On the Function of Money, Spending, and Saving in Recent Canadian Children's Texts Dealing with Poverty and Homelessness

In this review essay, I explore the function of money and the spending patterns of orphaned or homeless child subjects in a group of recent Canadian children's texts. This project comes out of my work on homelessness as a research assistant for Mavis Reimer in the Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures. During this work, I became interested in the way that the discourse of homelessness itself perpetuates the problem of homelessness, and I began trying to think of ways to bring that discourse to attention that would not merely be a reinforcement of the discourse's legitimacy. Discussions of the homeless have largely distinguished between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, with only the former group seen as consistently deserving recipients of charity. American historian Kenneth Kusmer notes that policies toward the homeless are often "based on the assumption that the homeless are lazy and irresponsible" (vii), and one of the ways that the homeless are marked as irresponsible is the way that they spend their money. In particular, the homeless are often asked to show a remarkable acumen with money. While reading this group of books, what became clear to me, distressingly, is that children's literature that depicts homelessness is still caught up in identifying the deserving and undeserving poor by a distinction between industry and idleness, or what Andrew O'Malley, writing about eighteenth-century children's literature, calls the distinction between the investment and lottery mentalities of the poor (8).

Investment and Purging: Homelessness and Finance

In Martine Leavitt's award-winning children's novel Tom Finder, there are multiple examples of street-involved youth discussing, spending, acquiring, and saving money. In fact, two of the key themes of the book are Tom's attempt to save the $5,388 it would take to rent and design a billboard to advertise to his parents where he is (33), which causes him to save all his money and to try never to "spend money on food" (34), and his friend Jeans's attempt to save enough money to return home to his family in Jamaica (74). According to Mavis Reimer, however, while Leavitt's text deals extensively with money, it "attempts to evade the systematic calculus it has insisted upon" by creating gaps in the reader's knowledge of Tom's finances as the story progresses (20). In this way, for Reimer, Tom moves from being like a "conscientious banker" to being someone with "a plethora of numbers" that explain how he is using his money, but the reader is never given the "figures needed to complete a computation" (20). While Leavitt's text uses Tom's spending and saving habits to mark him as a subject desirous of a home, the text undermines this same logic, denying the reader the necessary numbers to monitor Tom's worth through his ability to save.

The spending habits of the poor are also used as an evaluative tool in adult texts. In Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's work of new journalism, Down to This, the author/narrator discusses another aspect of the economy of the streets: the spending and consumption habits of the adult citizens of Toronto's Tent City. What becomes clear in contrasting this work with Leavitt's is that Bishop-Stall implicitly evaluates the homeless in terms of binaries, as either responsible or irresponsible, whereas Leavitt is still within the discourse of the deserving and undeserving poor, but is trying to deconstruct that very discourse by...