Page 226 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes these texts describe an ideal childhood-childhood as it ought to be-and perceiving a gulf
between this ideal childhood and the real behavior of children we know, we work in literature
and life to make children more like the ideal-to restore to them a "childhood" they appear to
have lost sight of.
But did we really experience childhood as we claim to remember it' Or have we come to
believe we did because we ourselves in both our childhood and our adult lives have also read
books by and had interactions with adults who worked to impose their visions of childhood
upon us? Perhaps what we call "childhood" is always an imaginative construct of the adult
mind, always being moved not only outwards to blind us to our actual perceptions of
contemporary children but also backwards into the past, to blind us to our memories of our
actual past experiences. Perhaps there never was a childhood as innocent, as creative, as
spontaneous as adults like to imagine. Perhaps children are always more like adults than
adults are ever able to see.
15. Circularity
Children oppressed by adult versions of childhood turn into the adults who oppress other
children. Said suggests a similar circularity in the thought of Europeans about Orientals.
Since the ancient Orient invented by European scholars is assumed to be the past of Europe as
well as of the contemporary Orient, Europeans could assume that they were the true inheritors
of that imaginary Oriental past. For instance, European linguists posited an ancient Indo-
European of their own invention that evolved into both contemporary Eastern and European
languages, then claimed that their own European languages were the natural evolution of
Indo-European, the Eastern ones merely degenerate versions of it. This conviction of their
own connection to ancient purity not only allowed Europeans to point out the degenerate
nature of the modern Orient but also to work to replace it with the truly classical values they
themselves represented an evolved version of. Similarly, we adults posit our own imagined
childhood as what we must work to persuade contemporary children of.
But in actual faa, Orientals do not turn into Europeans who then oppress a new generation of
Oriental. What distinguishes our thinking about childhood from other discourses about
otherness is that in this case, the other does quite literally turn into ourselves. All those who
survive childhood become adults, adults who tend to think of children as their other. Even
those adults who happen to be feminists tend to talk and think of children of both sexes in
terms of metaphors redolent of traditional assumptions about feminine weakness and passivity;
and those members of oppressed minorities who are most adamant about their own need for
freedom from oppression are often among those who are most vociferous about controlling
the image of the world presented in children's literature, trying to ensure that children adopt
their own correct attitudes. The irony in that is as obvious as it is depressing: if our thinking
about children is an aa of colonization, then it is in fact ourselves we are colonizing, ourselves
we are oppressing-albeit at one remove.
16. Fixity vs. Process
Said suggests two contradictory modes by which Europeans address Orientals. One is the
evolutionary enterprise of educating them into being more like Europeans; the other is the
self-confirming enterprise of educating them into being what Europeans have always imagined
Orientals to be-typical representatives of "the Oriental mind." The same contradiction is so
central to discourse about children and in children's literature that it might well be their
defining characteristic.
On the one hand, we believe that good children's books accurately describe what is often identified
as the wonder or spontaneity or creativity of childhood. In other words, they are good because
they teach children how to be childlike by providing them with appropriate images of childhood.
On the other hand, however, their themes or messages are almost always about becoming less

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