Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation (review)

In his contribution to the "rise of the novel" debate, Alryyes attempts to supplement Watt's claim that the eighteenth-century novel narrates "the new middle-class experience" by asserting that it "is also fundamentally linked to the experience of homeless children" (25). The errant child becomes, for Alryyes, an almost archetypal figure in the realistic novel at the same time as the child emerges as the site on which the changing nature of political citizenship and the nation is being debated. The first half of Alryyes's book, then, turns to Locke and Rousseau to discern how the child's relationship to the family, and especially to the father, came to allegorize the modern nation and its subjects.

Alryyes's reading of the relevant political philosophy pays particular attention to "the serious challenge to the contractarian" posed by children, whose inescapable dependence bars them from the status of "free and equal individuals" on which most social contract theory is predicated (30). Locke, Alryyes asserts, fails to overcome this problem, and winds up with a "jaundiced view of childhood" (36). His famous notion of the tabula rasa is, Alryyes claims, evidence of this, and he reads this formulation of the child's mind to mean that "the child was dead as the signifier that he/she had been in the old [absolutist and patriarchal] cosmological system, and not yet born as a signifier in the new ontology, first fully expressed by Rousseau" (38). To maintain this reading of the Lockean child, Alryyes is obliged, as he readily admits, largely to ignore the critically important Some Thoughts Concerning Education; he sees this later pedagogical treatise as contradicting Locke's earlier discussion of childhood dependency and the state of nature in the Two Treatises of Government.

This move seems to me to gloss a potentially important distinction between the practical advice Some Thoughts provides for shaping the political subjects of the future and the problem the child poses to Locke's theory of government and the development of the commonwealth. The contradiction that Alryyes perceives needs to be more fully articulated, I think, especially given that Some Thoughts had such a tremendous influence not only on how the child was to be represented in the eighteenth century, but also on how the state of childhood was conceived in the medical, pedagogical, and imaginative writing of the period. As well, Alryyes seems a little unfair to Locke; the tabula rasa could be seen as less jaundiced than the doctrine of original sin it helped to supplant. At the very least it was a double-edged metaphor, positing absence as not just weakness but as infinite potential as well.

Where Locke fails to resolve the challenge mentioned above, Rousseau succeeds, according to Alryyes, by arguing against the naturalness and originalness of the human family, and, therefore, against the inherency of childhood dependence: "His move potentially liberates not only children but all those dependent persons, like servants and apprentices, who were traditionally considered in the position of children" (78). While Alryyes's reading of Rousseau (not just Émile, but The Social Contract, and Of Inequality) is highly sophisticated and attentive to the author's complex nuances, this seems a remarkable proposition. Some evidence of this potential in the lived experience of children and other dependents would seem necessary here. Even if Alryyes is concerned principally with the child as a theoretical category and with representations of the child, he is still making such strong claims about Rousseau's social and cultural influence that the historical record should be more closely consulted. A lack of historical context seems to me to be one of the book's shortcomings. What history of the family and of childhood Alryyes does present could stand some updating. He relies heavily, for example, on Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800, which, while still useful, has been succeeded...