Child Autonomy and Child Governance in Children's Literature

Where Children Rule

Christopher Kelen, Bjorn Sundmark, Christopher Kelen, Bjorn Sundmark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317394792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores representations of child autonomy and self-governance in children's literature.The idea of child rule and child realms is central to children's literature, and childhood is frequently represented as a state of being, with children seen as aliens in need of passports to Adultland (and vice versa). In a sense all children's literature depends on the idea that children are different, separate, and in command of their own imaginative spaces and places. Although the idea of child rule is a persistent theme in discussions of children's literature (or about children and childhood) the metaphor itself has never been properly unpacked with critical reference to examples from those many texts that are contingent on the authority and/or power of children. Child governance and autonomy can be seen as natural or perverse; it can be displayed as a threat or as a promise. Accordingly, the "child rule"-motif can be seen in Robinsonades and horror films, in philosophical treatises and in series fiction. The representations of self-ruling children are manifold and ambivalent, and range from the idyllic to the nightmarish. Contributors to this volume visit a range of texts in which children are, in various ways, empowered, discussing whether childhood itself may be thought of as a nationality, and what that may imply. This collection shows how representations of child governance have been used for different ideological, aesthetic, and pedagogical reasons, and will appeal to scholars of children's literature, childhood studies, and cultural studies.

1 Where Children Rule

An Introduction

Kit Kelen and Björn Sundmark

Man is the genuine offspring of revolt,
Stubborn and sturdy—a wild ass’s colt;
His passions, like the wat’ry stores that sleep
Beneath the smiling surface of the deep,
Wait but the lashes of a wintry storm,
To frown and roar, and shake his feeble form.
From infancy, through childhood’s giddy maze,
Froward at school, and fretful in his plays,
The puny tyrant burns to subjugate
The free republic of the whip-gig state.

—William Cowper, “Hope”

O the magnitude of meekness!
Worth from worth immortal sprung;
O the strength of infant weakness,
If eternal is so young!

—Christopher Smart, “Nativity of Our Saviour”

Who runs the world? Who ought to run it? Surely we expect the adults to be in charge? In politics today, when it is suggested “the adults need to be in charge,” we see how routinely it can be asserted that lack of maturity in high places is dangerously disadvantageous to the community at large. No one in the world of serious politics (for which adults from time to time cast their serious votes) will consider that a child’s fresh eyes or approach might help to solve pressing problems (or, for instance, those adult-made catastrophes with which today’s children may later have to live).

Yet child rule, children in charge, the wise counsel of the young (their knowing, perhaps unwittingly, what needs to be known or done), the child as “father to the man”—these counter-intuitions—have had great power in Western literature since romanticism, and still do today. They have corollaries in the fictional empowerment of other subaltern subjects—especially “others” of various stripes (racial others, other-than-human others). All of these empowerments—but more particularly, child sentience, will, and decision—have provided a pervasive thematic framing for what we think of as literature for children. And, historically, when child protagonists do not know (or are not yet empowered to know), their experience frequently reveals them as exemplary in finding out what needs to be known, what is to be done. Think of Alice, think of Dorothy Gale, think of Harry Potter and friends.

Children in charge? The list of relevant texts and characters is a long one—among fairy tales in which children triumph, such as Hansel and Gretel; among novels, places where children or childlike characters are in charge (at least somewhere or some of the time) comprise perhaps a majority of plots, such as The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, the Narnia books, The Lord of the Flies, The Silver Sword, Seven Little Australians, Tomorrow when the War Began, Pippi Longstocking, Children of the New Forest, The Famous Five, The Railway Children, and most of the children’s works of Roald Dahl (one way or another). And there are places where the proxies of children are ruling, for instance animals; consider the “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” or Watership Down. The range of cultures, age targets, and ideological perspectives suggests how serviceable the idea of child rule has been.

If the idea of child-rule looms large in the mythos of Children’s Literature as a genre, then at least in Western culture we can see how well and centrally established its more general cultural credence is in the biblical story of Jesus. The most potent image of child rule in the western world is that of the Christ-child—the infant who is king. In Christian art and literature, this central mystery of child power and the image of God as a child is deeply embedded. Centuries of secularization have not altered this much. Rather, this symbolic anchoring has become part of the deep structure of western thought and morality—the idea that the child is at the center of social reality, both as the embodied fact of the future and as the possibility of redemption. The child is the one who will be savior. More mundanely, children are the hope of the future, the hope that all may yet be well beyond the gloom of adult horizons. In Christ, such hopes come to life in a personal, if universal, way. In Christ, we meet the character who is already, from the story’s outset, God, thus ruler on the largest possible scale. The character contains the story, so we know how it all will end. That this could be so is prima facie mysterious.

Nor is this kind of supernatural mystery thematic uniquely western. In Hindu and Buddhist cultures, there are older corollaries for the Jesus story (for instance, in the life of Krishna and of Buddha). There is the power of Cupid in Greco-Roman mythology and, indeed, the sense of the children of Zeus and Hera exercising power throughout the Olympian pantheon. Consider Japan’s Momotaro oni [ogre]-conquering myth and the anti-U.S. propaganda purposes for which it was deployed during the Second World War. Consider also Monkey, in Wu Cheng-En’s Journey to the West, certainly a story of maturation and one in which the powers of a child-like character are perennially to the fore.

How has that kind of world view sat with the historical development of societies around the world? How does it sit with child-adult relations in modernity and in our world today? Let us return to this latter question. The age of reason, and the mechanistic views it promoted, was kind to neither children nor animals; but (and perhaps as a reaction) romanticism, as a mode of enquiry, kindled adult interest in the child as subjective center for a universe worth exploring, and worth learning from, because it was able to be seen with fresh eyes. This idea has transformed the nature of poetry for us. The notion that innocence might be recovered for a poetic purpose, something we, for instance, see spectacularly in the works of William Blake, has rendered poetry and childhood ideas permanently and productively linked.

Interest in how the world might seem to us if we were the children we once were is not merely a nineteenth-century western phenomenon. Romanticism lit a spark, but this is an enquiry of growing interest (and one might say importance) for adults worldwide. Perhaps increased longevity makes childhood somehow more special and gives us more time to think about it? Childhood is as well, and particularly in the wealthier part of the world, itself an ever-lengthening phase of life (especially if we accept that it goes on in institutions of higher education). Interest in childhood and its nature (and its dominance as an idea) is a driving force in the production of Children’s Literature.

On the face of things, the essential function of representations of child sovereignty would appear simply to be empowerment, albeit delivered by exemplary/didactic means. Empowered fictional children show child readers what is possible to do. This plausible account needs a little teasing out and testing. How, for instance, does this idea sit with the way children are regarded in the real world and especially by those adults tasked with real-world interaction with young people—teachers, parents, the general public? Let us briefly consider a short-lived and apparently unusual example of child rule in the real world, as reported in the London Metro of August 5, 2015.

Nursery Is Trashed by Five-Year-Olds
Five-year-olds were among a gang of about 20 children who sprayed paint inside the Mezereaux Kindergarten in the Paris suburb of Mélun. They used a fire extinguisher to smash their way in. “When the door was opened, we saw pots, paints, pencils, books, all thrown to the ground,” said the Deputy Mayor, Ségolène Durand. Police have tracked down 15 of the kids—the oldest were 13.

While the scenario may not seem so unusual from a parental point of view (except in being newsworthy), the example shows just how undesirable it is to have children in charge in the real world. This little carnival/Saturnalia/self-empowering revolt of the small and not-so-meek is of course senseless, irrational, and serves no imaginable purpose. These are rebels without a cause. This little example illustrates how romantic ideas of childhood, although reified in literature and other children’s culture, are markedly at variance with how other media today (particularly newspapers in the English-speaking world) portray young people to adult readers. If we believe tabloid front pages, we will be convinced the young are dangerous, thoughtless, and generally untrustworthy. One could account for this apparent contradiction either by accepting that fiction and reality are related precisely as a parting of the ways or by noting simply that two different audiences are being pandered to here—the young would like to think well of themselves and older folk are happy to see the young put in their proper (disempowered) place. The question of motive, in this latter case, leads us to speculate that adult nostalgia might inspire jealousy of children and that this could account for mean attitudes.

Clearly, inter-generational relations are fraught with contradictions. Children are the future, and they are objects of love and devotion; children are a burden, and they do not contribute or take responsibility the way adults are expected to; children are a joy, and they surprise the world because the world is surprising to them; children are irrational, lack judgment, and so present dangers that are only averted through constant supervision. “Constant supervision” of course shades into care and admiration and even adoration. The child at the center returns us to the central mythos we have already noted—Christ-as child-as king.

As with other issues of subjectivity and alterity—other issues of difference concerning, for instance, gender, race, class, and relations with animal-others—the revelation of contradictions shines a spotlight on power relations as they exist in the real world of the writer and the reader. Whereas all of those other difference-issues have relevance here, literature for children foregrounds relationships between generations and between fiction and reality. The story for children is one of the key places where children get ideas about how to be in the world and about how to be with others (with adults, for instance, and with other children). It is also a place where one learns how to be in a story and about how that is different from being somewhere in life that is not in a story (and however much fun may be had with the blurring of that distinction). A corollary of these observations is that children’s literature is the place where adults inculcate these ideas about childhood and adulthood and about fiction and reality.

The global function of fiction is neither simply the socialization of cultural norms, nor a carnivalesque challenge to the status quo (or received wisdom). One approaches tautology when pointing out that culture is the ideological phenomenon par excellence precisely because it is the site of contestation of power. But because the fact is so often ignored, it demands our attention.

We will not gainsay any global position for the story simply by suggesting fiction has one sole function. Nevertheless, key generic demands (for instance, for suspense and surprise) do press the makers of culture in the direction of reimagining the world and making worlds ever more different. Putting children in charge has become a perennial vehicle for reimagining the world, especially for the benefit of children, as proved in terms of product sales, the least we can say of which is that this kind of surprise has impressed enough adults to go on purchasing child-empowered stories for children for as long as there has been something we call Children’s Literature. We think it will be fair to say that the magic must have worked on children, too.

And why?

A first hypothesis is that the empowering of children in cultural artifacts for their consumption (that is, texts allowing children to discover their own agency) could be read as a Barthesian inoculation—that small dose of acknowledged evil that protects the body from the full effects of the real disease. Children do not rule in the real world, but we can let them rule in stories, see what the consequences might be, and consider ourselves lucky they are not really in charge.

Is it that letting children rule in a safe place simply conforms to Cowper’s assertion that “man is the genuine offspring of revolt”? That is to say, there is a need to exercise the counter-intuition entailed in imagining the upside-down world where children are in charge. There is a stubbornness, perhaps a will to power, that gets us through childhood’s giddy maze. And coming to rule by overturning rule is surely the history of intergenerational change in human affairs? Witnessing the coming to rule of those who were children is simply acknowledging the universal story-frame of time’s passage. So the story of getting from will to power, as it were, will naturally be of interest.

From another point of view, child rule in literature could be seen simply as a sop for the young: accept your lot as powerless public school brats because in Narnia you can be kings and queens. Now here is an incentive for literacy! Reading directs your attention to a magically (and biblically!) better place. Open the book and you pass through a portal into a promised land where you are the chosen people. Read this way, the children-in-charge counter-intuition is a cynical adult ploy to keep the adults in charge. And then there is simple didacticism—if those without power are to acquire it, and to come to exercise it, then fiction will be a convenient means through which to learn empowerment and self-empowerment. What goes with this territory is a concomitant understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality. On this reading, the child-empowered text will teach children the thing they most conspicuously lack from an adult point of view: patience, the way to wait without being driven wild by the waiting. More than anything else, impatience clouds the judgment and renders a subject less suited to the exercise of power over others. (That is, unless we adopt a Nietszchean attitude to the value of instinct. But then, as stories show us, even instinct requires development and maturation.) Beyond simple didacticism, there are other kinds of pedagogy—for instance, the allegorical. Let us return briefly to Narnia for an example. British schoolchildren, born into a generation for whom the empire will be irrevocably lost, are in fantasy given an empire of their own. And whose fantasy would that be?

And we might say that beyond didacticism (a step beyond the pale?) there is the cynical manipulation of society’s most credulous. In this way, nasty doctrines may be propagated as normative. John Marsden’s generalized xenophobia for racial others in Tomorrow When the War Began provides a convenient example. In this story, true-blue Australian teenagers continue the absence of a camping trip when they discover that the country has been invaded by an unknown foe from the near north. Like Boccaccio’s youngsters, they are self-isolating, but the plague they are keeping themselves clear of is vaguely defined in terms of racial difference.

In stories for children, there is a common plot of mastering another world to return to one’s own with authority gained from experience. Running away from home to come back equipped with whatever was lacking in the way of empowerment before. In this kind of story, the journey is the teacher. This is how it is for Dorothy Gale in Oz, the place that isn’t Kansas anymore. It is also what comes of Alice’s otherworldly confusions—knowledge and self-knowledge bringing the power to rule oneself and to rule others.

* * *

A critical starting point for this study is Paul Hazard’s idea of “The Republic of Childhood” (1944). But what concerns us here is not so much Hazard’s universalist/essentialist claims about the presumed innocence of children’s literature, but rather the metaphor itself, suggestive as it is of a discursive space where children appear to be in control. These representations of self-ruling children range from the idyllic to the nightmarish and show how depictions of child governance have been (and are) used for different ideological, aesthetic, and pedagogical purposes. The idea of child governance and autonomy is not only present in the fictions themselves; it also pervades the critical analyses of literature created for child and young adult readerships. This is seen, for example, in the perennial discussion about the “impossibility of children’s literature” (Rose), or in the idea of a special “poetics of childhood” (Shavit), or in the supposition of the “hidden adult” (Nodelman), or, as previously, in Hazard’s idea of “universal” qualities in children’s literature. We would argue, however, that the metaphor itself has never been properly unpacked. This collection works through key instances of the child rule metaphor, referencing texts that are contingent on the authority and/or power of children.

More than an exercise in literary criticism, this book aims also to shed light on the social construction of childhood and adulthood. Bearing this in mind, terms such as “age” and “generation” come to function similarly to critical concepts such as “class,” “gender,” or “race.” Thus, in the sociological sciences the generational structure or order may be understood as a

complex set of social processes through which people become (are constructed as) “children” while other people become (are constructed as) “adults.” “Construction” involves agency (of children and adults); it is best understood as a practical and even material process, and needs to be studied as a practice or a set of practices. It is through such practices that the two generational categories of children and adults are recurrently produced and therefore they stand in relations of connection and interaction, of interdependence. (Alanen 21)

Children’s literature constitutes one of the practices in which the social order is constructed. The “practice” itself can be regarded as a “conceptual system” along the lines Lakoff and Johnson have famously discussed in Metaphors We Live By. Key metaphors, such as the “child rule”-figure that pervades so much of children’s literature, can be seen as part of the larger conceptual system that produces our understanding of children and childhood. Most of the chapters in this book are concerned with the metaphor and its uses. But even a child’s solitary act of reading (rather than the content of that reading) can of course be viewed in terms of agency and practice, something that will also be hinted at in some of the chapters.

The generational categories are flexible; they are, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Where Children Rule: An Introduction
• 2 Can Children Rule? An Enquiry into Locke’s Ideas of Children and Government
• 3 Discourses of Internationalism in Children’s Literature
• 4 Mysteries and Histories: Children and the Paradox of Religious Empowerment
• 5 Where the Child Is Father—Republics, Expulsions, and the Rule(s) of Poetry: Exploring Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
• 6 The Child Robinsonade
• 7 (Child)Reign of Terror: Dangerous Child Régimes
• 8 Where Girls Rule by Magic: Metaphors of Agency
• 9 In the Kingdom of Cancer: Dying Children Living Their Own Lives in the Contemporary YA Novel
• 10 The King of Misrule
• 11 “I’ve a Crown on my Head!” The Ruling Animal in Children’s Fiction
• 12 Woods Where Things Have No Names: An Investigation of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”
• 13 Children’s Rule in Comic Strips and Television Series
• 14 Finding the Spaces Within: Picturebooks and Child Agency
• 15 Playtime in Playworld: How Children Learn to Rule
• List of Contributors
• Index