The Erotics of Pedagogy: Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the "Gift of Education," and the Agency of Children

Abstract

The Erotics of Pedagogy:Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the "Gift of Education," and the Agency of Children Mitzi Myers (bio) I know that pedagogy is a depressing subject to all persons of sensibility, and yet I shall not apologize for touching upon it. Lionel Trilling In these times of wonderful revolution, and incalculable, & sudden changes in the fate of empires and the fortunes of individuals, the only good things of which we can feel absolutely secure are the possession of our minds, & of the esteem & affection of our friends. Maria Edgeworth to Etienne Dumont, 12 August 1815 Works of art exist simultaneously in two 'economies,' a market econ omy and a gift economy. . . . with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level . . . that we can give it away again. . . . the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Lewis Hyde Literary childhood, the representation of children for both juvenile and adult audiences, begins to play a significant part within the Anglo-American cultural tradition in a Revolutionary era. The global backdrop of the child's domestic debut is transnational change: the American, French, and industrial revolutions and the Napoleonic wars.1 But how do children and their literary history relate to what historians think of as "big" history—the macropolitics [End Page 1] and institutional events that identify and dominate the "masculine" public sphere?2 Literary critics are mostly content to say that this period's tales teach, without specifying precisely what they teach, whom they reach, or, most important, how they carry out their pedagogical agenda. For example, Claudia Nelson's study of late nineteenth-century children's literature packages its prehistory as an unproblematic narrative of obedience: "The stress in such stories is on the world as it is. Secure in the knowledge that adult civilization was daily going from good to better, eighteenth-century rationalist writers felt no urge to portray their young protagonists as in any way more powerful morally than their adult preceptors. . . . [T]he goal of overweening obedience forbids the implication that children may in any way positively affect their environment; their world neither asks nor needs any help from them."3 Neither the rationalist educator's own experience nor the stories she tells about her world seem quite so secure on closer inspection. Nor, for that matter, can Enlightenment education be equated with Wordsworth's reasoning little monster of the Prelude's Book 5, though few literary historians can resist the temptation (ll. 296–363). Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), the Anglo-Irish writer who is my subject, lived through all the cataclysmic events which mark the beginning of "modern" history and witnessed many of them at first hand. She saw Revolutionary Paris, fled for her life when the French invaded Ireland in 1798, and lived amid Irish upheaval. She coped with events ranging from murderous local marauders like the Defenders of the 1790s to the nationwide calamity of the Great Famine in the 1840s. Her public writing and its interplay with her world, her readers, and her life as a feeling daughter and a rational female writer solicit critical attention as exemplary of literary terrain we have not yet explored, not ground we know so well that we can dismiss it with a label. How, then, can historical contextualization and contemporary theory help us to specify what we mean when we say that a story from the literary past is "didactic"? Despite the theoretical bombardment to which the academy has long been subjected, despite the recognition that all texts (and interpretations) are historically and ideologically conditioned, despite the preoccupation with Difference, the Other, the Colonized, the Repressed, and the Marginal, it still does not seem to have occurred to the critical world at large that works for, about, and/or by children are ideal investigatory sites for trying out just about any contemporary [End Page 2] theory that elicits one's curiosity, be it gender, games, or gifts, subjectivity or psychoanalysis. Those who work with children's literature know better.4 Yet, as I've indicated, thus far critical...