Page 224 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes In crude forms, this is simply a matter of providing children stories which ask them to see
themselves in and thus accept the moral conclusions reached by child characters they are
supposed to, as we say, "identify with." In more subtle novels, as Rose shows, we provide
young readers with a "realistic" description of people and events that insist on the reality of
one particular way of looking at the world and themselves-our way.
9. Domination
Said says, "The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be 'Oriental' in
all those ways considered common place by an average nineteenth- century European, but
also because it could be-that is, submitted to being-made Oriental". Children do similarly
submit to our ideas about what it means to be childish, and do show us the childish behavior
we make it clear to them we wish to see, simply because they rarely have the power to do
anything else. Exercising power over the weak in this way might well be perceived as an aa
of bullying. If children are indeed weak enough to be so easily overwhelmed by our power
over them, then they are weak enough that our unquestioning willingness to exercise that
power in the blind faith that it's good for them implies some moral weakness in ourselves.
10. Self-Confirming Description
The fact that Orientals might be "made Oriental"-be manipulated into acting as if they actually
are what the outside other sees them as being-suggests the extent to which a discourse of the
other can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Said says, "we might expect that the ways by
which it is recommended that a lion's fierceness be handled will actually increase its fierceness,
force it to be fierce since that is what it is, and that is what in essence we know or can only
know about it". If we assume children have short attention spans and therefore never let them
try to read long books, they do not in fact read long books. They will seem to us to be
incapable of reading long books-and we will see those that do manage to transcend our
influence and read long books as atypical, paradoxically freaks in being more like us than like
our other. It may well be for this reason that a depressingly large number of children do seem
to fit into Piagetian categorizations of childlike behavior, and that an equally large number of
children do seem to like the kinds of books that adult experts claim to be the kind of books
children like. Indeed, in the current children's book market, driven more and more by the
marketing needs of a few major bookstore chains, almost no other kind of book gets published,
and therefore few children have any way of discovering if they might indeed like any other
kind. Whether or not real children really do share these attitudes, we have provided ourselves
with no way of perceiving their behavior as representing anything else.
11. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Furthermore, real children do often act as we perceive them to act. The discourse of the other
does often manage to absorb the other into its conceptions of otherness. In treating children
like children, we may well doom them to a conviction in and inability to transcend their
inadequacy.
12. Other as Opposite
A century or so ago, the British colonial official Lord Cromer summed up his knowledge of
the East by saying, "I content myself with noting the fact that somehow or other the Oriental
generally acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European" (Said 39). Or
in other words: I define who I am myself as a European by seeing the Oriental as everything
I am not. A main purpose of a discourse of the other is always this sort of self definition:
we characterize the other as other in order to define ourselves. "The Oriental is irrational,
depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different,'" says Said; "thus the European is rational, virtuous,
mature, 'normal'". Similarly, we adults can see ourselves as rational, virtuous, mature, and
normal exactly because we have irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, different children to
compare ourselves to. We need children to be childlike so that we can understand what
maturity is-the opposite of being childlike.

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