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  • Kipling's Children's Literature: Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood
  • Judith Plotz (bio)
Kipling's Children's Literature: Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood. By Sue Walsh. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010.

Like Kipling's "Two-Sided Man" offering thanks "to Allah Who gave me two/Separate sides to my head," Sue Walsh's book, as its title suggests, has a double consciousness and a double purpose. Walsh offers a much-needed series of stimulating and energizing readings of Kipling's work for children, especially of the Just So Stories. At the same time, and more globally, she attempts to deconstruct the current practice of children's literature criticism in order [End Page 517] to purge it of what she deems certain crippling delusions about the nature of language and childhood.

Despite the continuing and growing interest in Kipling, there is still no overarching study of his principal writings for children. In her introduction, Walsh connects this neglect to a pervasive critical condescension, an assumption that the label "children's literature" means a simplicity and transparency below the notice or need for critical inquiry. My hunch, however, is that Kipling's works for children, far from being pellucid, are on the contrary both dense and slippery, requiring a myriad of approaches. Kipling's children's writings are multigenre (verse, prose, fable, self-illustrated tale, novels), textually marked sometimes for age-specific and sometimes for age-indeterminate readers, and historically received by many different international audiences. These children's texts are not merely multinational in subject matter (heavily Indian and British) and provenance (heavily American), but the texts have been "stolen" (to steal Orwell's word) for many purposes by educators, scoutmasters, polemicists, and propagandists of several nations, especially of the former Soviet Union and the contemporary US. To add to Kipling's complexity, his works fit uneasily into the gendered categories of late nineteenth-century children's fiction, being both insistently macho and residually girlish (see, for example, "Fairy Kist," Kipling's tribute to Ewing). Furthermore, despite their high aesthetic finish and fixity, as befits literary artifacts emerging from the Aesthetic Movement of the 1890s, the works invite a biographical decoding.

Kipling, so popular and so tricky, thus offers good pickings for a critic such as Sue Walsh who is interested in problematizing the practice of children's literature criticism. On the whole, she doesn't think much of it. Walsh is a thoroughgoing skeptic about the current practice of such criticism, largely hewing to the line of argument set out by her University of Reading colleague Karin Lesnik-Oberstein and, especially, by Jacqueline Rose. Though Walsh does not expressly assert "the impossibility of children's literature criticism" (indeed, her book models such possibility), she does find almost all actually existing criticism—as embodied in the work of about sixty critics who have written on Kipling over the past fifty years—unsatisfactory. According to Walsh, too much stubbornly humanist naïveté and realist refusal to recognize that there is nothing outside the text vitiate the work even of the field's most admired scholars, critics, and theorists. Too many critics, she maintains, still assume that the language of children's literature is transparent, unmediated, distinctively sensuous, distinctively playful, and reflective of a "real" world; that the identity of the child in the book and out of the book is single, stable, and distinct from that of the adult; and that childhood is a literal historical fact rather than a social construction. Too many critics still assume some connection between the childhood depicted in children's literature and so-called real life.

At times, Walsh seems to be setting up a straw man, since the dominant [End Page 518] method in contemporary criticism is a nuanced constructivism. But Walsh is a strict constructionist for whom all referential rather than constitutive use of language is an absurdity. Even though almost every major theory of art since Aristotle has depended on the interplay of the mimetic and the harmonic, the ideal and the real, the constitutive and the reflective, Walsh makes an absolutist argument against the referential decoding of language. Thus it is illegitimate for the reader of Hardy to assume...

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