Kipling's Children's Literature

Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood

Sue Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317108962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Despite Kipling's popularity as an author and his standing as a politically controversial figure, much of his work has remained relatively unexamined due to its characterization as 'children's literature'. Sue Walsh challenges the apparently clear division between 'children's' and 'adult' literature, and poses important questions about how these strict categories have influenced critical work on Kipling and on literature in general. For example, why are some of Kipling's books viewed as children's literature, and what critical assumptions does this label produce? Why is it that Kim is viewed by critics as transcending attempts at categorization? Using Kipling as a case study, Walsh discusses texts such as Kim, The Jungle Books, the Just-So Stories, Puck of Pook's Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, re-evaluating earlier critical approaches and offering fresh readings of these relatively neglected works. In the process, she suggests new directions for postcolonial and childhood studies and interrogates the way biographical criticism on children's literature in particular has tended to supersede and obstruct other kinds of readings.

Chapter 1
The Child as Colonized or the Colonized as Child?

In this chapter I will address on the one hand how children’s literature criticism has engaged with post-colonial theory, and on the other with how post-colonial criticism has dealt with the figure of the child in Kipling’s work (in particular, in Kim), before going on, in Chapter 2, to elaborate, through a reading of The Jungle Books, some of the wider implications of how the ‘child’ is read therein.

Just as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is widely regarded as the foundational text of post-colonial literary theory,1 Perry Nodelman’s essay ‘The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature’ – which drew on Said’s seminal text to re-think the relationship between adult authors and critics and child readers, and which appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly in the Spring of 1992 – has been similarly influential within the field of children’s literature criticism.2 There, as Clare Bradford notes, ‘Nodelman proposed what has come to be accepted almost as a given in children’s literature criticism: that children constitute a colonized group spoken for by adults just as Orientals are spoken for by Orientalists’.3

Several issues arise out of Nodelman’s application of Said’s theory to children’s literature and its criticism, some of which are the effects of, as Bradford puts it, ‘convert[ing] an analogy into a model of child-adult relations’,4 others being already implicit in Said’s approach. In his reading of Said, Nodelman notes that ‘Not only is Orientalism an area of study that can be pursued only by outsiders, but what defines them as outside their subject is, exactly, their ability to study it: “the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact” (Said, …)’.5 Here then Nodelman suggests that what Said claims about Orientalism is analogous to the way that children’s literature or child psychology produce the ‘child’; that is to say that just as Orientalism as a discipline constitutes its practitioners as different from, and indeed as the opposite of, its objects of study – the Orient and the Oriental – so children’s literature and child psychology produce a similar distancing effect between author/psychologist and child. However, in quoting Said, Nodelman loses the original focus on authorial intention, for Said argues that ‘What he [the Orientalist] says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact’.6 As such, the very purpose of the discipline is analysed as being to produce and confirm difference.

This is related to another aspect of Said’s argument that Nodelman does not engage with here, which is the question of audience. The ‘exteriority’ that Said ascribes to Orientalism is explained in terms of the Orientalist ‘mak[ing] the Orient speak, describ[ing] the Orient, render[ing] its mysteries plain for and to the West’.7 Here then Nodelman’s analogy breaks down, at least in the case of children’s literature, since the latter’s declared audience is ‘children’, and therefore, as suggestively conveyed in Jacqueline Rose’s analysis of the shifting narrative perspectives of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, children’s literature’s production of difference could be read as intrinsically much more ambivalent than that ascribed to Orientalism. It is important to acknowledge the fissures in the analogy that Nodelman sets up, I would argue, since these fissures speak of important differences between children’s literature and child psychology on the one hand, and between ‘our [sic] representations of childhood’8 and Said’s characterization of the functioning of Orientalism on the other.

I would also argue here that both children’s literature and child psychology again produce a rather less definitively dualistic account of the relationship between adult and child because of what Clare Bradford suggests, namely that, ‘children stand in a quite different relationship to adults than do Orientals to Orientalists, since children are always seen as occupying a stage that will lead to adulthood, whereas Orientals never transmute into Orientalists and are thus always and inescapably inferior’.9 If Bradford is right with respect to how children ‘are always seen’, this would potentially complicate the claim, implicit in the analogy set up by Nodelman, that the children’s text (or the work of child psychology) is meant establish or secure the adult as outside of childhood. Nodelman could be said to acknowledge and address Bradford’s objection when he writes that,

What distinguishes our thinking about childhood from other discourses about otherness is that in this case, the other does quite literally turn into ourselves. All those who survive childhood become adults, adults who tend to think of children as their other. … [I]f our thinking about children is an act of colonization, then it is in fact ourselves we are colonizing, ourselves we are oppressing – albeit at one remove.10

Here then, the self/other relationship represented by adult/child is marked as different from, and not after all straightforwardly analogous to other constructions of a self/ other dynamic. Nodelman thus attempts to address the difficulties produced by an identity that is at one and the same time defined as distinct from adulthood and as being continuous with it. He preserves the distinction between adulthood and childhood as two separate realms whilst necessarily acknowledging that accession to the one (adulthood) is dependent upon the other. The ‘child’ is constituted as ‘other’, and therefore ontologically dependent upon the adult through which it is defined, and yet it is also positioned as prior and thus as determining the existence of the adult since ‘adult’ is an identity that is achieved by dint of survival of what is produced here as the essential and original state that is childhood. Throughout this section then, the constant distinctions between adult and child, and the persistent efforts to acknowledge childhood as an effect or construction of adulthood at the same time point to the difficulty in maintaining the division. Whilst Said seems to suggest that differentiation, articulated as the production of interiors and exteriors, is a condition of representation,11 and Nodelman’s discussion of childhood seeks to preserve that sense of distinction, some of the conceptual difficulties that are thus introduced may perhaps be best understood by taking further the notion of self-representation. If I represent myself, following Said’s analysis, I effect a split between a subject, ‘I’, who represents, and an object, ‘me-myself’, that is represented, and in the process ‘I’ is made exterior to ‘myself’. The problem here is that this assumes a pre-existing stable and singular identity that is to be ‘split’. This is what I take to be the point of Rose’s argument as to the function of children’s literature, that it is supposed to produce as actuality an identity that is far from self-evident or secure: the production of the child as child, and its relegation to a discrete and delimited position wards off the threat to adult self-coherence and operates as a shoring up against the ‘constant pull against our seeming identity’12 that it nevertheless simultaneously sets in train.

Clare Bradford’s remarks are suggestive of the way that the concept of the ‘child’, especially as applied to the colonized subject, may have unlooked for and potentially destabilizing implications in figurations of colonial ventures. What, for example, are the implications of the child/colonized analogy if the child’s positioning as an adult-in-waiting is allowed to feed through to the conception of the colonized? The consequences of these more far-reaching instabilities engendered by the figure of the child will be addressed more fully in Chapter 2 where consideration will be given to how that figure interplays with those of the ‘animal’ and the ‘native’ in Kipling’s ‘Mowgli’ stories so as to call into question other apparently much more secure differentiations made between human and animal on the one hand, and on the grounds of race on the other.

For his part, when Nodelman follows his description of Orientalism as ‘an area of study that can be pursued only by outsiders’ with the claim that it is therefore ‘inh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On Children’s Booksand ‘Mature’ Stories
• 1 The Child as Colonized orthe Colonized as Child?
• 2 Translating ‘Animal’, or Reading the ‘Other’ in Kipling’s ‘Mowgli’ Stories
• 3 A Child Speaking to Children?Biographical Readings
• 4 The Oral and the Writtenin the ‘Taffy’ Stories
• 5 Becoming ‘Civilized’:The Child and the Primitive
• 6 ‘And it was so – just so – a long time ago’?:Kipling and History
• Bibliography
• Index