Victorian Children's Literature

Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power of Love

Ruth Y. Jenkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319327617
• eBook ISBN: 9783319327624
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book reveals how the period's transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunities in which to analyze the relationship between identity and transformation. At the heart of this study is this question: what is the relationship between Victorian children's literature, its readers, and their psychic development? Ruth Y. Jenkins uses Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to uncover the presence of cultural anxieties and social tensions in works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Carroll, Stevenson, Burnett, Ballantyne, Nesbit, Tucker, Sewell, and Rossetti.

© The Author(s) 2016

Ruth Y. JenkinsVictorian Children’s LiteratureCritical Approaches to Children's Literature10.1007/978-3-319-32762-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Emerging Identities and the Practice of Possibility

Ruth Y. Jenkins¹

(1)

California State University, Fresno, California, USA

End Abstract

“Everything’s a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story,” Sara Crew explains to her younger companion Ermengarde in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1911). ¹ The novel pivots on this assertion, made nearly at the narrative’s center. Initially, Sara thrives through her ability to play at possibilities, but after her redefinition as orphaned and destitute, she survives through her capacity to construct alternative narratives in which to reconceive her harsh experiences. With her imaginative renderings, Sara eventually re-creates her world, embraces an elevated, if hybrid, cultural position, and realigns worth and value as it affects her. As a direct result of her ability to transform her life as abject into narratives of possibility, Sara counters oppressive social scripts by constructing competing orders that acknowledge and value her rather than deny or devalue her.

Sara Crew, however, is not the first child protagonist of British children’s literature to affirm the power of story to construct reality. Before Sara, Victorian fictional characters offered readers models of creative alternatives in the context of their culture’s normative scripts. The chimney sweep Tom in The Water-Babies (1863) or Ralph Rover from The Coral Island (1858), Princess Irene and Curdie from MacDonald’s Princess adventures (1872, 1882) or Sara Crewe in A Little Princess (1905), Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1883) or Oswald Bastable in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1889), or Beauty in Sewell’s Black Beauty (1878) or Ratto in Ramblings of a Rat (1857), Flora, Edith, and Maggie in Speaking Likenesses (1875), and even Alice in Carroll’s Wonderland (1865), all reveal competing desires from dominant cultural discourse in the narratives of their adventures. Whether affirming, negotiating, or even rejecting offered narratives of experience, these fictional children and creatures enable their readers the imaginative opportunity to experience a variety of potential scripts, free from prohibition even when challenging those constructs endorsed by culture.

Literature targeted toward the readers we now conceptualize as adolescents is an especially apt discourse with which to consider these dynamics. As readers transitioning between children and adults themselves, questions of individual identity and social development frequently frame the story as well as the plot of these narratives. Children’s literature written during the Victorian era in Britain, with the period’s own transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, or national energies, offers rich opportunities in which to analyze this relationship between identity and transformation, individual desire, and cultural scripts for acceptable patterns of behavior.

Although literature has long enabled the translation of desire into culturally readable forms, often sublimating culturally abject energy into discourse, Victorian children’s literature provides an especially useful place in which to consider the intersection of language and culture, desire and prohibition, the exalted, and the abject in constructing identity. Reading Victorian children’s literature in the context of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection reveals the presence of the cultural anxieties and social tensions that inform normative values and the dominant social order. Understood from this perspective, these texts also offer access to multiple scripts of possibility and provide opportunities for potential constructs of self that are unique from or in confrontation with those endorsed by culture. Given imaginative options for scripts of identity, young readers benefit from increased comfort in and familiarity with multivalent subjectivity, deconstructed absolutes, and creative possibility that are articulated in this discourse written for Victorian children.

At the heart of this study is this question: What is the relationship between Victorian children’s literature, its readers, and their psychic development? The Victorian convergence of advancing technologies, greater leisure time for emerging middle classes, and increasing literacy rates ² propelled narratives written for children into a recognized literary genre and a burgeoning industry. Heralded as the “golden age” of children’s literature, ³ this period invites continued study of these texts as cultural responses that give us insight not only in what concerned Victorians but why they remain viable narratives for readers today. How do these narratives contribute to their readers’ maturing ego constructs? What do they reveal about social values, scripts for behavior, and responses to those culturally abject?

In responding to these questions, Victorian Children’s Literature: Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power of Love considers two foci—what the literature illustrates about the period in which it was created and how the narratives serve young readers in their own ego developments. At times, creating the narrative as a means to create the self will be considered, and at others, how the reader participates in this dynamic. As a result, this project will variously turn to cultural analysis and Kristevan theory to argue for the continuing importance of these specific works as well as the essential value of literature in creating more compassionate and inclusive cultures as an ethical process, specifically what Kristeva names as Herethics.

Construction of Self

This study builds upon constructs of the speaking subject located in autobiographical and identity theories. Fundamental is the understanding that the “self” is constructed through discourse, that no coherent self can exist prior to the self-story. ⁴ Regardless if that self is an autobiographical design, fictionalized character, or imagined construct, language as narrative creates its existence. Language is, as Regina Gagnier notes, one of the key determining systems of culture with which the writing subject must mediate to establish the self ⁵ ; such mediations, James Paul Gee contends, are necessary to create or alter any culturally recognized discourse. ⁶ In other words, how a constructed self is appraised—as possessing or lacking value—determines both its social and rhetorical worth: Narrative experience that both recognizes and is recognized by cultural discourse will be perceived as credible and of value; that which counters normative values or is perceived as such will be determined unreliable or abject. That is, readers evaluate and determine a narrator’s authority to articulate experience and how that discourse relates to existing scripts of experience. Narratives that resonate with scripts determined comfortable or appealing and acknowledged by the reader would be perceived as possessing greater authority or credibility. Narratives that either challenge those scripts or are deemed unreadable meet with resistance or rejection. Thus, narrators must construct their stories in response to or in conversation with authorized scripts of experience—if they want to be read as part of cultural discourse. ⁷ If one’s story, one’s construct of experience, is not culturally recognized as discourse, that experience, that self, can be denied or dismissed. ⁸ Consequently, identity (as constructed self) is contingent, ⁹ existing in the context of what Martin Sökefeld posits as more than the self and built upon the “networks of power and discourse” that Michel Foucault describes. ¹⁰ It is this intersection of individual and institutional power, Gagnier notes, that determines how the self is understood. ¹¹

Critical Context: Children’s Literature

This project focuses on the process of that intersection, between culture and the individual as well as between the writing subject, the text, and the reader. As Deborah Thacker notes, all readers, including children and adolescents, are “subject to the power relations” within language. ¹² With this in mind, children’s literature may provide a unique opportunity to examine the tensions between culture’s normalizing discourses and those offered in response. Victorian children’s literature is especially interesting in that it offers evidence of an increasingly complex dynamic between cultural and individual scripts.

With Artful Dodgers, Marah Gubar has provided scholars of Victorian children’s literature an invaluable study of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Emerging Identities and the Practice of Possibility
• 2. Imagining the Abject in Kingsley, MacDonald, and Carroll: Disrupting Dominant Values and Cultural Identity in Children’s Literature
• 3. Gender, Abjection, and Coming of Age: Games, Dolls, and Stories
• 4. Constructing the Self: Connection and Separation
• 5. Giving Voice to Abjection: Experience and Empathy
• 6. Engendering Abjection’s Sublime: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
• 7. Embodying Herethics: Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses
• Backmatter