Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation by Ala Alryyes (review)

317 Ms. Perry treats the novel as I believe it was, a place to model human and social problems, and, as she says, in the ‘‘concerns obsessively repeated,’’ the anxieties and scenarios that ‘‘pervade’’ the fiction (emphasis mine), we find a culture working imaginatively and a little desperately to model possible solutions . As the state worked toward its ends, especially in the regulation of marriage and inheritance, the human costs for women rose. Incrementally, ‘‘the Great Disinheriting’’ assumes appalling detail. Paula R. Backscheider Auburn University ALA ALRYYES. Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation. Cambridge : Harvard, 2001. Pp. 226. $20 (paper ). Perhaps this is not quite as original a subject as Mr. Alryyes imagines. Attempts to trace the origins of the novel have often returned to the child—or at least the adolescent—and the nation. Recent books like Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism (Princeton, 1997) have shown how what she calls the ‘‘national novel’’ twists cultural nostalgia, educational theory, and imperial dreams together to form a narrative of nationhood. What distinguishes Mr. Alryyes’s book from others, however, is his exploration of dominant theories of education (Filmer, Locke, Rousseau) and their conceptions of the relationship of the child to political structures. Rather than look intensively at novels that trace the education of a child to become a ‘‘national subject,’’he spends most of his time tracing the differences between these theories of the political child. He stresses Locke’s insistence on the child’s dependent state, rather than exploring the way Locke outlines the transition to the age of reason and consent. In a similar way, he contrasts the lost ‘‘transparency’’ of childhood in Rousseau to the birth of social inequality and the necessity of a fatherly Lawgiver. The links between these theories and the novel, however, remain rather vague. In Chapters IV and V Mr. Alryyes looks at a number of well-known eighteenthand early nineteenth-century novels that focus on characters who leave home: Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Pamela , Tom Jones, Clarissa in the eighteenth century; Scott’s Waverley and Morton in the early nineteenth. (He also mentions Tristram Shandy, briefly, as a parody of the dominant plot line.) He claims that ‘‘the child’s story advertised a yearning for freedom that was an essential element of a central British national narrative.’’ But he fails to distinguish between children like Sophie Western and Clarissa who are escaping parental tyranny; children like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela Andrews who leave their families in part for economic reasons ; and children like Moll Flanders who have no existing family ties and are completely dependent on their own resources . In his effort to see all these novels as ‘‘national narratives,’’ he attempts to force them into one paradigmatic template that fits some much better than others . (I also question his definition of ‘‘the child’’ as someone who has not yet become politically independent; in spite of his defensive protests, it would seem to me much more convincing, if perhaps anachronistic, to discuss the protagonists mentioned above as ‘‘adolescents.’’) Though he places these novels in an unfamiliar context—the context of political theories about the child—his conclusions seem rather sketchy and arbitrary. 318 Mr. Alryyes tries to trace a narrative of ‘‘the rise of the novel’’ without mentioning recent work on the subject by scholars like Michael McKeon and Margaret Anne Doody. He seems unfamiliar with many recent discussions of the novels he treats—and with many British novels of the period, some by women, that might actually have supported his argument better than the ones he’s chosen. (Most of the scholarship on the novel he mentions dates from the 1980s or earlier.) He also sometimes seems slow to acknowledge his sources; for example, he talks about ‘‘transparency’’ in Rousseau frequently before he ever mentions Starobinski . Harvard University Press has not served the author well. There is no bibliography , a trend I lament. And there are far too many troubling errors and inconsistencies . The treatment of quotations from the French seems completely random , sometimes translated (in a footnote or in the text itself), sometimes not. The Index is slapdash at best: neither Goethe nor Austen nor Stendhal is...