Mother Goose's transformation into the symbol of children's nursery poetry, and indeed, of childhood, occurred during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, although, significantly, in America only. Numerous commentators, including Maurice Sendak, have pointed out that in Great Britain people refer "to the works of Mother Goose simply as nursery rhymes, songs, jingles, or melodies" (Sendak, 12).

One might speculate about why American readers needed an emblem for their children's literature, or why they chose the somewhat ambiguous figure of Mother Goose, rather than the childlike Tommy Thumb or the more seemingly tender-spirited Nurse Lovechild. Certainly, the marvelous synthesis of "Mother" and "Goose"--of household authority and the wild--resonated with the deceptive plainness and unpredictability of the rhymes. "Mother" registered the canon's many "old" women and wives more clearly and comprehensively than either "Nurse" or "Gammar," and the strange surname "Goose," suggested, with the lingering sibilance of a whispered confidence, (even, perhaps, a suggestion of concupiscence?¹ ) the magical transformations and flights of homely fancy found in the best of the poems.

In broader terms nations tend to produce national emblems, and well before nationhood, America had inspired female imagery to symbolize its existence. In "America in Person: The Evolution of National Symbols," John Higham writes that "[o]ver the course of American history, image-makers have created a small number of real or imaginary human beings to symbolize the nation and so to shape its meaning and character." (Higham, 474). Briefly surveying the partially clothed or unclothed savage accompanied by an exotic wild animal depicting the unexplored American landmass in the sixteenth century, to the "the barbaric queen borne aloft in a giant conch shell" of the materialistic Age of Exploration, and the subsequent eighteenth century figures of the meek Indian princess, and the post-Revolutionary Liberty or "Columbia," Higham notes that the feminine had repeatedly been used to symbolize various categories of American identity (Higham, 476). Although not an explicit marker of American geography or nationhood, the figure of Mother Goose may belong to a broader group of "imaginary human beings" that exist at the margins of this emblematic tradition. Read within the context of America's symbolical matrilineal succession, Mother Goose leads us to ask what national principles were being affirmed by the symbolism of childhood, or, how does American nationalism and childhood overlap?

Higham observes that the American state "rested on universal principles," rather than an ethnic basis, and thus, in theory, "belonged to everyone" (Higham, 474). One can recognize in this democratic principle the central tenet underlying the writings of Jacques Rousseau and eighteenth century Rousseau-based childhood pedagogical theories: more than an adult's passage through immaturity, childhood was a discreet modality to which all had an inalienable right; childhood was to be enjoyed, carelessly, by the young, cherished reflexively and vigilantly protected by the mature. In the American nationalist model, which valorized a political philosophy rather than a particular heritage, race, or cultural tradition, one can recognize the Rousseauean creed of the natural child, whose hardy, independent judgment leads him to scorn the prejudices and hypertrophy of European civilization. One can hear the plangent echoes of the American movement for Independence in Rousseau's address at the beginning of Èmile to the "tender and provident mother . . . who is prudent enough to leave the beaten road." (quoted in Summerfield, 114)

This is not to suggest that Mother Goose was created to be an emblem both of America and of an idealized childhood; but that Mother Goose assumed emblematic power because, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, America perceived a meaningful homology between the principles of the Union and the ideal of childhood; and the open nature of the symbol (Mother Goose) lent itself to the perception of both. Each side of the equation was dynamically reinforcing. By raising Mother Goose to the level of the iconic, America elevated childhood to the level of philosophical discourse, or at least, hypothesized the relevant ideas of Rousseau and his followers. Reciprocally, by configuring its democratic principle in the terms of an immutable category of existence, childhood, America expressed, and thus satisfied, a desire "to believe in the everlasting appeal and global relevance of [its] own immediate experience" (Higham, 480). While eighteenth and nineteenth century American coins and paintings carried the image of Liberty and the bald eagle, nineteenth century American children's books carried the image of Mother Goose and her airborne gander (or goose).

John Fleet Eliot's mid-century campaign to prove that Mother Goose climbed out of the eggshell of early American history attests to a prevailing nationalistic mood.² By seeking to "naturalize" Mother Goose, to place her birth within its own early years, American writers were attempting to match to their own culture to the earlier time she evoked, which implicitly took on the idealized characteristics of a Golden Age.

By the mid-century, the American Mother Goose had already been a domestic familiar for 20 years, with a history extending over three generations. As an enduring image, it was natural that, on some level, she would come to be associated with, even symbolize, the past; and, as Mother Goose valorized a construction of personal childhood, she also valorized a construction of our nation's childhood. Perhaps, if we recollect the earliest appearance of La Mère Oye, as la Muze historique, we may wonder whether Mother Goose had always implicitly conveyed something of a lost Golden Age, whether of childhood or of a nation.

The significant number of nineteenth and early twentieth century advertisements that show Mother Goose endorsing fountain pens, hams, banks, and so forth, reinforce her iconic stature as a link to a valorized past. While these whimsical ads plainly demonstrate our cultural predilection for consumption, at a deeper level they also reveal, even as they seem to trivialize, the urge toward idealism and transcendence.

¹Theodore Roethke's famous line, from "I Knew A Woman"--"love likes a gander and adores a goose," --seems particularly apt to the bawdiness of many of Mother Goose's rhymes--such as "Three Blind Mice," "Rub a Dub Dub," and the long-forgotten "Harry Parry"--"O rare Harry Parry/When will you marry/When apples and pears are ripe/I'll come to your wedding/Without any bidding,/And lie with your bride all night."
²Among the champions of Eliot's Vergoose hypothesis was Evert A. Duyckinck, co-editor of The Cyclopaedia of American Literature. For his Illustrations to Mother Goose's Melodies, which he published in 1873--thirteen years after Eliot's letter in the Transcript--to commemorate the remarkable illustrations created for the 1835 edition of the popular Munroe & Francis publication by Alexander Anderson, Duyckinck composed an introduction containing Eliot's account of the Boston origins of Mother Goose.