Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults

Carrie Hintz, Elaine Ostry, Carrie Hintz, Elaine Ostry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135373436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This volume examines a variety of utopian writing for children from the 18th century to the present day, defining and exploring this new genre in the field of children's literature. The original essays discuss thematic conventions and present detailed case studies of individual works. All address the pedagogical implications of work that challenges children to grapple with questions of perfect or wildly imperfect social organizations and their own autonomy. The book includes interviews with creative writers and the first bibliography of utopian fiction for children.

Part II
Community and Socialism

4
Sarah Fielding’s Childhood Utopia

SARA GADEKEN

The first English novel for children, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749), promises to teach its young readers “a Method of being very Happy,” offering a story of a group of girls who learn to live in perfect harmony.¹ Children’s literature, therefore, begins with a utopian vision. The novel assimilates the utopian genre to the novel of formal realism, setting its utopia not in another place or time but in a girls’ boarding school of the sort that her young reader might aspire to attend. The setting ensures narrative continuity and stability, and the familiar location means that the discourse can range over familiar ground: fairy tales, autobiographies, romances, fables, a plot summary of a play, and descriptions of excursions the girls take to a local farm and to the country house of a neighboring nobleman. Instead of focusing on a person or persons or on an imaginary journey, then, Fielding makes place itself the main structural principle of her story.

At the same time, the little girls at Mrs. Teachum’s school are, in a certain sense, travelers from another culture. Before they came to school they inhabited the culture of conventional, male-dominated families who have taught their daughters to suppose that happiness consists of outdoing everyone else and then reveling in the envy and frustration that this causes others. Finding themselves self-absorbed and miserable yet unaware that they can change this unhappy state, the girls, like any visitor to utopia, must first recognize their unhappy condition and then examine the assumptions that brought them to this state. The girls’ progressive edification is intended to parallel the reader’s own conversion to the novel’s values.

As a utopian novel, The Governess is one of a number of mid-eighteenth century novels by women writers who envision all-female utopian spaces intended to protect gentlewomen from economic and social dangers. Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) is perhaps the best known of these, but the model family in Sarah Fielding’s first novel, David Simple (1744), and the model community developed by the exemplary Mrs. Bilson in her History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759) are earlier examples.² Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s collaborative work The Cry (1754) is an extended commentary on such communities, and some years later Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village (1778) offers much the same project.³ These adult novels are logical sequels to The Governess, which teaches the little girls the technologies of self that will enable them to be the kind of women who will then inhabit the communities described in the novels addressed to adults.

“Technologies of self” is a term that Michel Foucault applies to religious confession from its inception as a mandated Catholic ritual in 1215 as a way of regulating interiority, of constructing the subject within power relations as individuals submit themselves to the Church or its human representative to make themselves in the arbitrary manner prescribed by the institution. His most extended explanation of the term is found in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I.⁴ Felicity Nussbaum follows Foucault when she argues in The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England that eighteenth-century autobiography “may be regarded as a technology of the self which rests on the assumption that its truth can be told.”⁵ The Governess seeks to inculcate in its young readers those technologies of self that each must learn in order to become the kind of adult woman who can live happily in the all-female spaces envisioned by Scott, Fielding, and Hamilton.

Although very different in style, each of these novels implicitly assumes a collective utopian theory of social relations that resists the theories of property and social contract, sometimes called possessive individualism, that have dominated Western thinking since the seventeenth century. The most important proponent of these theories is John Locke, whose political writing assumes that the community is essentially derivative, and that the individual is produced within the confines of a consensual social contract through reasoned defense of his property rights against competing claims. In contrast, Fielding, Scott, and Hamilton suppose that an individual is produced by and embedded in her community, and that her capacities will develop within a context of nonconsensual relations, a culture and a family that she does not choose. They draw on earlier social forms that reject the assumption that individuals are necessarily propertied, self-reliant, and autonomous, for such assumptions ignore the material realities of eighteenth-century women’s lives.

Because it is written for children, The Governess sets out its argument simply. The story is too slight to support a systematic critique of social-contract theory or a general assessment of the relationship between political and social theory. In uncomplicated language appropriate for children, the novel expresses the social nature of identity and relationships in a way that conceives of value as rooted in communal practice, and argues that the community should be constructed and guided by values that emphasize communal rather than individual good.

I

Locke’s theory, against which Fielding’s novel should be read, is intended to reject divine right and patriarchy as formal models of political society. He therefore assumes the existence of independent human beings bound together by mutual interest who can and do create all their relationships and obligations. Such human beings are free in the sense that they do not depend on the will of others. Property is constitutive of the individual:

[E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common rights of other Men.⁶

This view, as C. B. Macpherson points out in his study of possessive individualism, directly opposes an earlier tradition that “property and labour were social functions, and that ownership of property involved social obligations.”⁷ In contrast, Locke considers that the individual’s primary obligation is to himself and that he must continually protect his property against the interests of others. At the same time, however, individuals are bound together in a social contract, “by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it” (Locke, 169).

In this model, each individual sees the world from the perspective of his own self-interest as, within the framework of the social contract, he negotiates with others to ensure that his property rights are not infringed. Associations are assumed to be consensual and based on a reasoned assertion of self-interest unqualified by compassion. The virtues necessary for such individuals are vigor and industry, and much of the educational writing of this period assumes the validity of Locke’s model and attempts to instill these virtues in young readers.

Locke argues that an individual should guide his life according to the precepts of reason, “which is that law [that] teaches all mankind who will but consult it” (Locke, 123). Children should be taught to develop their reason and to distrust or deny their feelings, or “passions,” to use the common eighteenth-century term. According to James Nelson in An Essay on the Government of Children (1756), educators and parents “have two principal Points to aim at, for their own and Children’s Happiness; and indeed for the Happiness of all Posterity; viz. weakening their [children’s] Passions, and strengthening their Reason.”⁸ Fortitude, in Nelson’s view, is the virtue that will prepare men for the active state. Locke’s theory supposes, then, unequal relationships among individuals with competing or antagonistic interests. These individuals are connected by contract and, within this contract, each continually adjudicates private claims of self-interest against the claims of others.

This notion of the reasoned, propertied, independent individual vigorously defending his rights, however, bears little relation to the lived reality of eighteenth-century women’s lives. In her study of social-contract theory, Carole Pateman contends that such theory supposes a prior distinction between the two genders, one whose members are rational and property-owning and the other whose members are irrational and, in a sense, themselves property: “Only masculine beings are endowed with the attributes and capacities necessary to enter into contracts, the most important of which is ownership of property in the person; only men, that is to say, are ‘individuals.’”⁹ Ownership of property is as gendered a concept as any other at this time. Susan Staves, in her work on property rights of eighteenth-century married women, also notes women’s different relationship to property: “In the property regimes of patriarchy, descent and inheritance are reckoned in the male line; women function as procreators and as transmitters of inheritance from male to male.”¹⁰ Her study of the legal status of pin money offers an excellent example of this difference. Pin money can be used to buy clothes and ornaments, which then become the property of the woman who buys them, but if she buys real estate with her pin money, she cannot will or devise it (Staves, 147–48). A woman’s real property cannot become capital accumulation even when her labor is mixed with it. Her “labor and the work of her hands,” in Locke’s words, do not belong to her in the way that those of a man belongs to him, and therefore, property cannot be constitutive of the individual woman in the way Locke describes.

The Governess, by drawing on earlier notions of the relations of self and community, is able to offer a more appropriate model of selfhood for women, who possess little property, who do not have property rights in themselves in the way that men do, and who are reticent to claim self-reliance and independence. It supposes compassion and goodwill among peers rather than hierarchically structured patterns of competition, and it relies on consensus-building to resolve problems rather than on appealing to priorities of rights. A woman in this model is expected to turn to others when she is in need, and her identity depends on being a part of a community of equals whose interests coincide. Members move quickly to eradicate conflict, for conflict calls into question their fundamental conviction that the good of the individual and the good of the community are identical. The privileged virtues in these communities are truth, trust, and comity—the last not a word that the novel employs, but one which expresses its confidence that a willingness to treat others with compassion and respect is the basis of community. Like participants in the social-contract model, members must learn to control their imaginations with right applications of reason, but unlike that model they must also cultivate their imaginations in order to establish the sympathetic bond that is the basis of the community. The selfhood that The Governess strives to inculcate sees the individual not as independent but part of a larger whole.

II

The opening pages of The Governess directly challenge Locke’s notion of a unified self constructed in the course of defending property rights. A vigorous emphasis on such rights, it argues, produces chaos and destruction. The little girls, given a basket of apples for a special treat, engage in a robust fist fight over the largest apple—not over who actually should possess the apple, since the oldest scholar, Jenny Peace, who is their peer and mentor, throws it over the wall before the fight begins—but over who had the “most Right” to possess it (Governess, 4). In this rewritten Eden story, no one actually has any better claim to the apple than anyone else. Yet “[e]ach gave her Reasons why she had the best Title to it: The youngest pleaded her Youth, and the eldest her Age; one insisted on her Goodness, another from her Meekness claimed a Title to Preference; and one, in confidence of her Strength, said positively, she would have it” (3). Each fights vigorously for her nonexistent right to the now unavailable yet inexplicably still desirable apple until “their anger by degrees became so high, that Words could not vent half their Rage; and they fell to pulling of Caps, tearing of Hair, and dragging the Cloaths off one another’s Backs” (4). In a mock epic battle, the girls tear at each other until each “held in her Right-hand, fast clenched, some Marks of Victory; for they were beat and beaten by Turns. One of them held a little Lock of Hair.… [a]nother grasped a Piece of a Cap.… [a] third clenched a Piece of an Apron; a fourth, of a Frock” (4–5). This scene attacks Locke’s notion that the self is produced in the process of a reasoned defense of property rights in the person; here, selves are dismembered by such a defense. Moreover, the rights asserted are entirely imaginary, and the ease and speed with which each girl invents a special right for herself demonstrates the absurdity of thinking that rights are natural rather than self-created and self-serving.

Rather than assert her imagined rights against the rights of others, each girl must learn to subordinate her desires to the good of all. The process by which Jenny Peace teaches this lesson and restores peace to the shattered community exposes many of the veiled power relations, assumptions, and values that inform Fielding’s utopian vision. At no time does Jenny claim direct authority over the younger girls. Instead, she offers to teach the next oldest scholar, Sukey Jennet, a “Method of being very happy” (Governess, 8). She begins with a reasoned appeal to Sukey’s self-interest: if she had yielded the apple to another, “you would have proved your Sense; for you would have shewn, that you had too much Understanding to fight about a Trifle. Then your Cloathes had been whole, your Hair not torn from your Head, your Mistress had not been angry, nor had your Fruit been taken away from you” (7). In Jenny’s view, the powerless should not, for the sake of their self-esteem, see themselves as powerless but instead as having the moral strength to choose not to retaliate. A refusal to fight, according to Jenny, is not an admission of weakness but a deliberate recognition that one’s interests are better served by this choice.

This reasoned argument exemplifies the community’s professed belief that even a child can and should regulate her life by reason. However, Sukey, sharp as well as stubborn, finds a vulnerable point in Jenny’s logic: “if I could but hurt my Enemies...