‘Ideology and Children's Books’ pages 359-71 in Handbook of Research on Children's

and Young Adult Literature, Edited by Shelby Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso,
Christine Jenkins. New York: Routledge, 2011

25
Ideology and Children's Books
Robyn McCallum and John Stephens
Macquarie University

No matter how simplistic it may appear, no book is innocent of ideological implications. Whether a text seeks
to naturalize the belief systems of a culture or challenge them, it always places an ideological imposition on
its readers, since ideology inheres in the very language and images from which it is made. Seeking to expose
the implicit and explicit ideologies communicated through children's texts has become the primary work of
many of us who work with the genre, and we are indebted to the pioneering work of John Stephens and Robyn
McCallum for helping us frame those investigations. Here John and Robyn look at current frameworks for
exploring questions of ideology. Their arguments are reinforced by M. T. Anderson's brilliant rendering of
the questions faced by authors as they write in, around, through, in spite of, and sometimes in defense of their
own conscious and unconscious ideological positions.

Ideology emerged as a concern of children's literature
criticism during the late 1970s, as discourses interrogating
social assumptions about gender, race, and class began to
impact upon the production and reception of children's
literature. The first major study was Bob Dixon's (1977)
Catching Them Young, which set out to examine "the
ideas, attitudes and opinions which authors convey to
children through novels and stories" and "the ways in
which this is done" (Vol. I., p. xiii). A decade later, Peter
Hollindale (1988) argued that analysis needed to move
beyond a focus on explicit negative content to analyze the
unaddressed assumptions of texts and the propensity for
ideology to inhere in language itself. Underpinning these
approaches themselves was a Marxian assumption (largely
mediated through the works of Louis Althusser 119711)
that ideology was invariably negative in impact. That this
is a limited perspective in relation to children's literature
was argued from a critical discourse studies approach
by John Stephens (1992), who pointed out that there
cannot be a narrative without an ideology: "Ideology is
formulated in and by language, meanings within language
are socially determined, and narratives are constructed out
of language" (p. 8). Whether textual ideology is negative,
positive, or more or less neutral will thus be determined
by the ideological positioning of a text within culture.
Our purpose in this chapter is to explore such positionings
from the perspective ofthe critical discourse studies which
have developed over the past two decades, as seen, for
example, in Teun Van Dijk's (2001) evolving project on
discourse and ideology.

359
ROBYN MCCALLUM AND JOHN STEPHENS
Our grounding assumption, theno is that all aspects of
textual discourse, from story outcomes to the expressive
forms of language, are informed and shaped by ideology,
understanding ideology in its neutral meaning of a system
of beliefs which a society shares and uses to make sense
of the world and which are therefore immanent in the texts
produced by that society. Ideologies may be more or less
visible in texts produced for children, which seldom re-
produce overt ideology as a thematized component of text,
but which will reflect two functions of ideology. The first
of these is the social function of defining and sustaining
group values (perceptible textually in an assumption that
writer and implied reader share a common understand-
ing of value), and the second is the cognitive function
of supplying a meaningful organization of the social at-
titudes and relationships which constitute narrative plots.
As Van Dijk (2001) argues, ideologies can be adjudged
desirable or undesirable depending on the consequences
of the social practices based on them. Thus both racism
and antiracism are ideologies. Ideologies may thus serve
to establish or maintain social dominance, as well as to
organize dissidence and opposition.
While ideology may carry negative connotations, es-
pecially when applied to the social practices of an "other"
society, the sense in which we use it here encompasses the
social and cognitive functions that make social life possible.
Thus for a child to pafiicipate in society and achieve some
measure of personal agency within its forms or structures,
he or she must learn to understand and negotiate the various
signifying codes used by society to order itself. The princi-
pal code is language, since language is the most common
form of social communication, and the particular applica-
tion of language that concerns us here is the imagining and
recording of stories.
The creation and telling of stories-what we will refer
to as narrative discourse-is a particular use of language
through which a society expresses and imparts its curtent
values and attitudes, and this happens regardless of autho-
rial intention. A narrative may deal with speciflc social
problems as aspects of story or theme and express a more
or less overt attitude towards the implications of those prob-
lems, or, if it does not have any obvious exemplary intent,
it will express an implicit ideology, usually in the form of
assumed social structures and habits ofthought. Ideologies
can thus function most powerfully in books which repro-
duce beliefs and assumptions of which authors and readers
are largely unaware. Such texts render ideology invisible
and hence invest implicit ideological positions with legiti-
macy by naturalizingthem. In other words, a book which
seems to a reader to be apparently ideology-free willbe
a book closely aligned to that reader's own unconscious
assumptions, and the identification of such ideologies will
often require sophisticated reading of the text's language
and narrative discourse. Many books are ideological in both
senses referred to here, since a conscious attempt to bring
about changg in attitude will be grounded in any number
360
of contingent presuppositions about the nature of the self,
of society, and of ways of being and knowing.
Picture books, for example, often engage in overt at-
titude formation through their presuppositions, and this
may be quite evident in information books for young
readers, which are characteristically underpinned by posi-
tive ideologies. Janet Halfmann's (2006) AUiqator at Saw
Grass Road and Isabella Hatkoff, Craig Hatkoff, and Paula
Kahumbu's (2006) Owen and Mzee illusffate something of
the range of possibilities. In each, paratextual material sup-
plies additional facts and figures, so readers are effectively
assured that information given is authoritative. Published
in an environmental series about overlaps in human and
animal habitations, Alligator at Saw Grass Road delivers
a factual account of how an alligator lays her eggs and
cares for her young. The focus on mothering implicitly
dismantles the common human assumption that alliga-
tors are monstrous-the most pejorative remark offered
is that'Alligator is a sneaky hunter" (n.p.), where snealq
does little to evoke associations of violence or menace.
An interesting sub-story relating how a red-bellied turtle
surreptitiously deposits her own eggs in the alligator's nest
functions as a metonym for the text's assumption that the
alligator interacts symbiotically with the environment (see
Figure 25.1). Ideologically, then, the discourse avoids the
anthropocentrism that pervades most environmental books
for children (see Bradford, Mallan, Stephens, & McCal-
lum, 2008), and depicts, without human value judgments,
a part of the natural world fulfilling its own cycles'
A more overtly ideological narrative is the retelling of
the true story, in Owen and Mzee (Hatkoff et al., 2006),
of the unlikely affection between an ancient giantAldabra
tortoise and an orphaned baby hippopotamus. Written in
the colloquial register of a factual account, the discourse
is grounded in a form of analogical modelling whereby
represented action is brought into conformity with an
anthropocentric norm. Thus the Scholastic Study Guide
for the book, Cultivating Resiliency (Mandel, Mullett,
Brown, & Cloitre, 2006), explicitly articulates an ideol-
ogy which, we suggest, replicates the social assumptions
which self-consciously informed the writing of the book.
These assumptions become quite visible as the book
comes to a close:
Owen [the hippopotamus] suffered a Sreat loss. But with
the help of many caring people, and through his own ex-
traordinary resilience, Owen has begun a new, happy life.
Most remarkable is the role that Mzee has played. We'll
never know for sure whether Owen sees Mzee as a mother,
a father, or a very good friend. But it really doesn't matter.
What matters is that Owen isn't alone-and neither is Mzee.
(Hatkoff et al., 2006, n.p.)
This schema for a happy existence is, needless to say,
entirely unexceptionable, and that in turn will erase the
fact that it is profoundly ideological. The best society
embraces altruism and supports those in need, and this
action exists as a structure deeper than its everyday mani-

festations (mother, father, friend). Community existence
is preferable to solitary existence. Mandel et al. (2006)
assume that the function of a book such as Owen and Mzee
is to offer children a model of values and behaviors which
will contribute to the development of individual identity.
Hence they value resilience and link it to such qualities as
intelligence, competence, independence, self-control, and
a high level of self-esteem. The friendship between tortoise
and hippo is said to exemplify "the importance of caring
for others who may not be similar to ourselves" (p. 3) and
the importance of accepting "the natural diversity of our
world" (p. 5). In interpreting the book in this way, Mandel
et al. reproduce abasic function of children's literature-to
socialize its audience by presenting desirable models of
human personality, human behavior, interpersonal rela-
tionships, social organization, and ways of being in the
world. As Owen and Mzee and its interpretation indicate,
such desirable models are always produced by the ideolo-
gies that inform cultural practice.
Ideology can also become overt in an information book
if it seems to be advocating a practice which is not gener-
ally assumed to be a social norm.'lhus AndTango Makes
Three (Richardson & Pamell,2005), based on an actual
event, attracted controversy because it depicts gay adop-
tion in a positive way. Set in NewYork's CentralParkZoo,
the book recounts the story of two male penguins, Roy
and Silo, who bond as a couple, build a nest, and are given
an egg to hatch. They do this successfully, and raise the
chick, subsequently named Tango. The narrative strategy
of And Tango Makes Three is to evoke the assumptions
that famil,ies are a natural occurrence and that there are
"families of all kinds" (n.p.). The desire evinced by Roy
IDEOLOGY AND CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Credit : Excerpt from Janet
Halfinann and Lori Anzalone,
"Alligator at Sawgrass Road,"
page 21. Copyright @ 2006
Trudy Corporation and the
S miths onian I ns tituti o n,
Washington, DC 20560.
Reproduced with permission of
Trudy Corporation, Norwalk,
Connecticut.
and Silo to be parents (they share an attempt to hatch a
stone) and the existence of "an egg that needed to be cared
for" (n.p.) come together when the egg is placed in Roy and
Silo's nest. Their parenting of Tango follows the schema
for usual penguin parenting practices, and when all three
snuggle together in the nest at night they are embraced
by a regular family schema: they are "like all the other
penguins in the penguin house, and all the other animals
in the zoo, and all the families in the big city around them"
(n.p.). The logic of the story-that a gay couple parent in
the same way as a heterosexual couple-is thus grounded
on an everyday ideological premise about parents in ideal
families. To make its argument for gay parenting, the text
evokes the nuclear family as core social ideology and uses
it to frame the account of this particular family. In doing
this, it extends the nuclear family schema to include the
possibility of "two daddies" (n.p.), and hence argues for
a transformed ideology.
The Textual Presences of Ideology
While ideologies are textually pervasive, they are pres-
ent in different ways. As evidencedby Owen and Mzee
(Hatkoff et a1.,2006), an ideological position may be
topicalized: that is, it may appear as an overt or explicit
element in the text, expressing the writer's social, politi-
cal, or moral beliefs. Because children's literature is per-
sistently concerned with social issues and values, books
may openly advocate attitudes or positions as desirable
for readers to espouse. This possibility is perhaps most
evident in books which deal thematically with gender or
race. Such advocacy is more likely to be covert, however,
361
ROBYN MCCALLUM AND JOHN STEPHENS
in the sense that it is embedded in a narrative which has a
primary focus on events and characters. But since fictive
actions are broadly isomorphic with actions in the actual
world of readers, and the majority of narratives are built
upon the principle that the main character(s) will develop
by learning something about the world and the place of
the self in it, ideologies are never very far away. As the
representation of ideologies becomes less apparent, the
more desirable it becomes for readers to understand the
textual processes that embed ideology within fiction, if
reading is to be a critical process. The implicit presence
of a writer's assumptions in a text arguably has a more
powerful impact in so far as such assumptions may consist
of values taken for granted in the society that produces
and consumes the text, including children. The assumption
in Owen and Mzee that no creature should be alone is an
example of such a value.
On a wide scale, meaning is influenced by the larger
contexts of text and culture within which particular ut-
terances acquire meaning. Ultimately, however, ideology
is inherent within linguistic and visual semiotic systems
(sentence syntax, lexical selection, topicalization or im-
plicitness, conversational dynamics, and so on; physical
appearance, dress codes, placement within scene and in
relation to other figures, and so on). Particular utterances
are thus affected by the elements which join them together
into larger structures. These coherencies are of interest at
two levels: first, at the level of more specifically linguistic
features, such as the grammatical and other ties which
combine sentences together into larger units; and second,
at the level of elements often considered to be the domain
of a more "literary" purpose-type of narrator, the implied
reader who is constructed by the text, point of view, allu-
sion and theme, for example-but which are inextricably
bound up with discourse in some more precisely linguistic
application. This second element is probably more readily
identified by readers.
Ideology operates within all three components of a
narrative: the discourse (the linguistic and narrative struc-
tures); the story (characters and the actions they perform),
which is ascertained by an act of primary reading, or read-
ing for "the sense"; and the significance (organization of
social attitudes and values), which is derived by secondary
reading from the flrst two. While readers may attribute
quite different significances to a text according to their
already held social attitudes and values-and for scholars
this will be influenced by the kind of literary criticism they
practice-such signifi cance, unless entirely procrustean,
emerges as a dialogue between the already-held subject
position of a reader and the subject position(s) offered by
the text.
Ideology and Subject Position
The concept of subject positions implied within texts
is of crucial importance for reading and especially for
362
examining a text's possible ideological impact, because
what such positions inevitably seek is reader alignment
with or against the social attitudes and relationships that
constitute the narrative. Andrea SchwenkeWyile's (1999,
2003) accounts of three types of narration in children's
literature chart a very useful way into a central aspect
of subject position, especially when it is combined with
specific elements of discourse. The crux is always how
a narrator's telling of a story is related to a character's
perceptions as well as a reader's understanding. Wyile
argues that in immediate-engaging first-person narration,
in which the time of narration is close to or coincident
with events narrated, and in which the narrator is also
the focalizer, readers align closely with the subjective
experience of narrator-protagonists. It follows, then, that
readers will be apt to align with the subject position, and
hence social attitudes, occupied by such a protagonist. An
immediate-engaging third-person narration which is heav-
ily character-focalized produces much the same effect. In
Wyile's second type, distant-engaging nanation, in which
the time of narration is considerably later than the time of
the events, the narrating self can judge the narrated self
from the perspective of experience. The subject position
proffered is thus principally aligned with the narrating
character, although character focalization will produce
alignment with the narrated character. This more dialogic
structure builds a position apt to offer a more retrospective
reflection on social attitudes.
Wyile defined her types principally in relation to first-
person narration, and so did little with her third category,
distancing narration, which she concluded was o'not
prevalent in children's literature" and "more suited to
adult narratives, particularly stories about childhood that
incorporate the adult narrator's reflections" (p. 190). Third-
person narration in children's fiction has also been distant-
engaging since heavy character-focalization emerged as
the predominant practice during the 1960s, but distancing
narration is still common: It is a narrative with a non-
identified narrator, a predominance of narrator focalization
over character focalization, a tendency to represent
conversation as tagged direct speech rather than in free
or indirect forms, and, recently, inclusion of metafictive
elements. Major authors who use the form extensively are
Diana Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett, Philip Reeve, Neil
Gaiman, and Gregory Maguire, for example.
The three types ofnarration are not exclusive, however,
and a novel may employ more than one. DavidAlmond's
(2008) The Savage uses all three. Reader alignment with
characters in distancing narration is strong but intermittent,
so the subject positions available to readers entail a greater
awareness of how stories are imagined and narrated in
relation to society's values and attitudes. In this way, certain
objectives and outcomes of the story are assumed to be com-
monsensically natural and desirable-for example, it is only
to be expected that the main character of Gaiman's (2008)
The Graveyard Book, a child raised from infancy by ghosts

in a graveyard, will grow up and find his place in the world
of the living. His life-course is afantastic version of anormal
social expectation and, as a culturally desirable outcome,
it is not recognized as an element of social ideology but is
rather presupposed and not textually asserted.
Ideology and Imagination
The ideology implicit in quite simple texts, usually in the
form of assumed social structures and habits of thought,
can be a powerful vehicle for affirming that "this is the way
things are." How a text begins is apt to involve an ideologi-
cal orientation within the expected narrative orientation, as
the following picture book beginning demonstrates:
You think ir's easy being the tooth fairy? Well, it's not. lt
takes skilll lt takes daring! Thank goodness I am here to
do the job.
Let's get one thing straiSht, OK?
I never wear pink flouncing skirts or twinkling glass slip-
pers! That's Cinderella. She does a lot of sitting around the
castle looking PrettY.
Boring!
Me, l'm an action kind of gal.
I live {or danger!
For suspense! (Bell-Rehwoldt,2OO7, n. p-)
There are numerous picture books about the Tooth
Fairy in the English-speaking world, each book striv-
ing for a new angle, which it defines by its linguistic
structure, its intertextual relations, and a counterpoint-
ing of inclusionary and exclusionary ideologies. This
book is immediately grounded in a contrast of types of
femininity (the "action kind of gal" opposed to the pas-
sive femininity of "pink flouncing skirts"), which are
brought into combination with an assumption that work
must be valued.
It is common for small children in the English-speaking
world to believe that their first teeth, as they fall out, can
be left at night (usually under a corner of the child's pil-
low, or in a glass of water) for the Tooth Fairy to collect'
The Tooth Fairy is an anthropomorphic personification of
indeterminate form, so her appearance in picture books
is commonly drawn from conventional, often kitsch,
fairy images or traditional representations of angels. In
contrast to such images, Bell-Rehwoldt and illustrator
Slonim (2001) have produced a feisty modern girl who is
a version of a mountain climber, an inventive, active girl
devoid of mystery. Illustrations of tooth fairies don't strive
to enhance a numinous imaginative engagement with a
childhood imaginary being, but function ratherto make the
tooth fairy a familiar and benign figure, not someone small
children would feel worried about if she crept into their
bedrooms while they were sleeping. Through such illustra-
tions, the fantastic is incorporated into the everyday world,
and any propensity for the tooth fairy to be a supernatural
or numinous being from the realm of mythopoeic thought
is erased. Instead, a more mundane, practical message in
IDEOLOGY AND CHILDREN'S BOOKS
these books is that you should clean your teeth carefully,
and those perfect teeth will be displayed triumphantly in
the Tooth Fairy's palace.
A book such as You Thiruk lt's Easy Being the Tboth
Fairy? isplayful and imaginative, but confines the fantastic
imaginary to versions of the everyday. The Tooth Fairy
determines how to reach the relevant bedroom by using
"my Spy-o-Binoculars (patent pending) to scope out your
house" (n.p.).A mystery is thereby reduced to a legalism
"(patent pending)" and a piece of contemporary slang
("scope out"), with the consequence that eaily childhood
speculation and imagination is contained by means of
a strong ideological assumption about what childhood
should be.
In her anthropological study ofthe Tooth Fairy, Santa
Claus, and the Easter Bunny within social practice in
America, Cindy Dell Clark (1995) argues that belief in
these immaterial beings has two important functions. First,
it enables children to participate actively in culture, shap-
ing cultural practices rather than being simply acculturated
by them. Clark's second point is that mythopoeic thinking
and experience are made possible when disbelief is cogni-
tively suspended while trust and creative involvement are
engaged. It is then possible for a child to go on, when literal
belief has passed, to grasp the distinction between concrete
symbols and the referential, transcendent meaning beyond
those symbols. Clark's argument finds support in ideas
about the imagination proposed by Susanne Langer (1956)
and explored in fictive form by Gregory Maguire (2007)
in What-the-Dickens. The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy.
Langer (1956) argues that imagination enables a symbolic
or conceptual rendering of experience that finds expres-
sion in the formation and elaboration of images, grounds
language, and furnishes the material for dreaming, myth,
ritual, narrative, and the arts.
A rejection of mythopoeic thinking by some characters
in What-the-Dickens Maguire (2001) comes specifically
from religious fundamentalism, which is made an issue
early in the frame narrative. During an extreme weather
event, which the discoursal mode suggests is part of
an end-of-the-world scenario, three children are left in
the care of Gage, a 2l-year-old distant relative, while
their parents go in search of medication for the mother's
diabetes. To help survive a dark and stormy night, Gage
tells the story of What-the-Dickens, a Tooth Fairy (here a
skibb e re e ; plural, skibbereen). Zeke, the eldest child, has
internalized hostility to any narrative that is other than
factual or Biblical, so one strand in the frame story is
his development of an interest in mythopoeia' His sister,
Dinah, is an imaginative child, however.
"No, Santa Claus has no website staffed by underground
Nordic trolls. No, there is no flight school for the training
of apprentice reindeer. No to Santa Claus, period," her
mother always said. "Dinah, honey, don't let your imagina-
tion run away with you." Exasperatedly "Covern yourself!"
(pp. 5-6)
363
ROBYN MCCALLUMAND JOHN STEPHENS
The story Gage tells about the orphan tooth fairy What-
the-Dickens functions in a thematic dialogue with the
frame story (it is in part about resilience and survival),
and this frame and embedded story structure demands
imaginative engagement. The embedded story is a Bil-
dungsroman in which What-the-Dickens develops quickly
from an incompetent cinder lad to a strong, inventive,
independent subjectivity. Through this development the
narrative traces the evolution from concrete symbols to
the referential, transcendent meaning beyond those sym-
bols, as What-the-Dickens's struggle with the meaning
of existence and the nature of cathexis leads him to the
most valued quality in children's literature: altruism. At
the same time, the novel's abundant and extremely playful
intertextuality (which Maguire draws attention to in a list
of acknowledgements) involves readers in a process of
constant recognition and discovery and invites an active
play of imagination. What-the-Dickens actively engages
in arguments about cultural ideology that have gone on for
several decades, and affirms that a function of literature
is to express the imaginative processes that govern how
lived experience is remembered and retold in language and
narrative, and thence shapes our understanding ofhuman
actions and their significances.
Intersubjective Relationships, Gender, and
Agency
A strong ideological effect can be derived from an inter-
play between creative imagination and the stereotypic
discourses of everyday life, as is signalled by the opening
page of David Almond's (2008) The Savage, narrated by
a young boy, Blue Baker:
You won't believe this but it's true. I wrote a story called
"The Savage" about a savage kid that lived under the ruined
chapel in Burgess Woods, and the kid came to life in the
real world.
I wrote it soon after my dad died. There was a counsellor
at school called Mrs Molloy, that kept taking me out of les-
sons and telling me to write my thoughts and feelings down.
She said she wanted me to explore my grief, and "start to
move forward." I did try for a while, but it just seemed stupid,
and it even made me feel worse, so one day I ripped up
all that stuff about myself, got an old notebook and started
scribbling "The Savage." Here's the first bit of it, and I know
the spelling isn't brilliant, but I was younger then.
There was a wild kid living in Burgess Woods, I wrote.
(P'z)
The ideology of the text inheres in framing situation,
represented patterns of behaviour, interactions between
characters, linguistic discourses, and the interpersonal
relationship with implied readers. This beginning flags
several themes-coping with loss and grief, growing
up and developmental narratives, dealing with school
authorities, creativity, the power of story-and frames
these through the counterpointing of the narrator's own
364
life situation and a feral child narrative. Almond's Savage
(2008) conforms closely to what Kenneth Kidd (2004)
has identified as a symbolic discourse about human and
cultural development and the path to manhood, which,
in mapping a process of socialization onto a mode of
being that is marginal, alien, or subversive to the adult
social order, has mostly been complicit with a variety of
social institutions in producing the middle-class, White
masculine subject. Blue-fatherless, grieving, bullied at
school, struggling to express himself-.--creates a feral child
as an alter ego. When his story of the Savage continues,
"He had no famly and he had no pals and he didn't know
where he come from and he culdn't talk...," (p. 8) Blue is
delineating a pattem of behavior which also corresponds
to his own self-image. The social ideology against which
this pattern emerges is the assumption that whatever lacks
agency cannot be desired; thus Blue's attainment of a posi-
tively gendered subjectivity will depend on the possibility
of attributing agency to that subjectivity.
The failed interaction with Mrs. Molloy will later con-
trast with the intersubjective relationships with his mother
and sister which promote subjective growth, and with his
final, deeply moving and emotionally healing encounter
with the Savage of his imagination ("we ... stared into
each other's eyes like we were staring into some great
mystery" tp. 74D.The kind of masculine subject Blue
develops into is overtly ideological, topicalized by means
of his place in a triangular configuration with the Savage
and Hopper, the hard, macho bully who has made Blue's
life miserable. Blue's developing self-awareness has
led him to discover how discourse shapes the world and
hence to a realization that creativity is a form of agency.
Hence, his attempt to write a scene in which the Savage
enters Hopper's bedroom at night and kills him with an
axe unravels as he realizes that he cannot write the inci-
dent: "I'm not a hard lad and now I knew that the savage
wasn't either" (p. 56). So instead, Hopper is beaten and
terrorized. After the Savage leaves Hopper's house, he
performs two significant actions. First, in the street "he
danced like Jess had done in the woods that day and he
waved his ax round his head in triumfl' (p. 60). Then
he enters Blue's house, goes to Jess's bedroom, places
his hand on her sleeping brow, weeps, and "tried to say
poems" (p. 63).The sequence marks the Savage's final
entry into human intersubjectivity, but of particular inter-
est is the text-illustration interaction (see Figwe 25.2).
Brandishing his hand-ax, the figure evokes the image
schema of the dangerous primitive of flction and film,
but the fluidity of his bodily gesture, the delicacy of face
and hands, especially the ethereal linking of fingers and
ax, and the textual connection with Jess's feminine danc-
ing evoke strong audience empathy. It is not a "triumf'
of savagery, but of humanity, and functions as a strong
reinforcement of the text's humanist ideology.
There is satisfaction for Blue (and readers) in witness-
ing Hopper's subdued and abjected state on the subsequent

Credit: Excerpt from "The Savage" by David Almond and illustrated by Dave McKean, pages, 60-61.
@ 2008 David McKean. Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd., London
Illustration copyright
SEI 1 sHJ.
day. While, ideally, reducing a bully to inarticulate abjec-
tion is not the best outcome, it is endorsed by the popular
imagination, and by the inadequacy of the support offered
Blue (for example, Mrs. Molloy's advice to "try to ignore
it, try to understand that it shows how inadequate Hopper
is" [p. 18]). Blue's action in taking responsibility for his
own life leads to a form of masculinity widely approved
in modern society: It is grounded in a resistance to social
constructionism, in moral integrity and a capacity for
other-regardingness, and in self-awareness which enables
deep interpersonal relations grounded in mutual equality
(Stephens, 2002).
The ideological structure of masculinity in The Sav-
age (Almond, 2008) emerges from a textual negotiation
amongst the various tenets available within the social
group depicted in the novel. While the group is uniform
in ethnicity and origin, it is not entirely homogenous in
attitudes, assumptions, motivations and behaviors. Blue's
(masculine) subjectivity thus develops out of a process
of self-fashioning through imaginative composition, i.e.,
his writing is metonymic of self-constitution and subjec-
tive agency. As the Savage learns about language, what
it feels like to be human, and about "good and bad in
people" (p. 51), Blue shapes his own subjectivity by as-
sessing nonns and values, evaluating his social position
IDEOLOGY AND CHILDREN'S BOOKS
and relationships, and drawing upon the resources of
his family and creativity. His creativity thus articulates
subjective agency as a force for expressing emotions and
making responsible judgments based on consideration and
conceffr for others.
The triangular confi guration of Blue, Savage, and Hopper
exemplifies how many contemporary novels which seek
to intervene in normative gender constructions interrogate
the performance of gendered practices by what Romoren
and Stephens (2002) refer to as "metonymic configura-
tion" (p. 22}).Pattems of gendered behaviors are built up
through the simple fictive practice of developing conflict
and/or thematic implication through interactions amongst
diverse and contrasting charaiters (often character stereo-
types). Such characters function as metonyms because
they embody easily recognized, more general pattems of
behavior and being.
As Almond's (2008) novel evidences, an author writes
in the context of a number of constructions of and attifudes
towards gender; he or she may conceptualize a particular
social construction of gender as the dominant, filtering this
through his or her own aftitudes in order to reproduce it or
attempt to modify it. An author also chooses a genre to work
within, and this will tend implicitly to be always already a
gendered genre. This is most obvious with faky tale, and the
36s
ROBYN MCCALLUM AND JOHN STEPHENS
modem history of retellings that seek to undo the gendered
narratives of fairy tale.
DianaWynne Jones's (198612000) Howl's Moving Castle
is a good example of how patriarchal ideologies associ-
ated with traditional fairy tale and high fantasy may be
challenged. The story is narrated from the viewpoint of
Sophie, who embodies a form of "subjected" or repressed
femininity. Through its allusion to the quest narrative,
generally a specifically "masculine" fairy tale paradigm,
the opening of the novel attributes Sophie's subjection to
the patriarchal discourse, which traditionally informs fairy
tales and circumscribes the lives of fairy tale heroines. So-
phie herself knows the constraints on her subjectivity from
her reading, which is in turn symptomatic of the range of
discourses which construct female subjectivities.
To inhabit a gendered body in a gendered space can
mean that an individual is constructed, lacking the free-
dom to be self-fashioning. Writers who consciously resist
such positioning of an individual seek to depict characters
whose subiectivity will evolve so that by the time closure
is reached, subjectivity will be grounded in particular
attributes: a resistance to social construction such that al-
lows self-constitution; moral and political integrity; and
self-awareness which enables deep interpersonal relations
grounded in mutual equality. In other words, gender will
be framed within subjective agency.
In fictive representation, two of the key aspects in the
constitution of (inter)subjective agency are point of view
and intentionality, as narratives model subject positions by
depicting characters in relationship with other characters
within social structures, and imply particular positions
for readers to take up in relation to what is depicted.
Jones thematizes the function of subject position by the
curse placed upon Sophie at the beginning of the novel,
whereby she becomes a teenage girl inside the body of
an elderly crone. The resulting bifurcation emphasizes
that subjectivity is embodied as well as socially shaped
and foregrounds the focalizing perspective that perceives
objects or situations. By disclosing that the perception of
a given entity may change while what is perceived remains
the same, the text presents the possibility of a subjectivity
able to rework and reshape noffns and givens. Second, the
overt adoption of another subject position makes obvious
the function of intentionality in subjective agency. Altieri
(1994) suggests, "intentionality consists in the ways that
agents shape routes within the world and thus provide the
bases for defining convictions, expressing priorities, and
ultimately accepting responsibility for the routes chosen"
(p. 96).When a fictive character is depicted as playing a
role, as when Sophie embraces the license permitted to the
old and eccentric, what tends to be placed before readers is
a knowing and self-aware actor, capable of using discourse
with intention in spite of an inability to control the effects
of language use. The role-play gives the actor ostensible
power over public discourse, which is then manipulated in
the service ofpersonal expression. Sophie is a witch and
366
has a linguistic gift to bestow objects with intentionality,
although it takes her the whole novel to discover this. The
resultant dialogic relation between public discourse and
personal expression is thereby instrumental in gaining
assent from the implied community of address to 'onew"
forms of subjective agency.
Such dialogic strategies also make possible interroga-
tive relationships with the texts and genres of the past
(what might be loosely called the tradition of children's
literature) whereby the discourses of femininity inform-
ing fairy story, fantasy, and romance, for example, are
made visible as socially constructed and ideologically
shaped discourses. Further, in depicting characters whose
expectations and behaviors have been shaped by the
femininities represented in fairy tales, romance flction,
"high" fantasy, and other cultural discourses, writers can
use the constructedness of texts to draw attention to the
constructedness of those femininities, and to a great extent
the constructedness of masculinities as well.
Howl's Moving Castle (Jones, 1986/2000) is again
a useful example because it self-consciously and inter-
rogatively explores how a discourse of femininity is
organized in relation to culturally privileged texts, and
through its narrative processes and outcomes constructs
an implied reader position which in some sense can be
called feminist-in this case, the novel constructs a reader
position which can be broadly described as a pragmatic
liberal-humanist and typically liberal feminist. The con-
cept of "femininity as discourse" was explored by Dorothy
E. Smith (1988, p.37), though in applying it to fictional
representations we have to narrow its reference. Smith
vrewed femininity as "a social organization of relations
among women and between women and men which is
mediated by texts, that is, by the materially fixed forms of
printed writing and images" (p. 39). Its discourse has no
particular local source and is not embodied or produced by
individuals, but individuals "orient themselves to the order
of the discourse in talk, writing, creating images (whether
in texts or on their bodies), produced and determined by
the ongoing order" (p. 40). By performing the discourse,
an individual performs gender. Femininity is thus not
simply an effect of patriarchal ideology, though in Howl's
Moving Castle patriarchal practices and assumptions are
depicted as playing major roles in orienting the subjectiv-
ity of represented female characters towards a "feminine"
discourse centered on submission to authority, appearance
and behavior codes, guided ambition, and subordination
of the self in relationships, including romantic love where
this is applicable.
In Smith's (1988) framing of it, the discourse of
femininity is always already intertextual because it is a
complex of textual relations among magazines, televi-
sion, advertisements, shop and fashion displays, and (to a
lesser extent) books. Within novels this intertextual effect
is produced by the relations among (fictive) individual
experiences, some of the culturally diverse texts cited by

Smith, and more or less specific literary pre-texts. Hence,
the novels explore how forms of gendered behavior are
inscribed, and can be resisted, during the transition from
child to adult female subjectivity, and thus lay bare the
ways in which conservative gendered discourses are in-
scribed within social and narrative discourses. Resistance
becomes possible when oppositional reading positions are
constructed as a negotiation of intertextual space, wherein
it becomes possible to question and challenge the patriar-
chal discourses which position female characters within
feminine discourse. Such texts construct a narrative in
which the focalizing female characters come to recognize
this positioning process and the nature ofits oppressive-
ness, and seek alternative and more personally empowered
subject positions for themselves. Along the way they
will experience misperceptions and misdirections, but
the texts' dialogic strategies enable readers to evaluate
these. In combination, reader alignment with the point of
view of focalizing characters and evaluation of that point
of view construct a reading position from which the nar-
rative outcomes are affirmed as narratively coherent and
socially satisfactory. Insofar as the outcomes conform to
a feminist agenda-for example, "to understand the social
and psychic mechanisms that construct and perpetuate
gender inequality and then to change them" (Morris, 1993,
p. 1)-the implied reading position constitutes a feminist
reading position. Whenever feminist texts have emerged in
children's literature, it has been as a challenge to, indeed
a transgression against, masculinist ideology.
More recent feminisms, however, have challenged
presuppositions about how gender is constructed and
naturalized, and have moved away from ideologies attrib-
uted to second wave (liberal) feminism (Harnois. 2008).
Various "third-wave" feminisms now foreground personal
narratives that are multiperspectival and intersectional,
intersectionality being defined as "the relationships among
multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and
subject formations" (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). They draw
upon postmodernism to embrace pluralist conceptions of
subjectivity, emphasizing "the 'messiness' of their own
lives in terms of identities, beliefs, and actions" (Harnois,
2008, p. 133). And they seek to be inclusive and non-
judgmental about women's life choices (Hubler, 2000;
Marshall, 2004; Snyder, 2008). Such perspectives are
gradually emerging in children's fiction (and discussions
of it), and thus impacting upon the ideology of texts.
Messiness thus characterizes the life of Sophie
O'Farrell, protagonist, narrator and putative author of a
distinctively third-wave YA novel, Joanne Horniman's
(2008) My Candlelight Novel. While the novel is abour
"birth and death and love and sex" (p. 4),there is little ac-
tion or conflict. Rather, it is a topography of self and place.
On her daily walks, pushing her baby's stroller, the narrator
crosses and re-crosses a river in a movement metonymic of
the boundary crossings of time and sexuality that make up
her life and the novel she is writing. Both self and text are
IDEOLOGY AND CHILDREN'S BOOKS
in "a process of becoming" (p. 15), "the body is a leaky
thing" (p. 168), sexual desire is polymorphous, and phrases
and characters (Becky Sharp, Maggie Tulliver) seep into
the text from other literary works. Finally, the novel ends
with a bundle of fragments and memories which evoke
beginnings and endings in a way that refuses closure. My
Candlelight Novel demonstrates the ideological impor-
tance for children's flction of third-wave feminist ideas
about subjectivity. Subjective agency develops a different
nuance when contextualizedwithin notions of ambiguity,
multiplicity, contradiction, and even transgression, where
the becoming self will not be unified and its gender and
sexual identity will remain fluid.
Ideology and Thansgression
Representations of transgression more generally are an
important way children's literature makes ideologies
apparent and seeks to redefine or even overthrow them.
It does this especially by depicting complex processes
whereby characters define the otherness of the world by
separating themselves from it through roles or actions
involving subversion, deviance, or revolt. Carnivalesque
transgression, often flaunting taboo motifs, may go no
further than mocking the ways things are, but because
transgression is inevitably against some socio-cultural
formation, it is inextricably tied up with the ideology of
the text, whether overt or implicit. It thus tends to define
what ideologies are being depicted as the contemporary
status quo, and what are imagined as possible social or
individual transformations of behavior in opposition to
those ideologies. Transgressive action must evoke the
culturally dominant, or it would not be identifiable as
transgression, but in doing so its function may be to rein-
scribe the dominant: In other words, transgression often
implies, or even depends on, the strategies that contain it.
More often again, transgression defines a conflict between
co-existing formations or ideologies, and privileges one
over the other.'Almost invariably, the privileged ideology
is marked as more humane, more socially responsible,
more intersubjective, offering a perspective which not
only embraces difference but enfolds it within a larger,
more comprehensive sphere.
The possibility of transgression is premised on the ex-
istence of social, ideological, legal, or cultural codes and
conventions, which constitute boundaries or constraints
upon a person's actions, speech, thoughts, or sense of
identity. These boundaries imply the construction of sub-
jectivity as subjection to a particular set of constraints.
The action of either countering or violating them would
thus enable the construction of a sense of identity as agent,
and as capable ofconscious or directed meaning or action
which thereby situates a person outside of or in conflict
with existing ideology. However, the act of transgress-
ing does not simply constitute agency. Such actions also
function to position and construct a person, albeit in a
367
ROBYN MCCALLUM AND JOHN STEPHENS
conflictual relation to the received codes or conventions
of a society. In other words they also imply the status of
that person as a subject. The possibility of transgression
thus presumes the co-existence of two aspects of individual
subjectivity: a sense of a personal identity as subject-and
hence positioned in a relation, of compliance or of conflict,
to specific social and discursive practices; and a sense
of identity as an agent-and hence as occupying a place
or position from which resistance to or transgression of
the social boundaries which constrain the subject can be
produced (McCallum, 1999).
Because ideologies evolve over time, there are ongo-
ing developments in what children's fiction represents as
desirable models of human personality, human behavior,
interpersonal relationships, social organization, and ways
of being in the world. To examine how transgression op-
poses ideology, we will compare two very different novels,
David Almond's (1999) magical realist Kir's Wilderness
andAn Na's (2001) realist migration narrativeA Stepfrom
Heaven. Kit's Wilderness focuses on a specific and local
setting to recuperate a dystopian past, while A Step from
Heaven explores how the main character forges subjective
agency out of displacement and subsequent resistance to
hegemonic structures.
Both novels envisage a world better than the everyday
world the characters inhabit, and as such belong to a large
body of children's fiction from the early 1990s to the
present in which utopian tropes are evident either within
constructions of fantastic or realistic worlds (both utopias
and anti-utopias), or implied through their opposites in
dystopian narratives. These two novels are stories about
kinds of exile or displacement: A Step from Heaven (Na,
2001) tells the story of Young Ju, its principal character,
from the age of four until the end of her teenage yea$;
Kit's Wilderness (Almond, 1999) tells of events that the
narrator was centrally involved in over a period of half a
year while he was thirteen. The two thus,offer contrast-
ing perspectives on the experience of displacement. Kit's
Wilderness pivots on an internal re-migration, whereby
Kit has returned with his parents to Stonygate, the town
of their birth, so that Kit is displaced into a quest to com-
prehend place and origin. A Step from Heaven is a story
of permanent emigration from Korea toAmerica, narrated
by the protagonist, Young Ju, recounting the experiences
of an immigrant family, and exploring what it means to
be an immigrant.
A common form of transgression in children's literature
is transgression against norms of behavior determined
by the adult world. Adults in Kit's Wilderness (Almond,
1999) are quick to condemn the children's behavior when
a teacher discovers the children playing "the game called
Death" (p. 6), a game invented by JohnAskew, a marginal-
ized child from a dysfunctional family. The game involves
a form of shamanism, as a child, chosen at random, enters
a hypnotic trance which mimics death. For Askew, it is
a way to identify which of the children are like him, and
368
have the capacity to see the spirits of young boys who
died in a mine collapse in 1821. He perceives an affinity
with Kit, as their grandfathers worked the mines togetheq
and both boys shared their names with "great great great
great uncles" (p.21) who had died in the disaster. As Kit
becomes more engaged with Stoneygate, the spirits of
these long-dead children begin to appear on the edges of
his vision, presences from the past, a metonym of the deep
bond ofpast and present. For school authorities, however,
the game signifies "leanings to darkness" (p. 75) and in-
dicates a need to exercise more control over the children:
"'You're just children,' [the Principal] said. 'Innocents.
It is our duty to protect you"'(p. 76). The children are
quickly polarized into those who excuse themselves by
claiming Askew was evil and had threatened them, and
those, consisting of Kit and his friendAllie, who assert that
the game was meaningless. Power prevails, however and
Askew is expelled from school and rendered even more
marginal. Kit himself is given a gentle warning to curb his
powerful imagination and channel it into writing.
Since the valoizingof imagination in the Romantic era,
there has been a persistent controversy over the imagina-
tion: education systems in English-speaking countries, for
example, have privileged imagination over mundane learn-
ing, but have also sustained a suspicion of imaginations
that are overactive, overheated, and unhealthy. As John
Sallis (2000) encapsulates it,
...imagination has a double effect, a double directionality,
bringing about illumination and elevation, on the one hand,
and deception and corruption, on the other, bringing them
about perhaps even in such utter proximity that neither can,
with complete assurance, be decisively separated from the
other. (p.46)
In suppressing the game of death an'd unregulated
imagination (and these suppressions are depicted
physically as a bulldozer is brought in to destroy the
underground den where the game was played), the school
authorities play out a process whereby discourse operates
and maintains its authorized meanings and ideology exerts
control over all visions and judgments. The appropriated
duty to protect the innocent proves to be repressive in
what it will permit and deny. However, the suppression
ofthis flrst transgression and the concomitant repression
of agency is shortlived, and through its second act of
transgression Kit's Wilderness affirms the power of
artistic expression-visual art (Askew), writing (Kit) and
performance (Allie)-to resist the tenets of ideology and
become a means to see in new ways. In short, Almond's
novel affirms that it is a part of the aesthetic function of
literature to encompass the pleasures of creativity. imagi-
nation, and a knowledge about self and the world, and
thereby provide a critique of ideology.
The second transgressive act occurs towards the end
of the novel when Kit makes a night journey to enter a
mine-shaft in search of Askew, who has been missing

since his expulsion. The action is a much deeper version
of the game of death, and a culmination of the magical
realist, shamanistic element in Almond's narrative, and
hence of the power of imagination to render the world
meaningful. In this journey, Kit crosses a border that takes
him beyond his sense of being displaced in this setting
to becoming deeply embedded in it. More generally, the
concept of borders signifies in a variety of ways: It can
describe a personality disorder ("borderline"), the effects
of experiencing multiple subjectivities, or a liminal space
between meanings. Borders are thus also a marker of
hybrid or liminal subjectivities, such as those that would
be experienced by persons who negotiate among multiple
cultural, linguistic, or racial systems throughout their lives.
Borders also make space and time ambiguous, as meaning
slips metonymically between the literal and the figurative.
There is a predominant theme of healing in Kit's WiWer-
ness, which is identifiable as a reculrent motif in Almond's
novels, and here focused through the unlikely alliance be-
tween sensitive Kit andAskew, who is harsh and confused.
Askew is drawn by his negative construction of the past into
an emotional darkness-expressed metonymically by the
way he is drawn to physically dark places such as the mine
shaft. The power of Kit's creative imagination enables him
to negotiate the border of space and time, to learn there is
both light and dark in the world, and to guideAskew back
to a new beginning. In this way, the novel affirms the value
of an unfettered imagination as superior to a channeled
imagination inside a docile body.
A different perspective on ideology and transgression
emerges from an examination of fictive characters who are
intercultural subjects. Ideologies of multiculturalism have
been a vexed issue in any country that has embraced them,
and stories narrated from the perspective of a character
depicted as experiencing ethnic othemess have a propen-
sity to turn into problem novels. Nevertheless, as Peter
Morgan (1998) observed, because Asian American YA
novels deal with the question of fitting into the "identity-
conscious world of teen society" (p. 18), it becomes easy
for readers to subsume them into narratives of maturation
and thence into some overarching ideology of childhood
and development.
Young Ju, the principal character ofA Stepfrom Heaven
(Na, 2001), feels compelled to transgress against her
culture of origin in order to negotiate the border between
being American, the culture she primarily knows beyond
the domestic sphere of her family, and being Korean, the
linguistic and cultural domain of the family. An Na has
used the representation ofYoung Ju's quest for personal
and national identity to explore the complexities and
contradictions of growing up in a community where
independent female relationships are opposed by oppres-
sive patriarchal assumptions. Thus, she has adapted the
conventions of the novel of development to a novel about
migration, to offer her own narrative about progressive
development and coherent identity.
IDEOLOGY AND CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Young Ju feels compelled to lie to her parents about
her friendships, which they oppose, and despises herself
for concealing her impoverished family circumstances
from her friends. Strategically, however, the novel affirms
her transgressions by contrasting them with the greater
and destructive transgressions of her violent and drunken
father. For example, a scene in which the father ('Apa")
has beaten her and knocked her to the floor for continuing
to see an American friend closes with this injunction: "Do
not get up, Apa says, standing over me. Do not get up until
you know how to be a Korean girl again" (Na, 2001, p.
112). The scene sharply focuses the underlying clash of
ideologies between an open and closed society, and the
violent repression confirms the rightness of Young Ju's
transgression in quest of the more open society.
Similarly, her mother judges thatYoung Ju has behaved
transgressively in phoning the police during one of her
father's drunken rages-it is her husband's prerogative to
beat her as violently as he pleases. Readers will not see
Young Ju's attempt to save her mother as transgression,
and eventually her mother shifts her own view. Thus when
her husband, unable to find a way to exist withinAmerican
society, returns to Korea, she opts to stay in America with
her children. After this decision the novel moves toward
closure by leaping some years to the great day when the
mother and the two childr€n move into their own home on
the eve ofYoung Ju going away to college. By the close of
the novelYoung Ju has fully achieved an accommodation
to the existing society, demonstrating that she has become
capable of self-positioning and assessment of both herself
and her place in society:
Uhmma said her hands were her life. Butfor us, she only
wished to see our hands holding books. You must use this
she said, and pointed to her mind. Uhmma's hands worked
hard to make sure our hands would not resemble hers.
It takes only a glance at our nails, our knuckles, our
palms to know Uhmma succeeded. Joon and I both possess
Uhmma's lean fingers, but without the hard, yellowed cal-
luses formed by years of abuse from physical labour. Our
hands turn pages of books, press fingertips to keyboard but-
tons, hold pencils and pens. They are lithe and tender. The
hands of dreams come true. (Na, 2001, p. 154)
Young Ju's displacement is part of the modern Korean
diaspora, as Koreans spread out around the world in search
of another kind of life. Her mother, driven by a mixture
of ambition and desperation, undergoes great hardship to
achieve her dream for her family, working multiple jobs to
support them and to ensure they are educated. This almost
stereotypical immigrant's dream encapsulates the complex
of ideological and socioeconomic structures that produce
the protagonist's evolving relationships with society and
family. This final state of emplacement is balanced against
a photograph Uhmma gives to Young Ju to take with her
to college. It is a photograph taken on the day on which
the novel opens, when four-year-old Young Ju learned to
be brave in the waves of the sea. Her mother offers her the
369
ROBYN MCCALLUMAND JOHN STEPHENS
photograph to remind her to be brave, but also to remind
her of her heritage. The photograph enacts a nostalgic re-
lationship with, and affirmation of,Young Ju's lost origins.
WhileYoung Ju does not feel a desire for Korea as home,
the photograph sums up the novel's continuous process
of gesturing towards the 'osource" of identity, towards the
grounds of cultural origins, towards conflicting notions
and images of what constitutes home.
The literature of multiculturalism and now post-mul-
ticulturalism can be read as an ongoing exchange among
ideologies or discourses. One effect of this is that the very
notion multiculturalism has been produced within this
process of exchange and has therefore constantly been a
process of becoming. The process becomes very evident
when texts incorporate overt advocacy, or, like A Step from
Heaveno are structured as a progression from lack to well-
being; such processes constitute a dialogic relationship
between, on the one hand, what the writer conceives of
as a current and dominant situation or attitude and, on the
other hand, a desirable direction ofchange for society.
Closure thus has crucial ideological impact. How a
narrative resolves the complications of story is of special
interest with children's fiction. Here, the desire for c/o-
sure,both in the specific sense of an achieved satisfying
ending and in the more general sense of a final order and
coherent signifi cance, is characteristically an affirmation
of the social function of ideology to sustain or redefine
group values. Orientation of the self towards these values
controls both actions and interpretations, and in many
ways defines how fictive subjects represent themselves,
other participants, interpersonal relations, everyday social
actions, and the significances of time and place-in other
words, the ideological complex that organizes social atti-
tudes and relationships. Narrative fictions then function as
models of everyday life experience in the lived world.
Conclusion
Ideologies are the systems of belief which are shared and
used by a society to make sense of the world and which
pervade the talk and behaviors of a community, and form
the basis of the social representations and practices of
group members. Literary discourse, on the other hand,
serves to produce, reproduce and challenge ideologies
more self-consciously; thus, all aspects of textual discourse
are informed and shaped by ideology. Texts produced for
children seldom thematize ideology, but either implicitly
reflect its social function of defining group values or seek
to challenge received ideologies and substitute new for-
mations. No narrative is without an ideology, and since
narratives for young readers maintain a primary focus on
events and characters which are isomorphic with actions in
the world inhabited by readers, they are always imbricated
with ideological positions.
We have argued here that several concepts are geflnane
to understanding the ideology of text. First, the concept
370
of subject positions implied within texts is of crucial im-
portance for reading and especially for examining a text's
possible ideological impact, because what such positions
inevitably seek is reader alignment with or against the
social attitudes and relationships that constitute the nar-
rative. Reader alignment with unexamined positions can
be a powerful vehicle for naturalizing ideologies.
Second, we have drawn attention to the widespread
thematizing of imagination as a way of affirming and
advocating social metanarratives promoting humane
behaviors. A key expression of imagination is in the cre-
ativity of represented characters, especially its capacity
to articulate the connection of creativity with agency as
a force for expressing emotions and making responsible
judgments based on intersubjective relations. Underpin-
ning such representations is the social assumption that life
without agency is tantamount to abjection.
Third, we have pointed to the intersections of genre and
gender, whereby the ideology of a text inheres in framing
situation, represented patterns of behavior, interactions
between characters, linguistic discourses, and the interper-
sonal relationship with impiied readers. Because particular
genres instantiate reading strategies more or less implicitly
bound up with that genre, ideological implications are apt
to remain implicit or invisible. The interplay of overt and
invisible ideologies is most evident in realist texts which
thematize social issues, especially representations of bod-
ies and behaviors marked by gender or racelethnicity.
Fourth, we have stressed that representations oftrans-
gression are an important way children's literature makes
ideologies apparcnt and seeks to redefine or even over-
throw them. Because transgression is inevitably against
some socio-cultural formation, it is inextricably tied up
with the ideology of the text, whether overt or implicit, and
so tends to define what ideologies are being depicted as the
contemporary status quo, what are the problems with or
limitations of those ideologies, and what are imagined as
possible social or individual transformations of behavior
in opposition to them.
Finally, we would reaffirm that ideology inhabits text in
the most basic ways, in language structures and narrative
forms. Because ideology is formulated in and by language,
meanings within language are socially determined, and
narratives are constructed out of language, an effective
understanding of textual signiflcance must begin here.
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Almond, D. (1999). Kit's wildemess. London, England: Hodder
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Almond, D. (2008). The savage (D. McKean, Illus.). London,
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Bell-Rehwoldt, S. (2007). You think it's easy being the toothfairy?
(D. Slonim, Illus.). San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.
Gaiman, N. (2008). The graveyard book. London. England:
Bloomsbury.
Halfmann, J. (2006). Alligator at Saw Grass Road (L. Anzalone,
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Hatkoff, L, Hatkoff, C., & Kahumbu, P. (2006). Owen &Mzee: The
true story of a remarkable friendship (P. Greste, Photographer).
New York, NY Scholastic.
Horniman, J. (2008). My candlelight novel. Crows Nest, New South
Wales: Allen & Unwin.
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371
 Point of Departure
M. T. Anderson
Recently I was on a panel with several other children's
book writers, and we were asked what lesson we hoped
to pass on to children. Almost universally, the answer was
that we're not trying to pass on any lesson at all, just trying
to tell a good story.
If there is any accusation we fear as writers for chil-
dren, it is that our books have been somehow instructive,
that they havehad amessage. Our ownheritage of primers
and abecedaria embarrasses us. We all fear Dick and Jane.
We cringe at their knee-socks and the plasticine sheen of
their cheeks. Confronted with their image, we want to dis-
avow the vacuous sweetness of their moral world. Given
the marginalizationof children's books that Markus Zusak
discusses in his Point of Departure essay, we're eager to
prove that we don't play by schoolyard rules. After all,
in literary discussions, the charge of didacticism is often
precisely what contributes to our marginalization-the
dismissive assumption that books for kids are too safe in
their scope and limited in their vision.
So writers for children a"re more troubled by imputa-
tions of an ideological dimension to their work than writers
for adults are. Most of us were brought up in a literary and
critical tradition which suggested that literature is deflned
by ambiguity-the precise opposite (it would seem) of
ideological clarity. Trained in high school and college
English Lit classrooms that assumed critical approaches
vacillating between the modernist and the postmodem, we
are eager to celebrate the sublimity of the artfully unclear
and the polyvalent. So one of the reasons I love Romeo
and Juliet,for example, is that I can never decide whether
it's a grand, sweeping love story about a noble passion
that shall never fade-or the story of two self-absorbed
pubescents who die unnecessary and irritating deaths'
meeting their stupid, sticky ends in pools of blood and
puppy love. Is Mercutio right about the idiocy of love, or
is he just abuzz-kill sidekick? For me, the delight in the
play is the instability of these questions.
As the writer sits down at his or her desk, thinking
out the next chapter that needs to appear on the blank
screen, there is constantly a question of how far ambigu-
ity should reach in a narrative. How far should we try to
determine the reader's reactions? How far should we nail
down characters' motivations?And to what extent should
we be overt about stating our opinions? These questions
become more vexed because of embarrassment at the ac-
cusations that we, as writers for children, are hacks who
just say what we mean, shout out our spiel, and then drag
372
children by their gangly arms into whatever political and
ethical side-show we want to ballyhoo.
These craftsman's concerns for the calibration of
ambiguity-when we agonize over the clarity of charac-
ter motivation or the extent to which an abstract narrator
should endorse or condemn a character's actions-these
concerns should not blind us to the fact that (as the preced-
ing article suggests) ideology is always present, vibrating
in the text, whether it's there consciously or unconsciously.
We can't escape it. It structures our stories' It informs
our cast ofcharacters. It imparts a feeling ofrightness or
wrongness to our plot resolutions.
Picture a scene from some genericYA novel-the prom,
say, and a hunk of cake thrown on someone's lapel, and
the outsider boy blushes, and the mean blond girls laugh'
When we tell this story, it's embedded in a narrative tradi-
tion which we implicitly comment on, and the action is
undergirded by a series of tropes and topoi on which we
subtly take positions: sweet good boy vs. thrilling bad
boy, for example, or jock vs. intellectual, or mean stud
vs. shrinking sophisticate, or cruel sophisticate vs. gentle
rube-and behind those constructions lie other, more
deeply buried structures related to whatever ethical and
economic and cultural markers we wish to endorse'
And why should that embarrass us? It is those buried
debates and struggles that give these narratives their
energy. It is our willful desire to prove one thing true or
prove another thing false or declare our love for something
else that makes our prose dynamic. We ate, consciously or
unconsciously, always reworking our own histories, our
own tensions, our own anxieties, so of course Ihose topoi
and tropes are propelled by our own tangled subjectivity,
our own situation in intersecting ideologies and in stories
that came before us and meet within us.
This is true even in the simplest texts. Thke a hypotheti-
cal board book, say. The whole text is something like, "Up.
Down. Farm. Town. Black. White. Day. Night." Already,
however, in just these simple phrases, the writer reveals
a commitment to a certain kind of educational and devel-
opmental methodology-one based on the use of binary
oppositions to establish definition, for example. And even
just the fact that the author has written a board book is
significant: The board book as cultural artifact suggests a
certain approach to childhood literacy and development
that many of us take for granted in our culture, but which
isn't universal. And then we might look at the illustrations
in the board book-grinning cows, chickens settling down

under blankets-and note that the book partakes of a long
association between young children and the American
pastoral. While overtly teaching young children word
sets, therefore, the book is also introducing them to an oft
mythologized and de-historicized image of agricultural
prbduction-one which I, for example, as a guilt-ridden
Lut enthusiastic meat-eater, would infinitely prefer to real
and historicized images of life on the modern industrial
farm. So one could ask, what's at stake in the reproduction
of these images? What is being revealed and what is being
concealed? This board book couldn't be simpler or more
spare, in some ways, and yet it is involved in transmitting
all kinds of values to its readers.
So-given that our writing exists in a context of com-
peting ideologies anyway, and reflects those contexts and
itre siruggtes between them-why balk at wading into
the fray openly? Why not admit that we're girded with a
battle-ax lo grind? They say to write about your passion-
and I'm pasiionate about questions ofethics' questions of
the human capacity for love and for destruction and for
genius and for idiocy. Why shouldn't I just plonk down
iry *t*"t.? Why shouldn't I just write non-fiction, in
fact-argumentative non-fi ction?
Rnd a lot of the answer is that I don't always know the
answers before I begin writing. And a lot of the answer is
that answers aren't clear. And part of it is that I'm fasci-
POINT OFDEPARTURE
nated by those moments of disruption when I don't know'
(Though commitment to pluralistic ambiguity is itself
ideological.) And so I'm stranded between knowing and
notknowing, uncertain, often, whetherto make statements
or ask questions.
And in the midst of this, I wonder: Why, anyway, the
commitment to literary ambiguity when writing for a
young audience that is still using narrqtive to construct
their world? Don't we want to participate in that construc-
q
tion? Andeven: What's wrong, in some cases, with little
propaganda? What's wrongwithtelling the liel that might
^ro*,
tru" if they're believed? Tltese are diffrcult times, and
worse times may come, and do we really want to abjure
our power to argue fervently for what we believe in the
forum of the young?
And yet simply to say that causes me shame' How
brittle and trivial "lessons'o seem.
Oh, who knows? This all hurts my head. And maybe,
in the end, that's important. Maybe the books that endure
are those that engage us most powerfully in the anxiety
of doubt and polemic-narratives that hurt the heads of
successive generations, each generation reformulating
the story and the issues-5s that the author's ideological
certainty and ideological doubt both continue to inspire
debate within readers, and delight, and despair, and adora-
tion, and awe.
373