Come Play with Me: Theorizing Child's Play, Narrative World-Building and Imaginative Embodiment in Literature, 1749-1911

This dissertation argues that children's authors of the long nineteenth century imagined play as a creative way for child readers, collaborating with adults, to imbue physical reality with narratives which did not exist before. Books by Edgeworth, Alcott, Burnett, Montgomery, and others encourage their readers to question the line separating the body from the mind, the physical from the imaginative, the surfaces from the depths. I depart from a more traditional assumption that play is merely a disguise, or a distortion layered over a deeper meaning. After Freud, scholars have been trained to ask ourselves what novelistic children like Mary Lennox or Jo March, are “really” doing when they play, by digging under the surface for a text's disavowed meanings. This method, however, rests on the assumption that child's play always encodes a secret meaning, and that the job of the scholar is to ferret it out. I join scholars such as Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Eve Sedgwick to consider other, more generous ways to read.

Like Felski, I am not trying to demolish suspicious readings, but to decenter them, to ask what other moods and methods of reading are possible. By sidestepping the question of what's really happening when children play, I am advocating for a reading sees both play processes and the objects, stories, and bodies that are wrapped up in such processes, as important sites of meaning. When we regard play as a meaningful feature of a text, not only a symbol requiring decoding, we are more able to see how these children’s novels refuse distinctions between imaginary and real, and thus clear out spaces where we can imagine that the future doesn’t just reproduce the past, and that children do more than just repeat what adults model for them. The story of play doesn't always boil down to one answer—whether that answer concerns Oedipal origins, imperialism, or misogyny—and by paying close attention to both the spaces and the sensations of play, we can start to articulate other stories.