Cleary lets readers see how much Ramona depends on her cat mask to brace herself for this mo-ment

School, always a behavioral challenge for Ramona,

Without them, she has no identity. She does know she wants more than anything to be recognized as Ramona Geraldine Quimby.

which witch was which

acquiescen

ut it cannot be overlooked that Ramona, institutionally manipulated into socially acceptable be-haviors, uses the lessons she has learned in her literacy narrative in turn to manipulate someone else into behavior she considers accept-

Having her father speak to her as an equal validates Ramona's sense of herself as a competent agent in her family.

It empowers her within her family.

amona learns to read and write words like pol-lution and hazardous by including them in messages to her father

"awareness of the canonical workings of narrative"

hough the acquisition of those abilities, as Zarrillo suggests, sometimes proves tedious, Ramona does feel powerful when, "Words leaped out at her from the newspapers, signs, and cartons. Crash, highway, salt, tires. The world was suddenly full of words that Ramona could read"

of her life because she was consigned to the lowest reading group and literally terrorized by her teacher's practices, which in-cluded isolating children in the cloakroom for making mistakes in their reading.

Ramona's action, then, masculinizes her and thereby makes the girl's behavior even less acceptable in the feminized class-room. But it would be difficult to argue that this lesson in controlling one's

Has Ramona, as Orenstein suggests young girls do, already begun to assimilate the rules about compliance and less aggressive behavior?

This year she promised herself she would not pull those curls no matter how much they tempted her."

Paley concludes that girl-play and boy-play are strikingly similar in that whether the "play" is Cinderella or Darth Vader, girls and boys are equally noisy, equally messy, and equally interested in "social order"

distinguishing between the private and the social

Most significantly, Ramona does choose to go home, to drop out of kindergarten, "because Miss Binney did not love her any-more" (p. 165). Later, after several

The first time-which I will explore more fully below-she gets away with her defiant misbehavior because she is one of several children in witch costumes for Halloween, so Susan cannot identify which witch pulled her hair.

For the first time in her life, Ramona learns a lesson that her family has not succeeded in communicating: Her own very personal desires cannot be expressed freely or with impunity

amona attempts to sidestep responsibility for violating Susan's body by accusing the complaining victim of being a "baby,"

boing,"

Establishing Ramona's longing for the tactile experience of touch-ing Susan's boingy hair sets up what Pat Pfleiger identifies as one of Ramona's "difficulties" as she moves "into a world of complex rela-tionships" outside her family and neighborhood.

Ramona feel diminished as her sense of agency is undermined.

children facing what she calls "school culture" for the first time: "school culture is ... school language . . . school behaviors . . . school politics . . . school economics";

When at last Ramona arrives at kindergarten, the five-year-old has already said "No!," "stamped her foot," and considered that "she would make a great big noisy fuss"

While such disruptive tantrums can hardly be viewed as appropriate or positive behavior, they certainly allow Ramona to dom-inate the moment.

silence and compliance"

Always acutely conscious of her subordinate position as the youngest child in the Quimby family, she is overjoyed to think that she will at last "catch up" with her sister Beezus

roduces the humor in the series even as it emphasizes the child's developmental process and reveals ways that Ramona internalizes the lessons

ocial norms

coerces through various social punishments or convinces through equally effective social persuasions

Ramona adapts to the social norms of the educational community, she must internalize the external restrictions on her behavior or suffer the consequences of remaining at odds with the system.

notes that there is now a general agreement among historians that all societies in all times have had some way of designating a fundamental difference between childhood and adulthood

12 Bloomsbury Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature The first part of that sentence seems inarguable: in order to have a literature specially dedicated to young people, a culture has to have a sense of who and what that audience is and what they need to know as they grow into adulthood.

hildren, though they require different levels of physical care than adults, only need practical training in tasks that fit their role in their social group, and don't need special stories that would prepare them for life outside of their own communities.

through encounters with the world around us-our families, our cultural products such as books and other media, and our schooling-it becomes important for those who study child culture to examine how ideologies appear and are reinforced in youth literature.

But even though we consciously espouse certain beliefs or values, we also hold y_nconscious ideological positions that we have absorbed to the point where they seem like common sense; these are values that we take for granted, so much so that we are surprised when we find that other people perceive things differently.