The Outside Child, In and Out of the Book (review)

Christine Wilkie-Stibbs’s The Outside Child In and Out of the Book provides a timely and valuable addition to Routledge’s series, Children’s Literature and Culture. It is timely because it focuses on children of fiction, or “‘in-book’ representations of outsider children and young adults,” who inhabit the margins and borderlands as a result of contemporary spatial, physical, political, and psychological circumstance (xiii). It is valuable because of the varied sources from which she draws, including Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Genette Girard, Michel Foucault, and others who have helped scholars think of children’s literature in interesting and productive ways. The analysis further includes media reports and government documents that illustrate her point. Wilkie-Stibbs uses the reports and documents as “freestanding exemplars of ‘out-book’ outsider children and young adults” (xiii). For example, when Wilkie-Stibbs analyzes the role of foster care in Sharon Creech’s Ruby Holler in chapter 5, she includes a BBC report on how the foster care system often fails the children it should help. These sobering additions serve as a bridge between the children of fiction and children of the world. The text is additionally timely and valuable because Wilkie-Stibbs’s choice of novels is multinational. The novels and biographies she includes either take place in countries such as Sarajevo, Kabul, Iraq, Australia, Germany, South Africa, and the United States, or they are written by authors from different countries. Certainly this is an important consideration because the global and political climate contributes to, and is often responsible for, their status as “outsider” children. Equally important, she includes a variety of genres, including fiction, memoir, and biographical fiction. This type of inclusiveness results in a rich, layered, and textured analysis.

The first chapter, “Outsider,” serves as a foundation that characterizes the remaining five chapters: “Displaced,” “Erased,” “Abject,” “Unattached,” and “Colonized.” That is, the conditions described in chapters 2 through 6 contribute to physical and psychic dislocation and marginalization of children inside and outside of the book as described in the first chapter. As such, readers will likely identify numerous intersections among the chapters, for children who have been displaced because they seek asylum, are war refugees, or have immigrated as described in chapter 2 (“Displaced”), for instance, might also be unattached, and they will at some point be outsiders. However, these intersections are necessary, for they demonstrate the fluidity of the distinctions she uses.

While all of the chapters in some way address embodiment, chapter 3, “Erased,” provides analyses of those who have difficulties negotiating normative standards—those who are disfigured, who have difficulty communicating, who are psychologically unstable, or who fail to perform expected gendered behaviors. These are the bodies that become socially invisible, that serve as sometimes disturbing reminders that the body and mind are always incomplete and fragile. In Wilkie-Stibbs’s words, this chapter focuses on how characters “struggle for expression, representation, recognition, and understanding, and to materialize” (50). It is simultaneously how these representations disrupt the binaries in order to make them unstable. Wilkie-Stibbs’s analysis dislodges binaries and makes the texts and customary binaries susceptible to analysis.

Abjection, the subject of chapter 4, and erasure or invisibility, the subject of chapter 3, are closely related. Many cultures systematically expel or abject those who fail to meet the norms associated with that culture. They are relegated to the margins, a convenient location for invisibility. While Wilkie-Stibbs draws from Kristeva and others in helpful ways throughout the entire text, her application of Kristevan theories of abjection is particularly significant because of the ambiguous nature of the outsider as abject and as both subject and object. It is this very ambiguity that leads to ambivalence by the culture that defines normative parameters in that, according to Wilkie-Stibbs, “it is because these child figures embody ambivalence, marked out as difference, that they are defined as intolerable by the centrist binary framework of societal classification” (81; emphasis...