| Library home | Catalogue | Resources | Services | Help | Libraries | About us |
| Staff directory | A-Z index | Site map |
| Library home | Catalogue | Resources | Services | Help | Libraries | About us |
| Staff directory | A-Z index | Site map |
Chosen by:
Dr Michael Ackland,
School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts
Stead, Christina, 1902-1983.
The man who loved children / Christina Stead. (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1940)
The man who loved children / Christina Stead ; introduction by Randall Jarrell. 2nd ed. (New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965)
The Man Who Loved Children is Stead’s most famous and, in many ways, most controversial novel. On first appearing in New York on October 11, 1940, its stark portrayal of a tragically dysfunctional family commanded scant attention from a public preoccupied with war in Europe and economic recovery at home. When reprinted a quarter of a century later, however, it resonated with readers, unhappily aware of the generational tensions portrayed so memorably by James Dean and the young Marlon Brando.
"The Man Who Loves Children knows," Randall Jarrell claimed in his now famous Introduction, "as few books have ever known--knows specifically, profoundly, exhaustively--what a family is . . . The book has an almost frightening power of remembrance; and . . . what it reminds us of is terrible . . . it is a masterpiece with some plain, and plainly negligible, faults" (v-vi, xl). The second wave of reviews concurred, hailing the reissued work "a marvellous neglected novel" and "a funny, painful, absorbing masterpiece". Stead's resurrection from literary obliquity was completed in the late 1970s when, despite her strenuous protests, she was enrolled in a burgeoning counter-canon of neglected feminist authors. Her death in 1983 was followed by a spate of major monographs and articles that discerned in her portrait of the Pollit family a thinly disguised depiction of her tortured adolescence in Sydney, through which she sought to exorcise her painful past as well as to provide an unflinching anatomy of the political powers of patriarchy.
Yet this de facto critical orthodoxy is far from incontestable. For the novelist, when she began to plan and write the book in 1938, was closely associated with the New York branch of the Communist Party and engaged with quite different contemporary issues--raising the possibility that the original political concerns of the work may have been usurped by a feminist reading which, although assisting Stead's critical rehabilitation, has arguably obscured the novel's critique of American society. In short, the novel remains a potential social touchstone in which individual readers will inevitably discern aspects of their own upbringing, as well as a veiled portrait of an age struggling with the enduring issues of generational change, race and demagoguery, and the ease with which ostensibly benign, democratic procedures can assume a totalitarian dimension.
Photo album created with Web Album Generator