sell baby clothes or soap. Normal adults did not give them to one another, or decorate their desks with them. So far as I can remember, no one I knew even owned a rubber duck. I did own one, however, on account of the pet name my mother had given me. Back then, before her breakdown and subsequent vanishing act, she liked to call my brother Benjamin Bunny. I, inevitably, was Donovan Duck.26
My own rubber duck was a somewhat hideous specimen, with white plumage, a green topcoat, a hydrocephalic head, and the gentlemanly posture of a penguin. It resembled a Hummel figurine that had sprouted a beak. In the bathtub, when squeezed, instead of squeaking, it shot water from the soles of its feet, a vaguely scatological feature that greatly amused my brother and me, though our preferred bath toys were Hot Wheels, which we’d drive in laps around the tub’s rim and launch Evel Knievel-style off our wet knees. Most exotic varieties of rubber duck have since gone extinct—they are the dodos and carrier pigeons of the nursery—and what new ones have evolved share a single, yellow ancestor whose pop-cultural apotheosis was by my toddlerhood already under way.
It had begun in 1970, when an orange puppet named Ernie appeared on PBS and said, “Here I am in my tubby again. And my tubby’s all filled with water and nice, fluffy suds. And I’ve got my soap and washcloth to wash myself. And I’ve got my nifty scrub brush to help me scrub my back. And I’ve got a big fluffy towel to dry myself when I’m done. But there’s one other thing that makes tubby time the very best time of the whole day. And do you know what that is? It’s a very special friend of mine. My very favorite little pal”—at which point Ernie reaches into the suds and, brandishing his yellow duck, bursts into song.
You can watch a video clip of the number online. A pink towel hangs from a wooden post at the left edge of the frame. The post looks like something out of an old western. There is no other scenery to speak of. Behind the bathtub—which is huge, presumably claw-footed, and decorated with three pink daisies—hangs a sky-blue backdrop. Bubbles of the sort you blow with a wand come floating up from the bottom of the screen, and the gurgle of water accompanies the music. Although I watched my share of Sesame Street as a child, I far preferred Super Grover’s mock-heroic pratfalls to Ernie’s snickering bonhomie, and I have no memory of the rubber duckie number. My wife, on the other hand, still knows the duckie song by heart.
Replaying the clip, I can’t help imagining myself as a toddler sprawled on the shag rug, glassy-eyed and solitary before our old black-and-white Zenith, watching this solitary, football-headed, cross-eyed puppet—at once the child’s alter ego and his imaginary friend, half preschooler, half possibly gay bachelor—as he serenades a squeak toy that is his own fabulous alter ego and imaginary friend. “Rubber Duckie, joy of joys,” Ernie sings. “When I squeeze you, you make noise, / Rubber Duckie, you’re my very best friend, it’s true.” It’s all so synthetic, so lonely, so imaginary, so clean. And apparently children loved it. In the 1969 pilot episode of Sesame Street, in which a version of the rubber duckie song appeared, children in the test audience responded so enthusiastically to Ernie and Bert and so tepidly to segments featuring the live actors that the show’s creators redesigned it, giving the puppets a starring role.
However novel the medium, however inventive Jim Henson’s puppetry, Ernie’s bathtub serenade draws on a history of representation that can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when British portraitists stopped painting children as diminutive adults and turned them into puppy-eyed personifications of Innocence. In the Romantic era, no longer was innocence merely the antithesis of guilt and childhood the antithesis of adulthood; innocent children were the antithesis of modernity, little noble savages. Childhood became a place as well as an age—a lost, imaginary, pastoral realm.27
It is striking how much the modern history of childhood resembles that of animals. “In the first stages of industrialism,” John Berger writes, “animals were used as machines. As also were children.” In the latter stages of industrialism, poor children who escaped the factory often took to the street, where they formed what social historians call “child societies,” gangs of urchins who—like feral cats—invented a social order all their