Producing the Romance of Mass Childhood: Kate Greenaway’s Under the Window and the Education Acts
2009; Routledge; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/08905490903445486
ISSN1477-2663
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] “It has been said that Kate Greenaway dressed the children of two continents” (Spielmann and Layard 123). For a more detailed list of the earliest spin offs and their manufacturers see Engen, “Myth” and Lundin, “Sensational.” [2] Here, I am referring to the visual iconography of the child introduced by late‐eighteenth‐century portraiture. James Christen Steward labels this tradition, “the New Child.” Following this tradition, the child was resuscitated from its earlier inferior position as a miniature adult and instead valued for its unique body, subjectivity, and social position. This representation places a premium on the child’s untainted individuality, innocence, and naturalness. For more on the Romantic child’s connection with a “timeless past” see Anne Higonnet’s excellent study, Pictures of Innocence. [3] Ruskin’s assessment, in part, reflects his notrious penchant for little girls. For more on Ruskin’s odd attachment to girls, as revealed in his correspondences with Greenaway, see Engen; Speilmann and Layard. [4] Ruth Hill Viguers’s twentieth‐century interpretation follows a similar vein. Though Greenaway’s children may be idealized “like figures in an exquisite dream,” Viguers reads their melancholy expressions as the “rapt faces natural to those children who are uninterrupted in their absorption with a world of wonders they are only beginning to discover” (17). The attempt to locate a “natural” portrait of childhood within Greenaway’s images reflects the tendency of Victorian and modern criticism to treat children’s literature and its pictures as universal forms that stand outside of the indeterminacies of language or culture. For more on the critical tendency to universalize when speaking of literature for children see Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan. [5] Aestheticism was a hybrid movement that emphasized simplicity and function over gaudy commercialism. As a movement that encompassed decorative design and the high arts, it included a wide range of objects, including William Morris wallpaper and rugs, Japanese‐inspired décor, medieval‐inspired furnishing, as well as the experimental art of Beardsley and Wilde. See Aslin and Girouard for more on the aesthetic movement. [6] In regard to the latter point, Greenaway’s fashions partially reflect cultural practice; Victorian boys would have been dressed effeminately and not “breeched” until five or six (Cunnington and Cunnington 570; Calvert 102). [7] For more on the Victorian conceptualization of childhood as separate from adult culture see Claudia Nelson’s Boys Will Be Girls. Nelson contends that Victorians associated children and women with moral superiority and domesticity. For more on the general historical shift in attitudes and legislation see Kincaid and Wardle. [8] Payments by results ensured that each Board School was funded primarily through the “results” of student attendance and annual examinations. The capitalistic aims of nationalized education come through in the following statement made by the designer of the Education Acts, W. E. Forster: “upon elementary education depends our industrial prosperity … if we leave our workforce any longer unskilled … they will become overmatched in the competition of the world” (qtd. in Wardle 82). [9] Robert Baden‐Powell, the founder of British scouting, used the metaphor of brick laying to stress children’s need to lay aside their individualism and focus on the behaviors and values of benefit to the British Empire. As Baden‐Powell put it, since children are “very much like bricks in a wall; we each have our place … But if one brick gets rotten, or slips out of place, it begins to throw an undue strain on others, cracks appear and the wall totters” (qtd. in Rosenthal 285). [10] The uniformity of Greenaway’s fashionable children resonated with the established tradition of British charity schools, which refashioned disadvantaged children by placing them in orderly, antiquated uniforms. For more on the history of charity schools and their costumes see Phillis Cunnington’s and Catherine Lucas’s Charity Costumes (1978). [11] I first became aware of this phenomenon when photocopying Greenaway’s visual poems. While the images transferred well, often the words did not, as is reflected in the sometimes opaque lettering of the accompanying figures. [12] As we find in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), Greenaway creates a dialogic relationship between image and text and employs forms that appear deceptively “childlike” and simple. Although Greenaway does not confront children’s economic poverty as directly as does Blake, she challenges the lack of agency granted late‐Victorian children. For more on Blake’s dialogic use of word and image as social criticism, see W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (111–50). [13] Jack Zipes offers an extensive reading of the Grimms’ use of violence as a means of enlisting social obedience in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion.
Referência(s)