Page 227 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 19: Two Types of Orientalism—Orientalism as a Literary Theory

egocentric, more rational, etc. In other words, they teach children how to be adults. Thus Anneof Notes
Green Gablesot Harriet the Spy ate considered to be good books, first, because they capture the joy
of childhood, and second, because they end up by confirming adult ethical concerns. This inherent
contradiction, which appears in just about all children's literature, emerges automatically from its
being a discourse of the other. Viewed from the perspeaive of its efforts to colonize, children's
literature is essentially and inevitably an attempt to keep children opposite to ourselves and an
attempt to make children more like us. It may be exactly that contradiction at its heart that is its
most characteristic generic marker.
By now I've persuaded myself that child psychology and children's literature are imperialist
activities; I hope I've persuaded you. And most of us at least claim to dislike imperialism. So what
should we do about it?' What can we do about it?
We might, of course, attempt to do what Peter Hunt calls "childish" criticism-to think about
children and read children's literature from a child's point of view. But in fact, this is merely a
deception-another form of allowing ourselves to see and speak for them. Male readers can't really
know what it feels like for women to read male-oriented descriptions of women, any more than
masculinist authors could avoid producing descriptions of women that were male-oriented in the
first place; and no more can we adults read as children, even if we once could. The best we can do
in that line is to read as what we imagine children to be-that is, in terms of our adult assumptions.
Indeed, because it's our adult attempts to see and speak for children that create children's literature
and child psychology in the first place, our attempts to analyze texts in these areas are doomed to
inhabit the same discourse as they would be purporting to reveal and criticize.
So again: what can we do? We might simply say that we can't do anything. Theory teaches us that
all discourse is in fact a discourse of the other. According to linguists, it's an inherent characteristic
of language that any given word can be meaningful only within a field of differences-only by
being other than other words. The very act of making meaning requires us both to evoke another
(what we don't mean) and to marginalize it (make it less significant than what we do want to say).
Furthermore, we wouldn't speak or write if we didn't imagine an other less than ourselves in at
least one important way. An audience that doesn't yet know what we wish it to understand. As I
do in this essay, we always speak to our audience in an attempt to speak for it-to colonize it with
our own perceptions of things, including itself. If our discourse about childhood is imperialist,
then, it may not be much more imperialist than any other form of human speech. But that inevitable
imperialism might be less dangerous if we were willing to acknowledge it and at least attempt to
be aware of it. Orientalism could oppress vast numbers of people exactly by denying that it was
oppressive-indeed, by insisting that it was the opposite of oppressive, that it had a high-minded
interest in helping others less fortunate than oneself. To be aware of the possible oppressiveness
of our supposedly objective or even benevolent truths and assumptions about childhood does not
mean that their potential oppressiveness will disappear. But we can at least work on it. We can try
to move beyond thinking about individual children as if they did in fact represent some alien
other. We can become suspicious of adults who claim to "like children," as if they did indeed share
qualities en masse, and we can wonder about the suitability of those who make such claims to
become teachers or child psychologists. We can try to see the oppressiveness inherent in our use
of concepts such as "the eternal innocence of childhood" or stages of cognitive or moral development.
We can try to operate as if the humanity children share with us matters more than their presumed
differences from us.
I have to admit it: I find it hard to imagine a world in which children have the right to vote, serve
on juries, and control their own destinies. But then I remind myself of all those people in recent
history who found it hard to imagine a world in which women or Arabs could do these same
things.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 221