The Family in English Children's Literature

Ann Alston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415699617
• eBook ISBN: 9781135858568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

From the trials of families experiencing divorce, as in Anne Fine's Madame Doubtfire, to the childcare problems highlighted in Jacqueline Wilson's Tracy Beaker, it might seem that the traditional family and the ideals that accompany it have long vanished. However, in The Family in English Children's Literature, Ann Alston argues that this is far from the case. She suggests that despite the tales of family woe portrayed in children's literature, the desire for the happy, contented nuclear family remains inherent within the ideological subtexts of children's literature. Using 1818 as a starting point, Alston investigates families in children's literature at their most intimate, focusing on how they share their spaces, their ideals of home, and even on what they eat for dinner. What emerges from Alston's study are not so much the contrasts that exist between periods, but rather the startling similarities of the ideology of family intrinsic to children's literature. The Family in English Children's Literature sheds light on who maintains control, who behaves, and how significant children's literature is in shaping our ideas about what makes a family "good."

Chapter One
History of Family: The Growth of a Cherished Institution

It is no doubt true that since the beginning of the human race men have built homes and begot children, and it can be argued that within the great family types, monogamous and polygamous, historical differences are of little importance in comparison with the huge mass of what remains unchanged.

(Ariès 7)

Families are complex social constructions, and as Lissa Paul reminds us, ‘history is messy’ (25). When it comes to mixing families and histories the contradictions and complexities are immense and for this reason it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to begin to categorise, define, or map the changes in families over time without making generalisations and eliminating some of the diversity that no doubt existed/exists. The definition of family cannot be a fixed one, for families are fluid; they vary considerably in their make-up and in their traditions, and they are always culturally specific. There are, of course, many different types of family, and while I recognise this diversity, this study focuses on the middle-class family that is presented, often to the detriment of others, in children’s fiction. The definition of middle-class is in itself fraught with difficulty and contradiction, but it is my contention here that families in children’s literature are often middle-class and even those who cannot be so easily labelled tend to be described in terms of an ideology that is associated with the middle classes. As a consequence of its rise as written popular fiction from the eighteenth century onwards children’s literature has been used as a pedagogical device in order to instil a certain set of beliefs that promote middle-class values and ideals.¹

To further complicate such definitions of family, each one of us comes from some kind of family environment and therefore we cannot easily discard the cultural baggage we inevitably carry: family is always personal and every individual has a story to tell. But while the recognition of diversity and fluidity of meanings is imperative it is also important to acknowledge and account for basic patterns and changes. This chapter will first consider the significance of the culturally constructed concept of family, particularly the nuclear family, will then offer a brief analysis concerning the pre-modern family, and will conclude by examining changes that have occurred, mainly across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter does not attempt a comprehensive history of family, but offers a basic outline: a set of ideas, ideals and a deconstruction of assumptions which is helpful in situating my central concern, that is, the significance of family in children’s literature.

Concepts of Family

The concept of family is genetically programmed: procreation requires pair bonding to ensure the survival of the species. In conjunction with this, the creation of communities and larger families also affords a method of survival since the group can defend itself better than the individual and the gene pool is widened. The grouping of humans for safety and survival is a basic Darwinian concept; beyond this most other familial structures, traditions and customs are culturally constructed and are influenced by the times, environments and conditions in which people live. While the family is socially variable in its structure, the concept of family in its various forms affects all humans, and, despite cultural changes, this concept of family remains central to human ideology. Indeed, by the twenty-first century, with the rise of the self-sufficient individual, one could be excused for wondering why the family structure continues to be intrinsic to human life, and perhaps this is to do with a basic animalistic survivalist instinct that remains in our psyche.

Equally, the constant promotion of the ideology of the family within society also ensures the continued idealisation of, devotion to and reliance on the family unit. One of the ways this ideology is promulgated is in literature, but while adult literature tends to celebrate the individual, children’s literature is steeped in family matters. As the child learns from his/her parental role models, and competes against and works with siblings, he/she learns to co-exist with others. Literature for children, it seems, is the perfect space in which to foster both the Darwinian and cultural concepts of family, to introduce children to and immerse them in a set of adult constructs and ideals.

In our everyday lives we are constantly reminded of the significance of family. It remains, as Catherine Belsey proposes, ‘our culture’s most cherished institution’ (Shakespeare xiv). Tony Blair implied the synonymity of family and state when he argued that ‘[w]e cannot say we want a strong and secure society when we ignore its very foundations: family life’. The placing of traditional family values on a moral pedestal is a fairly common way in which to gain the favour of the public. The Royal Family and its behaviour, constantly charted and monitored in the media, is an example of the significance of maintaining and asserting ‘proper’ family conduct. This particular family is a public institution, and was perhaps at the peak of its popularity when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert metaphorically established themselves as mother and father of the nation, thus linking family and state. The Victorian period was one in which the ideology of the family was at a height and therefore it is difficult to say whether the intense interest in the Royal Family was a product of, or a response to, the time. In terms of class, similar notions of family were beginning to emerge between the royals as aristocracy and the middle-classes. Whereas in the eighteenth century the aristocracy had often been portrayed as wasteful and idle, here the Royal Family set an example of perfect family values thus emphasising the powerful ideological status of the family in the nineteenth century.

Public interest in the family affairs of the Royals has not always been beneficial, as the Royal Family has often suffered unpopularity resulting from a breakdown in traditional family relationships: the Queen Caroline affair caused much controversy in 1820 when George IV tried to divorce his Queen;² Edward VIII decided to abdicate because he wanted to marry the twice-divorced Mrs Simpson in 1936, and the Prince Charles-Princess Diana-Camilla triangle excited the tabloid press on a fairly regular basis with concerns about family relationships, divorces and affairs.³ Family, and how people conduct their family lives, it seems, matters. The myth of the loving nuclear family is a powerful one, and as a myth it has inevitably become naturalised, for as Belsey argues ‘[w]hatever is customary comes in due course to seem natural’ (Shakespeare xiv). In naturalising and promoting the loving family other types of family tend to be at best marginalised and at worst demonised; essentially, they become other.

The ideal of the family is not simply an innocent idealistic fantasy but an ideological system in which issues of power and control are embedded. This is evident in Michel Foucault’s work on the study of power. The distinction that Foucault makes between disciplinary and sovereign power is useful in explaining why we persist – and are encouraged to persist – with the ideal family. In premodern society, sovereign power, as the name suggests, invested all power with an influential, usually male, figure, for example, the king, priest or father. Power in this system was ordained by, for example, God, and this system of control was apparent both in the running of the nation and in smaller institutions, such as the family. In a white, Western patriarchal society, each household was a microcosm of the macrocosmic kingdom and this is crucial in controlling the populace, as Lawrence Stone makes clear: ‘For the state, Passive Obedience to the husband and father in the home was the model for and guarantee of Passive Obedience to the king in the nation’ (The Family, Sex and Marriage 654).

To kill the king was high treason and the king is head of state and the father is head of the home. The parallels are clear in that husband murder was called ‘petty treason’ and women were burnt for this until the eighteenth century, and to kill the king was ‘grand treason’. Yet while the father’s position obviously embodies power on a much smaller scale than that of the king, the mechanisms of power and control on which they rely are remarkably similar. This process of control is still, to a certain extent, evident in the family that we will see in Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family (1818). The mechanisms of sovereign power were not adequate to deal with the very large urban populations that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and therefore a new system of control emerged which Foucault terms disciplinary power.

Disciplinary power, according to Foucault, works on the individual to produce an obedient subject. Disciplinary power functions through ideology: concepts, values, rules, morals, all the mechanisms which permit the peaceful co-existence of masses of individuals, come to seem ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ because the individual internalises the ideology which produces them. But the ideologies which circulate in society have a controlling effect – they are part of a system of power that infiltrates the whole of society. As Simon During observes:

Disciplinary power works in quite strictly deliminated spaces, though its pathways and mazes spread across social totality, unlike sovereign power which is centralized and evaporates at the margins. It is deritualized and privatized, working on individuals as individuals rather than either as members of castes or as markers of a wider cosmic or social order. Its object is behaviour and the individual body; its tools are surveillance, examinations, training and its sites, factories, prisons, schools, hospitals. (151)

I contend that the family can also be read as a site of discipline; it is a site of surveillance. Within the family children are constantly under observation by parents and are therefore under constant parental guidance and control. Family is where the child is first immersed in ideology. Equally, the family unit is a disciplinary institution which conforms to state-promulgated ideologies. These ideologies dictate patterns of behaviour which insist on conforming to culturally constructed conventions of family.

Within the family, disciplinary power works on the individual: in Foucauldian terms the emergence of disciplinary power responds to the rise of the individual in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also functions to construct that individual. Disciplinary power relies on the self-policing that results from the internalisation of ideology, and such self-policing is intrinsic to an understanding of the family and its role in society and in literature. The family in children’s literature especially, I suggest, has a strongly ideological and disciplinary function. Family values are embedded in our culture and we feel ourselves constantly monitored and observed with regard to our families, for the ideology of family is itself a disciplinary system and one that is largely self-imposed. The family remains a central locus of power and we judge by family values and continue our family rituals as if being constantly observed, comparing our families to others, both real and imagined.

Therefore the home, in a sense, is as much a site of surveillance as the hospitals and prisons, and as we police ourselves and care for our own children in a family environment, the state need not concern itself directly with issues of family. In families, a system of order and discipline is established that inculcates in the young, and the adults, a degree of compliance to systems of power. It comes as no surprise then, that when journalists and moralists publicise concerns about the demise of the family the government begins to intervene, for the family across class divides is crucial in maintaining the order of the nation. Tony Blair’s speech was not only intended to rouse emotive feelings but was also a reminder that many issues of state power are reliant on the discipline of the family.

It seems that a paradoxical situation attaches itself to issues of family; on the one hand we adhere to the myth of the ideal nuclear family and on the other there is recognition that this nuclear family is no longer entirely workable. The state, though, has a vested interest in the maintenance of the institution of the family and consequently interferes in an attempt to promulgate the ‘basic values’ of family life. In interfering in family life the government must tread carefully, for the imaginary ideological family is also invested with a deep sense of privacy, and interference is unwelcome, resulting in the government coming under fire for inculcating a ‘nanny state’. Most recently the parliamentary bill on the physical punishment of children has raised fears about state interference with personal choice.⁴ Similarly, some parents have, controversially, been imprisoned because their child has played truant from school, and increasingly there are media reports that suggest parents can no longer control their children.

This lack of parental control may indicate a shift in the position of the child in the family. As Christina Hardyment has suggested in her book The Future of the Family, the child has become, in our twenty-first-century capitalist society, a consumer as opposed to a contributor; rather than contributing to the family finances the child consumes products manufactured outside the home with his/her parents’ money. Perhaps then, if there is really a loss of parental authority in contemporary society, then it is in literature for children that we find the best location to impose family ideology on children, to indoctrinate them with role models and to promulgate the family values which allow society to function in a specific way, in so far as we can in the present context. Thus perhaps we have not become so detached from the early nineteenth-century writers of children’s literature who are often regarded as being overly didactic in their teachings.

Family is essential to society and, although it is subject to historical change, the importance of the family as the central locus of power and control remains inherent in human lives. Family is biologically useful, and yet the nuclear family, no matter how much it becomes naturalised by myth, is always a social and cultural construct. This construct has important political implications. Even those families that break down and no longer fit into a conventional pattern are still controlled by state and self-discipline for they are engulfed by the myth of the ideal nuclear family that is promoted by the media, politicians, and individuals. As Belsey points out there are very few happy marriages in Jane Austen’s works and yet weddings still form the basis of the happy endings in her texts (Shakespeare 121). Individuals even now tend to form relationships and have families regardless of the happiness or otherwise of their parents’ marriages; we live in hope that the happy endings and romantic comedies of fiction and film might come true and yet we remain aware of the difficulties facing the family, of the impossibility of the Hollywood dream that is exemplified in The Waltons (1972–81) or comedies such as Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Despite ongoing anxieties concerning families the myth of the ideal family remains strong; encouraged by all mechanisms of power it remains essential to the way in which our society works. While great changes have occurred in the constitution of family, ideals and dreams seem to have remained fairly consistent for the 200 years on which I focus, and probably for some time prior to that; we are, and perhaps always have been, almost obsessed with the family that, ideally, should exist.

The Pre-Modern Family

While the majority of material considered here will be drawn from the period 1818–2000, it is also necessary to look at how this ‘modern’ family evolved in order to understand it fully. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and State Friedrich Engels investigated the role of family in early human life and insisted that as the means of production were communal, families did not exist; instead, there were communities that worked together. Engels argued that as time moved on more restrictions were placed upon this communal society and eventually, as individuals began to own property, the nuclear family began to emerge. This was because monogamous marriage was encouraged in order to ensure that the father would pass on property to his rightful heir.

Similarly, Lawrence Stone argues that before the seventeenth century, relations tended to be community-based rather than family-based as families did not necessarily have any more emotional attachment to their wives and children than to their neighbours:

In the sixteenth century, and almost certainly for at least a millennium before it, the characteristic type, especially among the social elite, was what I have chosen, for lack of a better term, to call the Open Lineage Family, since its two most striking features were its permeability by outside influences, and its members’ sense of loyalty to ancestors and to living kin. The principal boundary circumscribed the kin, not its sub-unit, the nuclear family. (Family, Sex and Marriage 4)

In addition, Stone points out that children would leave home between the ages of seven and fourteen, and both Stone and Philippe Ariès argue that as a result of child mortality rates – Stone puts the figure of child mortality before the late eighteenth century at between 30 and 50 per cent – parents did not form the same emotional attachment to their children (Family, Sex and Marriage 651; Ariès 37).

These arguments have been criticised by Linda Pollock, who gives many examples and accounts of loving relationships between parents in Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations From 1500–1900. Davidoff et al. are quick to emphasise that both sides of the argument have been criticised; Ariès and Stone for making generalisations from their sources, and Pollock for not giving sufficient social context for her work (Leonore Davidoff et al. 40).

It is inevitable that these conflicts appear in debates concerning the family, for if the fluidity of family is taken into account then it becomes clear that the historian is bound to be able to find some examples to back either case. Further, as we can never really know what went on in the minds or homes of the generations before us, family histories can never be entirely accurate or comprehensive. It is not unlikely that some parents loved their children, and yet parents were also more accustomed to losing their children than we are today, and it is possible that they had different grieving or coping strategies. While careful not to limit by date, Stone locates the next stage of family after the open lineage family to be the ‘restricted patriarchal nuclear family’. This family type, according to Stone, emerged from about 1530 onwards and peaked between 1580 and 1640, before fading out gradually in different areas and classes. The early proto-nuclear family saw loyalty to lineage, kin and community replaced by greater loyalty to the state or Church and Stone argues ‘“boundary awareness” became more exclusively confined to the nuclear family, which consequently became more closed off from external influences, either of the kin or of the community’(Family, Sex and Marriage 7).

As a result of the exclusivity of the nuclear family, the father became more powerful as head of the household and the Church began to gain more control of family life as is partly reflected by the fact that in the sixteenth century births, marriages and deaths were recorded by the parish. Indeed, the Church itself is bound in the hierarchy of the family with God the Father, Mary the Holy Mother and of course the Son. Belsey points out that the Reformation transformed the place of marriage: while in medieval times celibacy was regarded as a way of perfection, by the sixteenth century marriage had replaced monasticism as ‘a terrestrial paradise’ in which ‘the love between husband and wife [was] an analogue for the love of God’(Shakespeare 19–21). The family, then, was beginning to change, broadly speaking, from an all-encompassing community to a smaller, more inward-looking group, one in which both the Church and the father had an increasing influence, and one that was generally founded on an ideal of romantic love. For Stone the final stage of family is the ‘closed domesticated nuclear family, [which] came into being sometime after the 1640s and predominated in the eighteenth century. This family, Stone argues, ‘was the product of the rise of Affective Individualism. It was a family organised around the principle of personal autonomy, and bound together by strong affective ties’ (Family, Sex and Marriage 7).

Thus, the modern family, which we generally recognise today as being nuclear, began, though very slowly, to emerge in the eighteenth century, and this family model was later almost sanctified, placed as it was on an ideological pedestal in the nineteenth century. Of course, Stone can be criticised for drawing speculative time lines and imposing broad definitions on certain types of families in certain periods, and yet he qualifies this by stating that most of his sources originate from those people who visited London frequently or lived in the capital, and recognises that the plurality of family does not lend itself easily to categorisation (Family, Sex and Marriage 10). Indeed, Stone goes on to suggest that the only steady linear change has been an increasing concern fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 History of Family: The Growth of a Cherished Institution
• Chapter 2 1818–1914 Depictions of the Nineteenth and Turn of the Century Family: From a Good Beating to the Flight to Neverland
• Chapter 3 1920–2003 Depictions of the Twentieth-Century Family: From ‘Just William’ to ‘Harry Potter’
• Chapter 4 There’s No Place Like Home: Home and Family in Children’s Literature
• Chapter 5 A Room of One’s Own? Spaces, Families and Power
• Chapter 6 Edible Fictions: Fictional Food – The Family Meal in Children’s Literature
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography