As I noted in my last chapter, children’s literature has long been imagined as a way to transmit cultural, social, and political knowledge to young readers. Scholars continue to grapple with the relationship between children’s literature and dominant economic, political, and social structures, including those that perpetuate inequalities. Children’s literature has, in fact, often been understood as a cultural force that props up the dominant institutions of society. Other theorists, however, have regarded children’s literature as one of the most promising spaces for cultural change and countercultural ferment. Despite the historical and ongoing conservative roots of children’s literature, Kimberley Reynolds argues, it has also ‘provided a space in which writers, illustrators, printers, and publishers have piloted ideas, experimented with voices, formats and media, played with conventions, and contested thinking about cultural norms, including those surrounding childhood, and how societies should be organised’ (Reynolds 2007, 3). Does children’s literature shore up the status quo or provide its young readers with the tools and the inspiration to tear it down?
The answers to these questions are as varied as works of children’s literature themselves and the myriad historical contexts in which these works are produced and read. Contradictions inherent in the way we evaluate children’s literature are well encapsulated by Reynolds’s description of a ‘curious and paradoxical cultural space … simultaneously highly regulated and overlooked, orthodox and radical, didactic and subversive’ (Reynolds 2007, 3). This contradictory vision animates my exploration of the relationship of children’s literature to the political world in this chapter, as a space that includes both subversive and conservative elements.
Any examination of children’s literature as a political force involves the question of ideology. Robyn McCallum and John Stephens provide an excellent definition of ideology:
Questions of ideology are so important for the study of children’s literature because, as John Stephens notes, ideology includes
Ideology, then, is not so much a set of ideas but the prism through which we see the world; it is embedded in our social and educational institutions, including literature. To Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, ‘the literary text is a privileged operator in the concrete relations between the individual and ideology and in bourgeois society and ensures its reproduction’ (Balibar and Macherey [1974] 1981, 96). In their 1974 essay, ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form,’ they describe literature not as ‘the product of a mysterious “creation”’ that ‘falls from the heavens’ but rather
Scholars in the field have grappled with the ideological impact of children’s literature on young readers. McCallum observes that ‘an individual’s consciousness is formed in dialogue with others and with the discourses constituting the society and culture s/he inhabits’ and that this ‘subjectivity is always shaped by social ideologies’ (McCallum 1999, 3).
While she views young subjectivities as shaped by social ideologies, McCallum is also interested in the ways texts ‘can allow for a wide range of reading strategies and skills for inscribing experiences in the world with meaning,’ allowing for ‘a questioning of conventional notions of selfhood, meaning and history’ (McCallum 1999, 259). Like many Children’s Literature scholars interested in young people’s reading, she draws on Bahktin’s theories of heteroglossia—or the ‘many voices’ that a text can contain—to explore how such texts can allow for a questioning position towards the ‘selfhood, meaning, and history’ that constitute ideology, because they invite the reader into the process of sorting through their meaning.
In the next part of this chapter I will look at the role that children’s literature has played in political and social movements, and ways in which children are addressed directly as social and political thinkers. While many political groups and subcultures earnestly hope to engage child readers with their ideas, others worry that children should not be burdened with ‘political’ content. Yet the argument that all representation is political, whether in its unconscious expression of ideology or through more explicit messages, has made a forceful impact on the discipline.
In thinking about how children’s literature shapes children’s understanding of the political and social world, scholars must reckon with the fundamental mysteries of what we cannot know about children’s political engagement with texts. Building on my discussion of the reception of children’s literature in Chapter 1, in this chapter I consider moments where child readers resist overt messages, especially heavily didactic ones, and how the field of Children’s Literature is increasingly interested in registering and analysing children’s resistant readings.
My case study for this chapter, the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, is an excellent example of a classic text whose overt political messages and unconscious ideologies have increasingly sparked critical re-evaluation. The series holds the status of a literary and cultural classic, with many readers sentimentally attached to it, yet its obvious racial prejudices against Native Americans and African Americans have caused many critics to argue that the books should be read more critically or abandoned altogether. Involved in its portrayal of Native Americans is the implication that western settlement was inevitable, which is an implicit defence of colonialism. The portrayal of the Ingalls family as a self-sufficient, close-knit family has influenced several generations of readers—and even policymakers—to espouse the values of limited government, a kind of unconscious argument against social welfare programmes that reflected the political ideals of Ingalls herself and also the strong libertarian principles of her daughter and editor, Rose Wilder Lane. In this case study we see how this series, which seems to be nothing more than the pioneering adventures of a warm and loving family, captures and shapes momentous events of American history. My case study ends with a brief consideration of a British counterpart to Ingalls: H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905), a sweeping non-fiction history of England that, like Ingalls’ work, is an exercise in building a national identity over time.
A paradoxical space
In the last chapter I noted that education in the classical period was structured to nurture and shape elites. Seth Lerer notes how subjugated classes of people were responsible for the creation and dissemination of children’s literature in that era:
Paradoxically, children’s literature from the classical period often stresses the triumph of the underdog. Aesop’s own fables, as Victoria deRijke points out, were ‘originally told as a form of resistance using risky humour to expose uncomfortable truths’ (deRijke 2014, 49). Yet the overall literary and cultural system does not disturb the established order. The image of the capsarius, or book-bag carrier, is particularly poignant: he bears both a literal burden and the figurative one of advancing the system that keeps him at the bottom of the social ladder. In this example we see how children’s literature as an institution bolsters the dominant culture even when the messages of children’s literature itself are rebellious and subversive.
The establishment of the Religious Tract Society during the late 18th and early 19th centuries is another historic juncture where the expressed aims of children’s literature stand in sharp contrast to its actual effects. While intended to redress economic imbalance by helping the poor better themselves through educative tracts, it served instead to reinforce the social hierarchies already in place, since the ‘program of educating the poor was in fact a limited one’ (Ang 2000, 13). As Kristine Moruzi notes of the ‘waif novels’ distributed by the society featuring destitute children, ‘emotion and affect were used in conservative ways that suggested individual responsibility but failed to consider more radical social change. While encouraging child compassion, these texts nonetheless reinforce the social order in Britain’ (Moruzi 2018, 49). Ultimately, one of its aims was to stave off revolutionary change or social upheavals like the French Revolution, stirring up charitable feelings towards impoverished individuals but discouraging a more thorough consideration of the systems that created and maintained poverty in the first place.
Much traditional children’s literature has, in fact, been enthralled by the acquisition and maintenance of wealth and property, a fascination not lost on Perry Nodelman:
‘Golden age’ children’s literature, for example, is often geared towards middle- and upper-class children who, in the words of Susan Ang, ‘had maids running around after them, came into diamond mines and earldoms, had holidays in the Lake District, owned their own boats …’ (Ang 2000, 16). Here children’s literature reflects the existing class hierarchies and invites readers to fantasize about material wealth and privilege.
The cultural forces in late capitalism in our own era have raised pressing questions of children’s ability to shape their own relation to literary and cultural products. As has been widely observed, capitalism is not just a strong force but one bound up in our everyday social relationships and institutions. David Hawkes argues that postmodernism is one of the ‘many powerful and determined modes of thought’ that ‘seek to obscure’ the contradictions between capital and labour in our time. This obfuscation—which he names as ‘ideology’—happens because of the postmodernist disdain for dialectic thinking in favour of Derridean différance, ‘a never-ending chain of deferred and displaced significance, as the element through which thought and history move’ (Hawkes 2004, 14). For Hawkes, then, to understand that ‘capital is objectified labour, that it stands in logical contradiction to human subjectivity activity, to life itself, is accurately to comprehend the dilemma of our epoch’ (Hawkes 2004, 14). For some critics of children’s literature, late capitalism (and the postmodernist ways of thought that bolster it) determines every aspect of children’s experience of literature and culture, from its social institutions to its ways of thinking. This is also manifested as a concern about consumption and the demands of the consumer market, as we see in this lament by Jack Zipes: ‘The difficulty is that [young people] will not be able to resist the constant pressure to conform to market demands and to retain their critical and creative perspectives’ (Zipes 2001, 22).
When we see children’s literature most fervently upholding the status quo, we might turn to questions of political affect to explain why. Ang, for example, speculates that ‘the tone of authority discernable in certain children’s books in the late eighteenth century up to the First World War’ may have been ‘intended to act as reassurance, and have been inspired by the need to combat doubt and anxiety caused by ideological and industrial upheavals’ (Ang 2000, 13). Drawing on the work of J.S. Bratton, Ang avers that the growth of children’s literature was developed in reaction to ‘the increasing whirl of chaos (social, religious and so forth)’ (Ang 2000, 13). Here we have a complex model of children’s literature responding to both political realities and political moods. Thinking back to the work of Maria Edgeworth from the last chapter, a work such as ‘The Purple Jar’ could be read as an attempt to espouse clear moral guidance—a firm sense of adults knowing best—in an epoch of turmoil and roiling change.
Reassurance and calm that restore the existing order can be found even in contemporary children’s literature. The rage of Max in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is the classic example, with his rollicking journey into the Kingdom of the Wild Things ending with a tranquil return home, and a ‘still hot’ supper waiting for him. Would the book have been so successful without the pacifying resolution and with an ending that kept Max in a state of adventure? Moreover, as Michelle Ann Abate notes, ‘at the end of the book, Max’s newfound agency, freedom, and even sovereign power are eliminated’ (Abate 2016, 129). Roderick McGillis argues: ‘What every society wants is a quiet and satisfied collection of people. Perhaps for this reason, many books for young children displace aggression and offer substitutes for desire’ (McGillis 1996, 79). Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer note, for example, that much of children’s literature is marked by a home-away-home pattern, where a protagonist might venture away from safety but return to the familiar and the domestic in the end (Nodelman and Reimer 2003, 197–198). Adventurous, subversive children’s literature often tempers its rebellious energies by the end of the story.
Where many children’s literature critics see spaces of literal and affective safety and a return to familiar domestic spaces, others see children’s literature as opening up a more subversive set of ideas and possibilities. Alison Lurie notes that ‘the great majority’ of children’s books ‘told me what grown-ups had decided I ought to know or believe about the world.’ Her excitement was palpable when she discovered that
For Lurie, this ‘subversive’ children’s literature includes everything from Beatrix Potter’s animal stories and her imaginative escape from her stifling family, to the fantasies of E. Nesbit, to the heroic characters of J.R.R. Tolkien and T.H. White. In comparing children’s books to games and playground rhymes, she positions these works as a form of popular culture belonging to children.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the carnivalesque and the challenges it poses to dominant power structures has inspired Children’s Literature critics interested in subversion. For example, John Stephens, following Bahktin’s work on the carnivalesque inversion of order, notes three variations in post-1960s children’s literature. Some books give children a respite from ‘the habitual constraints of society’ but restore normality at the end (Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are [1963]); some strive ‘through gentle mockery to dismantle socially received ideas and replace them with their opposite’ (Babette Cole’s inversion of Cinderella, Prince Cinders [1987]); and some ‘are endemically subversive of such things as social authority, received paradigms of behaviour and morality, and major literary genres associated with children’s literature’ (Jan Mark and Anthony Maitland’s Out of the Oven [1986]) (Stephens 1992, 121). The rebelliousness of children’s literature is charted here on a continuum, with some children’s literature more oppositional than others. This taxonomy of degrees of rebellion is a good answer to the question of whether children’s literature is innately radical or conservative; when it challenges the status quo, it does so to different degrees.
Ideology and children’s literature
Children’s and Young Adult author M.T. Anderson offers an example of a purely hypothetical board book for very young children containing only the following words: ‘Up. Down. Farm. Town. Black. White. Day. Night.’ This simple book, with its ‘grinning cows, chickens settling down under blankets,’ carries within it a number of cultural assumptions. In using several opposite pairings such as ‘day’ and ‘night’ it implies that the world should be understood primarily through binary oppositions. The cosy cows and chickens are part of ‘a long association between young children and the American pastoral.’ It is also a ‘mythologized and de-historicized image of agricultural production’ quite different from the gritty realities of industrialized farming (Anderson 2011, 372–373). Although ‘Up. Down. Farm. Town’ is a hypothetical children’s book, it is clearly reminiscent of the many British children’s books that idealize English rural life, such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), which ascribes healing powers to the walled garden discovered by its child characters. Since child readers are in a phase of intense development—learning who they are, what subject positions they occupy—a book such as ‘Up. Down. Farm. Town’ offers a set of assumptions about the world that a person can understand as ‘natural’ and that work under the level of purposiveness and intention. Terry Eagleton points to this as he notes that ideology ‘presents itself as an “Everybody knows that,” a kind of anonymous universal truth’ (Eagleton 1991, 20). The writer may not even be aware of the ideological categories he or she is adopting. Rather than depicting a set of economic and political choices that led to a particular system of food production, the idealized farm of ‘Up. Down. Farm. Town’ seems completely natural.
McCallum and Stephens note that children’s literature can, and often does, hold overt political stances but covert ideological patterns are inevitably harder to discern:
There are obvious challenges to the reader in understanding the covert, embedded form of ideology, because of a certain ‘taken for grantedness.’ We might also think here of Louis Althusser’s notion of the ideological state apparatus, which includes churches, families, law, and education. Although ostensibly outside state control—unlike the violent repressive state apparatus of prisons, the army, the police, and so on—they nonetheless convey the state’s values (Althusser [1968] 1970). For Althusser, ideology has no history; it is presumed to be natural since it works through all of the social institutions of the ideological state apparatus and serves to produce and reproduce social relations.
Eagleton notes of literary works: ‘Like private property, the [work] thus appears as a “natural” object, typically denying the determinants of its productive process’ (Eagleton 1976, 101). Given this ostensible naturalness, criticism’s function ‘is to refuse the spontaneous presence of the work—to deny that “naturalness” in order to make its real determinants appear’ (Eagleton 1976, 101). Seemingly natural and inevitable cultural products are revealed as historically determined. While ideologies can be hard to combat because their ‘naturalness’ is hard to identify, they also shift over time. McCallum and Stephens describe how children’s literature changes when ideologies change: ‘Because ideologies evolve over time, there are ongoing developments in what children’s fiction represents as desirable models of human personality, human behavior, interpersonal relationships, social organization, and ways of being in the world’ (McCallum and Stephens 2011, 368). Readers who bring fresh lived experience or a new critical sensibility to a given text can bring fresh awareness of a text’s hidden assumptions.
Contemporary arbiters of children’s literature—whether teachers, librarians, caregivers, reviewers, or literary critics—are particularly concerned with how we should regard older children’s literature that expresses ideas now generally considered dated, taboo, or offensive. How should we engage with literary works whose ‘morality and ethics’ are no longer acceptable in contemporary society because they include ideas rooted in racism, sexism, homophobia, or ableism (discrimination in favour of able-bodied people)? A reader’s affection for a ‘classic’ literary text might stand in conflict with that same reader’s objections to the ideologies and values of the text.
Some publishers have re-released books with revisions that, in Clare Bradford’s words, ‘typically involve the removal of offensive descriptions of colonized or enslaved groups and individuals,’ citing as examples Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo (1899) and the removal of the ‘n-word’ from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (Bradford 2010, 43). For Bradford, this kind of editorial adjustment is not adequate: ‘What tends to be overlooked in such revisions, however, is that colonial and racist ideologies are commonly encoded in structural, semantic, and narrative features which are not ameliorated merely through the removal of words or phrases’ (Bradford 2010, 43). Rather than ban or bowdlerize books like Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), or Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Philip Nel argues that we should ‘teach these books critically, helping students see the ways in which they reinforce racism, engaging them in difficult and painful, but sadly necessary conversations’ (Nel 2017, 73–74). Not everyone agrees with Nel; indeed, there are many scholars who feel that books from the past with racist or otherwise offensive elements should be dropped from children’s literature curricula and reading lists entirely, even if they stop short of explicitly banning these books. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to this conundrum, but one that will need to be negotiated by both instructors and students in the field.
Children’s literature and political movements
C. John Sommerville was speaking of the radical Puritan movement when he noted that ‘[w]hen people organized for change … it is never long before they recognize that the rising generation will be crucial to their enterprise … Also, the image of the child will inevitably figure in the movement’s ideology, because all such ideologies include a particular understanding of human nature’ (Sommerville 1992, 10). But Sommerville could have been speaking of almost any of the political movements that see children’s books as a way to reach out to the younger generation and cultivate their sympathies. Julia L. Mickenberg contends that ‘nearly every social movement of the modern era, from abolitionism to socialism, communism, civil rights, Black Power, feminism, environmentalism, and gay liberation’ was affiliated with a form of ‘radical children’s literature’ (Mickenberg 2017).
The studies that have emerged of children’s literature’s engagement with political movements have offered an intriguing glimpse of how children’s literature can function to influence young people’s political views and sensibilities. Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006) focuses on leftist writers from 1920 to the late 1960s, with particular insight into Cold War children’s literature. Many left-leaning authors turned to children’s literature when mainstream publishing and distribution became hostile to them due to blacklisting or greylisting. Leftist writers made significant contributions to non-fiction genres such as history, science, and technology as well as works that foregrounded the cultural contributions of African Americans, working-class people, and women. In Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain 1910–1949 (2016), Kimberley Reynolds noted how left-wing politics, progressive education, and avant-garde art were all entwined in works such as Geoffrey Trease’s Bows Against the Barons (1934), which is based on the legend of Robin Hood. Told from the viewpoint of Dickon, a peasant boy who joins Robin Hood’s outlaws in an uprising against the feudal lords, it portrays Robin Hood as a hero of the radical left.
The American conservative movement and ‘right-wing’ children’s literature also produced a corpus of children’s literature, as explored by Michelle Ann Abate in her book Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism (2010). William J. Bennett’s successful The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (1993) is a well-known example of conservative children’s literature: an anthology of classic children’s literature that espouse timeless values such as compassion, thrift, and loyalty. At first glance, values such as ‘thrift’ and ‘loyalty’ seem like they should transcend partisan divisions, and Bennett argues that they do. But his production of this anthology conveyed a deliberately partisan message, implying that more ‘liberal’ children’s literature, with its focus on diversity, had abdicated from its cultural function to morally educate young people. In Abate’s view, the conservative movement in children’s literature reflected ‘a desire to roll back the transformations to American family life and morality during the 1990s that were precipitated by events like the successes of second-wave feminism, the advent of multiculturalism, and the rise of the LGBTQ movement’ (Abate 2010, 22).
If Abate’s more recent book, The Big Smallness: Niche Marketing, the American Culture Wars, and the New Children’s Literature (2016), is any indication, the contemporary publishing landscape today has become even more complex (and arguably more chaotic), transcending the concerns of left and right to cover a ‘wide array of personal, political, familial, cultural, biological, and psychological issues.’ These include niche publications that deal with countless topics, including plastic surgery, the ‘open carry’ of firearms, and the proposed legalization of marijuana among other concerns (Abate 2016, 19). Desktop publishing and the promotional and distribution power of the internet make niche publishing possible, fuelled as well by ‘the tremendous national divisiveness over contentious socio-political issues …’ (Abate 2016, 2–3). In a world marked by disagreement and market fragmentation, it is perhaps not surprising that the traditional distinctions of the left and right might no longer apply to a huge array of cultural production.
In some ways, niche publishing is a refreshing reaction to the fact that children’s publishing is increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few multinational companies. Yet niche publishing is not a challenge to market forms of production, but a profitable reinvention of it as a means to attract potentially lucrative niche audiences. Abate’s study reminds us of the proliferation of ideologies as they are embedded within contemporary children’s literature. Her work on niche publishing is also an important contribution to the debate about whether children’s literature is innately conservative or radical, because it points to a publishing landscape which includes every possible ‘special interest’ and a range of political proclivities that inform the ideological infrastructure of the genre.
Being political
Many adults express unease about the idea of exposing children to political ideas in children’s literature, so much so that in 2014 the New York Times staged a forum in its ‘Room to Debate’ section on the topic ‘Should Children’s Literature Be Political?’ In her contribution to the forum, Claudia Mills argued that there was no such thing as a children’s literature that was not political. For example, if an author writes about a child who has ‘two mommies,’ that is a political act. But if an author writes about ‘a traditional nuclear family’ with a mother and father, ‘that is also a political act’ (Mills 2014). For many people, the choice to deliberately expose young people, even very young children, to political texts is not an optional choice but an inevitable part of their lives, as we see from Jabari Asim’s argument that he wishes to expose his children to complicated and difficult issues early in life:
Asim’s awareness of the need to prepare his children for the difficult and unequal world they will inhabit reflects an ongoing tension in children’s literature between what Peter Hollindale calls ‘the adult-in-the-making’ versus the ‘child now’ (Hollindale 1997, 16). We have seen such a polarity throughout the history of children’s literature, sometimes with the romantic ideal of ‘the child now’ holding sway, sometimes with a stress on the ‘adult-in-the-making,’ and sometimes with a confused oscillation between them.
Divergent readings
Children’s literature has been aligned with various political affiliations and causes; it also includes several books whose political leanings have been interpreted in widely divergent ways. Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand (1936) is a case in point. A seemingly innocuous story about a young bull in Spain who refuses to fight in the bullring, its publication during the Spanish Civil War meant it was imbued with political significance. For example, in an attempt to imagine the readers of 1936–1937, who might see the book as Communist or anti-Fascist, Philip Nel points out that ‘Ferdinand takes control of his own destiny by opposing the wishes of the “Fascist” bullfighting community’ (Nel 2011). In his refusal to fight, Ferdinand could be seen as a pacifist; as Nel observes, ‘No matter how much the bullfighters try to entice him, Ferdinand just sits and smells the flowers’ (Nel 2011). However, we could read Ferdinand’s refusal as a capitulation to the Fascists, since ‘a failure to fight would mean certain victory by the Fascists’ (Nel 2011). The author, however, in the time-honoured tradition of children’s authors who deny political intent, insisted that The Story of Ferdinand contained no political content whatsoever. Some read the text as propaganda, and Adolf Hitler banned the book. Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, loved it. But, after the Second World War, Ferdinand’s pacifism was deeply appealing, and Jella Lepman distributed millions of copies of the book to the children of post-war Europe as a way of persuading readers away from a mentality of violence and conflict (Silvey 2002, 351).
Ferdinand can also be read in many ways that depart entirely from the context of war and peace. The eminent American science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin sees it as an ‘animal satire’ mocking human pomp and excess, albeit a ‘sweet-natured’ one ‘which, when you come down to it, is almost as hard on humans as Swift is, but a great deal more hopeful than Orwell. And is there any other satire in the world that ends, with no irony at all, “He is very happy”?’ (LeGuin 2004, 29). Ferdinand’s gender nonconformity has been a source of much interest, as he eschews the masculinity of the bullfight in order to ‘smell the flowers.’ As Katie Sciurba notes, Ferdinand’s gender variance not only sets him apart from his fellow bulls but ‘makes him unworthy as a competitor and saves his life’ (Sciurba 2017, 290).
Ferdinand has, in fact, served as a standard bearer for resistance to a wide variety of social norms. Journalist Bruce Handy looks beyond the ‘Iberian setting’ of the story to claim Ferdinand ‘as a proud American refusenik in a continuum that begins with Bartleby, the Scrivener, or maybe Thoreau, and goes on to include Benjamin Braddock, the hero of “The Graduate,” and, for younger audiences, Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre,” of “I don’t care” fame’ (Handy 2017b). Thus Ferdinand represents anyone who wants to follow their individual wishes rather than follow the dictates of others. It is fascinating to see the book variously interpreted as a partisan text, as an exploration of identity (including gender identity), and as a more universal narrative of resistance.
Any individual reader might have surprising responses to a work of children’s literature; indeed, any work read in multiple national or regional contexts might provoke divergent responses. Hergé’s (Georges Prosper Remi) notorious Tintin au Congo (1931) is a complex example. This book has been repeatedly condemned for its racist portrayal of the Congolese people, but Kiera Vaclavik focuses on the ways in which Tintin au Congo has been successful in the country in which it was set:
Congolese readers did not view themselves as the passive targets of racist European colonialist imaginings. Nancy Rose Hunt recounts that Blaise-Pascal Baruani, a Zairian in Brussels, told her that parents bought Tintin au Congo ‘for their children if they can to show them the colonized world their parents once lived in and how Europeans imagined Congolese subjects’ (Hunt 2002, 96). Of course, it is possible to imagine any number of different responses from readers, including one of deep affront. Sanghamitra Ganguly describes the 2007 campaign of Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a Congolese citizen, who sought to have the books pulled from the shelves in Belgium due to racist content (Ganguly 2018, 106). The variation in reader response is one reason why critics are so eager to engage with individual readers, child and adult, and to consider the cross-cultural transmission of children’s literature.
Propaganda
We have seen that children’s literature is deeply entwined with a teaching function, that it always carries ideological content, and that it is often explicitly political. But when does a political text lapse into propaganda? A work can be termed ‘propaganda’ if it contains clearly biased information used to promote a point of view or political position. Bertrand Russell offers a resonant definition of propaganda as ‘any attempt by means of persuasion, to enlist human beings in the service of one party to any dispute. It is thus distinguished from instruction by its motive, which is not the dissemination of knowledge but the generating of some kind of party feeling’ (cited in Marlin 2013, 9). In the light of Russell’s definition, even heavily didactic children’s literature is not necessarily propaganda until it forsakes the intent to ‘instruct’ and instead seeks to ‘enlist’ its readers. Randal Marlin draws attention to propaganda’s ‘lack of concern for truth, failure to respect the autonomy of those with whom one communicates, promotion of self-serving ends, seeking control over others, etc …’ (Marlin 2013, 7). Twentieth century totalitarian or authoritarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Communist East Germany, the Soviet Union, and the China of the Cultural Revolution have been the most obvious examples for scholars interested in the ways children’s literature has been put to use by a nation, state, or party.
To scholars working on totalitarian regimes, an awareness of propaganda is particularly linked to the extreme degree in which children’s literature was integrated into the goals of the state and/or the ruling party. With regards to Nazism, Christa Kamenetsky seems to believe that the didacticism far exceeded what had been seen before: ‘With the rise of Nazism a didacticism was imposed upon children’s literature for which there was also no equivalent in the past. The didactic trends of earlier times had served at least the moral and religious instruction of the individual child, but now literature and the child were both placed at the service of the State’ (Kamenetsky 1984, 22–23). German folklore emerging from the Romantic movement was co-opted for Nazi purposes, and, in keeping with the ideology of the Third Reich, Nordic myths were represented in such a way as to assert a continuation of Nordic heroic traditions.
Children’s literature produced in the Soviet Union espoused an all-encompassing devotion to the Soviet state and an unstinting enthusiasm for the national project of industrialization (O’Dell 1978). Before the advent of the restrictive aesthetics of Socialist Realism emerged in the 1930s, early Soviet picture-books for children advanced avant-garde aesthetics, many of which are appreciated by students of modernist art even today. Yet Evgeny Steiner explains that, in the years after the October Revolution, these sophisticated visual styles were explicitly intended to bolster the Soviet state: ‘Sharp angles, dynamic composition, shifted axes, swiftly tilting verticals and horizontals—all this charged the emotions, pulled people forward, urged them to volunteer, to build that five-year plan in four’ (Steiner 1999, xiii–xiv).
East German children’s literature in the 20th century had to be explicitly loyal to the ruling socialist party, as Gabriele Thomson-Wohlgemuth notes:
Here propaganda is tied in with something many Childhood Studies scholars have tended to find positive and desirable: a claim for the relative equality of children. But this equality leaves them more vulnerable to works that require their acquiescence in a specific political party, rather than less so. The model of childhood, therefore, remains one of greater ‘impressionability,’ but, of course, the coercive power of the children’s literature remains at the centre.
The manner in which the Chinese government absorbed children’s literature into the state is a telling illustration of the way that children’s literature can function as propaganda. Mary Ann Farquhar notes of the literature that emerged after Marxism reached China and the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921:
Xu Xu characterizes books of the Cultural Revolution as promoting ‘the negation of the self and the acquisition of class consciousness through learning from workers and peasants’ (Xu 2011, 388). Here we see both service to the state and an investment in curtailing the will of the individual child in order to reach collective goals: a marker of propaganda. If asked about the distinction between ‘instructing’ and ‘enlisting’ children raised above, we could indeed say it is a matter of degree rather than kind: the propagandist work aims at indoctrination rather than instruction, and leaves very little room for questioning or challenging a book’s message. It is more than possible, of course, that when discussing propaganda a choice to focus on regimes such as Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and so on might be a way of naturalizing propagandist functions within the Western tradition. Many of the politically committed children’s books I described earlier in this chapter, all of which emerge from Anglo-American political traditions of one kind or another, aim to stir up enthusiastic political and social commitments in their young readers. The line between ‘instructing’ and ‘enlisting’ a child might ultimately be more blurred than we would wish to think. At the same time, the field of Children’s Literature is increasingly interested in children as resistant readers. In the next section I will consider sceptical child readers who refuse to be ‘enlisted’ into a particular cause or worldview, in keeping with the field’s increased emphasis on child agency and children’s voices.
Sceptical child readers
In her ‘auto-bibliography’ One Child Reading, Margaret Mackey offers a subtle account of childhood critical reading that emerged from her location in Newfoundland, Canada, then at the periphery of literary culture. There were a number of things that Mackay noticed in her predominantly British and American books that did not match up to her daily life in Newfoundland. Rather than find this discomforting, this mismatch between ‘book conditions’ and her lived experience offered her a critical distance that inspired a lifetime of sceptical reading.
Mackey has established a productive disjunction between text and life, and she can now question both. Her articulation of ‘book conditions’ is a useful critical tool, since it helps a reader avoid being interpolated into the ideologies of the text by underscoring the division between lived experience and textual representation. Texts, then, can be taken seriously but they do not have to be taken literally: a judgment of what is valid and true is ultimately located in the reader’s own interpretive authority.
The resistance of child readers, especially to the explicit messages of children’s texts, is perhaps one of the lesser used but most promising tools in understanding the effects of children’s texts, with the understanding that collecting the reactions of individual readers can have the feel of an unrepresentative—even eccentric—sample of opinion. Readers can be stubbornly bent on their own interests to the extent that they miss any political valence of a work. On the other hand, it is that stubborn resistance to explicit political messages that is the source of so much interest. As an example of a surprising reaction from a child reader, Ian S. Marshall describes his son’s response to Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax(1971), in many ways the ‘go-to’ text of environmental children’s literature and one that has been nothing short of venerated by many for its critique of overdevelopment’s destruction of the environment. Marshall’s son Jacy, however, does not share the text’s horror of runaway industrial activity:
Jacy’s enthusiasm for the Super-Axe-Hacker—the tool used not only to cut a few trees but to decimate an entire Truffala forest—triggers a mild despair that the pro-environment message his father earnestly wanted to impart is being ignored. Jacy’s reaction shows that readers can and do find their own pleasures and priorities in texts, even when faced with explicit directives, and that these cannot necessarily be predicted in advance or controlled. Children’s books can also overlap with play, as children act out stories and remake them in different ways. Within this play, children can support or resist the text, or sharply diverge from the text’s norms altogether.
The fact that individual readers are abundantly capable of reacting idiosyncratically to individual texts does not take away from their power to shape opinion. Children’s literature can be seen not just to reflect culture, but to actively make culture. At the same time there is much promise in sceptical reactions and in critical literacy as tools to empower young readers. In the next section I will consider how recent critical responses to Laura Ingalls Wilder has offered new ways to think about a series once considered a bedrock of American children’s literature.
Case study: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House series
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books are an important example of how ideology functions within historical fiction, not least because the books have been embraced as classics for so long. Written between 1932 and 1942, they sparked a well-known 1970s television show, movies, and a veritable trove of spin-off products such as cookbooks and quilting books. On the market today are several first-person accounts by women who sought out the physical locations depicted in the books and tried to recreate Laura’s experiences, such as Kelly Kathleen Ferguson’s My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself (2011) and Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (2011).
Despite their classic status in American life and letters, or perhaps because of it, critics have turned their attention to the ideas and ideologies promoted by the books, both overt and subtle. The series, and in particular Little House on the Prairie, has been interrogated for its depiction of Native American people, destined to be displaced by the white settlers, as savage and threatening figures. The fusion of conservative and libertarian ideas in the book, with its stress on the nuclear family and scorn for government intervention, has also attracted commentary. Finally, feminist critics have re-engaged with the book with a renewed awareness of the restrictive gender roles it encodes.
Clare Bradford argues that the prevalence of historical fiction in children’s literature is bound up with its ideological work: ‘to explain and interpret national histories—histories that involve invasion, conquest, violence, and assimilation’ (Bradford 2007, 97). Little House on the Prairie (1935), which focuses on the Ingalls’ life on the ‘Indian frontier’ in Kansas, 1869–1871, is an important example within the history of children’s literature. Frances W. Kaye bluntly characterizes it as ‘apology for the “ethnic cleansing” of the Great Plains’ (Kaye 2000, 123). Little House on the Prairie, affirms Kaye, is a book that ‘lulls us into believing that the dispossession of the Osage people from Kansas was sad but necessary and even “natural,” like all losses of the innocence of childhood and other primitive ways of being’ (Kaye 2000, 124). This is the well-known trope of the Vanishing American Indian, as seen in other works such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826). It is, furthermore, ‘the myth of the necessary tragedy, the fortunate fall, that arises when the determined farmer meets the nomadic wanderer, the tragedy played out in Judeo-Christian myth from the time of Jacob and Esau’ (Kaye 2000, 126). As Kaye explains, the Ingalls were squatters on the Osage Diminished Reserve; they had no legal right to be there. Wilder’s elegiac stance towards the Plains Indians in the Little House series has been read as one of rueful sympathy, pointing out that Pa, Laura’s father, is respectful and admiring of Indians in the book, although her Ma expresses overtly racist attitudes. At the same time, Pa is quite clear he considers that the land belongs to his family and that the Osage people of Kansas must move further west to make room for them. Pa’s assertion might remind us of Terry Eagleton’s remarks about unjust acts, that they are ‘counterbalanced by greater benefits, or that they are inevitable, or that they are not really injustices at all’ (Eagleton 1991, 27).
While some Indians in the text are approvingly described as ‘friendly,’ the narrative portrays them as a threat to the Ingalls’ safety:
Although they take some goods, they leave the plough and the seeds for the next year’s crop wrapped up in the family’s furs, to their great relief. Yet the Ingalls remain aggrieved at their losses, even though as squatters they have themselves encroached on Osage territory and used resources that do not belong to them.
In 2013 Benjamin Lefebvre noted that objections to the portrayal of Aboriginal people from both Native and non-Native critics had not lessened its ‘continued appeal and sales success,’ and he pointed to ‘an endless list of sequels, prequels, interquels, sidequels, abridgments, adaptations for television and stage, tourist sites, and biographical and historical studies that seek to solidify Wilder’s role in the shaping of American literary history’ (Lefebvre 2013, 177). In 2018, however, the Board of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), changed the name of one of their major awards from the ‘Laura Ingalls Wilder Award’ to the ‘Children’s Literature Legacy Award’ because Ingalls’ ‘works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities.’ The name change was greeted with both approval and dismay on social media, with critics viewing it as an erasure of Ingalls from the history of American children’s literature. For its part, the ALSC/ALA argued that the name change did not imply that people should no longer teach Ingalls’ work or that it should be removed from libraries and reading lists, but simply that the organization needed to acknowledge that the inclusive values of the award and the dated racial politics of the books were not aligned. In addition to the controversial portrayal of Native Americans, the ALSC/ALA was also critical of the portrayal of a racist ‘minstrel show’ in Little Town on the Prairie (1941), where townspeople dressed in blackface, including Laura’s beloved Pa.
In recent years, critical and biographical scholarship has uncovered the role of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter, in the composition of the books. Lane was one of the forerunners of the American libertarian movement, along with Ayn Rand and others, which has traditionally been ferociously critical of government intervention in private property and in the lives of citizens. Laura Ingalls Wilder herself was critical of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and prone to exaggerate her family’s isolated independence on the western frontier, even though they received help from neighbouring families and from the government for many of their needs (Fellman 2008; Woodside 2016). Anita Clair Fellman notes that in the Little House books a ‘self-sufficient family, responsible for its own successes, manages to survive many challenging circumstances without the aid of the government.’ Furthermore, that ‘self-sufficiency is somehow tied to the admirable values of individual responsibility taught by the tight, cohesive, and loving family’ (Fellman 2008, 251).
Fellman notes that the Little House books continue to have an impact on their readers, influencing libertarian and conservative thought: ‘the two women had predicted many of the concerns of present-day opponents of the welfare state and advocates of the free market (Fellman 2008, 249). Here we have one of the signature attributes of ideology: it can operate on individuals and influence them, and that process seems almost unconscious. The Ingalls family seems vulnerable throughout the series, and the narrative encourages the reader to root for their survival. They endure a long journey, an attack of ‘fever-n-ague’ (malaria), and struggle to eke out some material prosperity against extraordinary odds. Laura’s child-like point of view as the family struggles for survival might make it easy to forget the kinds of political models being espoused, one of settler colonialism and anti-government sentiment. Sara L. Schwebel articulates this effect of historical fiction:
I have noted, of course, that readers are capable of resisting the ideological pull of a text in various ways. Indigenous scholars like Dennis McAuliffe, Jr, Debbie Reese and Waziyatawin have offered powerful critiques of the book. It would also be interesting to see how the text would appear to a child of any background who had studied a curriculum that offered an unvarnished view of the genocidal acts against Native people. Ideology will always shape children’s literature, but reader reception can complicate how that ideology circulates.
The gender politics of the books are also complex. You could read them as a ‘feminized’ version of the traditionally masculinized frontier narrative; they also make room for gender nonconformity. Laura is a mildly rebellious girl whose high-spirited antics stand in contrast to her exemplary, even prim, sister Mary, and in opposition to her Ma’s genteel and sometimes repressive ways. Yet, as Ann Romines notes, the gender roles solidify as the series continues: ‘Laura’s growing awareness of her own limits and duties as a woman brings new weight and sobriety to the Little House series in The Long Winter’ (Romines 1990, 37). In this sense, a rebellious nature, once tamed, can shore up the status quo.
The Little House books have been iconic for many American readers, and appear to harken back to a ‘simpler life.’ But a close study reveals that the childlike innocence of the books cloaks a number of political and social ideologies. The ongoing role of the series will doubtless continue to stimulate debate about whether the books deserve to hold a central position in the American children’s literature canon, especially because they reflect a settler colonialist mentality.
In terms of articulating a nationalist vision, it is interesting to compare the Little House series with a British work like H.E. (Henrietta Elizabeth) Marshall’s non-fiction history Our Island Story: A Child’s History of England (1905). Our Island Story was written in Australia at the height of the Edwardian empire, from the vantage point of someone remembering ‘the old country.’ Despite its status as a non-fiction history, Marshall emphasizes the book’s mythic qualities: ‘this is not a history lesson, but a story book’ which includes ‘fairy tales’ that are part of England’s lore (Marshall 1905, vi). For example, the book begins with Neptune the God giving his son Albion an island. Brutus, the Prince of Troy, later renames it Britannia. Our Island Story covers a vast swathe of the history of English and British history: rewriting Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, and Arthurian legends, drawing on plots from Shakespeare’s history plays, and extending through to the recent Victorian empire. It emphasizes both the continuity of English identity from the ancient Britons and the forward march of progress: from Parliament and the rule of law to a romanticized vision of the union of England and Scotland in 1707 as voluntary, natural, and mutually beneficial.
Throughout the book there is a stress on the virtues of the native Britons and their heroic resistance to the Saxons, Romans, and Normans, with an admiring portrayal of the Iceni (British Celtic) queen Boadicea, who led an uprising against the occupying Romans in ad 60 or 61. In contrast, the wild Picts of Scotland in the late Iron Age and early medieval period, and the mutinous Indians of the colonial 19th century, are positioned as ‘other’ to the true Britons, and therefore worthy of either defeat or assimilation. As Samantha Frénée-Hutchins notes, Marshall is ‘sympathetic towards the indigenous populations of the British colonies, but native communities were viewed as less civilized than the British’ (Frénée-Hutchins 2016, 186). Both Our Island Story and Little House on the Prairie offer a vision of national consolidation: a ‘national story’ related to foundation and settlement. These ostensibly simple books demonstrate the subtle and overt ways in which children’s literature becomes embedded in our national literary histories and the role that colonization plays in those histories. Children’s Literature scholarship is able to look both at the text as an art object, and at its political and ideological history within literary tradition.