Literature For Children

Peter Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134916269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Children's literature has recently produced a body of criticism with a highly distinctive voice. The book consolidates understanding of this area by including some of the most important essays published in the field in the last five years, demonstrating the links between literary criticism, education, psychology, history and scientific theory. It includes Peter Hollindale's award- winning essay on Ideology and Children's Literature, topics from metafiction and post-modernism to fractal geometry, and the examination of texts ranging from picture books to The Wizard of Oz and the the Australian classic Midnite. Sources are as disparate as Signal and the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, and the international community is represented by writers from Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and Germany. Each essay is set in its critical context by extensive quotation from authoritative articles.

1

Ideology

One of the most useful insights of modern criticism has been that no work, even the most apparently simple book for children, can be innocent of some ideological freight. As James Watson, a writer whose novels confront serious political issues, has observed: ‘The dominant discourses of our time are rarely challenged, so much so that we are often in danger of forgetting that alternative discourses even exist’ (Watson 1986:70).

In children’s literature, where there is a very obvious power relationship between writer and reader, and where writers and publishers are constrained and influenced by many pressure groups, this is a particularly emotive issue. As a result, work in this area has tended to be polemic (Dixon 1977; Leeson 1985), or to address specific issues such as censorship or covert racialism (Moore and MacCann 1986). Theoretical explorations are rather rarer, and as late as 1985 it was possible for Children’s Literature in Education to publish an essay on political ideologies in literature for children that began by spelling out what might now seem to be obvious.

Like other writers, authors of children’s books are inescapably influenced by their views and assumptions when selecting what goes into the work (and what does not), when developing plot and character, determining the nature of conflicts and their resolutions, casting and depicting heroes and villains, evoking readers’ emotional responses, eliciting readers’ judgments, finding ways to illustrate their themes, and pointing morals. The books thus express their authors’ personal ideologies (whether consciously or unconsciously, openly or indirectly). To publish books which express one’s ideology is in essence to promulgate one’s values. To promulgate one’s values by sending a potentially influential book into public arenas already bristling with divergent, competing, and sometimes violently opposed ideologies is a political act. Seen in this light, the author’s views are the author’s politics; and the books expressing these views, when made accessible to the public, become purveyors of these politics, and potentially persuasive. (Sutherland 1985:143–4)

Between this and John Stephens’s Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, which treats of, for example, ‘the linguistic constitution of fantasy and realism as discoursal modes’ (Stephens 1992:243) there is a considerable conceptual distance, which indicates how rapidly interest in this area has developed. Similarly, Peter Hollindale’s article, reprinted below, first appeared in Signal in 1988 and has been successfully reissued as a separate pamphlet by the Thimble Press. Hollindale, who has had a distinguished career in the fields of both English literature and education, has been influential in establishing the complexity of the issues.

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Ideology and the Children’s Book

Peter Hollindale

IDEOLOGY.4. A systematic scheme of ideas, usu. relating to politics or society, or to the conduct of a class or group, and regarded as justifying actions, esp. one that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless of the course of events.

Oxford English Dictionary

I will start with an assortment of disconnected statements.

It is a good thing for children to read fiction.

Children’s own tastes are important.

Some novels for children are better than others.

It is a good thing to help children to enjoy better books thanthey did before.

A good children’s book is not necessarily more difficult or lessenjoyable than a bad children’s book.

Children are individuals, and have different tastes.

Children of diff erent ages tend to like different sorts of books.

Children of different ethnic and social backgrounds maydiffer in their tastes and needs.

Some books written for children are liked by adults.

Some books written for adults are liked by children.

Adults and children may like (or dislike) the same book for different reasons.

Children are influenced by what they read. Adults are influenced by what they read.

A novel written for children may be a good novel even if children in general do not enjoy it.

A novel written for children may be a bad novel even if children in general do enjoy it.

Every story is potentially influential for all its readers.

A novel may be influential in ways that its author did notanticipate or intend.

All novels embody a set of values, whether intentionallyor not.

A book may be well written yet embody values that in aparticular society are widely deplored.

A book may be badly written yet embody values that in aparticular society are widely approved.

A book may be undesirable for children because of the valuesit embodies.

The same book may mean different things to differentchildren.

It is sensible to pay attention to children’s judgement ofbooks, whether or not most adults share them.

It is sensible to pay attention to adults’ judgements ofchildren’s books, whether or not most children share them.

Some of these statements are clearly paired or linked, butthey can be read separately in isolation. All of them seem to meto be truisms. It would surprise me if any serious commentatoron children’s reading were to quarrel seriously with any ofthem. He or she might wish to qualify them, to respond as to DrF.R. Leavis’s famous ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ with his permittedanswer. ‘Yes, but…’. Even so, I would expect a very wideconsensus.

However, if this series of statements is brought to bear on thecontroversy in recent years between so-called book people andso-called child people, it will be found I think that most of themdrift naturally towards either one side or the other. In particular,there is likely to be a somewhat one-sided emphasis on remarksabout adult judgements and their importance (book people);about children’s judgements and their importance (child people); about differences of literary merit (book people) and about the influence on readers of a book’s social and political values (child people).

If these two little exercises do indeed produce the results that I expect them to, much of the division between literary and social priorities which has arisen over the last fifteen years or so may come to seem exaggerated and sterile. We have differences of emphasis disguised as differences of principle. (This may have happened because the extremes of each alternative reflect a much larger public controversy about the chief purpose of education. People slip without realizing it from talking about children’s books to talking about educational philosophy.) One result is particularly odd. By my own idiosyncratic but convinced reckoning, the statements which are left over, which seem not to bend towards the critical priorities of either side, are those which concern the individuality of children, and differences of taste or need between children and adults or between one child or group of children and another. It is a curious fact that these, the most obvious truisms of all, are also the most contentious statements. They are contentious because on the one hand they cast doubt on the supremacy of adult literary judgement, and on the other they suggest that we cannot generalize about children’s interests.

It is very easy and tempting to simplify a debate until its nature becomes conveniently binary, and matters which are not associated by any kind of logical necessity, or even loosely connected, become coalesced in the same ideological system. Something of this sort has happened in the schism between child people and book people. In the evolution of debate, the child people have become associated not only with a prime concern with the child reader rather than the literary artefact but with the propagation through children’s books of a ‘progressive’ ideology expressed through social values. The book people, on the other hand, have become linked with a broadly conservative and ‘reactionary’ ideological position. The result is a crude but damaging conjunction of attitudes on each side, not as it necessarily is but as it is perceived by the other. A concern for the literary quality of children’s books as works of imagination has become linked in a caricatured manifesto with indifference to the child reader and with tolerance or approval of obsolete, or traditional, or ‘reactionary’ political values. A concern with the child reader has become linked with indifference to high standards of literary achievement and with populist ardour on behalf of the three political missions which are seen as most urgent in contemporary society: anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-classism.

If this is the general divide between book people and child people amongst the critics, a matching divide is said to exist between writers. The book people amongst authors—those who are said by hostile commentators to have produced the prize- winning, dust-collecting, adult-praised, child-neglected masterpieces of the illusory ‘golden age’—are those who write‘to please themselves’, or ‘for the child I once was’, or, in C.S. Lewis’s famous remark, ‘because a children’s story is the best art-form for something you have to say’ (Lewis 1980:208). The child people amongst authors, on the other hand, would accept Robert Leeson’s analogy between the modern author and the oral storyteller of days before the printed book:

is the public, the consumer, obliged to accept such a take- it-or-leave-it attitude, being grateful if the artistic arrows shot in the air find their target? What happened in the old story-telling days? If the audience did not appreciate the genius of the storyteller, did that individual stalk off, supperless, into the night? Actual experience of story- telling suggests something different. You match story to audience, as far as you can. (Leeson 1985:161)

The trouble with this packaging of attitudes is that it over- simplifies, trivializes and restricts the boundaries of debate. Admittedly most writers on both sides of the notional divide have at times unwisely offered hostages to fortune. One may take for instance Fred Inglis’s remark:

Irrespective of what the child makes of an experience, the adult wants to judge it for himself, and so doing means judging it for itself. This judgement comes first, and it is at least logically separable from doing the reckoning for children. Tom’s Midnight Garden and Puck of Pook’s Hill are wonderful books, whether or not your child can make head or tail of them. (Inglis 1981:7)

This carefully formulated and entirely sensible statement offers an important distinction between equally valid but separate ways of reviewing literary experience. Yet I have seen the last sentence removed from its context and made to seem like a wanton dismissal of the child, a typical instance of the book person’s negligent aesthetics.

On the other side of the chasm is Bob Dixon, who follows an assault on ancient symbolic and metaphorical uses of the word‘black’ by a paragraph which seems ready on ideological grounds to consign Shakespeare and Dickens to the incinerator:

Adult literature, as might be expected, is full of such figurative and symbolic usages—when it isn’t openly racist. Shylock and Fagin, Othello and Caliban all deserve a second look, for there’s no need for anyone to accept racism in literature, not even if expressed in deathless blank verse. (Dixon 1977:95)

This is quite true. Any individual is free to elevate political judgement above literary judgement, and to be contemptuous of all literature which offends a political criterion. The converse is also true. Any individual is free to like and admire a great work of literature, even if its ideology is repellent. These are the private freedoms of a democratic society, and I hope that any commentator would defend both with equal enthusiasm. I make the second choice myself in the case of D.H.Lawrence, whom I admire as a great writer and whose ideology I detest. Neither principle is much use when we confront the problem of introducing children to great works of the past which do not entirely accord with current moral priorities. But if anyone says,‘We should not introduce them; we should ban them’, I begin to hear the boots of Nazis faintly treading, no matter what colour their uniforms.

My particular concern in this article is to argue that, in the very period when developments in literary theory have made us newly aware of the omnipresence of ideology in all literature, and the impossibility of confining its occurrence to visible surface features of a text, the study of ideology in children’s literature has been increasingly restricted to such surface features by the polarities of critical debate. A desire on the part of the child people for a particular set of social outcomes has led to pressure for a literature to fit them, and a simplistic view of the manner in which a book’s ideology is carried. In turn, this inevitably leads to a situation where too much stress is placed on what children read and too little on how they read it. At the very point in history when education seemed ready to accept the reading of fiction as a complex, important, but teachable skill, the extremities of critical opinion have devalued the element of skill in favour of the mere external substance.

Diversity and individuality

Things can be made to sound very easy, as they do in RobertLeeson’s reassuring comments:

This is a special literature. Its writers have special status in home and school, free to influence without direct responsibility for upbringing and care. This should not engender irresponsibility—on the contrary. It is very much a matter of respect, on the one hand for the fears and concerns of those who bring up and educate children, and on the other for the creative freedom of those whose lives are spent writing for them. I have generally found in discussion with parents or teachers, including those critical of or hostile to my work, that these respects are mutual. (Leeson 1985:169–70)

I should like to think that this was true and generally accepted. But it cannot, no matter how true, be so simple. In a socially and culturally, politically and racially divided country such as Britain (and most Western countries to some extent or other) there is not a uniform pattern of ‘fears and concerns’ on the part of ‘those who bring up and educate children’. The ‘fears and concerns’ of a teacher in a preparatory school in Hampshire are likely to be substantially different from those of a primary school teacher in Liverpool; those of an Irish Catholic parent in Belfast will differ from those of an Asian parent in Bradford. I wish to make only the obvious but neglected point that the same book, read by four children in the care of these four adults, will not in practice be the same book. It will be four different books. Each of these children needs and deserves a literature, but the literature which meets their needs is unlikely to be a homogeneous one.

It is of course important too for the writer’s creative freedom to be respected. But in order to be respected it must be understood, and on that score also I do not share Robert Leeson’s optimism. There is too much evidence of pressure on writers (from all points of the politico-moral spectrum) to conform to a predetermined ideology issuing in visible surface features of the text (Inglis 1981:267–70; Leeson 1985:122). Here, for example, is Nina Bawden, a writer widely admired by critics of very different approaches.

Speaking to people who care, often deeply, for children, I have begun to feel that the child I write for is mysteriously absent…. ‘Are you concerned, when you write, to see that girls are not forced into feminine role-playing?’ ‘What about the sexuality of children?’ ‘All writers are middle class, at least by the time they have become successful as writers, so what use are their books to working class/ deprived/emotionally or educationally backward children?’ ‘Writers should write about modern [ sic ] problems, like drugs, schoolgirl pregnancies. Aren’t the books you write rather escapist?’ ‘What do you know about the problems of the child in the high-rise flat since you have not lived in one?’ To take this last question. The reply, that you project your imagination, is seldom taken as adequate; but what other one is there? (Bawden1975:63–4)

Leeson’s dictum, ‘You match story to audience, as far as you can’, is less straightforward than it seems. A diversity of authors exercising their ‘creative freedom’—as they must, if they are to write anything worthwhile at all—will only match story to audience ‘as far as they can’. If there were indeed a single, uniform audience, a theoretical ‘child’ who stood for all children, there would be few problems. Either a writer would be able to match her story to this ‘child’, in which case her credentials as a children’s writer would be proved, or she would not be able to, in which case she might have to settle for being a writer of those other children’s books supposedly beloved of the book people, the ones admired by literary adults but unread by actual children.

However, one point I hoped to make with my opening anthology of truisms is that the most conspicuous truisms of all are ones which many adult commentators are in practice loth to accept. When Leeson says ‘you match story to audience’, he must surely be postulating many possible audiences, whether individual (parent reading to child) or socially grouped (teacher or visiting author reading to school class). It is clear that these audiences will differ greatly from each other, whether in age, or sex, or race, or social class, and that these different audiences will perceive the same story in different ways. Otherwise there would be no need for Robert Leeson to do any ‘matching’. He is not suggesting that a writer who adjusts and improvises in order to make his story work with one group of children can then sit back, assured of its success with every other group thereafter. And yet at their own self-caricaturing extremes this is precisely the assumption on which both book people and child people seem to...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Literature For Children
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Ideology
• 2 Criticism: the state of the art
• 3 Internationalism
• 4 Poetry, response and education
• 5 Connections
• References