The Child Savage, 1890–2010

From Comics to Games

Elisabeth Wesseling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351893022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Taking up the understudied relationship between the cultural history of childhood and media studies, this volume traces twentieth-century migrations of the child-savage analogy from colonial into postcolonial discourse across a wide range of old and new media. Older and newer media such as films, textbooks, children's literature, periodicals, comic strips, children's radio, and toys are deeply implicated in each other through ongoing 'remediation', meaning that they continually mimic, absorb and transform each other's representational formats, stylistic features, and content. Media theory thus confronts the cultural history of childhood with the challenge of re-thinking change in childhood imaginaries as transformation-through-repetition patterns, rather than as rise-shine-decline sequences. This volume takes up this challenge, demonstrating that one historical epoch may well accommodate diverging childhood repertoires, which are recycled again and again as they are played out across a whole gamut of different media formats in the course of time.

PART I

The Child-savage in (Neo-)Colonial Discourse

Chapter 1

Technologies of Power: School Discourse in Late Nineteenth-century Ireland

Vanessa Rutherford

Introduction: The National School System

By the early nineteenth century, the English government focused on an Ireland where the lower classes were becoming more assertive and were expressing their rights through the medium of the Catholic Association founded by Daniel O’Connell in 1823. By 1824, it was “enrolled in what was arguably the first mass movement of organized democracy in Europe” (McCartney 1987, 112). The campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union (1801), the end of the Irish tithe system, universal suffrage and a secret ballot for parliamentary elections was nonviolent, but agitation and the threat of violence were constant. The passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) only fueled the imperial drive to “subdue the Irish,” to “make the poor contented with their lot” (McCartney 1987, 119). As the imperialist administration saw it, the solution to the Irish problem lay in cultivating the greatest resource the country had, its children, through bodies of knowledge and the disciplinary practice of schooling: “It is to the child we must address ourselves,” wrote Thomas Wyse in his treatise, Educational Reform. He continued: “an infant is capable of belonging to any country,” and given the “flexibility of his nature,” he may “with equal facility be moulded … into an Englishman.” Childhood education was metaphorically viewed as “a second creation” that would ensure a “useful, obedient, respectful and happy race” (Wyse 1836, 5, 278).

With the establishment in 1831 of a state-funded national school system of education in Ireland, the English empire set about civilizing an Ireland characterized by “barbarism … [where] several districts” were rendered “more perilous than the savage deserts of Africa.”¹ “Residences” were “shared between the half-naked squalid peasantry, and their hard-worked, half-starved horse, cow and pig.” People were “ignorant of the language, laws, customs, comforts, and regulations of civilised society” (Anon., The Absentee 1820, 10). It was not just blood but habits that labeled the Irish barbarous, backward and “Other” (Garner 2007). The Irish were cast as another race altogether, as “savage” and “childish,” “within the proliferating racial hierarchies” (Ignatiev 1996; Garner 2007). The national education system was to be the key agency in producing “a visible and permanent effect on the habits, manners, morals” and political feelings of the “rising and subsequent generations” of uncivilized Irish (Anon., The Absentee 1820, 12). The education system formed that supreme machine of disciplinary power designed to alter behaviors, to “break down,” train and “rearrange” Irish minds and bodies (Foucault 1977, 138).

The national school system, supported by political liberalism of the period, was envisaged as a training camp where lower-class Irish children could be rescued from an adult life of immorality, idleness, alcoholism, criminality and disease—characteristics aligned with child-like savages (Mehta 1997). Doctors lent scientific status to the view that there were “troublesome” elements of savagery within civilization (Foucault 1980), and that human development followed the path of life from a state of uncivilized savage to civilized man (De Condillac 1756; Darwin 1871). They claimed the child possessed “organs of animal life” where the mind was “completely instinctive.” With the correct environment and education, the mind could progress to a civilized state (Evanson and Maunsell 1838). Children were hence placed on that great chain of being that ran from animal to developed European (Darwin 1871). The clear mandate of national schools was to rescue children from a stage of pre-linguistic animality and place them on the royal road to humanity, truthfulness and honesty, and moral and social sensibility—all markers of civilization (McVittie 1904). In an 1865 medical treatise on “the idiotic and imbecile children of Ireland,” Dr George Kidd perhaps sums up the broader imperial aspirations for the primitive Irish child: “although their intelligence may never, perhaps, be developed to such a point as to render them the authors of those generous ideas and great deeds which leave a stamp upon an age, yet, still, they may attain a respectable mediocrity … they can be made industrious and cleanly” (Kidd 1865). The national education system would produce a culturally ameliorated, useful working-class Irish who would know their future place within the imperial scheme of things.²

A direct line was drawn from education to rational civilization to justify the exercise of imperial power through discourse. The Board “intended to supply the most convenient formula for the constant, immediate and total exercising of power” over children who would learn to take civilized cognitive, cultural and linguistic cues while in the schoolroom (Foucault 1980). School discourse was designed to fabricate the child via technologies of power that were “seeing without being seen” and impress in its object an internalization of mental, physical, social and emotional controls, in order that “the will itself” was “taken captive” (Rousseau 1974, 84). The Board controlled the curriculum, editing and publishing of all textbooks and teaching manuals. It produced a scheme of major reading books or lesson books, which were designed to “fortify the mind against contamination” (Mill 1850, 9) and the “lures of the imagination,” memory and creativity (Shuttleworth 2010).³ According to the Commissioners, “a preference has been given, in all cases” to discourses “which are calculated to lay the foundations” for “refined taste,” “to implant a love of virtue” and “to inspire devotional virtues” (Commissioners of National Education 1860, 5). The absence of magic, folklore, fairies and wizards, the “mainstay of popular culture in nineteenth-century Ireland,” was absolute in the books produced by the Commissioners (Bourke 1998, 92). For the English travelers to Ireland Mr. and Mrs. Hall, Ireland was a creature to be saved from its own savagery: “The Fairies of Ireland are daily loosing their repute … Education having worked havoc on them … The Rational is making rapid way. … Common sense is gradually forcing out the imaginative; and, ere long, the Irish peasant will retain little or nothing of a distinctive character” (Hall 1841). The banishment of “foolish superstitions” and the cultivation of disciplined subservience, rational self-control, character formation and productive economic utility were deemed necessary for “minds exposed to groveling circumstances and depressed by narrow means” (Wyse 1836; Commissioners of National Education 1850). This micromanagement of the child’s body and mind through school discourse combined with the macro-surveillance of the body politic, creating a disciplinary power that targeted the individual within state power targeting the social body (Stoler 2010).

The word “discourse” in the Foucauldian sense refers to bodies of knowledge or the social, historical and political conditions under which statements come to be regarded as true or false. Statements as components of discursive formations are functional units. They do things and bring about effects. Statements are not fixed, but can be understood via the rules that govern their functioning and are part of historically variable bodies of knowledge and technique(s) for the production of human subjects and institutions (Foucault 1972). This concept of discourse moves away from a purely linguistic system or social structure. Discourse is the relationships between disciplines or bodies of knowledge and the disciplinary practices or forms of social control, models of power and social possibility. School discourse is a revealing source of children’s media and genres, and provides crucial insights into the child-savage trope from the late nineteenth century. This childhood repertoire is intermedial, as the discourse combines and remediates broader mixed media and intermedia, namely secondary sources such as penny magazines, religious tracts, newspapers, periodicals, political and medical treatises, prose and poetry (Rajewsky 2005).

This chapter employs critical discourse analysis to describe, interpret and explain the ways in which school discourse in Ireland from the late nineteenth century constructs, and is constructed by, broader social, scientific, political, ideological and cultural contexts and struggles for power (Fairclough 1989). The analysis of five main lesson books published by the Commission for National Education in Ireland (1859–87) and three twentieth-century geography texts that introduce more complex commentary on people and place—A Geography of Ireland (Howarth 1911), Modern Geography (Sullivan’s School Series 1920), A General Geography of the World (1924) and The Irish Student’s Geography: Ireland (Butler 1930)—yielded two main themes that specifically frame this chapter: language politics and racial subjectivities. Each theme will now be considered in turn.

Language Politics

The opposition between the English as white/civilized and the Irish as colored/savage was substantiated through opposition between the barbaric Irish language and the refined English language. The idea of whiteness was not only a characteristic of skin color, but was also about how one lived (Bashford 2000), how one spoke and how one behaved: “we learn language not merely for the purpose of speaking it well, but also as an instrument of mental culture” (Wyse 1836, 56). School discourse encouraged cultivation and possibilities of pure imperial language and the world “expressed and implied by that language.” Within this discourse culture and civilization “spoke with one voice” (Brantlinger 1985). The entire experience of the Irish child within the national school—how they spoke, thought, behaved and what they learned—was influenced by governing bodies that were uncompromising in their desire to bring all schools under government control and standardize and secularize language, its determinants and outcomes. Language “was seen to provide proper content and form: the structure, idioms, ways of thinking, and cultural referents in which children’s character formation would take shape” (Stoler 2010, 121). The imperialist vision was that “provincialism” would “gradually disappear,” “a tone of civilization spread to the lowest cottage” and “a more obvious connection of the different orders,” namely a completely subordinate proletariat Irish, would ensue (Wyse 1836: 114–16). Ideologies regarding whiteness were constituted by educational discourse and regimes that shaped and fixed body and culture and the possibilities of this whiteness.

In 1831, the British Government advised the Commissioners of National Education to select and publish a series of textbooks for use of multi-denominational schools under their management. The Reverend James Carlile, member and ex-moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster, collaborated with eminent educationalists and churchmen about the content and style of each book (Ó Raifeartaigh 1955). There were originally five main lesson books in the series, and the design was standard. National school lesson books persisted through several editions and had a lengthy shelf life.⁴ Select sources for these lesson books included publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the Library of Useful Knowledge (1827–46), the Penny Magazine (1832–45), McCulloch’s Course of Reading, and Wood’s Natural History and Curiosities of Natural History. The First Reading Book for the Use of Schools (Commissioners of National Education 1887) was made up of short sentences of one-syllable words. The words appeared short, yet to an Irish child must have been difficult to comprehend. For example: “That man got my gold watch by theft. Pull the girth tight … give me a fork with three prongs” (8–9). The Second Book of Lessons (Commissioners of National Education 1866) contained a wider vocabulary and introduced the reader to geography, English grammar, history and the zoology of birds. The third, fourth and fifth editions of the Book of Lessons (Commissioners of National Education 1867, 1859, 1865) broaden this general format, while in addition introducing natural history and kingdoms in nature, descriptive geography, political economy and poetical pieces to the discourse. Each lesson book contained content lists, main titles and subsections. Illustrations, namely black and white line drawings, were very sparingly used.

This “ruling discourse” created a whole new mold for who, what and how Irish children would and could be. Early editions (1831–71) were void of local Irish material. Susan Mitchell, who attended a national school run by Miss Abbot in Morehampton Road, Dublin, resisted these technologies of power that she considered an oppressive hand suffocating her into silence:

An Irish girl … is given only the barest outline of the history of her own country and always in a subservient and secondary place to the histories of other countries, … history is divested of all personal charm and distinction … At the most enquiring and receptive age, when the strings of being are most sensitive, a heavy hand is laid on the wires and all their melody is muted. (cited in Pyle 1998, 12)

The “heavy hand” represents Foucault’s “technology of power.” The discourse used by the operators of disciplinary power was designed to produce normalized knowledge, implement social categories, create self-images and docile bodies that rendered “the wires and all their melody” muted, silenced. Such standardized discourse forms one of the great instruments in the overall mechanism of power that constituted the fabric of national education (Foucault 1980).

The use of Irish in schools did not fall within the Commissioners’ “plan of education.” The Fourth Book of Lessons (Commissioners of National Education 1859) told children: “The people of these islands have one and the same language (at least all who are educated), one and the same Queen, the same laws” (52). According to the Third Book of Lessons (Commissioners of National Education 1867), “in some parts of Ireland a different language is spoken … Irish … though all who learn to read learn English and prefer it” (142). Conchúr Ó Síocháin recalls his first day at the newly opened National School on Cape Clear, West Cork, in 1871:

The first day I entered the school the master called me up to him, and he enquired from me in English what name I had; but I didn’t understand him. Then he asked me in Irish “Cad is ainm duit?” said he. I told him. “And haven’t you any English?” he added. “No,” said I, “not a syllable.” “Well, little fellow, you’ll have to throw away your Irish now and speak English from this out,” he went on. (Ó Síocháin 1987, 8)

Ó Síocháin continues: “It was really hard work for me to change my language from the Irish to the English” (9). Nevertheless, he meets the demands of school discourse, changing his linguistic cues, “perceptions, beliefs, attitudes” and identity. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I THE CHILD-SAVAGE IN (NEO-)COLONIAL DISCOURSE
• PART II DOMESTIC SAVAGES
• PART III POSTCOLONIAL PLAYGROUNDS
• Index