tree she is trying to hold onto as her lover:
Don’t sweat or you’ll lose your partner, the tree. . . . Cling to your part-
ner, hang on to him and never let him go. Creep up on him a millimeter
at a time, slower than the slime and cover him like the moss. (183)
Jadine identifies closely with the sticky substance to save herself, and not
long after she emerges covered in slime, her love affair with Son begins.
Both are lured and stuck in an ideological struggle with each other over
class and racial identification. Son, a dark man from the poor, rural
South, accuses Jadine, a light-skinned black woman, of being a Tar Baby,
especially in the context of his disgust/jealously over her white, French
fiancé:
People don’t mix races; they abandon or pick them. But I want to tell you
something: if you have a white man’s baby, you have chosen to be just
another mammy only you are the real mammy ’cause you had it in your
womb and you are still taking care of white folks’ children. . . . You turn
little black babies into little white ones; you turn your men into white
men. (270)
Thus, Son accuses Jadine of wearing her “blackness” (like the Tar Baby)
as a tempting disguise to gain his trust—a sweet, sticky trap to transform
others. Eric Lott explains this as a strategy of blackface, “the black mask
offered a way to play with collective fears of a degraded and threatening
and male-Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control
over them” (1993: 25). And by identifying with Brer Rabbit, Son suggests
that he’s too smart for the trap.37
If, as Lott argues, “minstrelsy was an arena in which the efficient expro-
priation of the cultural commodity of ‘blackness’ occurred” (1993: 18),
then it is even more pertinent to acknowledge, as Katherine Capshaw Smith
does, that the “child’s body becomes the site on which the character of
the new black identity can be staged” (2006: 799). The complex symbolic
association of molasses with darker skin and “blacker” identities is appro-
priated for a mainstream audience of children when used, as by Winsor
McCay in Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1914), for a comic effect that
resorts to racist stylization through the primitive Imp, (Irish?) immigrant
clown Flip, and even his white centerpiece Nemo. In a strip from August 2,
1908, Nemo and Flip take a dip in a lake only to fi nd themselves covered
with molasses, suspiciously just enough for a minstrel’s blackface—their
lips are accentuated with white and red outlining (see Figure 4.3). Their
white bodies, covered in molasses, become pickaninnies, effacing all social
critiques implicit in the stories and symbolism they appropriate.
Winsor McCay worked on the vaudeville circuit as a speed artist, so he
was quite familiar with the figurations he appropriated for his strip. Janet
M. Davis writes that such marginalized and marginalizing acts were criti-
cal in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century development
of leisure culture (analyzed by Thorstein Veblen; Bill Brown): “Like vaude-
ville, the chain store, the ‘cheap nickel dump,’ and the amusement park, the
circus helped consolidate a shared national leisure culture at the turn of the
century” (2002: 14). This leisure culture did more than provide hobbies and
Molasses 137
Figure 4.3 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, August 2, 1908.
pleasure spaces, it reinforced social norms. Lott concludes that even when
black (as opposed to white) performers in blackface were subversively
playing for some control, it is clear that black culture was frankly on
display in the North as well as the South, and that such display adhered
to a commodified logic whose roots inevitably lay in slavery and whose
outcome was eventually the minstrel show. (1993: 43)
A little blackface cannot cover up the history of privation and manipula-

tion reflected in folklore that is still relevant today. As Michael Symons
says, “fantasies do not satisfy real bellies” (2000: 341). During Nemo’s
day, “Reports [of malnutrition] would soar as high as 53% for African-
American children in Mississippi” (Lovett 2005: 806). Sharman Apt
Russell reports that a century later, “over 30 million people—one in ten
Americans—live in what is called food insecure households. Twelve mil-
lion of these are children. One in four people in line at a soup kitchen
is a child” (2005: 34). In 2007, 22.2 percent of Black households were
reported as “food insecure” or hungry (Second Harvest 2009). Mike
Males has written extensively on the descent of American children, espe-
cially those of color, to the bottom of a widening age gap of poverty,
making the “link between young age and nonwhite race” visible: “Where
race, ethnicity, and gender were central to past confl icts, today young age
has become a new factor” (1996: 11, 10). The common cause is, of course,
socially imposed poverty, because just as “in past decades, race remains
a surrogate for poverty,” childhood is materially marginalized and liter-
ally devalued by public policy, sentimental protectionism, and decreased
autonomy (Males 1996: 11).
Earlier in this chapter I quoted Herman Pleij making a distinction between
the traditions of Cockaigne and utopias: “Cockaigne, no matter how unreal,
conjured up such an alluring world that the necessity of dreaming was fur-
ther stimulated rather than put in perspective” (2001: 6). Like molasses,
compensatory fantasies increase desire while temporarily seeming to sate,
offering an alluring excuse for inaction, but “Utopias propose the imple-
mentation of another structure to remedy evils that Cockaigne compensates
for temporarily by supplying their opposite” (Pleij 2001: 294). Where Cock-
aigne and Diddy-Wah-Diddy simply imagine eliminated want and conflict,
keeping a communal food supply impossibly infinite and delicious, Brer
Rabbit’s world (except as Disney portrays it in “Cornucopia”) leaves struc-
tures of a real and unjust world intact, suggesting possible ways (though
not ideal) of at least challenging greater evils through “The presentation of
a topsy-turvy world, whether or not depicted alongside the ideal world. . . .
The objective was invariably to point a stern finger at those thought respon-
sible for the deterioration of everyday life” (Pleij 2001: 357).
The “topsy-turvy world,” a common variation on Cockaigne, appears as
an epigraph to Octavian Nothing’s diary:
If Buttercups buzzed after the Bee,

If Boats were on Land, and Churches on Sea,
If Ponies rode Men, and the Grass ate the Cow,
Then All of the World would be turned upside down,
Molasses 139
Down, derry down.
Then All of the World would be turned upside down. (2008: 299)
Ritual and fictional inversions of status keep power discrepancies at the

forefront of our awareness. Diddy-Wah-Diddy might be the only place
where pigs fly, but the perennial reproduction of such images, folk sayings,
and even BBQ joints invoking the theme can sharpen our awareness of
where our own world falls short.
Much can be learned from Brer Rabbit and the symbolism of molas-
ses, not just as concerns the historical gustatory entrapment of poor black
Americans, but of all children, especially hungry ones or those whose crav-
ings can be manipulated. Nancy Scheper-Hughes writes, “A hungry body
exists as a potent critique of the society in which it exists” (1992: 174). Tar
Baby cautions that a hungry body is vulnerable to cultural manipulation,
but Brer Rabbit represents the hope that resistance is also possible if we
recognize that our appetites are forged within biasing cultural environ-
ments (racial capitalism, empire) and then listen for the rumblings of our
bodies instead. He also models wise independence from a system, even a
community, that ultimately cannot be counted on to administer for the
good of all:
World hunger has been blamed on overpopulation, the climate and

“primitive technology,” when the causes can be found within distor-
tions imposed by affluent nations. The more fi nely we share tasks, the
more completely we become dependent for our food—that is, the more
completely we become consumers. (Symons 2000: 337)
Brer Rabbit demonstrates a refreshingly unapologetic protest in his skepti-

cal self-sufficiency.38
5 Muscle and Greens
Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin,
The Physiology of Taste,
or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, 1825
I yam what I yam and that’s what I yam.

Popeye, E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre, November 6, 1929
In a description of early medicinal uses of sugar, Tim Richardson makes an

apt comparison:
References to sweets and to various forms of solid and liquid sugar oc-
cur in all kinds of ancient Sanskrit works. In medical treatises, sugar
consumption is linked with digestion and increased semen production.
. . . It has an effect like spinach on Popeye. (2002: 72)
Yet an important difference is: “We instinctively prefer . . . sweetness to

bitterness, sex to spinach” (46). In this chapter I’ll consider the unlikely
shift in Popeye comic strips to spinach over sweets, connecting the shift
fi rst to pediatric nutritional reform, then again to commercializing forces.
Though Popeye and his creator Elzie Segar may have been commodified
by Max Fleischer and his cartoon versions, canned spinach producers and
distributors, Popeye is an advocate of healthful resistance who takes on
labor-diminishing machines. His humble heroism offers much-needed
comic relief to the study of folklures.
To fi rst set a context for my analysis, one might consider Popeye’s rela-
tionship to other virile vegetarians like the Jolly Green Giant, who “is
clearly identifiable as a twentieth-century holdover of the numerous Euro-
pean fertility symbols or spirits of vegetation” (Sullenberger 1974: 54). He
also can be seen at any grocery store as the front man selling green stuffs.
Early American folk heroes comprise an important context for Popeye’s
creation. Scott Reynolds Nelson describes the important precedence set by
African American trickster-figures:
In slavery days, stories and songs were much more heavily coded. Thus
Brer Rabbit was the trickster who outsmarted other animals, and John
[the conqueror] tales told of a slave who lied, cheated, and stole from
Muscle and Greens 141
his master but almost always fooled him. After slavery, as the historian
Lawrence Levine has shown, stories of physically powerful, sometimes
desperate men became common currency. (2008: 112)
But Popeye also resembles the American fakelegends Paul Bunyan and
Johnny Appleseed, both “profitable publishing formulas—fanciful whim-
sies about a giant logger, scrapbooks of folksy Americana—[that] responded
to romantic-nationalist tendencies in the American ethos after World War
I” (Dorson 1976: 5). In the fi fties, Iona and Peter Opie recorded varied
playground songs on Popeye, such as “I’m Popeye the sailor man, / I eat
onions and scallions / To fight the Italians, / I’m Popeye the sailor man”
(2001: 112). He, like Rapunzel, is about the power of iron-strong greens.
He is also a nationalist icon shaped from decades of progressive politics and
economic depression—our scrappy but still-fighting man.
Despite losses in agency and well-informed choice, during the shift from
industrial to consumer capitalism, the U.S. gained in dietary prosperity and
variety. Harvey Levenstein describes a great change in average American
diets from the beginning to the end of the Progressive era: “The American of
1928 ate less in terms of quantity (about 5 percent fewer calories per capita),
but consumed more or a wider variety of nutrients than the American of
1890. He ate much more fruit, especially citrus fruits, and vegetables, par-
ticularly green ones, considerably more milk and cheese, and less cereals.
. . . Even beef consumption fell precipitously, from 72.4 pounds per capita
in 1899 to 55.3 pounds in 1930” (1988: 194). I will look at both causes and
cultural reflections of these dietary changes as represented in popular culture
by Popeye, the sailor, spinach-eater, and boxer, who embodies anxieties and
ideals of the Progressive era: for better health through nutrition, for mastery
over mechanization, and for individual resistance to conformist norms.
During the Progressive era, the American ideal of masculinity was both
lean and powerful, sometimes as a result of vegetarianism, or even fasting
(Griffith 2000). But the gendered foodlives we still know dominated then,
as Jeffery Sobal explains, “In the U.S. and many other Western post-indus-
trial societies, men’s foods are considered masculine and typically include
beef (especially steak), hamburgers, potatoes, and beer, while women’s
foods are considered feminine and often include salads, pasta, yogurt, fruit,
and chocolate” (2005: 137). The gendering of diets has been explained by
anthropologists and feminists as a justifying script for divided labor: “A
‘strong man’ script offers a model of masculine strength and power, where
physical might and virility are enhanced by eating meat to gain protein.
This represents a dominant hegemonic script in contemporary Western
societies” (Sobal 2005: 146). Massimo Montanari writes that historically,
“Voracious appetite was linked to a physical and muscular concept of
power” because “meat is endowed with the power to nourish the body, to
harden its muscles, and to confer upon the warrior both strength and the
legitimacy of his power to lead” (116).
However, vegetarian movements like that of Amos Bronson and William
Alcott, and even more so reduction dieters from John Harvey Kellogg to
Brenarr Macfadden (see Griffith) complicated foodlives by debunking gen-
der-limited diets through transgendered use and individual choice: “Veg-
etarianism provides an identity that transgresses masculinity in Western
societies, with the wholesale rejection of the male icon of meat-eater asso-
ciated with women’s, wimpy, or even gay identities” (Sobal 2005: 141). In
fact, Sobal remarks that diets themselves may have changed because gender
roles were already loosening, allowing for more complicated combinations
of formerly dichotomized “masculine” and “feminine” scripts:
Some authors suggest that meat intake is decreasing and becoming less
important in Western societies.1 This may be due to the rise in feminine
aspects of eating, increasing multiplicity of masculinities available in
contemporary society, or alternative ways for men to express power.
(Sobal 2005: 149)
At the intersection of all these changes stands Popeye, a complex repre-

sentative of manliness at a time when some felt that manhood was threat-
ened, others liberated, from rigid and artificial roles. From his entrance
onto the Thimble Theatre stage in 1929, Popeye resisted essentializing
and contradictory expectations for his class and sex. Susan Bordo’s appli-
cation of psychologist Gregory Bateson’s concept of the “double bind”
applies aptly: “we’ve created numerous fi ctional heroes who successfully
embody both requirements, who have sexual charisma of an untamed
beast and are unbeatable in battle, but are intelligent, erudite, and gentle
with women” (1999: 242). Popeye is defi nitely the latter of the three, and
what he lacks in education he makes up for with charming, simple-headed
innocence. He is both everyman and superman at once: manipulated by
social, hegemonic forces (he is empowered by spinach but becomes a
salesman for the spinach industry), while at the same time engaged in
constant resistance to those in his way (he’s not always right but always
fighting). He represents anger and acting it out almost thoughtlessly so it
doesn’t turn to rage—thus his appeal to a Depression-era audience and
especially children. 2
As Bill Blackbeard explains, Popeye’s appeal seems to be his everyman
quality, not a hyper-masculinized strength:
The one-eyed sailor’s super heroics, whether involving his invulner-

ability to death or his super strength, were surprisingly few and far
between. His superhuman powers became an established part of his
character, but were not emphasized. Of far greater interest to Segar
and to most of his readers was Popeye’s scrappiness and cheerful
contempt for most social conventions, including “correck” speech.
(1970: 100)
And yet Popeye started out as a more conventionally masculine character
than is often recollected—though always scrappy, he wasn’t always such
a counter-gendered didactic vegetarian; in fact, in his fi rst three years in
Thimble Theatre, Popeye is seen eating meat (hamburgers, especially) more
often than spinach (see Figure 5.1). One strip from 1930 demonstrates
his fighting spirit in a stereotypically manly way when, riddled with bul-
let wounds, Popeye demands a “HUNK OF BEEF” instead of “ζ?!%=!¡!
SOUP” from his hospital bed (see Figure 5.2). Not until two years later
(and three years after his fi rst appearance on the Thimble Theatre stage)
does Popeye fi rst show a taste for spinach thanks to his remorse over acci-
dentally killing and slaughtering the ranch dairy cow. Massimo Montanari
explains that this step allies Popeye more with the poor: “The symbolic
importance of renouncing meat is reflected in the monk’s preference for
‘poor people’s food,’ borrowed from the peasant world as a sign of spiritual
humility: greens, vegetables, grains” (125). But why choose spinach? Why
does Popeye not only suddenly like a vegetable diet, but fi nd strength in one
of the least popular3 vegetables? The most obvious answers can be found
in nutritional history.
Figure 5.1 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., February 26,
1932.
Figure 5.2 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., October 25,
1930.
Nutrition historians cite the fi nal decades of the Progressive era as “the
Great Malnutrition Scare” and “the First Nutrition Crisis” (Levenstein
1988; Lovett 2005). Early efforts to combat child malnutrition were holis-
tic but mercenary:
the fight against malnutrition was motivated more by the effects of

overwhelming urban poverty, especially on children. The goal was not
disease prevention as much as raising the standard of living, the Ameri-
canization of immigrants, and the ability to recruit physically fit young
men for the U.S. military. (Lovett 2005: 804)
And these models of social reform already involved propaganda that would
pave the way for later commercial appeals:
a major nutrition education program sponsored by the Commonwealth

Fund in the 1920s. . . . modeled their efforts on propaganda campaigns
aimed at instilling nutritional norms by convincing children that ev-
eryone was eating spinach, drinking milk, and brushing their teeth.
(Lovett 2005: 804)
Which likely explains why Lois Lenski would write Spinach Boy (1930) and
Lucy Sprague Mitchell would call “grim informational” and “moralistic”
stories “the spinach school” (285). It is not surprising, then, that Popeye
would become a spokesperson for healthy eating in spite of his toothless dis-
figurement, especially, we find, because of his particular health condition.
Popeye embodies Progressive era concerns about childhood disease
brought on by malnutrition (an idea spoofed by Family Guy). According to

Richard P. Huemer, “Popeye could become the poster boy for good nutri-
tion. In a very visual, intuitive way, Popeye makes the connection between
nutrition . . . and physical prowess. Children can learn about the rela-
tion between food and health from Popeye” (2003). Popeye’s hemorrhage
behind one eye, loss of the other, and his toothlessness are symptoms of
scurvy, a disease once common among sailors and children.4 Thomas E.
Cone reports that, according to an 1898 pediatric survey, scurvy was
most apt to develop between ages of seven and fourteen months, in-
clusive. Of the 378 cases, 83 percent occurred in private practice; this
pointed to the greater tendency of the disease to occur among the rich
or well-to-do. The child’s previous health was usually good and there
was no proof that digestive disorder itself bore any etiological relation
to scurvy. (1979: 123)
The lack of identifiable organic causes and prevalence among the wealthy
indicate the extent to which malnutrition was often a result of cultural
misunderstanding (about infant nutrition) rather than due to the costliness
of necessary nutrients. In fact, nutritionally valuable staples like greens and
veggies were feminized and thus culturally devalued—cheap, but consumed
less by the middle class (Sobal 2005; Levenstein 1988). There was a clear
need for nutritional reeducation. Attacking poverty would not be the last-
ing agenda because the privileged weren’t eating well enough either. Nancy
Tomes explains
Thus at the very time when the New Deal reformers were worrying
about health problems associated with underconsumption—that is, the
inability of some Americans to afford adequate food or basic medical
care—other commentators drew attention to the health dangers posed
by overconsumption. (2001: 534, my emphasis)
Class bias, or concern for wealthier children over the health interests of
every child, explains the resulting slow shift from focusing on food need to
food greed.
The cultural backdrop to Popeye’s development is complex and vast in its
shift in dietary implications. Nutrition science is often biased culturally, or as
Roland Barthes puts it, “Nutritional rationalizing is aimed in a specific direc-
tion. Modern nutritional science . . . is not bound to any moral values, such
as asceticism, wisdom, or purity, but on the contrary, to values of power”
(1975: 57, emphasis in original). So, what value of power lies behind Popeye’s
consumption of spinach? It has already been suggested that part of the inter-
est in child nutrition stemmed from the belief that stronger kids would build
and protect a stronger nation. But the Progressive concept of healthfulness
itself emerged within narrow political agendas, moving attention away from
poverty and its material causes to culturally suggestible diagnoses:
Public health campaigns of the 1880s sought to address the impact of in-
dustrialization on urban environments, calling for the sanitation of public
water supplies, the cleanup of city streets filled with garbage and horse
droppings, improved housing conditions, and the eradication of pests.
These early public health advocates insisted on the connection between
living conditions on the bodies of Americans: they saw a direct connection
between dirt and disease. With the rise of the germ theory, the emphasis
in public health work shifted toward efforts to isolate disease-carrying in-
dividuals and disinfect the environment. The focus on individuals intensi-
fied as public health campaigns of the 1920s concentrated their efforts on
hygiene education and intervention by physicians. (Lovett 2005: 814)
The historical legacy of Progressive health reforms echoes changes for

which Foucault provides a genealogy in The Birth of the Clinic (1963). As
medicine improves and a society’s general sanitation and environment with
it, mortality rates slow and individual deaths, thus individual lives, can be
afforded more recognition (Foucault 191). But as Roland Barthes has put
it, “in a mythical way, health is indeed a simple relay between the body and
the mind; it is the alibi food gives to itself in order to signify materially a
pattern of immaterial realities” (1975: 56). Modern diets, and so modern
health, increasingly became shaped by ideology rather than material real-
ity. And often the immaterial realities that the alibis of foods cover up are
indeed grave and unfair. Sometimes the “alibis of health” we embrace in
trying to make healthy individual choices aren’t even of our own making or
choice, but commercial creations of a consumer culture.
In fact, diagnostic methods and treatment cannot be clearly discerned
from ideological roots, so the intersection between them is opaque to the
public as well. In modern medicine there is rarely a space wherein healing
method can be properly demystified for patients. Foucault explains:
There is, therefore, a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence

between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical
technology. In a concerted effort, doctors and statesmen demand, in a
different vocabulary but for essentially identical reasons, the suppres-
sion of every obstacle to the constitution of this new space: the hospi-
tals, which alter the specific laws governing disease, and which disturb
those no less rigorous laws that defi ne the relations between property
and wealth, poverty and work; the association of doctors which pre-
vents the formation of a centralized medical consciousness . . . and
turn knowledge into a social privilege. (2003: 45)
Technologies of fighting child malnutrition during the twenties carry an

implicitly classist, rationalist ideology that turned attention away from
environmental factors like poverty and racism in order to conveniently

essentialize illness for consistency and ideological favor. Lovett explains:
“Many physicians and health workers were more typically interested in
physical rather than economic measures of malnutrition” (2005: 806). This
was accomplished by imposing normative measures in the form of simpli-
fied growth charts following children’s weight and height ratios as primary
indicators of health: “The statistical norms embodied in growth charts
were commonly communicated and recreated as social norms for students
in school health programs” (2005: 820). These charts were taken to reflect
norms but also shaped them ideologically. For example, Harry S. Mustard
and J. I. Waring argued that African-American children tended to average
taller heights and heavier weight (Lovett 824), which some doctors con-
veniently used as an excuse to overlook their greater rates of poverty and
need, dramatically evidenced by an infant “mortality rate [that] was gen-
erally twice that of white infants” (Smith 1995: 24). Rather than actually
secure care based on proven need, doctors simply changed their diagnostic
methods (both in measure and logic) to suit their ideological goal by creat-
ing separate racial standards. Lovett explains:
The insistence on a separate graph for African American children at

once assumed an entirely separate biological race and that there were
social implications to integrating normative measurements, namely
that white children were less developmentally ideal than black children
according to the scales. Separating by race allowed white researchers
to create a concept of normalcy that bracketed African Americans as
developmentally different from whites. (Lovett 824)
Likewise, this discrimination eventually happened along class-lines as

well:
Horace Grey and W. J. Jacomb, both pediatricians, noted that the stu-
dents they measured were economically privileged, well fed, and physi-
cally it, yet many were judged malnourished. . . . Rather than abide
this judgment, they created a separate scale for upper-class white chil-
dren. (825)
Of course, in the midst of what Lovett calls our “second nutrition crisis”
(characterized by obesity), we can no longer deny that such measures are
racist, class-relative, and misleading. A poor student can be an average
weight but over-consuming cheap processed foods and under-consuming
costlier, less accessible but healthful ones, thus becoming malnourished
and/or pre-diabetic as a result. Perhaps anticipation of this problem led to
some early revisions in malnutrition diagnosis. Jeffrey Brosco explains:
the use of weight to measure health and nutrition was considered inap-
propriate by the 1930s. Local physicians and clinics stopped evaluating
children’s nutritional state based on height and weight, and authorities

on child growth qualifies their support of weight as an index of health5
. . . Ten years after it began, the epidemic of malnutrition ended. There
was no great change in community health . . . what did change was the
diagnosis of malnutrition: it shifted from a simple one using weight and
height to a complex one requiring the clinical judgment of a physician.
(2002: 106)
Michael Pollan sees this shift as the beginning of “nutritionism,” or an ide-

ology of ‘nutrient’-focused health replacing commonsense eating of healthy
foods:
Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore

slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists
through whom the scientists reach the public) to explain the hidden re-
ality of foods to us. In form this is a quasireligious idea, suggesting the
visible world is not the one that really matters, which implies the need
for a priesthood. For to enter a world where your dietary salvation de-
pends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help. (2008: 28)
As nutritional science shifted paradigmatically, so did the basis for defi ning
malnutrition. However, the shift away from simple, if essentializing, charts
protected the “social privilege of knowledge” by reaffi rming the necessary
authority of individual doctors: “The irony of promoting a simple measure
of nutrition . . . was that physicians placed the diagnosis of malnutrition
within the competence of nonmedical personnel” (Brosco 2002: 109). Diag-
nosis appears more objective when in fact it is more exclusively dependent
upon subjective use of specialized knowledge, or, as Foucault says, “The
medical act is worth what he who has performed it is worth” (2003: 98).
The trend of clinical legitimizing brought preventive care under “no lon-
ger the gaze of any observer, but that of a doctor supported and justified
by an institution” (Foucault 2003: 109). What we see in the nutritional,
pediatric backdrop of Popeye’s development echoes the delegitimizing of
community care that took place during medieval witch hunts:
With the persecution of the folkhealer, women were expropriated from
a patrimony of empirical knowledge, regarding herbs and healing rem-
edies, that they had accumulated and transmitted from generation to
generation, its loss paving the way for . . . the rise of professional medi-
cine, which erected in front of the ‘lower classes’ a wall of unchallenge-
able scientific knowledge, unaffordable and alien, despite its curative
pretenses. (Federici 2004: 201)
Ideally, medicine should empower the patient as both object and subject
of healing with knowledge, after all, “Only individual illnesses exist: not
because the individual reacts upon his own illness, but because the action
of the illness rightly unfolds in the form of individuality” (2003: 207).
According to what Foucault calls the anatomo-clinical model, “Western
man could constitute himself in his own eyes as an object of science, he
grasped himself with his own language, and gave himself, in himself and
by himself, a discursive existence” (2003: 243). Height/weight charts over-
simplify diagnosis and can lead to essentializing use, but reliance solely
on doctors for diagnosis maintains the exclusionary power of medical
knowledge.
The danger of mystified medicine is the exclusivity of knowledge, leaving
bias and human error unchecked. Ideological bias prevented discovery in the
case of scurvy. Thomas E. Cone explains that the dominant approach was
to look at what caused the disease not what was missing that might prevent
it. As Lovett explained earlier, pervading germ theory and anti-immigrant
feeling tended towards scapegoating diagnoses. Doctors focused on scurvy
by looking for a germ or carrier, not dietary lack. However,
By 1910 Henry Koplik was probably the fi rst to give up the concept
of a positive etiological factor and to replace it with the concept of a
deficient or negative factor. . . . He was unable to say because vitamin
C was not isolated until 1928, and it was not known until 1933 that
the fi rst case of infantile scurvy cured by the administration of ascorbic
acid was reported. (Cone 1979: 168–169)
Like growth charts, vitamins would promise to put preventative power into
the hands of parents, patients, and consumers:
In the early 1920s there had been much concern over deficiencies in
calcium and vitamin A. Experts had therefore recommended drinking
enormous quantities of milk and stuffi ng oneself with green vegetables.
By the late 1920s the importance of vitamin C had been discovered and
duly exaggerated. (Levenstein 2003: 13)
Rima Apple explains how this concern grew into vitamania:

The power and hope of vitamins thrilled the American public, even be-
fore scientists had figured out the chemical structures and physiological
actions of vitamins. The earliest notes about vitamins in the popular
press, dating from the 1910s, stressed the miraculous cures possible
with the knowledge of vitamins. . . . By 1921 scientists recognized
three vitamins: fat soluble vitamine A, water soluble vitamine B and
water soluble vitamine C. (1996: 3–4)
With these discoveries, parents could prevent scurvy by giving their chil-
dren citrus fruits and greens. By the 1930s vitamin-fortified candies were
sold, precursors to Chocks chewable vitamins in 1960, Flintstones vitamins

in 1970, and Bugs Bunny vitamins in 1971 (Apple 1996: 107).
The tension between the need for consumer control in matters of health
and the mystified authority of clinical experts has remained, but in an
increasingly consumption-driven culture, choice becomes more question-
able. The combined factors of increasing authority for doctors and mystified
medicine created the perfect appeal for commercialized health alternatives.
Nancy Tomes writes,
The obsession with good health and bodily disciplines characteristic of

nineteenth-century reformers took on more popular, commercialized
forms in the early decades of the twentieth century. In an increasingly
robust consumer culture, Americans of all classes were exposed to a
rising tide of commercial messages designed to create a perpetual state
of dissatisfaction with their current health status. (2001: 531)
It was into this environment that Elzie Segar’s everyman, Popeye, was cre-
ated and eventually transformed by Max Fleischer into a spinach sales-
man in his move from paper to film, shifting slightly from the comic-strip
writer’s vision to a cartoon producer’s gimmick:
spinach was given little emphasis in the strip (unlike the enervating
focus of the film cartoons), and the huge statue of Popeye erected by
spinach growers in Texas in the thirties was certainly more persever-
ingly earned by Max Fleischer than by Segar. (Blackbeard 1970: 121)
At times Popeye was the spokesman and the spinach his tie-in product. Fred
Grandinetti describes this role in the Fleischer’s films:
Popeye consumed the vegetable infrequently in Segar’s strip in com-

parison to the numerous times he pulled a can out of his shirt pocket
in the Fleischer films. On occasion, the spinach can would take on a
life of its own. In the 1936 Fleischer film, “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard,” a
battered Popeye whistles for his can of spinach, which is in his locker
room. Upon hearing the whistle, the can quivers, drops to the ground
and rolls toward Popeye. In Famous Studios, “Friend or Phony” (1952)
Bluto tricks Popeye into throwing away his can of spinach. . . . the
sailor sends an SOS via the smoke in his pipe. The spinach can sniffs
the smoke, jumps off the back of the truck, hops toward Popeye, pops
itself open and pours the spinach inside Popeye’s mouth. (2004: 183)
The backdrop of industrial innovation is ever-present in Popeye’s com-

mercial development. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and
Drink in America,
Improvements in refrigerated rail transportation and, in 1929, Clar-

ence Birdseye’s development of a commercial frozen food process, as
well as claims made by the depression era cartoon character Popeye,
encouraged spinach consumption. At the height of Popeye’s popularity,
children ranked spinach as their third favorite food—behind turkey
and ice cream. (Smith 2004: 493)
Bud Sagendorf, who wrote Popeye strips after Segar’s death, claims, “From
1931 to 1936, the spinach industry credited Segar and Popeye with increas-
ing the United States consumption of spinach by 33 percent” (1979: 43).
Though Sagendorf does not give a source for this percentage, my research
indicates that there was certainly an increase in spinach production, though
it had already begun in the mid-twenties (Lloyd 1933: 3, n. 1) and would
be highly nutritionally and budgetarily recommended throughout WWII
(Kling 1943). Additionally, commercial production cannot account for
changes in what was then a larger demographic for spinach consumption,
rural families with crops for home use (Vance and Temple 1933). The spin-
ach trade was already booming in 1928 (probably due to Progressive nutri-
tional campaigns), and Popeye wouldn’t proclaim his love for the green
stuff until 1931. As Lovett points out, Fleischer was the one to really extend
and exploit the power of spinach: “Popeye’s producers at Fleischer Studios
did not invent the association between spinach and strength; they exploited
a social norm instilled in the course of the malnutrition crisis”6 (Lovett
2005: 805).
That a vegetable could perform as a near-heroic tie-in reflects a new
attitude toward preventive home health care and mortality. Popeye
directly appealed to parents and children the fi rst time he used spinach
for strength in the Segar strip: “Notice to mothers of chil’ren, please tell
yer youngtyirs I said they should eat spinach an’ vegetables on account
of I wants ’em to be strong an’ helthy—I will be a personal fren of all
chil’ren who eats what their maw says to eat—yers trulie, Popeye” (see
Figure 5.3). But once out of E. C. Segar’s hands, Popeye even advertised
other products on the radio, like Wheatena. Donald Phelps points out the
evident absurdity in his introduction to Fantagraphics’ release of their
second Popeye volume:
Wheatena replaced spinach as a regalvanizing food. (Entailing small
charley-horse, even in that elastic imagination normally encouraged by
radio7; since boxes of the breakfast cereal, pressure-cookers for heating
it, milk, and/or a diner to supply all of these was required to be repeat-
edly on hand).
Fleischer may have taken his cue on Popeye’s selling strength originally
from the canning industry. Harvey Levenstein explains that large canners
had to redouble their efforts during the Depression years in light of emerg-
ing knowledge about vitamins:
As vitamin-mania increased in intensity, it became apparent that it

might be a mixed blessing for large food processors. Yes, it provided
Figure 5.3 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., February 28,
1932.
tempting opportunities for outrageous health claims, but the main
thrust of vitamin research was on deprivation: Rats (and presumably
people) deprived of certain vitamins went blind, lost their vitality,
teeth, and hair, developed scurvy, pellagra, beri-beri. . . . Processors
might encourage people to eat their products to head off these horrific
consequences, but there were still disturbing indications that modern
food processing, particularly milling and canning, itself robbed foods
of vitamins. The large processor tried to reassure the public in a num-
ber of ways. (1988: 14–15; see Figure 5.4)
The large canning companies were clearly successful: “By the end of the
[1930s] Americans were eating 50 percent more processed fruit and veg-
etables than at the beginning—almost as much as the fresh kind” (1988:
25). Even so, canned vegetables were hardly fresh, as Barbara Kafka writes,
“Badly cooked and canned spinach are indeed rather repulsive, and small
children may have a problem with this vegetable’s tannin” (2005: 246). So
the industry needed help to push the product to a younger market.
Nancy Tomes provides a historical explanation for this direct plea: “The
deluge of health-related advertising in the 1920s and 1930s coincided with
growing awareness that as mortality from infectious diseases declined, ail-
ments associated with greater longevity and prosperity were becoming the
leading causes of death” (2001: 533). Parents could focus beyond infancy
and contagious disease, concentrating increasingly on longevity and diet
(aspects within their control), thus gaining a greater knowledge and agency
in maintaining health. Popeye was merely pushing spinach as a part of that
new health plan.8
One might expect that such reforms freshly empowered the family to bet-
ter care for themselves through knowledge and diet. But self-diagnosis and
care have their dangers too. Nutrition, like all aspects of consumer culture,
plays out tensions of choice, consequence, and body economy—advertising
Figure 5.4 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., May 21, 1932.
appeals to health became rampant and often misleading. Lovett describes
the market response: “a range of products of dubious nutritional or health
value flooded the market in the early twentieth century, producing calls for
greater regulation” (2005: 831). This is particularly demonstrated (in an
eerily almost-contemporary way) with the new, booming vitamin industry.
Everyday products (from bread to beer) were fortified with extra, often
unnecessary vitamins (see Levenstein 2003). This may have put even more
rigid dietary demands on children at the dinner table, but as one Popeye
strip demonstrates, the new consumerism also empowered them. Pictured
in Figure 5.5 are the mayor, his son, and wife negotiating Popeye’s release
from jail over whether or not the boy eats his spinach. The boy gets his way
simply by eating it.
In reality, children may have not yet gained power with increased spend-
ing, but they were already a target market. Lovett writes,
Although marketers increasingly targeted the child consumer, they

never forgot who held the purse strings. The advertising industry had
long used appeals to health, beauty, and vigor to promote adult prod-
ucts. With children, advertisers tried to capture their interest while
building brand identification. (817–818)
It may be that marketers discovered the potential of dually aiming for child
and parent at once—which would eventually lead to the 1980s notion of
“cradle-to-grave” loyalty. Vitamin-fortified candy and gum, or vitamins
that resemble candy (Flintstones, Bugs Bunny), are a good example of prod-
ucts that held this dual appeal. Perhaps the most outrageous product suc-
cessfully selling through the nutritional appeal was the Chicken Dinner
candy bar. Candy enthusiast Ray Broekel describes its appeal,
Chicken Dinner was one of the early nut-roll bars and fi rst came out in
the early 1920s. The fi rst Chicken Dinner wrappers pictured a whole
Figure 5.5 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., October 4, 1931.
roasted chicken sitting on a dinner plate. In the years following World
War I, the economy made many families feel fortunate if they had one
good meal a day on the dinner table. A whole roasted chicken on a
candy bar wrapper symbolized something substantial in terms of food
value. (1985: 13)
More recent products try something similar, if not more subtle: “Snickers
really satisfies” and “Give me a break (of that Kit Kat bar)” each imply
that their candy can sustain the consumer as an adequate in-between-meals
snack food, granting control over time and hunger. But today’s marketplace
has dramatically altered children’s consumer power and parents’ nutrition

control.
Lovett says, “In the comparatively unsaturated media market of the
1920s and 1930s, public health workers were able to create media images
with great impact. The newness of film and advertising directed at chil-
dren made this much easier” (2005: 828). Direct reform through nutrition
education, according to Lovett, was more possible in the fi rst nutrition cri-
sis than the current obesity problem in youth, because today “the budgets
spent advertising food and soft drinks to children dwarf the budget for
public health advertising. In fact, this disparity is so great that regulating
advertising seems like a better option than only trying to provide coun-
teradvertising” (2005: 828).
Bobby London’s Popeye strip during the 1980s addresses this change.
In one panel particularly relevant to rationalizing diets while exploiting
children’s appetites, Popeye chastises Wimpy’s gluttony, greed, and bald
dishonesty over some stolen (McDonald’s) burgers (see Figure 5.6). London
ironically reverses what the reader is assumed to know—that Wimpy,9 and
the golden arches in the background, are the exploiters, not protectors.10
In hindsight, the Progressive era seems to have set a more optimistic
example concerning child nutrition and health than we can at the begin-
ning of the twenty-fi rst century. Child poverty is once again dangerously
high (this time at a higher rate than adult poverty), but powerful advo-
cates are harder to fi nd. As Nancy Lesko puts it, “The almost century-long
Figure 5.6 Bobby London, Mondo Popeye, King Features Syndicate, 1987.
belief in ‘child-saving’ ended in the United States with the Welfare Reform
Bill of 1996, which plunged 60,000 children into poverty” (2001: 170).
Whereas nutrition education may have been enough to counter childhood
diseases of the 1890s to 1920s, today’s dietary issues are directly related
to consumerism (not to mention corporate exploitation of schools’ under-
funding), but they are dependent upon more than counter-advertising to
empower individuals with the knowledge to make healthy decisions. As
Foucault concludes from his study of French medical history, “The first
task of the doctor is therefore political: the struggle against disease must
begin with a war against bad government” (2003: 38). The prerogative of
healing change rests in structural reform.
FIGHTING MACHINES
When societies need superheroes they invent them. Like John Henry, Pop-
eye is a small but physically powerful man representing “muscle against
the looming technical age” (Nelson 2008: 137). Scott Reynolds Nelson
reminds us that before Popeye and Superman, there was John Henry.11 Col-
son Whitehead plays on this shared aspect of the men of steel and men of
iron in his John Henry Days (2001):
John Henry was born big, forty pounds and gifted with speech straight
out of the womb. He demanded food, two pigs, a generation of chick-
ens, acres of collard greens, yams by the bushel, and a pot of gravy
to wash it all down. . . . ‘John Henry was born with a hammer in his
hand.’ Warning to pregnant women to watch for excessive amounts of
iron in their diets. (138)
Popeye is often described as a man of iron, and like Hugo Gellert’s “bal-
loon-muscled John Henry represented the dangerous and revolutionary
potential of the male side of America’s working class” (Nelson 2008: 151).
Certainly this style contributed to Elzie Segar’s artwork as it did for super-
hero comics:
The bulging surfaces of the powerful manual laborer, of John Henry

and the many outsized workers he represented, was an irresistible
image of Jacob Kurtzberg [Jack Kirby] and the other tough kids of
the Lower East Side. Rounded, powerful, hairless men, men who
looked as if they were smuggling balloons underneath their shirts,
became a regular part of the vocabulary of the cartoonist. (Nelson
2008: 160)
DC comics has also produced a superhero based on John Henry, Dr. John
Henry Irons, in the storyline Steel. Strangely enough, in light of my last
chapter, there is a street drug in his fictional city called Tar, which height-
ens strength and aggression, making the user’s skin extremely tough.
To critics Bill Blackbeard and Mort Walker, however, Popeye is the first
American superhero: he predates Superman by four years, uses his super-
power heroically (and sometimes unheroically), but even better, he is far
more believable as an everyman (no fancy cape needed, just a can of spin-
ach). Popeye reflects the paradox of consumer powerlessness: he is a pre-
consumerist icon who nonetheless sells a product—he fights the system that
shapes his development. Like his readers, his power depends on food.
Popeye’s famous line, “I Yam what I Yam,” probably captures most con-
cretely the intimate relationship between our bodies and culture demon-
strated through food (see Figure 5.7). Though “yam” reflects his dialect,
not a food, Segar’s strip is infused with food, even at the level of his char-
acter’s figurative language, not to mention their names (Ham Gravy, Cas-
tor and Olive Oyl). Clearly Elzie Segar, creating his ironic but familiarly
human cast of Thimble Theatre, and Max Fleischer, adapting Popeye to
cartoon film, whether consciously or not, dramatized nutritional concerns
of the Progressive and Depression eras. Echoing Brillat-Savarin and Popeye,
Jane Bennett concludes her “Edible Matter,” by arguing that “Food—as
a self-altering, dissipative materiality—is also a player [public agent]. It
enters into what we become. It is one of the many agencies operative when
Figure 5.7 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., November 6, 1929.
we engage in the questions of what to eat, how to get it, and when to
stop” (2007: 145). Segar’s and Fleischer’s Popeye has an identity anchored
in the nutritional debates of his time—his spinach is a “public agent” that
reminds us that food shapes what we all are.
Ralph Ellison makes this clear in his use of it in Invisible Man, when his
title character gets an epiphanic release by eating baked yams he buys from
a street vendor. Having developed ethnic shame over foods he was fond of
back home in the South (this cultural significance is also projected onto
watermelon in Langston Hughes’s Black Misery), he marvels at the extent
to which he sees his people internalizing white supremacist defi nitions of
cultural value:
What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us

the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we
liked. Not all of us, but so many. Simply by walking up and shaking
a set of chitterlings or a well-boiled hog maw at them during the clear
light of day! (263–264)
Claiming his freedom from the public opinion of Northern whites and
resisting his own appropriation, the invisible man orders two more yams,
telling the vendor “They’re my birthmark. . . . I yam what I yam!” (266).
Ellison’s uncharacteristically facile pun on Popeye’s line is, in fact, one of
the hero’s moments of true agency and delight in the novel, even though it
is quickly sobered by a bite of frostbitten yam.
Our bodies are the most basic site from which individuals are hailed
by and struggle against hegemonic power, so many writers use food to
express the ineffable in this process. Just as food becomes a metaphor
for the relationship between power and personal identity, so power and
personal identity become metaphorically expressible through food (one
might note this in Figure 5.7, not only Popeye’s famous line but Cas-
tor Oyl’s preceding it). Consider James Baldwin’s description of alien-
ation and rage, when power prevents the expression and recognition of
individual identity: “The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless,
but it is also absolutely inevitable: the rage, so generally discounted, so
little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of
the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never
entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is there-
fore not susceptible to any arguments whatever” (1955: 165). Though
misunderstood, and thus unlikely to be heard (recognized), Baldwin’s
persona in this piece (the sole black man in an isolated Swiss village)
can express identity, anger, and rage through language that tends to con-
cretize his concept in the body. Unlike the focal characters of Hughes,
Ellison, and Baldwin, Popeye does not have to deal with ethnic shame or
rage-inducing prejudice, but he does deal in anger, and is accustomed to
defending his integrity, “who he is,” physically.
Popeye’s famous yawp of self-determination originally included no pun
on actual yams. He uses the phrase when defending his material exis-
tence and his cultural right to resist conformity. He also serves as an icon
who can act on his anger—and usually beats anyone who challenges him.
Wimpy might exploit him12 as a boxer, but it is Popeye whose “rage” is in
fact “esteemed” by his audiences (both in and out of the text). As Joyce
Carol Oates describes in her eloquent account, On Boxing: “boxing is
fundamentally about anger. It is in fact the only sport in which anger is
accommodated, ennobled. It is the only human activity in which rage can
be transposed without equivocation in art” (1987: 63). The importance of
Figure 5.8 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., January 4, 1931.
rage in cultural productions (not just boxing), is often overlooked, but as
Gerard Jones makes clear in Killing Monsters, experiencing violence vicari-
ously, as an outlet for our own sense of disempowerment, is one of the most
basic and early needs in storytelling: “Playing with rage is a valuable way to
reduce its power” (2002: 11). Because injustice exists, justified anger exists,
but as Baldwin warns, for the “disesteemed” it can do nothing but build
into rage if unacknowledged. Rage requires an outlet (see Figure 5.8).
A Progressive era–born hero becoming a boxer during the Depression
years addresses this public need vicariously, as Oates explains:
The remarkable rise of boxing in the 1920s in particular can be seen

as a consequence of the diminution of the individual vis-à-vis soci-
ety; the gradual attrition of person freedom, will, and strength. . . .
in the Western bloc it has come to seem a function of technology, if
not history—inexorable fate. How to master these ever more difficult
machines, how to even learn their language, when so many of us are
illiterate. . . . The individual exists in his physical supremacy, but does
the individual matter? (1987: 114)
Bud Sagendorf would agree:
As the theme of strength and spinach-muscles grew, Popeye tended more

and more to strike out at anything he feared or didn’t understand. . . .
Though today it may seem brutal, Popeye’s outlook was a natural reac-
tion of the time. A population frustrated by the Great Depression liked
the idea of one small man fighting back and winning. They, too, wanted
to strike out at something they feared and didn’t understand. (1979: 48)
Like cartoons in which the nemesis is pummeled, blown up, or simply

done away with in each episode, Segar’s and Fleischer’s work guarantees
audiences that Popeye will win, no matter how ignorantly. He embodies
both the simple-minded human and machine, enabling readers/viewers to
innocently channel their own anger and anxiety about industrial change.
Michael Wassenaar points out the predominance of machine imagery in
Popeye cartoons: “Metaphorically, the human body can be referred to as an
engine—and, as we shall see, this is a trope that runs rampant in the Popeye
cartoons” (1989: 21). In her book, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature,
Culture in Modernist America, Cecelia Tichi writes of the common mod-
ernist analogies of human machines in advertising: “ . . . the language of
the automotive machine was appropriate to a description of the human
body. The concept of the machine, in fact, helped readers better understand
the issues being discussed” because both an automotive and human body
are “dynamic systems of integrated, functional, component parts” (1987:
35). Among texts Tichi provides to illustrate the process is an Aunt Jemima
Pancake Flour advertisement from a 1921 Ladies Home Journal, which
promises to provide “Fine Fuel for Young Bodies” (1987: 36).
Mechanistic imagery of the time suggests that the engine became a way
of thinking of the body and its economy of feeding and movement. Popeye’s
fighting, like John Henry’s race against the steam engine, might also reflect
ambivalent American feelings toward industrialism, Taylorism, Fordism,
and the various intimate ways machines increasingly entered their lives (no
less in the food industry and home kitchen). Wassenaar depicts Popeye as a
cyber-hero who has successfully mastered, while integrating, technology:
Popeye transforms himself in each of the Fleischer cartoons—often

via spinach—and changes his world. But at the same time in many
of the cartoons Popeye metaphorically becomes the mechanism—the

engine—through which energy is transformed into work. As both reg-
ulator and regulated engineer and machine, Popeye is a popular hero
of the cybernetic. (1989: 23)
That food, along with various machine parts, could be considered a cyber-
supplementation has been a central premise of Jane Bennett’s “Edible Mat-
ter,” where she argues that
Human and non-human bodies [say, spinach in this case] re-corpo-

realize in response to each other; both exercise formative power and
also offer themselves as matter to be acted upon. Eating, then, reveals
not only the interdependence of humans and edible matter, but also
a capacity to effect social change inherent in human and non-human
bodies alike. (2007: 134)
One can imagine Popeye as both cyborg and everyman.

In this light Popeye can be seen as the scrawny, working-class Superman13
or white John Henry. Scott Reynolds Nelson explains their common origins:
The Communist strongman became many men: Superman was created

by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. Captain America and countless other
iconic strong men were created by Jack Kirby. . . . [All] pressed the
Communist strongman, based in part on the folk hero John Henry,
into nylon red-white-and-blue suits. And they made their strongman
white. A balloon-muscled strongman, so much like the Communist
symbol of worker’s strength, now emerged to fight evil. . . . and above
all fascists bent on twisting the minds of children. (2008: 161)
The popular device of man pitted against machine seems to have been
appropriated by comics artists from African-American worksongs and
folklore. Was Popeye the great white hope?
According to Wassenaar, the commonly repeated plot devices (of Pop-
eye mastering machines, or even becoming one himself) reveal assump-
tions about early twentieth-century audiences because they “rely upon an
appreciation of mechanization in the modern world, but they also exhibit
an unwillingness to put faith in the powers of technology” (1989: 26–27).
Cecelia Tichi might point out that Wassenaar is reflecting the very tropes
he exposes by analyzing Popeye as cybernetic:
Humankind’s function is to expedite progress, wherever necessary, by

redesigning socio-cultural parts of the material world ranging from the
kitchen to the government. It is not unusual to come upon figures of
speech which presume that human progress is a function of mechanical
advances in design. (1987: 34–35)
Though Fleischer made Popeye more of a cyborg, he is still the everyman

that Segar created, and the fact that his power comes from spinach (not a
super-spider bite, radiation, or bionic enhancement) consoles his audience,
who at least have access to spinach.
Whether readers of Thimble Theatre and viewers of Popeye cartoons
during the Progressive era and Depression were anxious about money,
health, or technology, it is clear that the much-loved sailor-man had an
immense, lasting appeal because he could humorously overcome (or clob-
ber past) such hurdles, even when the hurdles were exaggerated. Popeye
also demonstrates a resistance to such worries. They simply don’t matter to
him. Every time one of Castor Oyl’s get-rich schemes works, Popeye loses
his share of the fortune in some altruistic way (see Figure 5.9). His health
is of great nutritional concern but completely in his control (conveyed as
dependent only upon an accessible diet of vitamin C–rich spinach). Tech-
nologically, he represents an old order coming in comfortable contact with
the new: he might have to adapt to machines, but his manner of using them
tends to remain as basic and independent as it can be.
Figure 5.9 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., November 29, 1931.
Conclusion
Flesh and Blood
Nothing the newborn infant does establishes so swiftly its social con-
nection with the world as the expression and satisfaction of its hun-
ger. Hunger epitomizes the relation between its dependence and the
social universe of which it must become a part. . . . Food preferences
that emerge early in life do so within the bounds laid down by those
who do the nurturing, and therefore within the rules of their society
and culture.
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power
“It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh,” said the Scarecrow,

thoughtfully; “for you must sleep, and eat and drink.”
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum, a representative of the Gilded Age, commentator on the

coming age of consumerism, and myth-maker for children, wrote the fol-
lowing scene in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900): the cowardly lion
asks Dorothy of Toto, “Is he made of tin, or stuffed?” to which she halt-
ingly answers, “Neither. He’s a-a-a meat dog” (53). The Oz books are full
of uncomfortable reminders that we are “meat” people—that being “real”
means being vulnerable, necessitating our dependence upon society and
acceptance of its norms. Tison Pugh writes of Oz and its surroundings, “A
variety of beings inhabit these lands, and humans are frequently derided as
‘meat people’ who suffer the many vagaries of biological existence” (2008:
334). Baum takes the traditional “eat-or-be-eaten” scene to new levels of
profundity while remaining direct—almost simplistically allegorical. Viv-
ian Wagner explains:
The meat question reverberates with the labor and corporate practices
of the period and with the material production of Oz itself. If humans
and dogs can be meat, what’s to protect their existence and identity?
Here lies the unspoken but ever present threat of Oz. Worries about
commerce and commodification inform the meat/identity question.
(2006: 32)
By linguistically reducing flesh to meat, Baum also anticipates the ‘meat

puppets’ of post-industrial consumer culture and idealized cyborgs who in
contrast represent alternative agency at the cost of authenticity. Following
Haraway and Baudrillard, Thomas Foster writes, “To be a cyborg means
accepting a postmodern condition of inhabiting a body that functions
as a signifying surface, where the social construction of all subjectivities
becomes legible” (15). Of course, all subjective identification necessitates
abstracting subjectivity in order for it to be ‘legible’ to others. In this chapter
I’ll concentrate on how flesh and blood children are folklorically signified
as vulnerable and countered by bodiless predators and artificial protectors
who protest children’s vulnerability too much.
Just as we associate Popeye with physical power, not scurvy and malnu-
trition, ideals of resistance also obscure infi rmities of the flesh. But Baum
brings them back to the fore:
Not only do inconveniently fleshy beings, such as Dorothy, need food

and water; they also must protect their bodies. Jack Pumpkinhead can
always get a new head, the Scarecrow can be put back together, and
the Tin Woodman can be treated and cured by tinsmiths. Dorothy,
however, always has the threat of death or illness, and the fear of these,
hanging over her. (Wagner 2006: 32)
In Oz and its outposts, there are also constant reminders of the dangers of
humans being vulnerable to the hunger of others, as Tison Pugh points out:
food defi nes the society of Oz, but humans are now accorded a lower
level in the hierarchy because their meat bodies must continually be fed
and tended. Indeed, as a meat-based life form, human bodies are poten-
tially constituted as an entrée in cannibalistic feasts. (2008: 334)
Complicating this theme is a fantasy range of humanized, sentient objects

and talking animals. Pugh argues that “[t]he egalitarian façade of Oz is
continually undermined . . . because talking animals cannot truly repre-
sent the equals of other characters if they must always protect themselves
from being killed, cooked, and eaten” (2008: 329). This complication is
explicitly developed in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of
the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), in which the title character becomes
an intellectual activist on behalf of Animals (sentient animals who in matu-
rity can talk like humans). Sentient, speaking Animals and their primitive
counterparts, animals, are difficult to distinguish from each other in a pre-
lingual state: “without language or contextual clues, at its infant stages a
beast was not clearly Animal or animal” (145). The possibility of acciden-
tally eating a sentient equal (signified by the eater communicating with the
to-be-eaten—a theme developed by Lewis Carroll and later in Charlotte’s
Web by E. B. White) in turn equalizes animals. Are animals food, pets,
or friends? Any child raised on a farm can recall discovering where meat
comes from.1 As Pugh puts it,
Conclusion 165
in Oz, because one can never know if one’s meal is what it appears to
be or is merely an illusion, one’s relationship to food thus threatens the
core of personal identity and communal civilization predicated upon
one’s observance of community dietary laws. (2008: 331)
In contrast to the dangers of being made of flesh, Baum also repeatedly

stresses how resilient his otherwise sadly unreal characters are. When Dor-
othy stops in the forest to sleep, we’re told, “The Scarecrow, who was never
tired, stood up in another corner and waited patiently until morning came”
(38). Of course, it sounds boring for him sometimes, but what an advan-
tage to never tire. In The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), this scene is also
repeated when Tip gets sleepy. The newly vivified Sawhorse, confused, says,
“I do not know what sleep is,” and the Scarecrow explains,
Still, we must have consideration for this poor boy, who is made of flesh
and blood and bone, and gets tired. . . . I remember it was the same
way with little Dorothy. We always had to sit through the night while
she slept. (76)
As in “Hansel and Gretel,” sleep is suggested as a way of staving off another

human weakness, hunger, as the Scarecrow continues,
We all have our weaknesses, dear friends, so we must strive to be con-

siderate of one another. And since this poor boy is hungry and has
nothing whatever to eat, let us all remain quiet and allow him to sleep;
for it is said that in sleep a mortal may forget even hunger. (76)
In Emerald City of Oz (1910) the Scarecrow expresses his relief when he

realizes that he’s invulnerable to the mind-erasing powers of the Nome
King’s worst weapon: “‘Nothing could make me forget what I know,’
remarked the Scarecrow, gazing into the fountain, ‘for I cannot drink the
Water of Oblivion or water of any kind’” (282). I can only assume that his
fellow guards are also immune, as they are depicted as equally resilient
many times elsewhere: “The Scarecrow had no need to sleep; neither had
the Tin Woodman or Tiktok or Jack Pumpkinhead. So they all wandered
out into the palace grounds and stood beside the Forbidden Fountain until
daybreak” (282).
The invulnerability that comes of being animated from basic materials
is often cast in relief by evoking the vulnerability of children, as in golem
tales (in which a clay man is mystically animated to protect Jews from libels
accusing them of using Christian children’s blood in Passover matzohs),
or in Frankenstein (in which the unguided brute power of the creature is
dramatized through his killing of a child 2). In relation to hunger-threats
like that of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” such a “blood lie” draws
attention to a common fear for child safety from the hunger of predators
that was flexibly stretched to fit the scapegoat of the times: “The kidnap-
ping and ritual murder of Christian children and the desecration of the
Eucharist were ascribed to both Jews and witches” (Russell 1972: 167).3 As
Herman Pleij wrote of medieval folk fictions,
Men and women were continually eating up their own and even other
people’s children, and there are also frequent reports of the reverse
situation: children killing their parents to fi ll their stomachs. . . . No
one living in the Middle Ages could have failed to recognize the truth
of such stories, being convinced that such things could, did, and indeed
were always about to happen. Fear kept all these topoi alive, and they
in turn continued to feed the fear. (2001: 116–117)
One needn’t stretch too far to imagine similar fears motivating a marginal-
izing protectionism towards children today reflecting contemporary anxi-
eties (drugs, sexual predators), but in the medieval Prague of golem tales,
the traditional scapegoat was Jewish. According to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s
version of the golem tale, “Whenever a Christian child disappeared, the
enemies of the Jews immediately proclaimed that it had been killed to pro-
vide blood for matzohs” (1996: 3).
Artificial beings have always held a place in folklore that reflects anxiet-
ies of their times, especially in attempts to deny mortality or fleshy vulner-
ability, thus rejecting the body’s bounds. Robert Plank writes, “The legend
of the golem assumes a dichotomy of body and soul and implies a con-
tempt for the body” (1965: 15). The golem is artificially created and so can-
not have a soul, which, ironically, makes him impervious to bodily harm.
When Rabbi Leib (called Lowe or Loew in other versions) entreats the maid
Miriam to help him put the golem to sleep,
The Rabbi told her that there would be no sin in this, because the
golem was not a human being but only an artificial and temporary
creature. The rabbi explained to her that the golem had no soul, only
a nefesh—the kind of spirit that is given only to high animals. (Singer
1996: 75)
Elie Wiesel’s version makes the limit and purpose of the mud man’s super-
capabilities clear:
the society in which the Jews lived, terrified of the future, had fallen so
low that only a Golem—an artificial being without a soul, a creature
of clay, dedicated to earthly matters and excluded from divine inspira-
tion—could still have an effect and save it from perdition. (45)
Without a soul to jeopardize, he can do the dirty work for persecuted

innocents.
Conclusion 167
In The Astonishing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), Michael
Chabon links the golem to other fairy-tale and folk traditions when Sammy
remembers how his mentor “had quoted some paradoxical wisdom about
golems, something in Hebrew to the effect that it was the Golem’s unnatu-
ral soul that had given it weight; unburdened of it, the earthen Golem was
light as air”4 (611). The giant protector’s innocence is often emphasized
by his lack of corporeal attributes. Robert Plank writes that “the golem
is destroyed before he reaches sexual maturity”; while in contrast, “Fran-
kenstein’s monster escapes this fate” (1965: 19). The golem can remain the
invulnerable hero of tales because he (usually) doesn’t become a desiring
monster. Isaac Bashevis Singer introduces a female love object in his golem
tale, Miriam, an interest that fi nally makes the golem vulnerable. Franken-
stein’s monster reaches a kind of sexual maturity in which he demands a
mate and then kills Frankenstein’s bride out of desperate loneliness, jeal-
ousy, and spite.
An extension of the golem’s ability to represent and vicariously alleviate
adult anxieties over children is the careful avoidance of sexuality even in
its creation:
One wonders if this desire to be able to create in a way which is not

the natural way is not essentially a wish to circumvent the sexual act of
creation. Being divorced from the sex act, the process would, as it were,
become purified. (Plank 1965: 13)
But some critics have pointed out a more blatant denial. Norma Rowen
states that the tendency in automaton, golem, and homunculus narratives is
towards “paternal propagation, that is of propagation that derives mainly
or solely from the male” (1990: 173). Charles Klopp compares Franken-
stein’s creature (and by implication, the golem) to Pinocchio in this sense:
“Both works are birth stories that begin with the painful coming to life of
a creature that has a father but no mother” (2006: 28).5 Ruth Bienstock
Anolik calls the golem “a figure of unnatural appropriation of the divine
and female power to create life,” adding that “golem folk tales simultane-
ously express and allay male anxieties toward women” (2005: 141). Such
perspectives are certainly supported by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
when the scientist imagines the gratitude of his homuncular offspring: “A
new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and
excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the
gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (39).
Womb envy or not, Frankenstein, golem tales, and Pinocchio expose the
lie that parenting is by defi nition selfless. Holly Blackford highlights this
irony:
The obsolescence of the parental figures is both inevitable and terri-

fying. It is the elder’s own thirst for immortality and power through
creation that undoes his place on the throne. This age-old paradox is
quite recognizable; the moment Adam is created, the moment Pinoc-
chio is crafted, the father realizes he has given life in his own image and
fashioned a rival. (2007: 84)
Fears of death and being forgotten create confl ict with fears of being
replaceable and usurped. Roberta Seelinger Trites makes this connection
between sexless immortality and parental fear of death even more explicit:
“sex exists as a biological antidote to death. Species procreate because they
are mortal. . . . I have always suspected that authority figures in our culture
protect children from knowledge of sex because of our cultural desire to

protect children from knowledge of death” (2000: 122).
Joann Sfar’s golem in Vampire Loves (2002) is explicitly created for and
fails at replacing his creator’s daughter. Though he is certainly ignorant,
and thus innocent, he nonetheless has a corporeal appetite and so compli-
cates his maker’s expectations: “you’re very nice. But you’ll never replace
my beloved daughter . . . you’re just a big fat simpleton who doesn’t under-
stand a thing. And who only cares about eating” (87). Though some could
argue that these beings’ sexuality is allegorized by food, the symbolic treat-
ment indicates the indoctrinating pull of food, or more specifically, how
the dependence upon and lure of food can make social bonds necessary.
Frankenstein’s creature narrates how food lured him closer to civilization:
One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fi re which had been
left by some wandering beggars. . . . I found, with pleasure, that the
fi re gave light as well as heat and that the discovery of this element was
useful to me in my food, for I found some of the offals that the travel-
lers had left had been roasted, and tasted much more savoury than the
berries gathered from the trees. (89)
When he fi nds an abandoned hovel near a cottage, “It was indeed a para-
dise compared to the black forest, my former residence, the rain dropping
branches and dank earth” (92). But he realizes that being lured by desires
more complicated than basic urges, he has ruined himself for the state of
nature: “Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known
nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat” (105). The more
recognizably human his desires, the more monstrous he appears to his
father/creator.
In this context we can better understand the economies of innocence
underlying golem tales. The protector (sometimes avenger) can only remain
in holy service without bodily awareness, but like humans, in whose image
he is made from base materials, the golem (and homunculus) is tempted
toward corporeal experience. In Elie Wiesel’s more orthodox version the
golem clearly does not depend upon food, “Strangely enough, he did not
eat, he did not drink—at least not in public. Another thing: he did not age”
Conclusion 169
(1983: 89). His independence from feeding helps his protective powers—
the only time he ingests food is to serve as taster who can detect poison:
“He gave a piece of the matza to the Golem, who began to groan and moan:
he was sick as never before” (74). Unless the Rabbi wills it, the golem can-
not die.
There exists among golem tales a strange but simultaneous contradic-
tion—the golem is invulnerable but all body (dumb matter). Elie Wiesel
writes, “In spite of what you think, he was not less human than we, but
more human” (34). Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Rabbi Leib says to the golem,
“You are part of the earth, and the earth knows many things—how to
grow grass, flowers, wheat, rye, fruit” (36). But Singer also complicates the
golem’s development through a romantic awakening. He falls in love with
Miriam, his vulnerability to human emotion weakening his social indepen-
dence as a result:
Until then, the golem never had any need for food. Suddenly he began
to develop an appetite. . . . He would enter a bakery, shovel out all the
loaves from the oven, and try to swallow them. Once he tried to eat all
the meat in a butcher shop. (60–61)
Miriam asks, “Where do you put all this food?” and the golem answers,
sounding much more like a TV Frankenstein than Mary Shelley’s did:
“‘Food,’ the golem echoed” (72). And he keeps true to form in the now
famous idiom of childlike monsters: “Golem hungry!” or “Golem want
wine. . . . Golem love wine” (81–82).
The golem and homunculus posit an intersecting of the material and
metaphysical in the same way that cyborgs merge the artificial and organic,
machine and human. As Robert Plank writes, “The homunculus and Fran-
kenstein’s monster were the most conspicuous intermediate stages between
the golem and the automat, and the automat in turn is the last intermedi-
ate step to the robot” (1965: 19). In such a progression, the merging of
conceptual opposites breaks down false binaries but also creates a shock
of cognitive dissonance: “The evolution from the golem to the robot can
therefore also be understood as a consistent pushing forward of the frontier
of the uncanny. . . . from magical and biological to scientific and techno-
logical fantasy” (Plank 1965: 27). The now famous exemplar of the literary
uncanny in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1815) emerged from
the same transitional context. Robert Plank writes, of Hoffmann’s dancing
doll, Olympia:
Her saga was written during the same period that also saw Franken-
stein and the Second Part of Faust. . . . The forces that had shaped the
golem and those that were to shape the robot were evenly balanced,
and different types of fantastic creatures coexisted. But the tramp of
metallic feet could already be heard over the lilt of the music box, and
the pace of industrial and social change was to quicken before the nine-
teenth century had reached its midpoint. (1965: 21)
Ann Lawson Lucas credits Frankenstein and “The Sandman” with making
way “for toy stories,” though they are not about “children’s playthings,”
because they investigate artificial life and resulting crises of inauthenticity
(2006: 113).6 Of course what appears to be authentic is culturally rela-
tive. Plank explains historically changing responses to differing levels of
technological familiarity in terms that are very practical to understanding
material contexts:
If the uncanny feeling thus depends very much on the readiness of the
individual to experience it, this readiness must be assumed in turn to
depend upon the historical setting. . . . Having grown up in the Age of
Enlightenment which had discarded superstitions such as those that
nurtured the golem legend, while robots were still in the unperceivable
future, [Jacob] Grimm and [Anchim] von Arnim “knew” that such
things could not be. [Ernst] Jentsch and Freud would be less sure; and
we, coexisting with robots, even less than they. (1965: 27)
Working in reverse we might try to imagine what cultural understand-

ing has been lost with structural changes that result from technological
advances. For example, Marina Warner offers this reassembly of Romantic
Gothicism behind the industrial homunculus:
Against this background of advances in medical knowledge, the deep

fear of pollution excited in the eighteenth century converges with
the body-snatching terrors and other scientific abuses that underlie
the cultural rise of the vampire and the Frankenstein creature, who
in the Gothic tale is stitched together from boneyard remains. (1999:
132–133)
Joann Sfar sets this tradition in comic relief by banalizing the uncanny with
unexpected cuteness and bathos. In Little Vampire Does Kung-Fu! (2001),
a human boy befriends some monsters who devour the school bully who
picks on him. When Michael convinces them to sew the bully back together
and magically animate him, their homunculus turns out to be a giant boy.
Parodying the assembled man-monster (in his reconstituted bully), Sfar
demonstrates that such a predator is no longer really the expression of his
culture’s anxieties. This is not to say that today’s bogeymen are held up to
more realistic standards.
In “The Decline of Witches and the Rise of Vampires,” Gábor Klaniczay
recounts how in eighteenth-century Europe (especially Eastern Europe),
under the guise of rational modernization, the need for witch-hunting
was merely redirected through new scapegoating of imagined monsters,
Conclusion 171
reflecting fears of science and disease. Vampires served a similar imagina-
tive function as the witches who’d preceded them, but were imagined as
scientific mystery or invisible contagion.
Though more mystified, the folkloric connection between vampires and
child victims has been well documented (and remains surprisingly relevant
to later witch-figures and the continued presence of cannibalistic themes).
Thus the peculiar resonance of Dracula (1897). McNally and Florescu
explain that “generations of grandmothers warned little children: ‘Be good
or Dracula will get you!’” (1994: 3). In Bram Stoker’s version, the special
threat vampires pose to children is foreshadowed when Jonathan Harker
hears a desperate mother cry outside the count’s gates, “Monster, give me
my child!” (48). Dracula has brought the infant for his three vampire brides
to feed on. As with the depiction of cannibalistic witches in fairy tales, it
seems to be the female vampires that are a particular threat to children;
as with Lucy, who after death becomes the legendary “bloofer lady” who
preys on children who play outdoors:
we recognized the features of Lucy Westenra . . . but somehow changed.

The sweetness had turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the pu-
rity to voluptuous wantonness. . . . With a careless motion, she flung to
the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched
strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone.
(187–188)
Perhaps avoiding the depiction of blood-sucking females in an erotic and

powerful role (as they might appear with adult victims), this device is
also a direct inversion of basic maternal nurturing. Stanley Rosenman
observes that the projection “in the blood libel is envy of the young sib-
ling who drains all the mother’s nurturant fluids, leaving the mother too
depleted to succor the subject” (1982: 243). Both blood and milk, as life-
force, become conflated, as in In The Night Kitchen (1970), Mickey’s
insistence that he is not the milk that is used to make dough (echoing the
older claim that witches use children’s blood to make gingerbread7) has
ancient origins, as Luise White explains: “accusations of ritual murder
in Christian times conflated blood and bread: early Christians in Rome
were accused of hiding the infants they were about to eat in dough”
(2000: 192). Even if Mickey is not the milk, he sure winds up surrounded,
encaked, by dough.
All this dolling up of babes in delicious ways, wanting to consume out of
love or necessity, hints at another projection:
The blood libel gave expression to the adult’s desire to destroy enviable
youth. The adult craves to possess the elixir of juvenility for himself.
He wishes to be relieved of the burden of rearing the young, an activity
experienced as the devouring of his blood. (Rosenman 1982: 243)
Véronique Campion-Vincent indicates that blood libel always tells a tale
about power:
This extraordinarily adaptable8 story can express the fear of people

towards deviants, minorities, and foreigners, but also the fears of the
poor and the minorities towards the ruling 9 elites. This has been espe-
cially true in situations of colonization or conquest, where the rulers
were foreigners. The victims were eaten, emptied of their blood or
their fat, and their vital forces are absorbed by the evildoers.10 (2005:
165)
Evisceration is used so frequently as a metaphor it is easy to forget such

originating precedents.
Regardless of who served as scapegoat of the blood lie, it reflects an
envy and resentment of children, while at the same time guilt guaranteed
that child innocence would be even more protested. Mathew Kuefler has
written that
behind the untruth of Jewish ritual murder was the truth of the tragic
lives of many medieval and early modern European children, and the
image of poor, rural childhood presented throughout the legends. . . .
is not a happy one. . . . If in the early modern era there was a less
chance of sale into slavery . . . the perennial threats of war and famine
still continued. (2009: 27)
The blood lie also serves a classic case of inversion projection, as Stanley
Rosenman explains: “The legend . . . pushes onto the observance of the
Jew those cannibalistic features so explicit in the ritual of the Mass” (1982:
243). Transubstantiation symbolically transgressed against kosher law that
requires draining of blood and not mixing with food. Catholic mass, how-
ever, integrates blood and body as food. Alan Dundes writes,
Whereas Jews are specifically forbidden to drink blood, Christians are

specifically ordered to do so . . . Since Easter is the time of crucifi xion,
this might be a period of maximum or intensified guild feelings on the
part of Christians for eating the body and blood of their god. (2007:
397)
Luise White follows vampire stories in East and Central Africa that sprang
up in response to white colonists and missionaries, especially those starting
hospitals or blood banks in particular, which caused misapprehension and
fears as well as blatant accusations of blood-drinking and cannibalism,
like “Catholics eat people” (2000: 182). McNally and Florescu go as far
as to point out that “[s]ome see it as a Christian allegory or a parody—
Count Dracula as an evil invasion of Jesus Christ, offering eternal life if
Conclusion 173
one drinks his blood” (1994: 153). Perhaps Edward Cullen wraps it all up
in one sexy package.
Even though he’s typically a vilified character, the vampire is enviable in
his strength and invulnerability to mortal problems like death and hunger.
Sure, there’s the thirst, but that’s dangerous to the mortals, not the vam-
pire. To exploit these strengths and downplay his vices, Stephenie Meyer
remakes the vampire into a fairy-tale hero in her Twilight series. Bella, who
researches vampires to calm her growing fears about her new boyfriend,
concludes that “most vampire myths centered around beautiful women as
demons and children as victims; they also seemed like constructs created
to explain away the high mortality rates for young children” (2005: 134).
McNally and Florescu predicted this versatility of vampire-figures for such
romantic revisions:
The vampire possesses powers which are similar to those belonging to

certain twentieth-century comic book characters. During the day he is
helpless and vulnerable like Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne . . . Clive Leat-
herdale has characterized Batman as “the count cleansed of his evil and
endowed with a social consciousness.” (1994: 125)
Perhaps it is this glimmer of the romantic hero in vampires that appealed to

this four-year-old’s retelling of Cinderella:
Once upon a time a baby cat was born. And she was very small. And
since her family was very poor, she decided to run away into a dark,
dark woods. And he got lost into a dark, dark woods. . . . the moon
went behind a cloud, and when it came out again, the little boy turn
into a VAMPIRE! (screams). . . . Cinderella’s the little boy, and now
she’s a vampire. And then the—Cinderella-vampire smelled—saw a
boy and a girl, and some other girls, and he swooped up in the sky say-
ing, “I wonder which one I should eat fi rst?” Then he swooped down
and he ATE ’EM! Then he blew up. (Tucker 27–28)
This retelling also takes advantage of the vampire’s amorphous androg-

yny. The Cinderella-vampire provides a cathartic relief from fears when
told from a child’s perspective. This impossible blending of role model and
predator makes sense, however, in consumer culture, where youth becomes
the target and point of consumption. Rob Latham writes, “The modern
vampire, then, can be a youthful consumer, a consumer of youth, or a
figure consumed by a mythology of youth—or all three at once” (140).
Latham points to The Lost Boys (1987) as a central text demonstrating
these multiple levels of signifying the consumption of youth: “The contem-
porary consumer is thus, like the vampire, trapped in a stasis of perpetual
youth” reflecting “the endless capacity of capitalism to generate ever new,
ever youthful commodities” (140). Marx used vampirism as a metaphor for
consuming in Capital. Franco Moretti stresses the fetishistic mutability of
Dracula because he
has no body, or rather, he has no shadow. His body admittedly exists,

but it is “incorporeal” . . . as Marx wrote of the commodity, “impos-
sible as a physical fact,” as Mary Shelley defi nes the monster in the fi rst
lines of her preface. (1988: 91)
In these regards the vampire resembles the stereotyped child as much as

he preys upon it—he’s both exploiter and elusive, a desired commodity
himself.
Post-modernist depictions of artificial beings likewise often gesture back
to the industrial gothic to imagine such a mystified monster, as Russell Pot-
ter points out,
With its visceral excesses, its gargoyles of blood and sensuality, the
Gothic offers a perfect compensation for the dead historical machina-
tions of the postmodern. Founded itself in a reconstruction of a past
that never was, the Gothic does not re-enact history, but withstands it
(and its loss). (1992: para. 3)
Like the pastoral, the gothic resists, or at least provides an escapist out-
let from, modernization and industrialism, nostalgically compensating for
social loss and dependence. In contrast to its early-industrial hypotext,
Heinrich Hoffmann’s “Slovenly Peter,” Potter uses Edward Scissorhands
(1990) as a text that demonstrates this function:
Edward’s secrets—that no amount of make-up will cover our scars,

that the libido has nothing to do with families and everything to do
with society at large (economics, houses, hedges, malls, talkshows,
food), that our own sanity has been purchased as the result of a kind of
extortion or holding-hostage of our bodies—are, in the end, too much
to bear. (1992: para. 19)
Potter highlights the effectiveness of Tim Burton’s film to foreground struc-

tural change within the bourgeois post-industrial family: with industrial-
ism came fi rst a cordoning off of community, then an illusory reconnection
through common consumerism.
Potter also argues that the self in such a culture is fragmented by noncon-
formity: “Edward himself is the persecutorial agent of the suburban enclave
whose practiced conformities he unwittingly shreds. . . . he severs and dis-
joints the body of the socius” (1992: para. 5). In Patchwork Girl (1995), how-
ever, Shelley Jackson updates the homunculus (this time via Frankenstein)
even more by emphasizing the collective quality of patchwork people. Teresa
Dobson and Rebecca Luce-Kapler describe the disc Patchwork Girl as an:
Conclusion 175
interactive novel, a clever parody that combines image and text to tell
the story of a female monster, one created not by Victor Frankenstien,
but by Mary Shelley. The image of the stitched-together monster is em-
ployed above all as a metaphor for text. (2005: 270)
As an example of post-modernist forms encouraging folkloric hypertex-

tuality, Jackson particularly foregrounds the process “in ‘quilt,’ which is
comprised primarily of quotations from feminist theory, Frankenstein,
and Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz,” write Dobson and Luce-
Kapler, “Jackson employs patch writing to explore questions of, among
other things, textuality and intertextuality” (2005: 270). Laura Shackel-

ford praises Jackson’s work in its proof that “new media have become a
celebrated sign of the postmodern” (2001: 63).
In contrast to Edward Scissorhands, Patchwork Girl spins fragmenta-
tion into collectivity. Astrid Ensslin describes the title character as the “jig-
saw totality of womanhood” (2005: 205). Dobson and Luce-Kapler insist
that the Patchwork Girl has a collective, physical (material) identity,11 not
a fragmented one:
the graveyard selection playfully explores the notion of identity as a

socially constructed category. The female monster, like her nineteenth-
century male counterpart, is a collection of used parts. . . . Matter of
factly, she itemizes her parts, including: the tongue of Susannah, a talk-
ative pub woman stocked for drunken licentiousness; the ears of Flora,
which overhear secrets; the nose of Geneva, which should she follow
it, gets her into “tight” situations; and the stomach of Bella, a glutton
who was in her lifetime tried for crushing a man and who, oblivious to
her fate, nibbled her way to the gallows. (2005: 271)
Her many parts are greater than her bodily whole.

As Potter mentions, the pastoral and gothic share common impulses in
reaction to modernization and mechanization, but for many, “The twen-
tieth century, with its growing ecological awareness [and I might add,
destruction], has seen the pastoral mode and its pre-established harmony
between the sexes, as well as between nature and man, become obsolete”
(Ensslin 2005: 206). The pre-industrial golem easily translates into post-
industrial simulacra as a continued means of fantasized agency, especially
in the popular figuration of cyborgs, who have the best from both worlds—
human and machine. Robert Plank points out that whereas golems and
homunculi are organic in composition, “Robots do not grow. They have a
fi nality which is unknown to nature” (1965: 23). The robotically endowed
gain some degree of immortality. They are also made of often diverse
components—golems and patchwork people, though organic, are also col-
lective beings—their creators do not create their material existence, they
simply stitch up and turn the switch.
Michael Chabon writes, in Maps and Legends (2008), of his youth:
“I was beginning to learn the bitter truth about Golems. A golem, like a
lie, is the expression of a wish: a wish for peace and security; a wish for
strength and control” (199). Amy Sonheim has pointed out that “[u]nlike
the Pagan or Gentile analogues of Prometheus, Faust, or Frankenstein . . .
Rabbi Loew is not a power-hungry character seeking to better his God”
(2003: 387). But “the golem is created not simply to fend off the enemies
but to manifest its creator’s anger” (Sonheim 2003: 377). Like the superhe-
roes that he spawned, the golem enacted the fantasies of those who could
not execute them, including performing heroically without conscience. As
a result Chabon writes, “This golem, like a lie, grew to a tremendous size,
and in its vengeful might came in time to threaten the security of those it
had been made to keep safe” (200).
The power of language to evoke safety or real danger is an important
part of golem tales. In his picture book, Golem (1996), David Wisniewski
explains the mystic animation of the clay man: “The rabbi knelt and engraved
the word emet—Truth—upon the creature’s forehead” and to undo the
spell, “erasing the first letter—aleph—from the word on Golem’s forehead.
At this, emet—Truth—became met: Death.” Likewise, Chabon writes in
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000),12 “Every universe,
our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the
world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein
of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through
language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chit chat—was, lit-
erally, talked into life” (119). Joe Kavalier understands that discourse can
enable evil just as well, recasting the familiar folk motif when he refers to the
Czech ghetto as “the witch’s house in Terezin” (455). During the war, when
he hears false reports of Jews being fed and medically treated in the ghetto,
“Joe became more and more convinced that the paste board cheeriness and
vocational training masked some dreadful reality, a witch’s house made
of candy and gingerbread to lure children and fatten them for the table”
(442). In the same vein, the golem becomes pure gimmick in James Sturm’s
The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001), when Hershl Bloom, the only gentile
player for an otherwise Jewish baseball team, the Stars of David, agrees to
dress up as the golem to increase ticket sales: “If wearin’ some getup puts
more money in my pocket then I’m all for it” (32). Roxanne Harde describes
the xenophobic crowd’s response to what is perceived as “a Jewish threat
to American capitalism13. . . . a team of Shylocks using baseball as a ruse
to emasculate the men of Putnam by making off with their money” (77).
Sturm’s and Chabon’s revisitations of the golem story emphasize that plac-
ing one’s fate in the hands of the unreal is not agency at all. Golem’s demise
warns that externalizing agency lets go of control, thus power.
Chabon’s novel and commentary charmingly demonstrate and probe the
unique compensation that popular fantasy offers (in folk-heroism, comics),
as Lee Behlman has argued:
Conclusion 177
Without denying the trashiness of much American popular culture,
Chabon issues an aesthetic and ultimately moral defense of escapism
as it is found in one of America’s only original contributions to world
culture (along with jazz music), superhero comic books. . . . the novel
is remarkable for the intimate ways it shows how much pleasure and
value may be found in producing and reading fantasy. (2004: 62)
Superman’s origin parallels that of the golem in Chabon’s novel14:

“Though he had been conceived originally as a newspaper hero [by a cou-
ple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men],
Superman was born in the pages of a comic book . . . Comic books were
Kid Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the moment when
the kids of America began after ten years of terrible hardship” (Chabon
2008: 77–78). Comic books also catered to the new idle market of teens
who might have worked before labor reforms and the depression and were
about to emerge as a new class of consumer. In The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay, Rosa paints a mural in the room they prepare for Joe’s
little brother, “Rosa wrestled for a long time with the proper subject. Char-
acters from nursery rhymes, wooden soldiers, fairies and frog princes and
gingerbread houses, such motifs would be considered hopelessly puerile by
a boy of thirteen” (394). Especially a Jewish boy from the Prague ghetto,
who has suffered from anti-Semitic discrimination, hatred, and violence
(all of which he dies trying to escape).
Chabon’s comics-artist character Kavalier uses comics (most of which
are thinly veiled versions of the golem tales) as an outlet for his rage and
desperation, as well for dealing with his survivor’s guilt, demonstrating the
buffering power of fantasy,
The Golem in this story represents both the dead hope of Jewish life
in Europe and the ever-living promise of Jewish creativity. . . . It is a
predecessor, then, as an artifact of Jewish fantasy, to the new Jewish
fantasy-creation, the comic book hero. (Behlman 2004: 67)
But ultimately Kavalier emotionally collapses into self-destructive behav-

iors (picking fights with Germans, ultimately becoming a wandering sol-
dier), as Behlman points out, leaving the reader with a tempered view of
fantasy’s limitations:
While the Escapist [a comics-superhero within the Chabon novel] ful-

fi lls the fantasy of protecting the persecuted (much like Rabbi Loew’s
Golem patrolling the streets of Prague) and even goes further to visit
active retribution upon Hitler and his cronies, still, the effective-
ness and the satisfactions of such a creative consolation are seriously
curtailed by an awareness of what is actually happening in Europe.
(2004: 68)
The novel serves as a metacritical defense of the comic arts as narrative
necessity but also shows their interdependence with an exploitative indus-
try and use by a fantasy-dependent consumer-public:
Chabon’s intent in exploring superhero comics is not to issue a post-

modern critique of the “real” and realistic art forms, nor a populist
anti-intellectual assault on “elites” and their art, but to show, in a phe-
nomenological way, how it may assuage pain. With this comforting
gesture may come the admittedly problematic, quintessentially Ameri-
can phenomenon of forgetting. (Behlman 2004: 62)
This reminds us of the lure of certain lore—its strengths and potentially

delusional repercussions.
A similar balance of dangers is averted or triggered by fairy tales. Behl-
man writes: “fantasy may also act as an interruption to memory, a hold-
ing action against the incursions of the past” (2004: 71). Though fantasy
carries history, its escapism also buffers pain in order to confront realities.
Folktales and fairy tales’ frequently occurring worries over food supply
mirror food concerns, not necessarily the actual levels of food supply. Mas-
simo Montanari writes that the industrialized world has moved from fear
of hunger to fear of obesity with economic development, while maintaining
folkloric fantasies of deprivation: “We have moved into an age of abun-
dance with the mental equipment constructed for a world of hunger” (122).
Herman Pleij demystifies our presentist tendencies in this respect: “Famine
in the Middle Ages was not that much of a problem. Hunger in the third
world today is probably much more widespread and certainly more fre-
quent, and the accompanying death rate inconceivably higher” (2001: 102).
Wolfgang Behringer also reports other triggers like unpredictable weather
and inherited anxieties, indicating the extent to which all cultural fantasy
stems from composite causes.
If fairy tales reflect culturally shared neuroses, they can also work
through tensions toward vicarious resolution. Norma Rowen writes, for
example, that
The automaton had had a life in legend going back to the ancient world.
In these legends, the automaton’s life was often presented as being the
result of black magic, and it is hardly surprising that when spectators
fi rst viewed these mechanical creatures they experienced frissons of
awe and anxiety. But there was no magic, black or otherwise, in the
latest products of science. On the contrary, they were totally mate-
rial, with what “life” they evinced residing entirely of the machinery of
which they were made. (1990: 172)
Yet, Karl-Johan Illman points out that fantasy can anticipate technologi-
cal advances, as in golem legends: “People are saved through a creation
Conclusion 179
of their own. For this reason the inventor of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner,
spoke about the Golem as the archetype of his science” (2002: 181). The
theme of danger through human mechanization15 can be seen as traced
from golem legend, homunculus narratives, and “Faustian16 techno striv-
ing” to the “cybernetic sinning” or “gadget worship” of science fiction,
such as forewarnings of the computer Hal’s mutiny in Arthur C. Clarke’s
2001: A Space Odyssey (Rickels 2004: 50–51). Part of the danger comes
simply from an impractical dependence upon man-made machines that
surpass our own “intelligence” capabilities—in short, parceling out our
own agency, as Gershom Scholem explained in terms that echo the shifting
object-relations of children from homemade toy-pieces to mass-produced

toys, or medieval peasants from mind-altering poppy breads to a rising
middle class with industrially produced food:
the oldest [medieval] extant recipes for creating the Golem—a mix-
ture of letter magic and practices obviously aimed at producing ecstatic
states of consciousness. It would appear as though in the original con-
ceptions the Golem came to life while the ecstasy of the creator lasted.
The creation of the Golem was, as it were, a particularly sublime expe-
rience felt by the mystic. . . . It was only later that the popular legend
attributed to the Golem an existence outside ecstatic consciousness.
(1954: 99, my emphasis)
With the development of society comes the further reliance of its members
upon externally created conveyances of security and power. As the legend
of John Henry’s race against the steam-powered drill teaches, “mechanical
power17 came unmoored from its source” (Nelson 2008: 7). We fantasize
solutions to fears of our continued, increased dependencies. For example,
Holly Blackford writes, of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),
the film asks us to consider the fine line between machine and organic
creations through lyrical scenes in which the human characters wear
and depend upon various technologies to eat, breathe, and move. The
technological child is one that human beings create again and again,
only to regard it with horror as it seizes the tools of the father and rises
to power in a classic Promethean or Frankenstein plot. (2007: 74)
Like Hal and the golem, the childhood constructed by industrialism

and consumerism is ultimately resented if not controlled. One means of
controlling it, ironically, is through narratives of externalized agency
in which an inorganic, adult-made (and almost indestructible) agent is
adored. Perhaps Frankenstein’s creature has come to understand this
when he bemoans, “Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to
those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings.
If our impulses were confi ned to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be
nearly free” (81). As consumers who confuse choice with freedom, we
certainly are not free.
This motif of invulnerability (and danger) through artifice becomes a
familiar type-scene when seen in its pervasive post-industrial context. A
century after Baum’s antique androids populated Oz, Scott Westerfeld has
created the ultimate cyborgs, or “Specials” in his Uglies series—Uglies
(2005), Pretties (2005), Specials (2006), and Extras (2007). Specials are
set apart not simply for their bionic implements, which outcompete with
any natural human talents, but by their extended survival attributes—they
are not easily tired or hungry. The heroine of the series, Tally Youngblood,
goes through a series of surgical alterations, most of which are part of a

controlled development imposed upon the young in her culture. First is
the transition from being a child (‘ugly’) to adolescent (‘pretty’), in which
the young are physically remade to conform to a hegemonic standard of
beauty. Then, in the case of those who show unusual capacities for spe-
cial service (one of the basic credentials is height), better technology and
further operations provide preternatural strength and senses (better hover-
boards, “sneaksuits,” skintennas—a subcutaneous communication system
mentally connecting all of the specials in range), described in the following
comparison of “Special” Tally to “Smokey” (unaltered) David:
Tally was special now. David’s reflexes were nothing compared to hers,
and all his practice couldn’t make up for the fact that he was random: a
creature put together by nature. But Tally had been made for this—or
remade, anyway—built for tracking down the city’s enemies and bring-
ing them to justice. (2006: 24–25)
Bionic and computer enhancements give Tally preternatural power: “She

felt her special senses dissecting the forest around her, her instincts spin-
ning, her mind calculating from the stars overhead exactly how long it
would take to catch up” (2006: 49). An added advantage comes from the
time gained from not requiring sleep: “As the runaways wrestled their way
into sleeping bags, Tally allowed herself to fall into catnap mode. Specials
didn’t need much sleep . . . ” (2006: 173). She is shocked to see her ex-
boyfriend looking so unspecial after her surgery: “He looked sleepy in a
way that Specials never did, as if he were wallpaper, just another pretty”
(2006: 82).
Tammy Oler’s commentary on the “fembots” of popular culture can help
us to put Tally in the context of other female cyborgs, androids, and robots:
“even when, in such films as Blade Runner (1982) and Eve of Destruction
(1991), fembots do the soldiering-and-killing work that’s usually associated
with male androids, they continue to be imagined as overtly sexual objects
of male desire” (2008: 36). In contrast, Tally does the soldiering (not kill-
ing) for a cause she believes is just, yet she is not objectified. The closest
thing to objectification is the treatment of Tally’s love-interests Zane and
Conclusion 181
David. Oler points out that “[t]here are far fewer female cyborgs in pop
culture than female androids,” suggesting an unwillingness on the part
of filmmakers to empower human (and thus believable) female characters
with bionic empowerment (2008: 37). Unlike the rare exception to this
trend, the Bionic Woman, Tally is the central, unobjectified actor in her
conflicts and resolutions, but like the Bionic Woman, Tally is a cyborg,
which means, unlike the artificial androids of Blade Runner or Oz, she is
human and powerful, in spite of being a “meat” person.
Specials may not outlive humanity, like A. I.’s David, because they are
humanity—plus. They can, however, self-heal through nanotechnology
(Westerfeld 2006: 246). Survival abilities are enhanced as well through

diet:
Specials gathered their own food in the wild; their rebuilt stomachs
could extract the nutrition out of practically anything that grew. A few
. . . had actually taken up hunting, though Tally stuck to wild plants—
she’d eaten her share of dead animals back in Smokey days. (2006:
139)
Westerfeld’s most powerful characters are the most liberated nutritionally.

The future civilization in which Tally Youngblood has been reared is a
food utopia that is dystopian in its loss of individualism and autonomous
agency that citizens trade for social structure, shelter, and food security.18
Each inhabitant of “the City” can request any food whenever desired at
any time—though most of their food seems a standardized vegetarian diet
supported by a technologically controlled agrarian project: “Tally couldn’t
imagine city kids eating meat after only a couple of weeks in the wild. Even
Smokies rarely hunted for food—they raised rabbits and chickens” (2006:
200). Tally becomes aware that her appetite has been culturally constructed
and is contextually relative:
Among the scents of self-heating meals, Tally smelled something that

made her skin crawl . . . something rotten. . . . The stench grew and
grew, fi nally so strong it almost made her gag. A hundred meters from
the camp she found the source: a pile of dead fish, heads and tails
and picked-clean spines with flies and maggots crawling all over them.
(2006: 199)
The challenge of this scene to Tally’s composure indicates the extent to

which the stench is unknown to her. The emphasis given to the set-apart
word “rotten” indicates the drama of this “other” encounter for Tally—
someone who can remain “icy” as she cares for her own deep flesh wound
but is accustomed to “self-heating meals” in the wild, or who is used to
gathering any plants her special digestive system can easily utilize. Such
moments heighten the reader’s awareness, as is commonly done in utopian
fiction, of just how much we overlook that our reality is constructed for us
culturally and subject to controlled change.
As we see in the example of Popeye’s spinach, nutrition information
is subjectively shaped and can be ideologically biased. Michael Pollan
writes,
the “What to eat” question is somewhat more complicated for us than it

is for, say, cows. Yet for most of human history, humans have navigated
the question without expert advice. To guide us we had, instead, Cul-
ture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for
your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to
eat it, with what and when and with whom have for most of human his-
tory been a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents
to children without a lot of controversy or fuss. (2008: 3)
Tally is not accustomed to eating food that rots with such a stench; she is
accustomed to conscientious, convenient waste disposal. In fact, hunger
is so obliterated and unknown to Tally’s culture, that the term is com-
pletely reappropriated for a new technological meaning. When Tally and
Shay break into the armory, they accidentally release a defensive “clean up”
chemical—a liquid that oozes over and eradicates anything: “It’s hunger,
in nano form. It eats pretty much everything, and makes more of itself”
(2006: 119).
Wendy Katz has written that “a child’s attitude to food is an index to
that child’s emotional stability. . . . the child’s adjustment to the social
order” (1980: 193). It is curious that so many androids are anorectic—are
they rejecting the social order, just as anorexics resist sexuality20 (or adult
corporeality)? If our outlet for expressing empowerment for individual
human subjects is to envision them embodying resistance to bodily needs
through disembodiment, we’re setting up an impossible ideal. Such excep-
tions merely highlight the rule that hunger is a symptom of oppression, and
likewise, that appetite can be exploited—which is why Tally has the fol-
lowing moment of insight: “Sometimes I think I’m nothing but what other
people have done to me—a big collection of brain-washing, surgeries, and
cures” (2006: 190). Despite their exemplary power, such figures cannot
necessarily cure all vulnerabilities of being a social subject.
Fleshy child victims of adult appetites swayed through discourse against
the best interests of their bodies, and artificial beings brought to life through
magic words remind us that “everything is in the word,” as in golem tales
(Wiesel 1983: 44), but it is also true, according to Michael Symons, that
“we can never be liberated from the metabolic world. As earthly beings, we
are bound by natural laws; they support our only powers. We must still eat,
drink, breathe and die” (2000: 341). In an effort to recognize this balance
of constructivism and essentialism—let’s call it substantive materialism—
Karen Coats and Roberta Seelinger Trites argue that “[l]iterary critics can
Conclusion 183
no longer afford to focus only on literature as discourse. Discourse requires
embodiment—and both the knowledge of discourse and the knowledge of
embodiment begin in childhood” (2006: 152). This is especially apparent
in narratives that hinge on the borders of body and disembodied intelli-
gences, which break the false binary of body/mind, but also remind of us
our own vulnerable substance.
Holly Blackford shows how mechanistic figures allow more material and
realistic awareness of embodiment in spite or because of lacking flesh:
The machine, computer, or toy is not inherently good or bad, much

like the child in post-Lockean educational theory is neither our spiri-

tual savior nor our original sin. However, the machine is inherently in
conflict with our persistent romantic ideas about organic childhood,
which include the child’s playful and imaginative soul, its connection to
nature, and its regenerative powers for us all. This model of childhood
is simply in conflict with our image of children as learning machines,
whose environment we engineer. Deep down, what adults are really
facing in these fables is what their children may already know: com-
puter-age children, with their flexibility and adaptability, will grow
into a world we cannot know, one for which we cannot really prepare
them. (2007: 89)
Out of fear, an impotent desire to protect, envy, or all of these, we tend

to saddle kids with stories in which we have tried to puzzle through mate-
rial existence for the relief of a delusional free will. H. Joseph Schwarcz
explains that such narratives displace our agency, and especially that of
children identifying with artificial invulnerability,
The child is expected—this is what the story proposes to him—to enter

into a meaningful emotional fantasy relation to it-him-her [toy, pup-
pet, robot], exactly as he would be expected to do in a story about a
human being or an animal. In other words, he is asked to identify with
the machine-hero’s exploits and personality. . . . The fact that, unlike
humans and animals and, in fantasy at least, effigies, dolls, and toys,
machines have actually only a strictly functional raison d’être—this
fact is neglected. (1967: 82)
The raison d’être that supposedly comes with being “real” or fleshy isn’t
always pretty. Westerfeld makes this clear in his critique of capitalism (or
“Rusty” economics) from Extras:
Back in the Prettytime, bubbleheads could ask for anything they

wanted. Their toys and party clothes popped out of the hole in the wall,
no questions asked. But creative, free-minded human beings were more
ravenous than bubbleheads, it turned out. . . . Some people wanted to
go back to Rusty “money,” complete with rents and taxes and starving
if you couldn’t pay for food. (2007: 32)
As with any material relations, food need can easily turn into food greed.
Sharman Apt Russell writes, “Appetite is desire, born of biology, molded
by experience and culture” (2005: 24). Through a culture in which biol-
ogy is not only manipulated but controlled by technology, we see extreme
examples of the dangers we face when we can’t even trust our own bodies.
In texts for young people, this relationship is especially fraught with com-
plications: artificial beings—stuffed toys, action figures, robots, cyborgs—
are presented as powerful, loving, and deserving of devotion. These beings

beckon children to enter into relations with commodities, to identify with
commodities, to accept their own commodification. If children identify
with beings—unreal, meatless people—who cannot be the agents of their
own decisions and actions but only agents for other actors, their own
agency is thwarted by a false promise of power. In denying our own fleshi-
ness we barter away our own autonomy. And in denying possibilities for a
child’s agency (autonomous from that which we imagine for ourselves), we
further marginalize the young. Daniel Thomas Cook argues: “regardless of
one’s feelings about children’s consumption or their social insubordination
. . . we must position ourselves in relation to the putatively and potentially
agentive child. To fail to do so is to commit something of a moral transgres-
sion” (151).
There is an extreme discrepancy between ideals of resistance and the
subtler reflections of reality suggested by the presentation of agency in folk-
lore—especially as motivated by poverty, renewed in cultures of hunger,
and reformulated for consumer culture. What is often called the dilemma
of “eat or be eaten” in traditional folklore takes on renewed relevance
within consumerist cultures, which represent the dilemma of hunger as
capitulation to the demands of social bonds that provide access to food. It
also illuminates that which protectionism attempts to disguise—children’s
disempowerment in desirability. James Kincaid describes this as “a pecu-
liarly modern double-speak that made every act of child worship an act of
desecration, every act of self-sacrifice an excuse for murder, every offering
of maternal breast and paternal bread a cannibalistic assault”21 (2000: 2).
All of the sentimental discourse of bourgeois child worship dresses chil-
dren as consumers and consumables, sugarcoating surrendered agency as
empowerment. But as Kincaid concludes, “You can’t have your child and
eat it too” (2000: 10). We cannot expect future generations to act respon-
sibly if we commercialize folklore and passify childhood, imagining for the
young only conditional agency within a wind-up world.
Notes
NOTES TO THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. See Mike Males and Nancy Walker et al.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. As Frederic Jameson has indicated, this term is troubled by inconsistent tenden-

cies to confuse it for a periodizing reference. To avoid this confusion I’ll use “post-
industrial” as the more precise temporal term and reserve “post-modernist,” as
Ihab Hassan and Brian McHale have recommended, to stress the meaning as
post-modernism, not post-modern(ity) or postmodern-ism (see McHale).
2. I am using both terms in a broad and inclusive sense. Brian Sutton-Smith
writes that childlore encompasses both “juvenile folklore” and “imaginative
behavior”:
childlore may be considered also to include a variety of special theo-
retical and methodological concerns, such as: the historical changes
in the nature of childlore, the changing conceptions of child nature,
adult memory for child nature, the ontogeny of symbols, theories of
child symbolism, and developmental explanations of the phenomena
of childlore. (1970: 1)
Jack Zipes defi nes folkliterature as including children’s literature and popular
fiction: “Long before the fi rst Harry Potter novel was published, children’s
literature had become the most profitable and successful branch of the book
publishing industry. . . . children’s literature is the most popular of popular
literature. It is truly folkliterature, literature for all the folk, read by young
and old, and highly important for the socialization of children” (2002: 208–
209). Alex Scobie has convincingly argued for the inclusion of comics in the
category of folkliterature, in particular for their folkloric quality of audience
reciprocity. I will focus on literature, ritual, and popular culture representing
fairy-tale and folktale-type scenes or motifs in an effort to characterize their
pervasive and variant presence.
3. Naomi Wood points out that “Andersen’s sweet-sour narratives are often
adulterated, simplifying his complex flavors, because adults repudiate his
mode, in America at least, part of a general cultural tendency to avoid things
that make us fearful when they cannot be contained easily in commodifiable
packages such as horror movies or amusement park rides” (194–195). I must
admit my initial response was consistent with the adult denial she describes.
186 Notes
4. Also an inspiration for a ballet, Coppélia, is Hoffmann’s “The Sand-
man” (1816), which revolves around an automaton who becomes the main
character’s obsessive love object. In the Saint-Léon/Delibes ballet Cop-
pélia (1870), the automaton is featured as a dancing mechanical doll—a
popular motif in ballet. Susan Stewart writes, “In children’s literature this
transition from hesitation to action, from the inanimate to the animate,
continually appears in the theme of the toy come to life. The nutcracker
theme can be found even on the boundary between didactic and fantastic
children’s literature” (1993: 55). Zipes writes that Hoffmann “was very
much disturbed by tendencies of early capitalism which caused humans and
human relations to assume the properties of things and machines while the
real productive power and quality of human beings became distorted and
obscured” (2002: 45).

5. H. Joseph Schwarcz, writing in 1967, found that animated objects were rare
in fiction before the nineteenth century: “All this was changed by the appear-
ance of the fi rst writer of modern fantasy, Hans Christian Andersen” (78).
6. Zipes writes of some tales by Andersen: “just a handful depart from tradi-
tional storytelling, self-glorification, and religious conservatism,” comprising
a “few radical fairy tales, legends, and anecdotes with a ferocious tone and
spirit along with many saccharine religious tales that drip with sentimental-
ity and banality” (2006a: 233).
7. For more on the limits and complications of this defi nition, see “A Childhood
Studies Primer” in Elusive Childhood (Honeyman 2005).
8. Relevant in this discussion will be Priscilla Denby’s term “folklure” for the
appropriation of folklore by advertising as lures to consumption. Linda Dégh
quotes Ernest van der Haag to illustrate how folklures support cultural tran-
sitions to consumerism: “Advertising helps to unify taste, to de-individualize
it, and thus to make mass production possible” (Dégh 1994: 52). See also
Tom Sullenberger (1974).
9. Dégh analyzes “television’s most characteristic, though by defi nition least
fantastic and most conspicuously earthbound genre: the dramatized com-
mercial. This remarkable modern art form evokes most frequently and obvi-
ously the Märchen” (1994: 36). Koven explains, “the television commercial
is the American adult equivalent of the folktale—for example, magical assis-
tance, and promise of riches beyond our dreams” (2003: 182).
10. Zolklover explains that the traditional bias towards proving “the orality and
traditionality of folklore items and motifs in a given text severely limits the
horizons of scholarly inquiry into comic books” (39).
11. Heda Jason also notes, “Bogatyrëv and Jakobson felt that it is difficult to
establish sharp boundaries between oral and written literature” (1991: 33).
12. Attempts to construct ‘composite’ texts or fi nd an Ur-text of variants is also
an act of faith in the langue, which is posited as the composite of all potential
variants.
13. In this sense I have found Bill Brown’s idea of the material unconscious
extremely helpful. Note its similarities with folk study: “Irreducible to either
an authorial or a cultural unconscious, the ‘material unconscious’ is a con-
cept I put into play when, granting dimensionality to a passing reference or
impression . . . I confront an image of the past that otherwise inexplicitly
renders the text as a whole, and its moment in history, newly legible” (1996:
14). Like Brown, I found that objects (toys, food) in folk/fairy tales persisted
in my forethought as a reader, demanding to be read and hopefully revealing
a history of things.
14. Elsewhere Gramsci describes the folkloristic as “conceptions that are
imparted by the various traditional social environments” (1980: 30) and
Notes 187
“not something rigid and immobile, but . . . continually transforming itself,
enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which
have entered ordinary life. ‘Common sense’ is the folklore of philosophy”
(326, n. 5).
15. “Some folklore studies have emerged that seek to enumerate folklore types
and motifs when they occur in popular media, in other words, studies that
engage in motif spotting” (2008: 9).
16. This struggle is frequently foregrounded in the work of Winsor McCay, espe-
cially Little Nemo in Slumberland. It is also a major factor in Popeye’s trans-
formation from the Thimble Theatre “stage” to television cartoons, as I will
discuss in Chapter 5.
17. Coover humorously counters Disney’s idealization of the father figure
Gepetto, who becomes, far from the selfless parent Disney produced, a
drunken, abusive, and delusional father who has dubbed himself “San Petto”
and wants to remain in the whale where he brews his own grappa. This is
right funny stuff.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. Yorick is the pen-name of Collodi’s contemporary, P. C. Ferrigni, who wrote

La Storia dei Burattini (The History of Puppets) in 1884.
2. Wunderlich and Morrissey support this interpretation, which is especially
relevant to Pinocchio in America (1928), written by the Italian-American
pedagogical reformer Angelo Patri. In this set of stories Pinocchio is guided
as much by Lady Liberty as by the Blue Fairy.
3. Adult immigrants were more widely perceived as justifiably exploitable work-
ers than children in light of reformists’ rhetoric (Zelizer 1985: 63).
4. Likewise, Patri’s readers are encouraged by example to rely on belief in
benevolent agents other than themselves rather than acting alone, as indi-
cated by the tagline under Mary Liddell’s illustration of Pinocchio’s star
ride: “A Dream, and that is Enough” (see Figure 1.1). Robert Coover mocks
the trope in Pinocchio in Venice, in which the All-Puppet Vegetal Punk
Rock Band plays, “improvising raucously upon his little phrase (which
sounded suspiciously to him like ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’)” (1997:
141).
5. Competition for survival within the “tyranny of the new” (D. Harris 2000:
36) complicates the identity of playthings by externalizing their value. Cease-
less pressure for novelty in consumer culture is a common issue in negoti-
ating identity. John Fiske explains, “Newness, of course, is central to the
economic and ideological interests of capitalism: the desire for the new keeps
the production processes turning and the money flowing toward the produc-
ers and distributors” (2000: 327).
6. In “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan writes that “the
recognition of desire is bound up with the desire for recognition” (1977:
172), but the process of self-signification becomes more complicated and
even seemingly paradoxical (in a moment relevant to commodification): “I
am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am
where I do not think to think” (1977: 166).
7. Literally dramatizing the pressure of market identification, the characters
in The Brave Little Toaster (1980), by Thomas Disch, are appliances who
fear, above all, obsolescence and the city dump. In Robots (2005) the “bot”
characters fear and fight becoming “outmodes.”
188 Notes
8. Stephen Nissenbaum compares the tradition of a Santa Claus who “knows
when you are sleeping,” etc., and is an intimidating yearly ritualization of the
Judgment Day, evoked yearlong in “regulating children’s behavior” (1996: 74).
9. It is also a point that Leo and Diane Dillon emphasize in their gorgeous 2001
illustrations to Margaret Wise Brown’s Two Little Trains: on the left hand of
each doublespread is an illustrated train and on the right its toy counterpart
mimicking its journey.
10. Of course, from a human-centered perspective this use of transitional objects
makes sense. We bond with objects in order to be able to separate from them
in our own self-signification. D. W. Winnicott writes, “In these ways the
object develops its own autonomy and life, and (if it survives) contributes
to the subject, according to its own properties” (1982: 90). But consumerist
“commoditoys,” Beryl Langer explains, “stimulate rather than satisfy long-

ing,” which results in “a short but intense ‘shelf life’ as objects of desire”
(2004: 255).
11. No wonder the fi lm adaptation of The Brave Little Toaster expanded senti-
mentally on the character with the most symbolic resonance to child culture
as a popular transitional object—the Blankie—as if to ensure an understand-
ing of our emotional connection (and commitment) to things.
12. A notable exception (or variation, depending on your slant) is Gail Car-
son Levine’s Ella Enchanted (1997), in which the protagonist becomes “a
complete puppet” due to a fairy’s curse that she always be obedient. This
infringement upon her agency nonetheless fails to prevent her from learning
from her hard and mostly involuntary labor—by the end of the story, when
she marries the prince, she signifies her solidarity with workers and those
who do not overvalue status and money: “I refused to become a princess
but adopted the titles of Court Linguist and Cook’s Helper” (231). Perhaps,
however, Levine can convincingly indulge this ideal because her setting is,
like most fairy tales, pre-industrial.
13. Brian Aldiss reports of his original storyline (fi rst sold to Kubrick and then
Spielberg for adaptation) that “I had seen how the David cycle should end,
and had written a third story. The three stories between them contain in
outline form all that is needful for my idea of a motion picture. No flooded
New York, no Blue Fairy. Just an intense and powerful drama of love and
intelligence” (2001: xvii). Again, if I’m understanding the writer’s intentions
correctly, in adapting to fi lm, much dignity was lost.
14. Brown writes that critical rejections of The Whilomville Stories as children’s
literature “may well be a symptom of how threatening the new material-
ism of childhood began to look as a mode through which to fantasize, indi-
vidually and collectively, alternate (and alternatively gendered) economies”
(1996: 198).
15. Wagner also points out that in the Oz stories, animated bodies implicitly
express and work through cultural anxieties about electricity. A telling post-
modernist contrast can be seen in The Brave Little Toaster (especially the
fi lm version), in which electricity is an explicitly unproblematic life-force for
all the main characters.
16. Geller continues . . .
That means we have to spend some brain power on figuring out what it
means to be authentic in our industry. If toys are not replicas, what are
they? How can we still be relevant to kids who are beyond traditional
role play? On the other hand, we see the “kidult” phenomenon, where
adults are refusing to take on the responsibilities and cultural symbolism
Notes 189
of adulthood . . . play becomes as important as work, and toys become
kidult tools. (2004: 8)
17. Likewise, in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Fac-
tory (2005), a child’s empowerment, through gaining capital and secure
employment in Willy Wonka’s factory, comes with the stolen opportunity
of an adult-indulgent, family-affi rming message. An entire narrative involv-
ing Wonka’s father is added, providing a healing nostalgic ending for adult
viewers estranged from their own parents, and a double emphasis for child
viewers, through Charlie’s own lips, that “parents only make rules to protect
you”—that family is more important than the central child’s future career as
a chocolatier.
18. Edward Muir informs us that “the prominent, long nose” is a common attri-
bute of Carnival masks: “widely understood to represent the phallus, and
bawdy jokes about sausages explicitly connected food and sex” (89).
19. Muir explains, “The word ‘carnival’ is apparently derived from carne, which
means ‘flesh,’ and levare, which means ‘to take away’” (88). He also notes that
Carnival “celebrated the materiality of everyday life” (86). This explains its
continued influence on public reflexivity relevant to my study: “Migrations
of motifs from Carnival proper into other holidays ‘Carnivalized’ much of
Renaissance festivity,” and, as we will see, folklore for centuries to come (96).
20. Pleij expounds: “it appears that edible architecture was not limited to the
world of dreams or fairy tales but was also a regular feature in a long culi-
nary tradition of the affluent aristocracy. Even though the image of inhabit-
able foodstuffs took on various forms, they all sparred with similar weapons
in their efforts to combat the fear of food shortages by conjuring up an over-
abundance as ridiculous as it was fanciful” (2001: 140). Accounts of such
feasts predate their abundance in the Middle Ages—for example, see “Din-
ner with Trimalchio” in The Satyricon by Petronius (fi rst century CE).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. I intend to suggest a Foucauldian method here, in which evidence from the

past is used to more concretely understand the present.
2. In her “Parent–Child Relationships in the Nineteenth Century,” Rebekka
Habermas analyzes “a new concept of parent–child relations which was
emerging in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century,
one characterized by an absence of parental needs, one which we might call
disinterested parenting” (43–44). Maria Tatar identifies “Children Living in
a Time of Famine” as originally “a summary of a seventeenth-century . . .
sensational news story, ” which would place it before the change Habermas
delineates, serving as a fi ne contrast (2004: 380).
3. The cultural significance of bread alone is far beyond the possible scope of
this book, but to review a few contexts: often class confl ict due to famine
results in “bread riots”; bread has marked caste according to black breads
and white (Allen 2002), the French revolution is a dramatic case in point
with Marie Antoinette’s famous line “let them eat brioche,” a rich bread
that, like her, was completely inaccessible to the poor.
4. At his most eloquent on this fact is Don Quixote’s Sancho: “while I sleep, I
am troubled neither with fear nor hope, nor toil nor glory; and praise be to
him who invented sleep, which is the mantle that shrouds all human thoughts,
the food that dispels hunger . . . in a word, the general coin that purchases
190 Notes
every commodity” (2004: 1099). In sum, “sleep is a remedy for those miser-
ies which we feel when awake” (1111).
5. Both essential and luxury foods, especially grains, honey and fruits, represent
plentitude and are used in many tales about oral greed. Claude Lévi-Strauss
collected tribal variants from South America. Like those tales discussed
within the scope of this chapter, these serve to indoctrinate the regulation
of consumption, but more significantly to my point and to understanding a
present contrast, is that they also, like Hansel and Gretel, relate consumption
directly to one’s contribution to the community—one’s worth in work, shar-
ing, family loyalty—in short, reciprocity (unlike industrial tales like Hoff-
mann’s or post-industrial ones like The Boy Who Ate Around).
6. Lisa Chinitz points out that “[p]opular sympathy always falls to Hansel and
Gretel as heroes who vanquish evil. But we read the story exclusively from the
children’s perspective; from the mother’s point of view; things look quite dif-
ferent” (1994: 271). Her analysis highlights Henry James’s use of the inverted
Hansel and Gretel story in “The Turn of the Screw,” in which the estate Bly
has turrets like those of “gingerbread antiquity,” though I feel obligated to
add that this term was in current usage to describe gaudy American appro-
priations of Victorian architecture and mightn’t consciously suggest any con-
nection to the folk/fairy tale (see Maass 1983). One might also consider these
similarities, however, in light of the fi lm adaptation The Innocents (1961)
and the more recent reworking of the theme in The Others (2001).
7. Although, one satirically proposed legendary source for the tale of “Han-
sel and Gretel” would suggest the innocence of the “witch” (at the hands,
though, of adult wrong-doers) in the case of Katharina Schrader, an innova-
tive honeycake-maker acquitted of witchcraft charges and living in self-exile
in the forest, who was murdered by the spurned and envious Hans Metzler
and his sister Gretel (Rudnay and Beliczay 1987: 90).
8. The rhetoric of “selfless parenting” is shown by Rebekka Habermas (see note
2) to disempower children economically into passive objects (1998: 46).
9. Relative tolerance of high infant mortality is often mistaken for indifference
through the lens of presentist protectionism. The critical over-defensiveness
in response to the constructivist premise of childhood by Philippe Ariès
is perhaps based on a misunderstanding of his healthy dose of nominal-
ism. Clearly Hansel and Gretel’s (step)mother is prioritizing food distribu-
tion with an understanding that as dependents, Hansel and Gretel cannot
procure their nourishment if the parents themselves starve. The story, of
course, resolves that confl ict too (suggesting its relevance as an interpretive
rubric)—Hansel and Gretel fi nd enough riches to feed the family even in
famine.
10. Monica Green has further developed this assertion (with new complications)
in her 1989 article.
11. Sample taken by the Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Department
of Folklore in a general survey taken in 1966–1967 (Professor H. Halpert’s
archives, qtd. in Widdowson).
12. For more on the centrality of milk to child nutrition, nursing discourse,
manipulation of children, and teaching children dietary self-management,
see Burgan.
13. Peckham also points out: “Conversely, international cuisine is promoted
and consumed as a touristic experience, so that a meal at an Indian, Italian,
Greek or Chinese restaurant becomes a substitute for travel” (172). Consider
Ted Lewin’s Big Jimmy’s Kum Kau Chinese Take Out (2002), which presents
Notes 191
food as a souvenir for a touristic experience, but also presents the experience
in a consumerist format—the endpapers are menus.
14. This hyperliteral application of “you are what you eat” will also be discussed
as concerns ethnic identification in chapter four.
15. In “Let’s Eat Chinese!” Lisa Heldke calls this gorging “cultural food colo-
nialism”: “When I began to examine my culture-hopping in the kitchen and
in restaurants, I found echoes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
European painters and explorers, who set out in search of ever ‘newer,’ ever
more ‘remote’ cultures which they could co-opt, borrow from freely and out
of context, and use as the raw materials for their own efforts at creation and
discovery” (2001: 78).
16. See Thompson.
17. Michael Symons writes, “The sisters and merchants might as well live in sep-
arate lands. The women are torn between their homely past and the dream
of a chore-utopia” (200: 326). Might they be also destined for lazy-luscious-
land (Luilekkerland)?
18. In an explanation that might apply to globalizing economies like that of the
U.S., Shannan Peckham writes that “the anxieties stemmed from an appreci-
ation of the fact that the population was no longer producing the food it con-
sumed. Massive imperial expansion had opened up new tastes and brought
new foreign foods home, while technologies of conservation, storage and
transport facilitated and encouraged this flow” (1998: 176).
19. See O’Reilly.
20. Camporesi explains, “Thus prepared and ‘seasoned,’ the infant was entrusted
to the dark arms of the night. The initiation into controlled dreaming and the
artificial ease of opium-induced sleep began with swaddling clothes. From
infancy to old age narcosis ruled supreme” (1989: 25).
21. Again, turning to Pleij, some qualifications may be necessary: “Hunger and
scarcity almost always begin with very bad weather conditions. . . . Bakers
and grain merchants were always held responsible for food shortages, even
when it was not at all clear how much they were to blame” (2001: 102).
Pleij also warns against oversimplifying the causes and exaggerating medi-
eval famines: “occurrences of hunger and hardship were usually localized
and of short duration. . . . Reports of the fear of famine were considerably
more frequent than indications of its actual occurrence” (2001: 103). An
undertreated cause of structural instability and people’s fears, Pleij argues,
was the constant reality or threat of war.
22. The author does not footnote or elaborate on this reference. I’d be very inter-
ested to know what texts he had in mind with this comment or which ones fit
this description well. Nevertheless, I’ll get back to pancakes in Chapter 4.
23. See Muhawi and Kanaana.
24. This allusion to Apocalypse Now (1979) increases the characterization of the
Queen Bee’s villainy for an adult audience familiar with the Vietnam War film.
Robert Duvall’s character, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, actually says, “I
love the smell of napalm in the morning” during an attack on a village.
25. Contrast the freedom of Hansel and Gretel (necessary losses who nonethe-
less have the opportunity for family fiscal reciprocity and empowerment)
with that of Rapunzel (who is also given up for food, in this case lettuce or
parsley, depending on the version, but held to standards we uphold today but
won’t recognize here: selfless parenting, or really, imprisonment to impos-
sibly “protect” her from men, inevitable adulthood, and pregnancy). Mother
Goethel is trying to save Rapunzel in the same way that Lizzie is Laura. But
sometimes protection is infantilizing. See also Getty.
192 Notes
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. Philippe Ariès writes, of various holidays in the past involving “house-to-

house collections: a practice which was sometimes a greeting and sometimes
genuine mendacity,” including American Halloween: “the ritual of these cel-
ebrations tended to make little or no distinction between children and ado-
lescents” (1962: 78). The more current infantilization of such traditions in
industrialized consumer culture has rendered trick-or-treating “babyish”—
something only seriously done by younger children.
2. For today’s equivalent, look into Mosquito Teen Repeller (sold to shopkeep-
ers to discourage teens from hanging out with high-pitched sounds older
customers can’t hear)—although, it has been subversively adopted by teens
as a Teen Buzz message ring tone on cell phones that teachers usually can’t
hear.
3. Consistent with Tuleja’s suggested cause of urbanization, Moss and others
of this time reveal a budding sense of geographic class boundaries—espe-
cially the suburban experience becomes segregationist to “outsiders.” Clearly
another factor in the rise and fall of trick-or-treating.
4. Today the turn to enclosing child activity on Halloween has intensified.
Schmidt writes, “Some merchants have even begun to recast Halloween, a
rising star in the fi rmament of commercial holidays, as ‘Malloween,’ where
trick-or-treaters are removed from the dark dangers of the streets to the safe
haven of the shopping center” (1995: 4).
5. Elizabeth Pleck writes, “An easy way to understand the significance of Amer-
ican family rituals is to demonstrate their economic importance to the mod-
ern American economy. Every October the sale of Halloween supplies such
as Ross Perot masks, Count Dracula fangs, and miniature peanut butter cups
contributes $400 million to the gross domestic product” (2).
6. Accounts vary on the number of fi res: Nicholas Rogers reports one thousand
in one night: October 30, 1983 (2002: 99). Skal reports only 350 in 1984
(2002: 151). Chafets reports eight hundred in 1986 (1990: 4). It is difficult to
tally the reported and unreported fi res, especially because they usually occur
over a three-day period leading up to Devil’s Night.
7. Following white fl ight into the suburbs from 1950 onward and the deadly
Detroit riot of 1967, “[b]etween 1978 and 1986, Detroit lost virtually a third
of its jobs in the auto industry. . . . Because the state of Michigan banned
deficit budgets, it made it impossible to mount massive public works pro-
grams to bring hope and jobs to the unemployed. Deindustrialization and
neoconservative economics was turning Detroit into an urban nightmare”
(Rogers 2002: 98).
8. At Christmas, texts from ’Twas the Night before Christmas (1823) to The
Polar Express (1985) indulge this theme.
9. With my television examples I think it’s worth remembering that “[l]ike the
legends themselves, filmic and televisual representations of urban legendry
are a useful barometer to contemporary social norms and beliefs. Or rather
. . . [they] reflect the kinds of debates surrounding specific beliefs that such
legends embody” (Koven 2008: 80).
10. Though more generally mumming involves travelling folk players in carni-
valesque mimicry, very likely Cross is specifically referring here to a New
Year’s tradition the Opies describe: “groups of children, usually three in a
group, wearing old clothes and with faces blackened with soot, maintain a
form of ‘mumming,’ so called, in which, on being granted admittance, they
slink into a house . . . and start to sweep the floor with a hand brush. While
doing this they emit a high-pitched humming noise between their teeth . . .
Notes 193
and keep their faces strictly averted. Only when they have been given money
do they become little human beings” (2001: 290). In this chapter I will dis-
cuss some connections with the ritual (la Befana, witch’s brooms, the lucky
chimney sweep) that also certainly relates to blackface discourse in Chapter
4.
11. Stephen Nissenbaum explains that such “inversion rituals,” where power
and roles are reversed (as with Roman Saturnalia), can be seen as reinforcing
the control of those in power: by inverting the established hierarchy (rather
than simply ignoring it), those role inversions actually served as a reaffi r-
mation of the existing social order. . . . like Halloween today—when, for
a single evening, children assume the right to enter the houses of neighbors
and even strangers, to demand of the elders a gift (or “treat”) and to threaten
them, should they fail to provide one, with a punishment (or “trick”). (1996:
11) Another inversion ritual of great interest to child power (but outside the
scope of this chapter) is “barring the schoolmaster” (see Nissenbaum 1996:
112–114).
12. In this sense Halloween can be compared with Christmas, which both David
Hamlin and Stephen Nissenbaum argue has ritualistically evolved within
the family to the advantageous control of parents. Halloween, however,
remained an exclusively child-oriented and communal holiday longer. Ham-
lin argues that bourgeois families used gifts at Christmas as bribes to keep
kids near home—away from potential mingling with others. Nissenbaum
(1996: 74) sees the figure of Santa as an omniscient threat—perhaps invert-
ing the trick-or-treat relationship of old into be-good-or-no-treat.
13. See Walker et al. (40, 73–75, 195).
14. To ensure the profitability of this shift in the 1980s, “three major indus-
try associations—the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, the National
Candy Brokers Association and the National Confectioners Association—
attempted to pressure Congress to extend Daylight Savings Time through
the fi rst Sunday of November. Their reasoning was the extra daylight hour
would translate into greater candy sales” (Pottker 1995: 204).
15. Ann Lawson Lucas explains that la Befana comes “from folklore and popu-
lar tradition” in “Italy, the heartland of Roman Catholicism—she provides
a pagan dimension during a festival of the Church. Her name is a corruption
of the word ‘Epifania’ (Epiphany)” (2006: 106).
16. See note 10.
17. Roy Vickery describes the British cautionary precedent in Jenny Greenteeth,
who “is supposed to drag unwary children into the deepest parts of stagnant
pools” (1983: 247). She “descended from ‘water spirits’ of Gothic mythol-
ogy, whose great seductive beauty was somewhat marred by their green
teeth” (248). Vickery writes, “It is probable that Jenny Greenteeth got her
name from the tooth-like appearance of Duckweed, and it is not surprising
that she should have been brought into service to persuade children to keep
their teeth clean” (1983: 249).
18. Tuleja describes two French sources for the ritual: “The fi rst, from 1887, has
the child put the tooth beneath its pillow, and the exchange for money or a
toy being accomplished by no less a figure than the Virgin Mary. The second,
from 1902, has a ‘good fairy’ as the benevolent dental agent, with the reward
being not money but candy” (1991: 15–16).
19. A great source for those interested in how Dickinson was published for chil-
dren is Angela Sorby.
20. The overlap between Carnival and Halloween traditions is too vast for
treatment here, though I might point out a few particularly relevant simi-
larities involving Mardi Gras in the U.S. Barbara Maudlin reports that
194 Notes
groups of children visit neighborhood homes during Mardi Gras chanting,
“The Mardi Gras comes once a year to ask for charity. / Once a year is
really not too often for you” (133). Ned Sublette describes “the Skull and
Bones Gang,” who “wear skeleton suits. They ‘come out of the coffi n’ early
in the morning on Mardi Gras day, and run through the cemetery and
the neighborhood, waking people up. They frighten children so they’ll be
good” (2008: 307).
21. Perhaps such traditions migrated and evolved along with the traditions of
Carnival, which has been so widely and variously influential as to be too
vast for this analysis. To touch on two examples, however, one instance
of this link appears in Bradbury when the children visit Notre Dame and
see gargoyles coming to life, reminiscent of the carnivalesque: There came
men’s heads with sausages in their mouths. Beyond danced the mask of a
Fool upheld by a spider that knew ballet. . . . All accompanied by pigs with
harps and sows with piccolos and dogs playing bagpipes, so the music itself
helped charm and pull new mobs of grotesques up the walls to be trapped
and caught forever in sockets of stone. Here an ape plucked a lyre; there
floundered a woman with a fish’s tail. (98–99) Ancient and medieval figures
like Orpheus and Hades, the Pied Piper, the Feast of Fools, and, relevant
to my next chapter, Cockaigne appear all as part of the carnivalesque (also
important to Pinocchio in Venice). U.S. custom that still makes use of such
figures appears every Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where, also linking Day
of the Dead and Halloween tradition, the Skull and Bones Krewe still scare
children into behaving.
22. See Engels (121–122, 138–139, 144–145).
23. Throughout this chapter I conflate use and exchange value, as I am looking
at consumerism in a widely material sense, not simply involving money but a
pre-fi nancial set of experiences: literally procuring and ingesting. It is inter-
esting to note that consumer culture obscures use value, whereas in dealing
with children, we often “protect” children from understanding exchange.
24. The most widely influential study to this line of inquiry so far has been
Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of
Children (see chap. 6). See also Daniel Thomas Cook (6–7, 144–151) and
Nicholas Sammond (360–363).
25. See Ariès (10, 32–33, 39–40), Foucault (1976: 98, 153), Habermas (43–44,
51), and Donzelot (45, 93–94).
26. See Schlosser (2002 “kid kustomers,” 42–46) and Schor (“age compression,”
55–58).
27. Then again, if the history of the Mars corporation is any indication, some
protection is in order: “The Mars Corporation recently endowed a chair of
chocolate science at the University of California at Davis, where research on
the antioxidant properties of cacao is making breakthroughs, so it shouldn’t
be long before we see chocolate bars bearing FDA approved health claims”
(Pollan 2008: 39).
28. Nestlé is a particularly interesting exploiter of the young, being a company
that is most famous for milk substitutes and chocolate products. It is also
the largest food corporation in the world and spends the most annually on
marketing to ensure cradle-to-grave loyalty (Nestle 2002: 12).
29. See Marion Nestle (2002: 334–337).
30. Ironically, the real Wonka candy line inspired by Dahl is owned by Nestlé.
Robert M. Kachur writes of the company’s advertising for a new product,
WonkaZoid: “food plays as central a part as it did in Dahl’s original text. But
the relationship being facilitated by food is between a consumer and a brand,
not between a reader and a larger cultural tradition” (2009: 232).
Notes 195
31. In Arthur’s Halloween, the students have “bat-wing brownies and vampire
blood” (brownies and red punch) and “human eyeballs, hearts and brains”
(peeled grapes, Jell-O, cold spaghetti) in the same spirit of making food
“fun.”
32. For a comprehensive and fascinating history, the best source is still Mintz’s
Sweetness and Power.
33. For more on need, income level, and child obesity, see Marion Nestle.
34. On a more positive note, Eric Schlosser is contributing to this educational
possibility with his Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know
about Fast Food (2006), an adaptation of his arguments from Fast Food
Nation (2002) for a juvenile audience.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. Appelbaum provides his own translation from “Lecture de Brillat-Savarin”

(Marty 2002).
2. You can see the comics reprinted in Del Giudice. They are also available in
special collections at Michigan State University and Ohio State University.
One might argue that Disney and other child-targeting corporations exploit
Cockaigne imagery as folklures still. Beryl Langer writes, “Corporate lit-
erature positions the children’s culture industry as a conduit to the world of
the imagination: manufacturers of magic and purveyors of fun. . . . Disney
online is ‘where the magic comes to you’ . . . and McDonald’s children’s web-
site . . . is ‘the Internet’s land for fun’” (261).
3. Even Marx incorporates this motif into his description of past philosophers
who went no further than they could reason to reach truths (at the peril
of ignoring structural realities): “For before, philosophers had the answer
to all riddles lying in their desks and the stupid exterior world has only to
open its mouth for the roasted pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it”
(1987: 36).
4. These lands are often customized to reflect regional cuisine, as in Boccaccio’s
The Decameron (1353), in which the fabled “Nomansland” is described: “in
a district which is called Bengodi, where they tie the vines with sausages and
you can buy a goose for a cent and have the gosling with it. Moreover, in
that country there was a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese, inhabited by
people who did nothing but make macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked
in chicken broth and then threw on the ground, and those who can pick
up most get most. Nearby there was a stream of white wine, the best ever
drunk” (460). These vines with sausages might resemble the true sausage
tree native to South Africa called kigelia pinnata. You can see a full-grown
specimen at the Miami zoo.
5. The importance of starches in these gastronomic utopias (like the ginger-
bread house, too) is repeated in the children’s book, The Day it Snowed
Tortillas (2003) by Joe Hayes, and is explained by Jeffery M. Pilcher in terms
reminiscent of the dark bread/light bread distinctions. Pilcher reports Mexi-
can racial and class prejudices against corn and rice in favor of wheat: “The
tortilla discourse really served as a subterfuge to divert attention away from
social inequalities” (1998: 78). The title story of Hayes’s book repeats the
motif from Boccaccio (throwing tortillas, not pasta, on the ground): snowing
tortillas is a preposterous fiction a poor woodcutter’s wife tells her husband
in order to make him appear mentally disabled. Ultimately this deceit earns
them a fortune.
196 Notes
6. See J. B. Smith (1982: 226–240).
7. Herman Pleij explains, “It is not clear whether the conversion of the oral
Cockaigne material into written form gave rise to these new functions. Even
though oral versions of the text could also be put to such use, it is obvious
that the written texts, at the very least, made this new didactic intent more
explicit and generally expanded and reinforced it” (2001: 85).
8. The name has been kept in current consciousness through blues songs (Bo
Diddley, Bessie Smith), and as a name for soul-food restaurants (see Minton).
On that note, there was a soul-food stand in my hometown called “Garden
of Eatin’” that played on the same theme.
9. See Muhawi and Kanaana, Paola, and Aylesworth, respectively.
10. Most notably in the American conscience is Sammy Cahn’s and James Van
Heusen’s song “High Hopes,” made famous by Frank Sinatra in 1959: “He’s
got high hopes, high hopes. He’s got high apple pie in the sky hopes.” High
hopes are presented in the quintessential American mode—apple pie and the
famous food utopia become signifiers for optimism.
11. Another example is Harry McClintock’s “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”
(1928). Relevant details of this utopia “where you sleep all day” include
“handouts grow[ing] on bushes,” “cigarette trees,” “hens lay[ing] soft-boiled
eggs,” “little streams of alcohol,” and “a lake of stew and of whiskey, too”
(Rammel 1990: frontispiece).
12. A facsimile of this issue (April 1921) appears in Dianne Johnson-Feelings’s
The Best of the Brownies’ Book. The Noyes poem appears in her book on
pages 316–317.
13. Luisa Del Giudice writes, of Italian variations of the Cockaigne reflecting the
use of poorer grains in bread, resulting in hallucinogenic effects, “the sort
of relief Cuccagna song texts might have provided was akin to an addictive
drug” (2001: 15).
14. Herman Pleij explains, for example, how in the transition from medieval
feudalism to early modern mercantilism: “The new urban economy could not
thrive if work was not viewed in a more positive light” (366).
15. Holly Blackford points out that “The Flesh Fair of Spielberg’s [A. I.] mirrors
Pleasure Island in Pinocchio,” making the theme of labor alienation more
explicit (2007: 79).
16. One might also note the following reversals but direct uses of Cockaigne
motifs: “Pinocchio is hungry, and he looks for an egg to make himself an
omelette; but just as he breaks it. . . . instead of the yolk and white of an egg,
a little chicken flew out, and making a polite curtsy, said gaily, ‘A thousand
thanks’ . . . ” (23–25).
17. Jacqueline Dutton separates sexual and gastronomic desires in her reading
of utopias, adding that “sexual representations of desire tend to become con-
fused with institutional and political issues” (2002: 28). It is my contention
that such confusion is deliberate. Gastronomic utopias are no less political
than erotic ones, and the Tar Baby stories demonstrate that sexual and gus-
tatory temptations cannot be so clearly isolated. Tar Baby is female in most
versions (like Hamilton’s “Tar Baby Girl”) but not always gendered. I believe
that Howard Cruse plays with Southern sexual orientation and race politics
in the graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), though I’m not sure the allu-
sion is intended.
18. “‘Christmas Gif’ was a surprise game played by the slaves on Christmas Day.
Two people, meeting for the fi rst time that day, would compete to be the
fi rst to call out ‘Christmas Gif’! The loser happily paid a forfeit of a simple
present—maybe a Christmas tea cake or a handful of nuts” (Rollins 1993:
xvii).
Notes 197
19. Consider the necessity of Remus’s begging in contrast to the Irish custom:
“In Medieval Ireland, fasting against a person was a part of the legal system.
If a man felt you had wronged him and died hungry on your doorstep, you
became responsible for his debts” (Russell 2005: 74). One could only imag-
ine how different the Reconstruction in the U.S. would have looked with
such justice.
20. These early preconditions for the advent of capitalism also helped to defi ne
the poor as pariahs: “Charges of witch craft often served to punish the attack
on property, primarily thefts, which increased dramatically in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, following the increasing privatization of land and
agriculture. . . . in England, poor women who begged for or stole milk or
wine from the houses of their neighbors, or were on public assistance, were
likely to be suspected of practicing evil arts” (Federici 200).

21. In Ray Bradbury’s Halloween Tree, the children ask Moundshroud of the
Grecian tradition, “Those people, why are they painting black molasses on
their front door posts?” to which he responds, “Pitch. . . . black tar to glue
the ghosts, stick them fast, so they can’t get inside” (2001: 66).
22. Such folk beliefs are usually uttered as warnings to deter consumption. Con-
sider this related example from Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, when
the candy store is out of Jennifer’s favorite candies and only has gum: “But
Jennifer’s not allowed to eat gum even though everyone else is. Her father is
a doctor and has explained the situation to her. Eating gum will give her big
lips. It is very important for her to keep her mouth shut when not talking or
forking food into her mouth, or else she will get big lips like so many of their
race” (272).
23. Emma Lou Morgan is also taunted by the name “Topsy” (56, 174), which
in the context of my discussion seems significant to Cockaigne, or other
“Topsy-Turvy,” upside-down worlds. Also see Michelle Ann Abate.
24. Consider the following precedent in Heinrich Hoffmann’s “Story of the Inky
Boys” from Struwwelpeter, wherein some white boys are dipped in ink,
“made black as crows,” because they “teas’d the harmless black-a-moor”
(13). This tale seems to infl ict blackness as punishment just as the blackening
of the bad daughter in “The Three Fairies” with pitch. But it also provides a
white-centered commentary on the supposed permanence of race in contrast
to temporary blackface: “Boys, leave the black-a-moor alone! / For if he tries
with all his might, / He cannot change from black to white” (11).
25. Lott adds, “It would certainly be a mistake to see the minstrel types that
began to emerge in the late 1820s as continuous outgrowths of slave tales . .
. They should rather be placed at the intersection of slave culture and earlier
blackface stage characters such as the harlequin of the commedia dell’arte,
the clown of English pantomime and the clown of the American circus, the
burlesque tramp, perhaps the ‘blackman’ of English folk drama” (1993: 22).
26. Davis explains that Barnum exploited the new class of consumers: “In the
1880s, P. T. Barnum called himself ‘the Children’s Friend’ and welcomed
‘children of all ages’” (2002: 35). He also organized “Orphan’s Day” at the
circus. There were also circus novels and circus toys:
Schoenhut’s popular Humpty Dumpty Circus (1903) was a wooden,

jointed playset of circus athletes and animals which could be twisted into
myriad poses. Both toy manufacturers and circus proprietors used con-
temporary imperialism to create salable commodities. By 1910 Humpty
Dumpty Circus became ‘Humpty Dumpty in Africa’ based on Theodore
Roosevelt’s African safari of 1909. The playset included a Roosevelt fig-
ure and a black guide, in addition to the usual stock of circus characters.
198 Notes
The modern child often fi rst glimpsed the exotic Other through circuses
and toys, a formative encounter that helped make colonial power relations
part of the unconscious, ‘natural’ world of child’s play. (2002: 35–36)
27. Frederick Douglass Opie reminds us: “Historically, poor white southerners
ate the three same Ms [meat, molasses, and meal] as blacks” (2008: 90).
Thus, I am not limiting my examples strictly to works by or about African-
Americans but openly surveying the pervasive influences of such sources.
28. Robinson also acknowledges that “Marxism, the dominant form that the cri-
tique of capitalism has assumed in Western thought, incorporated theoreti-
cal and ideological weaknesses which stemmed from the same social forces
which provided the bases of capitalist formation” (1983: 9). It is difficult to
avoid these “ideological weaknesses” in an analysis of racialist food iconog-

raphy that also developed in such a context, so I apologize if I unintentionally
at times oversimplify material relations in a way that unintentionally essen-
tializes social difference.
29. Wayne Curtis confi rms: “Molasses was industrial waste, an effluent best got-
ten rid of by dumping it into the ocean” (2006: 25).
30. Douglass manipulates conditions to better feed himself as well, as when he
purposely loses his master’s horse so that he could go after it at his master’s
father-in-law’s farm: “My reason for this kind of carelessness, or careful-
ness, was, that I could always get something to eat when I went there. Master
William Hamilton, my master’s father-in-law, always gave his slaves enough
to eat. I never left there hungry, no matter how great the need of my speedy
return” (58).
31. Another dietary ideology that developed to serve a prejudicial food economy
was the prevalent notion that “Negroes do not need as much to eat or live
on as the whites, and are less discriminating in their choice of food” (Cussler
and De Give 1952: 71).
32. I’d be remiss if I were to omit a more exact recipe for fl ip: “Mix one cup beer
[a stout like Guinness works best], two tablespoons of molasses, and one
ounce Jamaican-style rum into a mug or tankard. Heat loggerhead to red hot
in an open fi re [a fi replace poker knocked clean of ashes will do], then thrust
into drink. Keep loggerhead in place until foaming and sputtering ceases.
Drink hot” (Curtis 2006: 65). While you’re at it why not try a blackstrap—
“rum mixed with a little molasses” (82).
33. This period also initiated some lasting changes in the national appetite for
sweets: “the Sugar Act of 1760 meant that for their sugar kick Americans
had to turn to molasses. . . . Americans never lost a taste for it, and when the
Rueckheim brothers launched their molasses-covered peanut and popcorn
mix, called Cracker Jack, in 1893, they found they had a hit. . . . Molasses
was supplanted by sugar as the national sweetstuff only in the nineteenth
century” (Richardson 2002: 192–193).
34. Wayne Curtis writes, “Distilleries were built wherever molasses could be
unloaded and stored. . . . It was modern-day alchemy—through distillation,
the dull, treacly dross of molasses was converted into the gold of rum” (2006:
97).
35. “Slapjacks” are made from cornmeal, milk, flour, and eggs drenched with
molasses and butter.
36. Wayne Curtis further clarifies that “the rum trade kept the great mechanism
of colonial economic development humming along. The rum-to-slaves-to-
molasses trade brought untold fortunes to merchants and sugar planters,”
but, he qualifies, “the smooth-running and sinister New England Triangle
Trade is, in large part, overblown myth. . . . The value of the rum-for-slaves
Notes 199
trade was minimal. . . . More molasses went into pudding, beer making, and
baked beans than into rum for the slave trade” (2006: 126–127).
37. Literary identifications with the wily rabbit have emphasized both demean-
ing and empowering associations. Consider in contrast the Invisible Man’s
surreal operation/rebirth scene where he is asked “WHO WAS BUCKEYE
THE RABBIT?” and then “BOY, WHO WAS BRER RABBIT?” (Ellison
241–242) and Malcolm Little as a newcomer to Roxbury: “Later on, Shorty
would enjoy teasing me about how with that fi rst glance he knew my whole
story. ‘Man, that cat still smelled country!’ he’d say, laughing. ‘Cats’ legs was
so long and his pants so short his knees showed an’ his head looked like a
briar patch!’” (Haley 46). The adult perspective of Malcolm X framing this
retrospection casts a sense of humiliating scorn on his younger self who once
conked that wild hair.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. Industrialized countries tend to increase meat availability thus diluting its

symbolic power, but in contexts of impoverishment meat can signify mas-
tery and comfort, as in Cockaigne imagery: “Cockaigne significantly supple-
ments primeval vegetarianism with a healthy ration of meat. This ties in with
the idea that wild animals coexist peaceably with humans and are apparently
conscious of their subservient position, which means that they willingly sub-
mit to being eaten” (Pleij 2001: 226).
2. Bill Blackbeard writes: “Popeye cartoons were for a long time the single most
popular TV series for children. The Segar strip had the widest subscription of
any comic in history until Peanuts” (1970: 111).
3. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America,
“spinach has remained a stranger to most American tables. American annual
per capita consumption, only 0.4 pounds by 1977, increased to 1.3 pounds
by 2002—lower than that of all other vegetables except artichokes, aspara-
gus, and eggplant” (Smith 2004: 493).
4. Or, of course, anyone subjected to a limited diet and malnourishment, like
railroad workers throughout the nineteenth century. Scott Reynolds Nelson
describes a common set of affl ictions that would come to be called “John
Henry syndrome,” including hypertension, silica, and heart attack: “Three
hundred and eighty black convicts had been leased to the C & O Railroad
between September 1871 and September 1872, and these were the men who
died. . . . The surgeon stated that scurvy, dropsy, dysentery, and consump-
tion could mostly be attributed to construction work and tunneling on the C
& O” (2008: 25).
5. My personal experience, however, leads me to believe that the chart-method
continued to be influential within homes and schools (though no longer with
doctors). Traditions like measuring children and leaving marks for compari-
son border on essentializing development. As late as 1976, when I was in
third grade, my teacher lined up all the girls and boys on separate chalk-
boards according to weight, then marked height as well. Needless to say,
being at the “fat” or “skinny” end of the line was an uncomfortable ordeal.
6. The same comment probably applies convincingly to Popeye’s creator E. C.
Segar as well, but the treatment of norms in Popeye fi lms as opposed to the
original comic strip varies greatly. Whereas the Fleischer fi lms mechanically
repeat similar plotlines, Segar’s strip was wildly inventive, often radically
challenging and subverting norms.
200 Notes
7. You can hear a sample at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye#Radio.
8. Following Popeye’s example, SpongeBob is the latest spokes(sales)person for
spinach: “In 2005, Nickelodeon licensed the SpongeBob character for use on
packages of spinach produced by Boskovich Farms in California. Will doing
this make kids want to eat spinach? Candies are still the food products most
heavily marketed to children” (Nestle 2006: 381).
9. Wimpy (as his name might imply) is a foil to Popeye in many ways. On the
most obvious level he lacks Popeye’s brawn and hides behind it. But he is also
a foil to Popeye’s simplicity, honesty, and ability to nurture.
10. See also Mechling and Alwin.
11. Scott Reynolds Nelson has adapted his scholarship on John Henry with Marc
Aronson for a juvenile audience in Ain’t Nothing But a Man: My Quest to
Find the Real John Henry (2008).

12. Wimpy is the consummate short-term capitalist, as reviewer Daniel J. Mitch-
ell quipped: “Cartoon aficionados will remember Wimpy, the friend of Pop-
eye who was always fond of saying, ‘I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a
hamburger today.’ This also could be an apt description of the United States
Congress. Politicians have a quaint little habit of spending money while
expecting future generations to pick up the tab” (2005: 501).
13. Gerard Jones reports that Jerry Siegel claimed, “’The Popeye animated car-
toons were one of the strongest influences’” on Superman’s “strength and
action” (2004: 115–116).
NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION
1. Pugh points out (and we may relate this to Popeye and Brer Rabbit as well)
the resulting logic: “The Oz series underscores the ways in which carnivores
might turn against one another at any moment, and in the fi nal analysis,
vegetarianism also fails to offer any lasting redemptive possibilities to the
culinary problems in this utopia” (2008: 335).
2. Thus, Marina Warner explains, “Frankenstein’s creature has become more
malevolent in representations [concurrently with the rise of the cult of child-
hood innocence], from the classic fi lm of 1931 to children’s Hallowe’en masks
today, and one of his most appalling crimes is killing a child” (384). In chil-
dren’s fiction today, Frankenstein’s characterization hinges on his threat of
danger to children or his own childlike innocence. In Frankenstein Doesn’t
Start Food Fights (2003) one student suspects that “Frank” and his bride are
using a cookie business as an excuse to drug children: “I’m talking about
mad-scientist stuff . . . A formula made just to turn sweet, innocent kids like
me into monsters” (Dadey and Thornton Jones 29). In Adam Rex’s Fran-
kenstein picture books, the monster is sweet, but still somehow a cannibal.
When his bride suggests they have a harpist for their wedding, Frankenstein
replies, “I hear harpists are delicious.”
3. Jeffrey Burton Russell reports, “Not only heretics but also Jews were some-
times identified with witches in the popular mind. The terms ‘synagoga,’
and later ‘sabbat,’ were applied, as an indictment of Judaism, to the witches’
assembly” (1972: 167).
4. One might consider as intertext to this motif George Macdonald’s The Light
Princess (fi rst published to humorous effect in the context of Adela Cathcart
in 1864), in which the title character must become subject to gravity in order
to have emotional responsibility and progress beyond her own childhood
(perhaps Peter Pan can fly because he resists such progress?).
Notes 201
5. Klopp expands on this comparison with contextualization, “Franken-
stein, though published earlier, is clearly the product of a more industrially
advanced society. Mary Shelley wrote at a time when science and manufac-
turing were more fully developed in England than they were sixty-five years
later in Italy. The Italian economy depicted in Pinocchio was still largely that
of agricultural workers and small-scale artisans” (2006: 30).
6. For this reason Lucas also categorizes “Pinocchio more in the Romantic tra-
dition of Der Sandman than in any other literary tradition for children”
(2006: 113).
7. Discussed in Chapter 2.
8. Campion-Vincent expounds on these adaptations and varied expressions in
organ-theft legends and the politics behind international adoption (164–165,
83). Even the blood libel thrived in the U.S. during the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries: “there was also a pamphlet which claimed that the 1932 kid-
napping of Charles A. Lindbergh’s baby was an instance of Jewish ritual
murder” (Dundes 2007: 393).
9. McNally and Florescu note that porphyria may have influenced the devel-
opment of vampire lore: “The patient suffering from inherited porphyria
becomes extremely sensitive to light. In addition, skin lesions develop, and
the teeth become brown or reddish brown because of excess porphyrins. This
vampire disease may have been prevalent among the Eastern European nobil-
ity. Five hundred years ago physicians even recommended that some nobles
replenish their blood by drinking the blood of their subjects. So when a peas-
ant declared that there was a vampire living up in the castle, he wasn’t refer-
ring to folklore but to an actual blood-drinker” (132).
10. Campion-Vincent provides more historical background: “The fable of ritual
murder existed already in ancient Rome; at that period, it was Christians
who were accused of abducting and devouring babies in their secret rites.
It was important in medieval Europe, where it occasioned a blossoming of
legends about young saints, children who were said to have been martyred
by Jews and whose names are still remembered in folksong: Simon of Trent,
Hugh of Lincoln,” and Anderl of Rinn (2005: 165).
11. This theme seems popular in steampunk and is particularly developed in
Steampunk: Manimatron (Chris Bachalo and Joe Kelly 2000–2001), in
which characters are composed of differing degrees of artificial materials
and steal, buy, and swap body parts.
12. The title characters not only create golem-like superheroes, their names sug-
gest their own identifications with the golem: Josef Kavalier has the same
fi rst name often given the golem, and Sam Clay’s original name is Klayman.
13. The vampire has also been linked with capitalism metaphorically by Marx in
Capital (1867). Mediating capital is the vampire who takes the “free agency”
of the worker: “the vampire will not lose its hold on [the worker] ‘so long as
there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited’” (1987: 475).
14. Byron Sherwin reports that “one of Superman’s archenemies is identified as
the golem” and the clay figure is also “found in Mendy and the Golem, a
comic book series sponsored by Hasidic Jews, wherein the golem acts like a
Jewish version of Casper, the Friendly Ghost—a benevolent and helpful com-
panion. Golems also play a role in such popular children’s games as Pokémon
and Dungeons and Dragons” (2004: 44).
15. Byron Sherwin writes that “the golem was chosen as an apt symbol of the
individual as a machine-like automaton manipulated by nation-states and
bureaucratic institutions. It became a metaphor for the dangers posed by the
very developments in science and technology that had promised to redeem
human beings from their physical and economic misfortunes. One such
202 Notes
danger was that humans might become like the machines they had created:
lifeless, emotionless, soulless automatons” (2004: 42). The use of the golem
in analogy with artificial intelligence or “frankenfood” for genetically modi-
fied food extends the metaphor.
16. Laurence Rickels traces the theme: “Historically the Rabbi Löw chapter of
the Golem legend was contemporaneous with the historical background and
literary legendary elaboration of Dr. Faust” (2004: 50).
17. Scott Reynolds Nelson explains that in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, “Power no longer meant horses, a waterfall, or human muscle. It
was suddenly portable, cheap, and efficient” (7).
18. All inhabitants (except the Specials and self-exiled Smokies) wear “interface
rings” that allow intelligence to monitor even the most intimate behaviors.
Apparently this isn’t just science fiction: American and British companies
have begun to market GPS tracker-clothing to parents for children (and
teenagers?). See GPSnanny.com for one example. In an interview with Scott
Westerfeld, Amanda Craig writes, “In the world of Uglies . . . our large,
energy-guzzling technologies have been replaced by minute, stylish devices.
Such technology is already with us, with teenagers in California being moni-
tored by their cellphones or even dental implants. It is [Westerfeld’s] prescient
perception that such inventions will lead to absolute loss of privacy,” not
to mention autonomy, for the young. Westerfeld comments, “Skateboards
[which parallel his fictional hoverboards] were made illegal in Texas because
they encouraged teenagers to congregate. . . . Adults react to teenagers as
they do to dogs—you know, two are cute, five are scary and twenty a riot.
Everything they do is criminalized. Yet it’s the age when people are most
creative, instead of just sucking in facts.”
19. Mary Pipher explains, “Like Peter Pan, anorexics tend to view the world of
adults with fear and loathing. . . . Adulthood in general, but especially adult
sexuality, frighten[s] . . . anorexic girls. Starving [is] a way to stay small,
asexual, and dependent” (1995: 69–70).
20. As proof of how lastingly relevant this insight is, take a look at Red Car-
toons: From the Daily Worker: a December 22, 1924, editorial cartoon by
Robert Minor shows a fat capitalist dropping children into his mouth like
dainty morsels.
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Index
A appetite, as means of control, xii, 3–5,

A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 40, 45, 46, 7, 77, 105; and domination, 65,
47, 181, 188n13, 196n15 75; as ideological 139, 197; as
Accum, Friederich Christian, weakness, 108, 182
89–90 Apple, Rima, 149–150
action figures, Action Man, 49; Trans- Ariès, Philippe, 190n9, 192n1
formers, 48 Armstrong, Louis, 132
agency, 1–3, 5–8, 10, 21–23, 25, 27, Aronson, Marc, 200n11
29, 31–35, 37, 39–40, 42–43, Arroyo, Arsacio Vanegas, 96–97
45–55, 57, 59, 63, 75, 83, 100, Arsenault, Isabelle, 96
132, 110, 141, 153, 164, 175, Austin, Ben, 130
176, 179, 181, 183, 184, 187n6, Aylesworth, Jim, Full Belly Bowl, The,
188n12, 201n13 115
Albala, Ken, 129, 131 Ayres, Brenda, 90–91
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 142
Alcott, Louisa May, Little Men, 42 B
Alcott, William, 142 Babar, 64
Aldiss, Brian, 188n13 Baker, Julie, Up Molasses Mountain,
Allen, Stewart Lee, 72, 189n3, 191n22 125
Almond, Steve, 108 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 28, 126
Althusser, Louis, 16 Baldwin, James, 158, 160
Al-Windawi, Thura, 77, 109–110 Ball, John Clement, 63
Andersen, Hans Christian, 185n3; Barnum, P. T., 197n26
agency and, 1–3; “Emperor’s Barthes, Roland, 7, 36, 58–59, 111,
New Clothes, The,” 2; “Little 146
Mermaid,” 1–2; “Puppeteer, Basile, Giambattista, “Three Fairies,
The,” 3; “Red Shoes,” 2; “Stead- The,” 56
fast Tin Soldier, The,” 2; “Ugly Bateson, Gregory, 142
Duckling,” 1 Baudrillard, Jean, 164
Andersen, M. T., Astonishing Life of Baum, L. Frank, Emerald City of Oz,
Octavian Nothing, The, 123, The, 165; Marvelous Land of
129–130, 133–134, 137–138 Oz, The, 43, 165; Patchwork
Anglund, Joan Walsh, Nibble, Nibble, Girl of Oz, The, 43–44, 175;
Mousekin, 54 Wizard of Oz, The, 6, 7, 43,
Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, 167 45, 94, 107, 163–65, 180, 181,
anorexia, 65, 68, 202n19 188n15, 200n1
Apocalypse Now, 74 Beauchamp, Gorman, 114
Appelbaum, Robert, 111, 116, 195n1 Beeck, Nathalie op de, 42
222 Index
Befana, la, 93, 95, 96, 193n15; benevo- Bugs Bunny, 111
lent witches and, 93 Burgess, Anthony, Clockwork Orange,
Behlman, Lee, 176–177, 178 A, 50
Behringer, Wolfgang, 178 Burgess, Barbara Hood, Oren Bell, 83
Belasco, Warren J., 88, 130 Burton, Tim, 174, 189n17
Beliczay, László, 56, 190n7 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 1
Bennett, Jane, 157–158, 161
Benson, Sally, Meet Me in St. Louis, C
78–79 Campion-Vincent, Véronique, 172,
Benson, Stephen, 9, 13, 14, 16–17, 19, 201n8, 201n10
25, 26, 52 Camporesi, Piero, 56, 70, 112, 191n20
Best, Joel, 90 candy. See sweets
Bettelheim, Bruno, 56, 60 candy industry, 89–90, 92, 97, 104,

Bignell, Jonathan, 48 105, 108, 193n14, 194n27,
Blackbeard, Bill, 142, 150, 157, 199n2 194n28, 194n30
blackface, 93, 121, 126, 131, 136, 137, Candy Land (board game), 6, 58, 75,
192–193n10, 197n25 124
Blackford, Holly, 10, 46, 47, 69, 77, Carmichael, Elizabeth, 95, 96–97
167–168, 179, 183, 196n15 Carnival, 52, 71, 96, 193n20, 194n21
Blade Runner, 180–181 Carroll, Lewis, 164
Block, Francesca Lia, 13; Rose and the Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote,
Beast, 19 189n4
Boccaccio, Decameron, The, 195n4 Chabon, Michael, Amazing Adven-
Bogatyrëv, Peter, 9, 11, 13, 186n11 tures of Kavalier and Clay, 167,
Boissegur, Beatrice, vi 176–178, 201n12; Maps and
Bontemps, Arna, 121 Legends, 176, 177
Booth, Allyson, 32, 33 Chafets, Ze’ev, 82, 192n6
Bordo, Susan, 142 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Borten, Helen, Halloween, 84 (2005), 189n17
Bottingheimer, Ruth, 11 Chavasse, Pye Henry, 72
Bourdieu, Pierre, 69 childhood, bourgeois, 98–99; Roman-
Bradbury, Ray, Halloween Tree, The, tic, 72
95, 96, 97, 194n21, 197n21 children, as commodities, xii, 27, 100;
Brautigan, Richard, 58 as consumable, 75, 99; as con-
Brer Rabbit, 7, 111–112, 114, 116, sumers, xi, xii, 27, 39, 42
119–121, 122–124, 130, children’s literature, 6, 10, 42, 46, 52,
136, 137, 139, 140. See also 72, 96, 114–115, 124, 185n2,
Bontemps, Arna; Disney, Walt; 186n4, 188n14
Harris, Joel Chandler; Hughes, children’s rights. See youth rights
Langston; Newman, Dora Lee; Chinitz, Lisa, 190n6
Rees, Ennis; Tar Baby tales Christians, as perceived threat to chil-
Bridwell, Norman, Monster Holidays, dren, 172, 201n10
85 “Cinderella,” 75, 95
Brillat-Sauarian, Jean Anthelme, 140, Clarke, Arthur C., 2001: A Space
157 Odyssey, 179
Broekel, Ray, 154–155 class, xi, 7, 14–16,18, 20, 23, 24, 27,
Brosco, Jeffrey, 148 35, 42, 78, 83, 85, 93, 98, 110,
Brown, Bill, 17, 35–36, 41, 42, 42–43, 113, 119, 132, 136, 142, 145,
46, 65, 136, 186n13, 188n14 147–150, 156, 161, 172, 189n3,
Brown, Marc, Arthur’s Halloween, 85, 192n3, 195n5
86, 195n13 Clinton, Hilary Rodham, 99
Brown, Margaret Wise, My World, 36, Coats, Karen, 8, 182–183
42; Two Little Trains, 188n9 Cohn, Rachel, Gingerbread, 57, 58
Brown, Philip, 93 Collins, Ross, Alvie Eats Soup, 65, 67
Index 223
Collodi, Carlo, Pinnochio, 3–6, 21–23, Denby, Priscilla, 186n8
25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 34, 37, Diamond, Jared, 132
39–40, 41, 46, 51, 118, 201n5 Dickinson, Emily, My Letter to the
comics, 10, 18, 20, 42, 48, 111, 116, World and Other Poems, 96,
176, 177, 185n2, 195n2, 196n17; 193n19
comic books, Fables, 25, Machine dietary change (U.S.), 141
Teen, 48; Mendy and the Golem, Dillon, Diane, 188n9
201n14; New Mutants, The, 48; Dillon, Leo, 188n9
Power Pack, 48; Steampunk: Disch, Tom, Brave Little Toaster, The,
Manimatron, 201n11; Steel, 157; 6, 35, 45, 187n7, 188n11,
Teen Titans, 48; X-Men, 48; 188n15
comic strips, 20, 115, 140, 150, disinterested parenting, 26, 56, 189n2
199n6; graphic novels, 69, 90–91, Disney, Walt, 10, 19, 20, 22, 52,
126, 168, 170; superhero comics, 187n17, 195n2; Brer Rabbit
156, 161, 177–178 and, 111–112, 122, 123, 124,
Cone, Thomas E., 145 137; Pinocchio, 25, 29, 31–32,
consumption, and free choice, 91–92; 34, 37, 45, 118; Song of the
and gender, 68–70; and imperial- South, 131
ism, 64–65 Dobson, Teresa, 174–175
Cook, Daniel Thomas, 26, 51, 184 Dorfman, Ariel, 64, 65
Coover, Robert, Gingerbread House, Dorson, Richard, 12–13, 14, 141
The, 75, 116; Pinocchio in Ven- Douglass, Frederick, 128, 130, 198n30
ice, 19, 21, 22, 29–31, 35, 39, Dracula, 172–173, 174
52, 187n4, 194n21 Dresang, Eliza T., 18
Coppélia, 186n4 Drescher, Henrik, Boy Who Ate
Counihan, Carole M. 57 Around, The, 63, 64, 65, 190n5
Craig, Amanda, 202n18 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, “Little Brown
Crane, Stephen, The Whilomville Sto- Baby,” 125
ries, 42, 188n14 Dundes, Alan, 11, 12, 13, 14, 60, 172
Cross, Gary, 48, 78, 86–87, 192n10 Dutton, Jacqueline, 116, 196n17
Cruse, Howard, Stuck Rubber Baby,
196n17 E
Curtis, Wayne, 127, 129, 130, 198n29, Easter Bunny, 84–85
198, n34, 198n36 Edward Scissorhands, 174, 175
cyborgs, 47–48, 163–164, 169, 175, Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, 158,
184. See also robots 199n37
Elmore, Patricia, Susannah and the Poi-
D son Green Halloween, 87–89
Dadey, Debbie and Thornton Jones, embodiment, 8, 183
Frankenstein Doesn’t Start Food Ensslin, Astrid, 175
Fights, 200n2 Erdoes, Richard, 119
Dahl, Roald, BFG, The, 64; Charlie Eve of Destruction, 180
and the Chocolate Factory, 6,
40, 74–75, 107, 194n30; Danny, F
Champion of the World, 124; fairies, 93–95, 122, 193n18; Blue
Witches, The, 89 Fairy, 25, 29, 31, 32, 35, 94–95,
Daniel, Carolyn, 4, 6, 72 187n2, 188n13; Jenny
Daniels, Steven, 37 Greenteeth, 193n17; tooth fairy,
Davis, Janet, 126, 136 94–95
Day of the Dead, 95, 96 fairy tales, capitalism and, 21; com-
de Paola, Tomie, 73 mercialization and, 20; consum-
Dégh, Linda, 10, 186n8, 186n9 erism and, 21; development of
Del Giudice, Luisa, 111–112, 195n2, consumer childhood and, 23. See
196n13 also folklore, folklore studies
224 Index
fakelore, 12–15; dominant culture and, Age and, 116–117; labor and,
13; fakelegend, 141 118, 119; Luilekkerland and, 71,
fantasy, 177–179 113, 117, 118; U.S. immigration
Family Guy, 145 and, 116–117
Farson, Richard, 101 Foster, Thomas, 164
Faust, 179, 202n16 Foucault, Michel, 8, 47, 146–147, 148,
Federici, Silvia, 61, 62, 71, 123–124, 149, 156, 189n1
148–149 Fox, William, 13
Fega, Camilla, Late for Halloween, Frankenstein’s creature, 167, 168,
108–109 179–180
Ferrigni, P. C., History of Puppets, The, Freeman, Dan, Corduroy, 6, 33–34, 39
187n1 Freeman, Michael, 99, 105
Field, Rachel, Hitty: Her First Hundred Freudenberg, Rachel, 72, 73

Years, 32
Fisher, M. F. K., 77, 109–110 G
Fiske, John, 187n5 Gainor, J. Ellen, 65
Fleischer, Max, 150–151, 157, 162, Gannon, Susan, 34
199n2, 199n6 Gee, Stanley, 93
Florescu, Radu, 171, 172–173, 201n9 Geertz, Clifford, 14
folkliterature, 1, 9, 185n2 Geller, Rachel, 50, 188n16
folklore, 8–18; bricolage and, 13, 17, Gellert, Hugo, 156
18; childhood and, 10; comic gender, 7, 42, 65, 68, 69, 72, 137,
books and, 10, 20; commercial- 141–142, 188n14, 196n17
ization of, 10; fairy tales and, Genette, Gérard, 19
15; film and, 20; historicity of, gift-giving, as control, 35
8–9; hypertextuality and, 19–20; gingerbread, 6, 53–59, 72, 74, 96, 116,
ideology and, 16; Saussurrean 171, 176, 177, 189n3, 190n6,
terminology and, 11–12. See 195n5.
also fairy tales, fakelore, folklore Gingerbread Boy, The, 58
studies Gingrich, Newt, xi
folklore studies, 9–18; cultural studies golem tales, 165, 166–67, 168–79,
and, 11, 15; fairy tale studies 182, 201n15, 202n16. See
and, 14–15; popular culture and, also Chabon, Michael, Amaz-
10. See also fairy tales, fakelore, ing Adventures of Kavalier and
folklore Clay; comic books, Mendy and
folklure, 6, 9, 58, 140, 186n8 the Golem; MacDonald, George;
food, advertisements for, 104; agency Sfar, Joann, Vampire Loves;
and, 6, 52, 158; cultures of Singer, Isaac Bashevis; Sturm,
hunger and, 111–112, 113, James; Wiesel, Elie; Wisniewski,
115, 121–122, 131–132; gender David
and, 141–142; representation Goodman, Jennifer, 101
of children and, 6; socialization Gorey, Edward, 119, 120
and, 6, 7 gothic, 174, 175
food utopias, 7, 111, 137, 181–182, GPS, xii, 202n18
195n4, 195n5, 196n17; Afri- Gramsci, Antonio, 16, 187n14
can American lore and, 111, Grandinetti, Fred, 150–151
113–115; children’s literature Green, Monica, 190n10
and, 124; Cockaigne and, 52, Griffith, R. Marie, 141, 142
71, 96, 112–113, 116, 117, Grimm, Wilhelm and Jacob, 12, 18, 20,
118, 123, 124, 131, 137–139, 22, 54–55; “Children Living in
194n21, 195n2, 196n7, 196n13, a Time of Famine, The,” 55–56,
196n16, 199n1; Diddy-Wah- 189n2; “How Children Played
Diddy and, 113, 124, 137–139; Butcher with Each Other,”
dystopias and, 7; Greek Golden 98–99; “Mother Holle,” 124;
Index 225
“Sweet Porridge, The,” 115; Hoodwinked, 7, 10, 109
“Tale about the Land of Cock- hooks, bell, 135
aigne, The,” 114; “Tall Tale Houston, Gail Turley, 111
from Ditmarsh, A,” 114–115 Hudson, Lois Phillips, 83
Gruelle, Johnny, Raggedy Ann Stories, Huemer, Richard P., 145
32–33 Hughes, Langston, 121; Black Misery,
158
H hunger, 3–7, 9, 54–57, 60, 710, 111–
Habermas, Rebekka, 56, 98, 189n2, 113, 115, 118, 121–123, 128,
190n8 130–132, 134, 135, 139, 155,
Haizlip, Shirlee Taylor, 135 163–165, 168, 173, 178, 179,
Haley, Alex, 115–116 182, 184, 190n5, 191n21
Halloween, Devil’s Night and, 82, Hurston, Zora Neale, 113

192n6; economic changes and,
80–82; as empowering, 78–79; I
origins of, 194n21; protection- Illman, Karl-Johan, 178–179
ism and, 86–87; socialization of Incredibles, The, 51
children and, 77; urban legends Innocents, The, 190n6
and, 87–91; witches and, 92. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,
See also trick-or-treating rituals 84, 85
Hamlin, David, 35, 192n12
“Hansel and Gretel,” 4, 5, 6, 22, J
54–63, 71–75, 85, 116, 122, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” 61, 62
124, 131, 165–166, 190n5, “Jack the Giant Killer,” 112
190n6, 190n7, 190n9, 191n25 Jackson, Shelley, Patchwork Girl,
Haraway, Donna, 47–48, 164 174–175
Harde, Roxanne, 176 Jacobs, Harriet A., Life of a Slave Girl,
Harris, Ashleigh, 121–122 127–128
Harris, Daniel, 187n5 Jakobson, Roman, 9, 11, 13, 17,
Harris, Joel Chandler, Uncle Remus: 186n11
His Songs and Sayings, 121, 124 James, Alison, 103, 105, 107–108
Harry Potter, 92 James, Henry, Turn of the Screw, The,
Hassan, Ihab, 185n1 190n6
Hayes, John, Day It Snowed Tortillas, Jameson, Frederic, 185n1
The, 195n5 Jarmon, Laura C., 121
health reforms (U.S.), 146. See also Jason, Heda, 12, 18, 186n11
nutritional reform Jews, as perceived threat to children,
Heldke, Lisa, 191n15 165, 166, 172, 201n8, 201n10.
Henke, Kevin, Kitten’s First Full Moon, See also golem tales
65 John Henry, 114, 129, 156–157, 161,
Hill, Joe, “Preacher and the Slave, 179
The,” 115 Johnny Appleseed, 141
Hoban, Russell, Bread and Jam for Johnson, Brad, 116, 117
Frances, 6, 68, 75; Mouse and Johnson, Mat, Incognegro, 126
His Child, The, 2, 49–50 Jolly Green Giant, 140
Hobhouse, Henry, 108, 132–133, 134 Jonassen, Frederick B., 112
Hoffmann, E. T. A., Nutcracker,The, Jones, Gerard, 49, 160, 200n13
2; “Sandman, The,” 169–170, Juan, Ana, Night Eater, The, 65
186n4
Hoffmann, Heinrich, Struwwelpeter, K
The, 65, 66, 174, 197n24 Kafka, Barbara, 153
holidays, commercialization of, 81, 97 Katz, Wendy R., 5, 54, 182
Holt, John, 100–101 Keeling, Kara, 6, 63, 64, 67–68
honeycakes, 5, 56, 70 Kellogg, John Harvey, 142
226 Index
Kelso, Megan, Squirrel Mother, The, Luce-Kapler, Rebecca, 174–175
90–91 luring children, 33, 55; food and, 5–6,
Kidd, Kenneth, 17 23, 57, 58, 64, 71, 75; lore of,
Kilworth, Garry, 56 xii; spinach and, 7. See also
Kingsley, Charles, Water Babies, The, 118 folklure
Kincaid, James, 184
Kirby, Jack, 156, 161 M
Klaniczay, Gábor, 170–171 MacDonald, Betty, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle,
Klein, Melanie, 4 65, 68, 75
Kline, Steven, 46, 47, 83–84 MacDonald, George, Light Princess,
Kling, William, 151 The, 200n4
Klopp, Charles, 167, 201n5 Macfadden, Brenarr, 142
Knoepflmacher, U. C., 59, 60 Maguire, Gregory, Wicked: The Life

Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, 10, 70 and Times of the Wicked Witch
Koven, Mikel, 10, 19, 186n9, 187n15, of the West, 164
192n9 Malcolm in the Middle, 7, 86
Kubrick, Stanley, 188n13 Malcolm X, 115–116, 199n37
Kuefler, Mathew, 60, 172 Males, Mike, 102, 137
Kuznets, Lois, 6, 34–35, 37–39, 39–40, Mardi Gras, 82, 193n20, 194n21
45 Marshall, James, Hansel and Gretel,
72, 73
L Marx, Karl, Capital, 25, 54, 173–174,
Lacan, Jacques, 33, 187n6 195n3, 201n13
Landow, George P., 19 Maudlin, Barbara, 193n20
Lang, Tim, 66–67 May, Kathy, Molasses Man, 125
Langer, Beryl, 42, 89, 110, 188n10, McCay, Winsor, Little Nemo in Slum-
195n2 berland, 115, 136, 137, 138,
Latham, Rob, 173 187n16
Lenski, Lois, Spinach Boy, 145 McDonald’s, 155, 195n2
Lesko, Nancy, 155–156 McHale, Brian, 185n1
Levenstein, Harvey, 73–74, 110 McKenzie, Gary, Gingerbread King-
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 17, 55, 190n5 dom, The, 74
Levine, Gail Carson, Ella Enchanted, McNally, Raymond, 171, 172–173,
188n12 201n9
Levinstein, Harvy, 141, 144, 145, 149, Mechling, Jay, 4
152–153, 154 Melville, Herman, Typee, 58
Lewin, Ted, Big Jimmy’s Kum Kau Menke, Richard, 70
Chinese Take Out, 190n13 Merriam, Eve, 87
Liddell, May, 30, 187n4; Little Machin- Meyers, Stephanie, Twilight, 173
ery, 42 Miles, Mike, 185n1
Lindbergh, Charles A., 201n8 milk, 62–63, 190n12
Linnecar, Alison, 103–104 Minor, Robert, 202n20
Lionni, Leo, Alexander and the Minton, John, 113–114
Wind-Up Mouse, 2, 33, 37 Mintz, Sidney, 109, 135, 163, 195n32
“Little Red Riding Hood,” 61 Mitchell, Daniel J., 200n12
London, Bobby, Mondo Popeye, 155 Mitchell, Lucy Sprague, 145; The Little
Lost Boys, The, 173 Engine That Could, 47
Lost in Space (tv series), 50 molasses, 5, 112, 124–136; pancakes
Lott, Eric, 126, 136, 137, 197n25 and, 131
Lovett, Laura, 110, 144–145, 146, Molasses Act, 129
147–148, 149, 151, 154, 155 Montanari, Massimo, 9, 23, 52, 123,
Lowry, Lois, Willoughbys, The, 104 141, 143, 178
Lucas, Ann Lawson, 26, 93, 170, Moore, Clement Clarke, Twas the
193n15, 201n6 Night Before Christmas, 192n8
Index 227
Moretti, Franco, 174 Others, The, 190n6
Morgan, James, 103
Morgan, Tracy, 131 P
Morrison, Toni, 7; Bluest Eye, The, Paola, Tomie de, Strega Nona, 73, 115
126, 134–135; Tar Baby, 124, pastoral, 117, 174, 175
134, 135–136 Patri, Angelo, Pinocchio in America,
Morrissey, Thomas J., 31, 187n2 29, 30, 187n2, 187n4
Morton, A. L., 114, 118–119, 123, 124 Paul Bunyon, 141
Moss, Dorris Hudson, 79, 192n3 Peckham, Shannon, 64, 190n13,
Muir, Edward, 52, 189n18, 189n19 191n18
mumming, 87, 93, 192n10 Perella, Nicholas J., 26
Murphy, Louise, True Story of Hansel Perkins restaurant, 59
and Gretel, The, 22, 109 Perrault, Charles, “Three Fairies, The,”
Mustard, Harry S., 147 23–24, 26, 75
Peter Pan, 95
N Petranius, Satyricon, 189n20
Naifeh, Ted, Courtney Crumrin and the Phelps, Donald, 151–152
Night Things, 69 Pilcher, Jeffrey M., 195n5
Napoli, Donna Jo, xii Pinocchio, 71, 75, 126, 167–168,
National Youth Rights Association, xi 196n15, 196n16, 201n6; agency
Neill, John R., 44 and, 29, 31, 32; as (anti-)
Nelson, Scott Reynolds, 140–141, Cinderella story, 26; as critique,
156, 161, 179, 199n4, 200n11, 41; authenticity and, 36–37 ;
202n17 Baum, L. Frank and, 43; blue
Nestle, Marion, 105, 106, 110, 195n33 fairy and, 95; comic books and,
Newman, Dora Lee, “Tar Baby, The,” 25–26; fixed childhood and,
121, 122 25–26; gaze and, 35; national-
Nicholson, William, 38 ism and, 28–29; subversive
Nissenbaum, Stephen, 35, 188n8, potential of, 34; as transitional
193n11, 193n12 figure, 47. See also A.I. Artifi-
Noyes, Minna B., Brownies Book, The, cial Intelligence; Collodi, Carlo;
116 Coover, Robert, Pinocchio in
nutrition reform (U.S.), 6, 7, 144–45, Venice; Disney, Walt, Pinocchio;
151; history of medicine and, Patri, Angelo
148–149; malnutrition diagnosis Pipher, Mary, 202n19
and, 147–148; nutrition science Pirandello, Luigi, Six Characters in
and, 146, 148; nutritionism and, Search of an Author, 41, 42, 49
148; vitamins and, 149–150, Plank, Robert, 166, 167, 169–170, 175
152–153, 154 Pleck, Elizabeth, 82, 84–85, 192n5
Pleece, Warren, 126
O Pleij, Herman, 52–53, 65, 70–71,
Oates, Joyce Carol, 159–160 113, 117, 118, 124, 137, 166,
Obama, Barrack, xi 178, 189n20, 191n21, 196n7,
O’Bryan, Clark, 89 196n14, 199n1
Oler, Tammy, 180–181 Pollan, Michael, 148, 182
Ong, Walter, 19, 20 Pollard, Scott, 6, 63, 64, 67-68
Opie, Frederick Douglass, 127, 128, Pollyanna, 40
130–131, 132, 198n27 Popeye, 5, 7, 140, 164, 187n16; box-
Opie, Iona, 79–80, 141, 192n10 ing and, 159-160; cyborgs and,
Opie, Peter, 79–80, 141, 192n10 161, 162; dietary change (U.S.)
Oring, Elliott, 11, 15 and, 141; famous line, 158–159;
Ortiz, Alfonso, 119 folk heroes (U.S.) and, 141,
Osment, Haley Joel, 40 156; masculinity and, 142–143;
Ostrander, Gilman M., 127, 129 nutrition reform and, 145, 150,
228 Index
153, 157–158; Progressive era Sammond, Nicholas, 6, 25, 27, 29,
nationalism and, 141; scurvy 49–50, 98, 100, 102
and, 145, 199n4; spinach and, Sandburg, Carl, Rootabaga Stories,
150–153, 162, 182; superheroes 124–125
and, 157, 161; technology and, Sanders, John, 8
156, 160–161; vegetarianism Sanders, Julie, 22
and, 143; Wimpy and, 200n9, Sanheim, Amy, 176
200n12. See also Fleischer, Santa Claus, 84–85, 93, 94, 192n12
Max; Segar, Elzie C.; London, Saturday Night Live, 131
Bobby Sayer, Chlöe, 95, 96–97
Potter, Russell, 174, 175 Sayers, William, 115, 116
Pottker, Jan, 77, 89, 102, 104, 193n14 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 139
poverty, xi, 55, 59, 82, 102, 112, 113, Schlosser, Eric, 195n34
124, 137, 144–147, 155, 156, Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 81, 192n4
184 Scholem, Gershom, 179
protectionism, xii, 23, 27, 28, 55, 58, Schor, Juliet, 107, 109
59, 166, 184, 190n9; Halloween Schrader, Katherina, 190n7
and, 78, 82, 83, 97–107 Schwarcz, H. Joseph, 47, 183, 186n5
public sphere, 26–27 Scobie, Alex, 185n2
Pugh, Tison, 163, 164–165, 200n1 Segar, Elzie C., Thimble Theatre, 142,
150, 156, 157, 162, 199n2,
R 199n6
Rammel, Hal, 118 selfless parenting, 86, 98, 190n8
Ransome, James, 119 Sendak, Maurice, In the Night Kitchen,
Rapunzel, xii, 52, 61, 191n25 6, 62–63, 68, 75, 171; Where
Rees, Ennis, Brer Rabbit and His the Wild Things Are, 63–64, 68,
Tricks, 119–120 75
Register-Guard, Eugene, 80 Sfar, Joann, Little Vampire Does
Reno 911, 78 Kung-Fu!, 170; Vampire Loves,
Rex, Adam, 200n2 168
Richardson, Tim, 58, 78, 89, 97, 108, 140 Shackelford, Laura, 175
Rickels, Laurence, 179, 202n16 Sharp, Corona, 41, 126
Robin Hood, 124 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 165, 167,
Robinson, Cedric, 127, 198n28 168, 170, 175, 201n5. See also
robots, 5, 169–170, 175, 184, 188n7; Dadey, Debbie and Thornton
female, 180-181. See also Jones; Frankenstein’s creature
cyborgs Sherwin, Byron, 201n14, 201n15
Robots, 187n7 Siegel, Jerry, 200n13
Rodnay, János, 56, 190n7 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, The Golem, 166,
Rogers, Nicholas, 82, 83, 192n6, 192n7 167, 169
Rosenman, Stanley, 171, 172 Siporin, Steve, 78
Rossetti, Christina, “Goblin Market,” Skal, David J., 79, 82, 87, 89, 192n6
68–69, 70, 75, 191n25 Sky High, 51
Rowen, Norma, 167, 178 slave narrative, 113–114
Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, 6, 39 Sleeping Beauty, 95
Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 166, 200n3 Smith, Andrew F., 151
Russell, Sharman Apt, 7, 137, 184 Smith, J. B., 112
Smith, Katherine Capshaw, 136
S Smith, Susan Lynn, 147
Sagendorf, Bud, 151, 160 “Snow White,” 61, 90–91
Salazar, Souther, Monster that Ate the Sobel, Jeffrey, 141, 142, 145
Stars, The, 65 Sorby, Angela, 193n19
Salvation Army, “In the Sweet Bye and Southwick, Albert, 129
Bye,” 115 Spielberg, Steven, 46, 188n13
Index 229
spinach, 5, 7, 49, 77, 105, 140–143, toy industry, 41, 42, 46–47, 50
145, 146, 150–154, 157–158, Toy Story, 2, 33, 42–43, 45, 46
160–162, 182, 199n3, 200n8. Toy Story 2, 33
See also Popeye; Lenski, Lois trick-or-treating rituals, 7, 78, 192n1;
Spitz, Ellen Handler, 33–34, 63 changes in, 78–79, 80, 83–85;
Spongebob Squarepants, 200n8 controlling children and, 86–87;
Spy Kids, 50–51 intergenerational conflict and,
steampunk, 201n11 86; inversion rituals and,
Stewart, Susan, 8, 9, 11–12, 27, 33, 46, 193n11; pranks and, 85, 86;
186n4 “protection racket” and, 79–80,
Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, 21, 22–23, 84, 85
25, 28, 40–41, 47 Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 8, 168,
Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 171 182–183

Stone, Gregory, 80 Tucker, Elizabeth, 173
Stone, Jennifer, 21 Tuleja, Tad, 79, 81, 94, 192n3, 193n18
Stone, Kay, 13, 47 “Tunjur, Tunjur,” 73, 115
Story of Little Black Sambo, The, 131 Twitchell, James, 111
Strathern, Marilyn, 91–92, 98, 106
Street, Douglas, 32, 34 V
Sturm, James, Golem’s Mighty Swing, vampires, 170–174, 195n31, 201n9,
The, 176 201n13. See also Dracula;
Sublette, Ned, 193n20 Meyers, Stephanie; Sfar, Joann;
Sugar Act, 129, 197n33 Stoker, Bram
Sullenberger, Tom, 140, 186n8 VanAllsburg, Chris, Polar Express, The,
Superman, 161, 177, 200n13, 201n14 192n8
Sutton-Smith, Brian, 3, 185n2 Vance, Thomas R., 151
Swann, Marjorie, 23, 26, 93–94, 122 van der Berhe, Jan, “Hans the Sweet
sweets, 6, 70, 74, 77–79, 83, 135, Tooth,” 65
198n33; addictive, 103; kets, van der Haag, Ernest, 186n8
108; medicinal, 140, 150, 154; Veblen, Thorstein, 98, 136
pacifying children with, 79; poi- vegetarianism, 140, 141, 142, 199n1
sonous materials and, 90 Velde, Vivian Vande, 56
Symons, Michael, 69–70, 103, 137, Vickery, Roy, 193n17
182, 191n17 video games, 48–49
Vint, Sherryl, 8, 10
T
Tar Baby tales, 5, 119–121, 122, 124, W
139, 196n17 Wagner, Vivian, 43, 163, 164, 188n15
Tatar, Maria, 31, 55–56, 98, 189n2 Walker, Nancy, 59, 99, 185n1
Taylor, Laurie, 69 Wallace, Christopher, Pied Piper’s Poi-
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, Nutcracker, son, The, 22
The, 2 Walter, Virginia A., 72
Temple, Verna M., 151 Waring, J. I., 147
Thomas, Joyce Carol, Blacker the Warner, Marina, 4, 54, 60, 61, 76, 79,
Berry: Poems, The, 125 89, 113, 170, 200n2
“Three Fairies, The,” vi, 23, 26, 56, 75, Warnes, Andrew, 7, 119, 124, 126,
124, 197n24 130, 131–132, 134, 135
Thurman, Wallace, Blacker the Berry, Washington, Booker T., 131–132
The, 125–126, 135 Washington, Ned, 29
Tichi, Cecelia, 160, 162 Wassenaar, Michael, 160, 161–162
Tomes, Nancy, 145, 150, 153 Weiner, Norbert, 179
toy fiction, 27–28, 34, 170; agency and, Welfare Reform Bill, 156
32; authenticity and, 37; power Wesley, John, 72
and, 35 West, Cornel, 102
230 Index
Westerfeld, Scott, Uglies, 7, 180–184, Y
202n18 youth agency, 1, 26; as conditional,
White, E. B., Charlotte’s Web, 164 184; consumer capitalism and,
White, Luise, 171, 172 5; consumerism and, 7
Whitehead, Colson, John Henry Days, youth rights, 6, 59, 100–102; con-
156, 197n22 sumer rights and, 77–78, 101,
Widdowson, John, 61–62, 92–93, 190n11 103, 106, 107; financial inde-
Wiesel, Elie, Golem: The Story of a pendence and, 101; nutrition
Legend, The, 166, 168–69, 182 rights and, 103–106; reci-
Williams (Bianco), Margery, Velveteen procity, 78, 82, 98, 100, 101,
Rabbit, The, 2–6, 37, 38, 45, 46 190n5, 191n25; rhetoric of, xi,
Williams, Raymond, xiii, 117–118, 123 102
Willingham, Bill, Fables: Legends in

Exile, 25–26 Z
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Fac- Zelinsky, Paul, xii
tory (1971), 40 Zelizar, Viviana, xi, 6, 26–27, 81–82,
Wilson, Bee, 89–90, 108 187n3
Winnicott, D. W., 36, 188n10 Zipes, Jack, 2, 3, 5, 9, 13, 14, 15–16,
Wisniewski, David, Golem, 176 17, 18, 20, 21, 28, 37, 54–55,
Wood, Naomi, 3, 185n3 57, 114–115, 124, 185n2,
Wright, Richard, 7, 128, 132 185n4, 186n6
Wunderlich, Richard, 31, 187n2 Zolkover, Adam, 10, 186n10

Honeyman - Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature

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Fairy Tales, Childlore,

specialists in the field.

2. Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature

New York London

Simultaneously published in the UK

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2010 Taylor & Francis

Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN10: 0-415-80614-3 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-80614-5 (hbk)

Introduction: Material Youth 1

1 What Good Little Girls and Boys Are Made Of 25

5 Muscle and Greens 140

Conclusion: Flesh and Blood 163

1.1 Mary Liddell for Angelo Patri’s Pinocchio in America.

1.2 Johnny Gruelle, Raggedy Ann Stories. Simon and Schuster,

1.3 William Nicholson for Margery Williams, The Velveteen

1.4 John R. Neill for L. Frank Baum, The Patchwork Girl of

2.1 Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwepeter. 1845. English

2.2 Ross Collins, Alvie Eats Soup. Scholastic, 2002. (By

3.1 Megan Kelso, The Squirrel Mother: Stories. Fantagraphics,

4.1 Brad Johnson, (untitled entry), Comix 2000. L’Association,

5.1 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

5.2 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

5.3 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

5.4 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc., May

5.5 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

5.6 Bobby London, Mondo Popeye, King Features Syndicate,

5.7 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

5.8 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

5.9 Elzie Segar, “Thimble Theatre,” King Features Inc.,

*All Popeye images used by permission of King Features, Inc.

In “Kids and Commerce,” Viviana Zelizer explains that American house-

Dominant discourses of the twentieth-century followed suit in an increas-

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class

Cringing a bit, I nonetheless found myself agreeing, as Gingrich’s

In my pursuits as a perennial student and scholar, I’ve benefited from the

How does the present appropriate the past? . . . How do aspects of

ary tradition, particularly as practiced from the late seventeenth century

However we construct it and whatever it stands for to us, body is

moral well-being of their parents. . . . [C]hildren must exhibit a certain

Such an emotional burden without power or autonomy pervades bourgeois

Children’s folklore as the struggle for power certainly has a different

These dark and radical representations of youth, however, are tempered by

Rather than offering the comfort of endlessly supportive imaginary

In “The Puppeteer,” Andersen dramatizes extremes of agency and poten-

First noting that Melanie Klein believes “cannibalism is a phantasy univer-

Stories about monsters with abominable appetites have multiple func-

Much has been written psychoanalyzing the developmental significance

Pinocchio has learned this fundamental principle of survival within net-

When Toys Come Alive: Narratives of Animation, Metamorphosis, and

Each of the following chapters investigates a fairy tale, folk custom, or

to take embodiment into account, recognizing, as Sherryl Vint explains,

Just as the folktale fails to adhere to our notion of authorship, so the

Instead, we can focus on what cultural figurations communicate about

literary types who would like to be cultural anthropologists. I hate to think

But those “pale and inadequate reflections” are what we nonfolklorists

To privilege either view is to stop the vital movement of the sign. . . .

Folklore resists such tight, clear, and potentially reductive packages, as

32). If synchronic, analysis discounts history, if archetypal, analysis gener-