Powerful Shadows: Child and Adult Audiences in Where the Wild Things Are

Wayne Booth describes literature as a relationship, an offering of friendship, between an implied author and an implied reader. This rhetorical relationship, however, can have a third party hovering in the background—an eavesdropping or shadow audience, not specifically invoked by the author but privy to the conversation and exerting a greater or lesser influence on both the author and the rhetorical situation.

Sometimes this secondary audience has greater power than the invoked audience in the world at large, which gives the author a practical and potent incentive for attending to it. For instance, as we spoke about in class, a female rhetorician like Virginia Woolf spoke directly to a female audience but had to be aware of messages she was implicitly sending to men as well. As another example, the genre of children’s literature highlights the interactions of a shadow audience with the implied author and implied audience.

Children’s literature presents a world created for and about children where adults are present but often pretend they’re not—a classic case of “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” As Zohar Shavit points out, while “by definition, children’s literature addresses children,” in fact “always and without exception, [it] has an additional addressee—the adult, who functions as either a passive or an active addressee of texts written for children” (83). 

Not only do adults write the children’s texts, they also do the publishing, reviewing, promoting, and often buying and award-giving. At each step, adults act as audience with power to grant or withhold approval. As Shavit continues, the children’s writer must court adult sanction to reach a child audience at all (84).

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Balancing relationships with two audiences who may not have the same desires or interests can get complicated. How does the author attend to and  stay ethical to both? In children’s literature, one answer might be: forget the adults, this story is for the kids. But even if that were practical, as Jill Paton Walsh asks, is it ethical when speaking to children for the author to “[put] down the adult’s burden of knowledge, and experience” (212)—or, I would add, to disregard the concerns of a caring adult audience who has the children’s interest in mind, though viewing it from a more mature perspective? 

One classic story that balances these elements and concerns is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak effectively and ethically attends to both audiences by appealing to the values of a legitimately concerned adult audience while keeping the story firmly within the perspective of the implied child audience. 

So that's the introduction, ending with the thesis, as all good little composition students know. What books have you noticed seemed to be balancing two audiences at once? Are they successful, or does it come out awkward?

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Notes:
Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: Towards an ethic of literature.

Mills, Claudia. “The Ethics of the Author/Audience Relationship in Children’s Fiction.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 22 (2000): 181-187.

Shavit, Zohar. “The Double Attribution of Texts for Children and How It Affects Writing for Children.” Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults. Ed. Sandra L. Beckett. New York: Garland, 1999. 83-97.

Walsh, Jill Paton. “The Rainbow Surface.” Suitable for Children? Controversies in Children’s Literature. London: Sussex UP, 1976. 212-15.