Goodly Is Our Heritage: Children's Literature, Empire, and the Certitude of Character (review)

Rashna B. Singh's Goodly Is Our Heritage examines how, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and North American children's literature, "Character . . . must be consciously promoted, and while character needs careful nurturance, its origins are predetermined by race" (41). This inquiry into the relations between youth, character, race, and empire has been underway for some time—for instance, in the works, cited by Singh, of Michael Rosenthal and Robert H. MacDonald—yet it is still a ripe field for study. Unfortunately, Goodly Is Our Heritage falls short on several fronts, primarily due to the book's application of its theoretical methodology. Early on, Singh states: "What I am searching for in this study is the moral and intellectual consensus to which Antonio Gramsci referred when he said that hegemony flows not from the barrel of a gun but from moral and intellectual consensus" (xxxv). In the epilogue to the book, Singh claims that the "children's literature discussed here emerged out of 'consent' in the specific sense that Gramsci uses the term" in his "famous doctrine of hegemony" (312). Although applying Gramsci to imperialist children's literature is a worthy endeavor, there are major problems with Singh's execution of it.

Most importantly, one could expect that a scholarly work applying Gramsci to children's literature would give more attention to Gramsci's theories of hegemony than Singh actually offers (she discusses Gramsci for less than a page and quotes none of his works). Singh gives little sense of the nuances and vicissitudes in Gramsci's thinking, including his awareness that the "attempts of specific groups or sects to take over hegemony . . . may well be unsuccessful" and his warning against a "Mechanical historical materialism" that "assumes that every political act is . . . a real and permanent (in the sense of achieved) modification of the structure" (Gramsci 191). Commenting some time ago on Edward W. Said's claims regarding the hegemony of orientialist discourse, Dennis Porter noted that Gramsci saw hegemony as a "process in concrete historical conjunctures, as an evolving sphere of superstructural conflict in which power relations are continually reasserted, challenged, modified" (Porter 181). For Porter, Said "fails to historicize adequately the texts he cites and summarizes, finding always the same triumphant [orientalist] discourse where several are frequently in conflict" (Porter 192). Whether or not one agrees with his assessment of Said's Orientalism, Porter's phrasing aptly designates the central problem in Singh's book: the fact that the representations of race and character she treats achieved the "moral and intellectual consensus" necessary to become "hegemonic" is simply asserted, not proven through careful historical research into, for example, reception of texts by child and adult readers. The works of a writer such as G. A. Henty might reveal a desire to establish such hegemony, but Singh takes the desire as proof that the hegemony existed: "Henty's use of the pronoun 'our' as in 'our troops' or 'our authority' makes it clear that his books are addressed to an English audience . . . that at the time would have read or received similar accounts and that, in any case, would have been, because of distance or patriotism, disinclined to doubt that events unfolded as Henty said they did" (191).

Ironically, the most interesting moment in the book (for this reader) occurs when Singh presents, without commenting on the fact, a reader critical of imperialist notions of race and character. In the fourth and most successful chapter, on the works of Enid Blyton, Singh initially argues that "Blyton is still widely read in Britain's former colonies, and the concept of ideal character she propounds still propagated" (200). Thus, "in importing her books, the countries of the Commonwealth are importing not just a commodity but also an ideology" (201). The evidence that Singh offers—references to Blyton "in a number of postcolonial literary works" (201)–is intriguing, particularly a passage in Rohinton Mistry's novel Family Matters in...