ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its case study the book cover that received condemnation in the British media on its release: the 2014 jacket of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It examines what is at stake in our discussions of childhood and sexuality and how this relates to ideas of the (in)appropriate book for the child. Rejackets for the adult market both produce ideas of the knowable child’s body and its excess and a fetishism that apparently permits looking at adolescent sexuality. At stake in this is the accessibility, or lack thereof, of the child’s gaze at the adult for whom it is seemingly intended, a familiar trope that this chapter reframes through reconsidering frame and pose. A critique of the child as exchangeable commodity examines the covers’ reflection and deflection of the apparent content of the book, with the commercialism of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory contrasted to the female objecthood at stake on the front. Drawing on contemporary accounts of the cover (including Anne Fine in the Guardian and Joanne Harris on Twitter), a concluding discussion of current debates about the media and childhood finds that the security on which the covers’ condemnations are made is precisely the position on which the counter-argument is premised, thus destabilising the ability of either side to claim the child for itself.
