Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form

Abstract

Socializing Rosamond:Educational Ideology and Fictional Form Mitzi Myers (bio) "It. . . does not lead to the bad habit of frittering away the mind and requiring no exertion from the reader—the fault of most. . .namby-pamby performances. Those who have teeth and digestive organs must use them and not be fed only with pap." Maria Edgeworth (qtd. in Hill 126) A recent critic of books for the young provocatively suggests that "many of society's concerns are reflected in children's literature more rapidly than in other literary studies" (Pickering 16). A good case can be made for this point of view, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when theories of child socialization typically function as synecdoche for broader ideologies of reform or repression. Notions of "the child," "childhood," and "children's literature" are contingent, not essentialist; embodying the social constructions of a particular historical context, they are useful fictions intended to redress reality as much as to reflect it.1 The representation of the child is also a reconstitution of the child, a locus for personal longing and reformist fantasy alike. Literary representations enacting child socialization have proven peculiarly accessible and attractive to women writers of the past. In the modest, useful guise of elementary instructors, they reimagine their own childhoods and invent the future childhoods of their gender in more satisfying forms than unmediated realities proffer. Moreover, their socializing experiments engender literary experiments. In evading the romantic fantasies of the adult female marriage plot, they struggle to evolve a mimetic literary structure correspondent to their theme. Their prenuptial plots of female development replace Jane Austen's updated Cinderella and Prince with mothers and daughters, but their domestic realism, psychological acuity, and lively wit entitle them to be called Jane Austens of the nursery. The epigraph's anti-romantic credo (Maria Edgeworth is commenting on another female author of juvenile fiction) is as rich in formal as in thematic implications. Using Edgeworth's "The Purple Jar" (1796) as a test case, this paper offers a revisionist approach to socialization stories of the past. Thus a central aim is to demonstrate how a work of historical children's literature not only reflects its period's concerns, but how it comments on its social and intellectual milieu, how it tries to answer its era's questions about childhood and especially girlhood, how it functions as a cultural critique of contemporary educational practice and gender definition. But I want to do more than examine the educational ideology of my chosen example, the statement that the text makes; I want also to look at the work's literary structure in relation to its content and to argue that the formal elements by which the meaning is represented replicate that meaning, that method supports message, that, rather than undermining artistry as modern criticism insists, pedagogic intent facilitates literary achievement. For, finally, this is an essay in how to decode women writers' educational genres as well as an examination of a single tale. I want my analysis of one story by one writer to suggest a positive, contextualized approach to a much berated genre among historical children's books, the rational and realistic moral tale favored by Edgeworth and by most other women writers of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (a period we can call "Georgian" for the sake of brevity). Understanding why and how their fictions construe "child," "childhood," and "children's literature" as they do, we may discover liberating potential in stories of everyday life as well as in folk and fairy tales.2 However knowledgeable modern readers are about children's literature, or about women writers, or about early nineteenth-century fiction, the chances are they won't have read much by Maria Edgeworth. If they have read any novel, it is probably Castle Rackrent (1800), which is atypical in its form if not its merit. Yet here too, as in Edgeworth's stories for the young, a naïf engages the world and a family situation grounds the story, though in this case the reader undergoes the learning process alone rather than accompanying the protagonist. If my readers know any of Edgeworth's tales for youngsters...

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