Member-only story
How Sex Plays a Significant Role in Children’s Literature
Tom Sawyer & the Absence of Sex (from Para.doxa)
Though it might at first seem an unlikely assertion, sex plays a significant role in Children’s Literature. One of the cornerstones of our very definition of childhood–evident, for example, in our system of movie ratings–is the taboo that surrounds knowledge about sexual matters. Such a restriction draws attention to the way authors treat or don’t treat sexuality in children’s books, either by sublimating it or by leaving it out altogether (often in ways that call loud attention to the erasures in the manuscript). Consider Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”
Desexualizing Tom Sawyer
The transformations of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820)–as they cross over from the adult romance (The Last of the Mohicans, 1826) to the children’s book (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876)–present a case history of the desexualizing of American juvenile literature. In Ivanhoe, Scott’s Rebecca trails a musky eroticism and is attractively dark because she is Jewish. The villain, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, is taken with her and (in the language of the time) tries to forcibly steal her virtue.
James Fenimore Cooper, in turn, revised Ivanhoe in his The Last of the Mohicans.[1] Here…
