The Feminine Subject in Children's Literature

Christine Wilkie-Stibbs

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415929967
• eBook ISBN: 9781136699924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book builds upon and contributes to the growing academic interest in feminism within the field of children's literature studies. Christie Wilkie-Stibbs draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan in her analysis of particular children's literature texts to demonstrate how a feminist analysis opens up textual possibilities that may be applied to works of children's fiction in general, extending the range of textual engagements in children's literature through the application of a new poststructural critical apparati.

1

Theoretical Introduction: The feminine in Children’s Literature

The feminine is an exploration of an alternative aesthetics for children’s literature that gives voice to some latent silences and apparent absences in a body of children’s literature texts, and in the critical discourses about children’s literature that have been otherwise unexpressed, unwritten, and therefore unread. The feminine derives from the French school of feminist criticism, especially the works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, and is used here with a very specific meaning, both nominally and adjectively, of an aesthetics of corporeality in speech and writing,¹ appropriated in this case to the writing and reading of children’s literature. The entire project, then, serves to extend and widen the critical language and parameters of literary engagement in a body of children’s literature texts by reading them in the feminine, and the focus texts introduced in the foreword have been selected to act as paradigms.

The French school of feminist criticism is preferred² because, even while acknowledging the discrete and unequivocally distinct premises from which Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva operate, they are especially relevant in the way each has embraced a sustainable aesthetics of the inscription of human subjectivity in language and the body as an alternative signifying system which is, it is argued, axiomatic to the idea of the especially literary subjectivity and the idea of both the historical and textualized subject of, and in, children’s literature that are considered equally here.³ Cixous’s idea of “l’écriture féminine,” Irigaray’s idea of the “le parler femme,” Kristeva’s interest in the linguistic relations between what she has called the “Semiotic Chora,” and the “Symbolic” of the Lacanian definition, which are engaged through the chapters of this book, all share an idea of the possibility of a language that is spoken characteristically in the feminine.⁴

In Cixous’s understanding, the feminine is not reducible to biological or sexual definition, neither does it preclude sexual difference. It includes women but does not exclude men.⁵ It is, rather, as Cixous believes, potentially the province of both sexes,⁶ but by connecting in new ways with their own bodies, women are potentially the subversive agents of what these three critics, in their different the-orizations of the subject, have collectively regarded as the masculinist economy of language in the Lacanian appropriation of the “Symbolic Order” to spoken and written discourses. The critical perspectives equally adopted here then are not reducible to biological or sexual definition: to men’s and boys’ versus women’s and girls’ versions of writing and/or reading and/or characterization, because the feminine is being proposed not only as an aesthetics of the literary subject but also as a mode of literary engagement that is not gender specific nor gender determined. The fact that the focus texts are written by women does not imply that the idea of the feminine in literary subjectivity excludes literary works written by men. The feminine is about a distinctive contribution to language, and about the way that it both creates and sustains alternative forms of narratives and narcological relations in children’s literature in, on the one hand, particular combinations of narrative devices and plot structures and, on the other hand, between text and reading subject, and at the meeting point between them both. The critical perspectives circulating round the idea of the feminine, therefore, make a distinctive contribution to an understanding of textual relations in these focus texts and others like them which straddle generic boundaries but nevertheless, as will be shown through the chapters of this book, share in the aesthetic of the feminine.

However, despite Cixous’s declaration of the non-biological specificity of the feminine, the way that these three feminist critics have theorized mother/child relations, especially their attempts to restate maternal psychic and physical relations with girl children and to redress the balance of what they have perceived to be women’s de facto exclusion from language in the Lacanian definition—in which she has been defined only in terms of “lack,” or “absence,” or “the same” all that is repressed and disavowed⁷—make a focus on women and girls an inevitable consideration here. The women, as mothers—“good,” “bad,” and indifferent—as daughters, as wives and lovers in familial and non-familial relations, as widows and witches, and the girls as daughters, lovers and sisters, whom we see in Mahy’s The Tricksters, The Changeover, The Other Side of Silence, and Memory, and in Cross’s Wolf, are symptomatic in their singular importance to a strain of children’s literature, but their narrative roles and function have been relatively untheorized in the discourses of children’s literature criticism.⁸ Women and girls are an inevitable consideration here, but not exclusively so. The feminine in children’s literature also embraces the narrative role and function of men and boys as fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, friends, and lovers, such as feature in Memory, The Tricksters, and Pictures in the Dark. In addition to gender considerations, the feminine also encompasses particular patternings of plot structures, and the coming together of narrative devices in unique and distinctive combinations, all of which bear upon our modes of textual engagement.

Within these definitions a psychoanalytic model of reading analogous to the psychoanalytic process of Transference is assumed and is described in more detail below in the section “The Psycho-Dynamics of Text/Reader Relations.” But, briefly, in these terms, the reading subject is positioned as analyst in relation to the literary text. In the process of what is described here as literary Transference, the act of reading is an act of interpretation, and is a dynamic, dialogic, and dialectical process becoming, by turn, counter-Transference as the textual structures interplay with conscious and unconscious systems in the reading subject, and inscribe the act of reading as a process of recovery of the “textual unconscious.” The term “textual unconscious” derives from Jacques Derrida’s work on deconstruction,⁹ and is conceptually similar to Fredric Jameson’s idea of the “political unconscious,”¹⁰ but here it describes how, as James Mellard has said, “A literary text is created as a textual unconscious and mirrors the human unconsciousness which, for Lacan, is an unconscious texture if not precisely a text.”¹¹ Some of the elements and processes of what is named here as literary Transference are comparable with reader-response criticism; but literary Transference extends the premises of reader-response criticism because it conceptualizes a hermeneutical notion of the “text as psyche,” “the psyche as text,” and “the reading subject as text,” which is the site on which an especially literary subjectivity is inscribed in a dynamic exchange during the act of reading. It is questionable whether Transference in analysis is entirely analogous to the literary exchange, but the principle of dialectical unconscious relations in the process is sustainable, and the idea of literary Transference as described and defined here, would seem to be crucial to the especially literary subjectivity of the feminine which is defined and described in more detail below and developed through this book. There is also a methodological problem because the idea of literary Transference, in common with reader-response theory itself, describes a theoretical process, in this case, of conscious and unconscious engagement between literary text and the reading subject, not a method of reading. It is, therefore, the case that a reading of a literary text, such as feature in this book, is itself an act of literary Transference. So, instead of endlessly repeating the detailed workings of the process, it is the case that the readings of the focus texts in this book imply all of the theoretical positioning and textual exchanges that are exemplified here and extended in chapter 4.

Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva are positioned here as the three major critical voices: their critical oeuvre is extensive. They have been variously charged with “essentialism,” “positivism,” “empiricism,” “negativism,” and of being “apolitical,” and “ahistorical,” each point of which has been argued and counter-argued across the factions and spectrum of feminist criticism.¹² But, it seems, none of these critics has supplied a substantial or comprehensive alternative that is not somehow embedded in an understanding of the human subject residing in conscious and unconscious contents; neither, post-Lacan, has the critical establishment ignored the significance of the role of language in subject formation.¹³ While often critiquing and criticizing what feminist criticism has labeled the “phallocentric” (and Derrida has termed the “phallogocentric”) assumptions upon which Lacan’s work is founded, these three French critics nevertheless have each appropriated a Lacanian topology to their conceptions of subject formation, even if only for the purpose of deconstructing it, and even while attempting to distance themselves from his name.¹⁴ It is, therefore, against a background and in the context of the Lacanian conception of the subject that these critical voices are being positioned here. And to know what they were reacting against, as well as to understand the status (or non-status) of Lacan in this branch of feminist psychoanalytical criticism, what follows is an outline of some of the key concepts and terminologies in Lacanian thought that have made their distinctive contribution to an understanding of subject formation. The vast work of Lacan, sustained over a wide field of psychoanalysis and a long career, often means that poststructuralist commentaries on Lacan’s work on subject formation use the same terminologies and formulas with different interpretations, or with different emphases which nuance their meanings in shades and colors that can be confusing or misleading.¹⁵ This is not surprising given that Lacan himself at different stages of his developing work used the same terminologies to connote different meanings.¹⁶ Many commentaries and commentators are openly critical of Lacanian models, especially those from a feminist perspective, which includes the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.¹⁷ The theoretical framework outlined in this chapter and developed throughout the book is, therefore, necessarily a selection from various critical fields (though not uncritically). Selection implies omission which, in its turn, implies that there is always an alternative position to be adopted, and an alternative version to be written. Acknowledgedly, this is the inevitability of treading critical minefields of such extensive and widely written about areas as psychoanalytic, feminist, and postmodernist criticism. Readers who are already familiar with the work of Lacan, may wish to go straight to “The Psycho-Dynamics of Text/Reader Relations,” and/or “the feminine Fantastic in Literature” (below), or straight on to chapter 2.

Lacan and the Subject

Lacan’s version of subject formation is described in his model Schema L,¹⁸ of the formation of consciousness and unconsciousness¹⁹ in which he defines such terminologies as: primary and secondary narcissism, splitting, alienation, desire as it exists in dialectical relations to “lack” and the “Law,” the tropes of metaphor and metonymy, the parent/child triangle in relation to the “other” of the Imaginary phase of subject formation in Lacanian epistemology, the great “Other” of the secondary unconscious symbolized in language and the “Law,” and the symptoms of hysteria, psychosis, and neurosis. Lacan also, and quite controversially for feminist criticism, proposed the idea of the phallus as the “universal signifier” and prescribed its distinctive role in sexuality.

Lacan distinctively repositioned the subject, semiotically, in language (in a way that Freud, whose work Lacan built on, did not), by making distinctions between wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Theoretical Introduction: The feminine in Children’s Literature
• Chapter 2: Writing the Subject in Children’s Literature: l’écriture féminine
• Chapter 3: Reading the Mother in Children’s Literature: le parler femme
• Chapter 4: The feminine Postmodern Subject in Children’s Literature
• Chapter 5: The feminine Textual Unconscious in Children’s Literature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index