The End of Empire? Colonial and Postcolonial Journeys in Children's Books

To read children's books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is to read texts produced within a pattern of imperial culture. Works of the past, such as Tom Brown's Schooldays, The Water-Babies, and The Secret Garden, readily disclose the imperial ideologies that inform them. Thus, Hughes's depiction of schoolboy life at Rugby is framed by imperialism, not merely because Rugby's régime constitutes a training-ground for imperial adventures, as in the case of Tom's great friend East, who leaves the school to join his regiment in India, but also because the conceptual world in which the boys are located comprises two parts: home and abroad, center and margins, as Hughes's depiction of the tribe of Browns demonstrates: "For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, [the Browns] have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands" (13). In The Water-Babies, Kingsley's mobilization of imperial ideologies is distinguished by its convergence of categories of race and class. When Tom climbs down the wrong chimney to arrive in Ellie's room and catches sight of himself in a mirror, he sees "a little ugly, black, ragged figure, with bleared eyes and grinning white teeth" (19). Here, the grime of the chimney, a signifier of Tom's lowly position within the domestic economy, is mapped onto the blackness of peoples colonized by British imperialism.¹ Conversely, Tom's ascent to the middle class is coterminous with his transformation into a white imperial man: "[he] can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth" (243-44). And in The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett represents India as a space marked by disorder, danger, and sickness, so that Mary's return to Britain restores her to physical and psychic health (see Cadden; Phillips).

In these texts, the lands and indigenous peoples "out there" in the far reaches of the British Empire are "Othered" in order to produce and sustain an idea fundamental to colonial discourse: that Europe (and, in these three texts, Britain) is the norm by which other countries and peoples are judged. Not that the process of "Othering" is an unproblematic one—indeed, colonial discourse is shot through with anxieties concerning what Peter Hulme calls "the classic colonial triangle, . . . the relationship between European, native and land" (1). Thus, for example, discourses of Christianity, some of which promote the equality of all people as children of God, frequently clash with colonial discourse, which promotes the superiority of white over colored peoples, and so validates the appropriation of land (see Bradford). Nevertheless, despite their moments of uncertainty and their occasional resistance to dominant ideologies, colonial texts are by and large organized through such binary oppositions as self and other, civilized and savage, white and black.

Postcolonial texts are marked by a more complex and contradictory set of discursive practices, some of which this discussion seeks to identify and analyze. Although the post of postcolonial is sometimes read merely as a temporal marker separating a period of colonial rule from the time after it, many theorists have pointed to the cultural and historical differences that are concealed by such a monolithic term, and to the fact that in countries with colonial histories (such as North America, South Africa, India, Australia), the consequences of colonial rule are played out in contemporary struggles over power and especially over land (McClintock 9-14; Dirlik 503-4; Ghandi 1-5). Accordingly, my use of the term postcolonial recognizes the shifting and uncertain significances that attend references to the imperial project.

A feature common in newly independent states after colonialism is what Leela Ghandi terms "postcolonial amnesia" (4), in which painful events of the colonial period are "forgotten." After Australia achieved nationhood in 1901, for example, there followed what the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner described in 1968 as "a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale" (25), an eloquent silence regarding Aborigines and the violence and dispossession that they endured following white settlement. Most Australian...