Language and Control in Children's Literature (review)

To be involved with the professional study of literature is to accept the premise that language has specific effects on human beings. The most abstruse aesthetic theories postulate an emotive effect to certain linguistic constructions so that one particular combinations of sounds and images is beautiful, another grotesque. Even deconstruction, popularly if inaccurately simplified as a critical effort to strip language of the possibility of meaning, concerns itself with the ways in which language produces effects other than those intended by the writer.

For those interested in ideological structures, language presents itself as a tool by which competing visions of social structure attempt to establish themselves. In particular, control of language may translate into control of behaviors; the party that establishes its ideology in the discourse of everyday life has already won more than half its battle. To understand how language is deployed in the service of a particular ideology is essential if one is to escape from that ideology.

This, in essence, is the task that Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjœr set themselves in this frequently fascinating but flawed study. Linguists by training, their goal is to explore “the reality-creating potential of language” (ix) in children’s books from the Victorian age to the present, and in particular, to reveal “the linguistic means writers employ in their efforts to support, undermine or simply comment on particular relationships of domination, including those which obtain between children and their adult mentors” (46). To that end, they employ a variety of linguistic tools.

One of the chief tools is “collocation,” the identification of language and syntactic structures that commonly surround uses of particular words or phrases associated with a social construct such as family, gender, or race. These patterns of collocation can demonstrate the extent to which these constructs are upheld or critiqued, normalized or differentiated, etc. Their analysis offers moments of illumination—for instance, they demonstrate that Mary Lennox’s development in The Secret Garden is reflected in the types of syntactic roles she plays throughout the book. Early on, she is associated with passive syntactic structures, more frequently acted upon or referred to than speaking or acting directly (79–80). This type of analysis thus provides support for the less quantifiable impressions that readers have had that Mary becomes a more attractive and more active personality as the story proceeds.

The development of the authors’ linguistic model is elaborated with occasionally eye-glazing detail, but this heavy dose of linguistic terms seems necessary to provide the groundwork for later argument; by using fairly well-known test cases (The Railway Children, The Borrowers, and The Secret Garden are primary exemplars, along with the major works of Roald Dahl), they nicely illustrate how the method can be used to support textual interpretations. At times, some of the linguistic analysis seems to belabor the obvious, but it is nonetheless somewhat comforting to note that one can objectify and quantify essentially subjective impressions about these texts. However, Knowles and Malmkjœr apply this methodology only sporadically and sometimes comment on the relation between ideology and literature in ways that don’t seem to be supported by the kind of linguistic analysis they develop so painstakingly.

Using a different linguistic methodology to examine literary fairy tales, they are able to show ideological differences between George MacDonald, whose tales support a hierarchical social order, both through explicit admonitions (didacticism) and through the associations of characters’ morality with a hierarchy, and less hierarchical ideologies in Oscar Wilde’s and E. Nesbit’s tales, and to provide a linguistic vision of Roald Dahl’s heavily subversive tales. Again, the ideological points being made are not necessarily new; the distinction of Knowles and Malmkjœr’s study is in the method used to expose the ideology.

Their purpose, as they state several times, is to examine the role of ideology and control in children’s literature generally rather than to analyze specific texts. Most of the illumination afforded by this study, however...