The Voice of the Child in American Literature by Mary Jane Hurst (review)

Abstract

120Reviews articles and excerpts presented here are less than two decades old and can be said to represent the current critical opinions on the McCaslin fiction. The most important items in this anthology are the essays by John R. Cooley and Mick Gidley on the Indian forebears, and the three essays about the McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family relationships authored, not surprisingly, by Thadious M. Davis, Eric J. Sundquist, and Panthea Reid Broughton. Several other interesting essays also appear, including Annette Bernert's "The Four Fathers of Isaac McCaslin" and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's corrective study of women in Go Down, Moses. One gathers from this volume that Go Down, Moses is now largely regarded as a study of Southern race relations, a meditation on slavery and race in Southern and American history. That it is. There is no doubt either, however, that the three hunting stories in this novel, "The Old People," "The Bear," and "Delta Autumn," are among the very best writing of Faulkner's career. The notion of Go Down, Moses as a hunting book is clearly out of favor now (as it should be), and these stories receive less attention as stories of the hunt than as explorations of the racial issues in the novel. Thus, "The Bear" is important because of Part 4, in which Ike McCaslin discovers from his father and uncle's plantation journals the truth of his heritage, and "Delta Autumn," in which Ike finally fails to confront that heritage. Except in the two essays about Indian forebears, "The Old People" is largely overlooked, while "The Fire and The Hearth," the masterful "Pantaloon in Black," and the title story take on added significance. But the partial view of Go Down, Moses one gleans from this anthology is not attributable to Professor Kinney's choices so much as to how attitudes towards Faulkner's fiction have evolved in the past two decades. University of GeorgiaHugh Ruppersburg Hurst, Mary Jane. The Voice of the Child in American Literature. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1990. 198 pp. Cloth: $25.00. This volume is an investigation into the linguistic nature of the language spoken by children in works of American literature, from, roughly, Hawthorne ("The SnowImage ") through William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist), with stops along the way for discussions of child discourse in such writers as Whitman, James, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, and Roth. The purpose of Hurst's study is to "analyze fictional child language using linguistic methods to arrive at a better understanding of the language itself, of the fictional children who speak the language, of the texts in which the children appear, of the authors who have created the texts, and of the culture from which these authors and their works have emerged" (pp. 2-3). Her reason for undertaking the study, Hurst tells us, is the "shocking lapse" of attention given to "the presence of child language" in most considerations of works containing speaking child characters in American literature (p. 4). Despite an "overwhelming number of children in our literature," the speaking child is essentially ignored by critics, a reflection, Hurst suggests, of our "apparent ambivalence toward children, in literature as well as in life" (p. 2). In the successive chapters of her book, Hurst takes the reader through various applications of linguistic theory to a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of fiction. Her discussions of such subjects as case grammar (in a comparison of What Maisie Knew and Lolita) or gender-specific characteristics of speech (in a comparison of Cather and Steinbeck) provide what is, essentially, a clear introduction Studies in American Fiction121 to basic ideas in linguistics and ways in which these concepts may be used in the analysis of literary texts, a process of close reading that she demonstrates quite effectively in her final chapter on Faulkner's "That Evening Sun." Here her interesting work with fragmented and gender-related aspects of children's speech in the figures of Caddy and Quentin reveals Faulkner's subtle reversal of masculine and feminine characteristics in these two children that leads not to a happy, compensatory balancing of these qualities in either child but rather to dissonance, to incompletion. At the...