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Authors: Declan Kiberd
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culture in which it is produced as a state of unspoilt nature, and on the related assumption mat children's literature can preserve for all values which are constantly on the verge of collapse. So, as a result of Yeats's equation between child and unselfconscious peasant, childhood is recommended as the zone in which the older forms of culture now jeopardized by modernity are preserved in oral tradition.
This has the unintended but undeniable effect of infantilizing the native culture. Within British writing, there had long been a link between children's fiction and the colonial enterprise, which led to an identification of the new world with the infantile state of man.Captain Marryat, that ultimate purveyor of lands of heart's desire, had once exclaimed: "what a parallel there is between a colony and her mother country and a child and its parent!" 9 All through the nineteenth century, the Irish had been treated in the English media as childlike – "broths of boys" veering between tears and smiles, quick to anger and quick to forget – unlike the stable Anglo-Saxon. In the words of historianPerry Curtis: "Irishmen thus shared with virtually all the non-white peoples of the empire the label childish, and the remedy for unruly children in most Victorian households was a proper licking".
In an age when children had few legal rights, the Irish and the child were victims of a similar duplicity of official thought. Present-day readers are often amazed at the fact that those same Victorian adults who wept copiously for the innocent outraged children of Dickens belonged to a generation which still sent children up into chimneys and down into coal-mines. The powerful have an instinctive desire to be entertained, and even accused, by their subjects. How else to explain the preponderance of female forms in the art galleries of a world so clearly run in the interests of men? Or the continuing popularity of Irish writers and media-personalities in England? The manipulation of childhood by sentimental Victorians was just another example of such functional hypocrisy: and it was no accident that the cul-de-sac into
which writers on childhood were led was blown open not in England but inMark Twain'sUnited States.
Such renewal could not come from nineteenth century Ireland, because to write book-length celebrations of an Irish childhood was to flirt dangerously with the stereotype of the childlike Hibernian peasant. A shrewd awareness of this probably accounts for Yeats's growing reluctance to exploit the image of the child after the comparative success in the London theatre of The Land of Heart's Desire. Revival writers were caught in a double bind. Disenchanted with the growing murderousness of their land, they sought relief amidst the scenes of childhood memory, only to discover that the very act of dreaming that dream was itself tainted with the politics of Anglo-Irish relations. The inspired solution turned out to be part of the underlying problem.
So Yeats, though he devotes more than seventy pages ofautobiography to "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth", uses the space to challenge English preconceptions by depicting himself as a gifted, mature child among rather juvenile, derivative English boys. At school in London during election time, he was amused at the way in which classmates covered the walls with the opinions relayed by their fathers from newspapers, whereas he, an artists son, thought things out for himself. One of his recurrent narrative strategies is to reverse many traditional manoeuvres. Where the English had used the Irish as a foil to set off John Bull's virtues, Yeats now deploys the English boys as a measure of Irish intellectual superiority. He marvels, for instance, at the contrast between his father's view that it was bad manners for a parent to speak crossly to a child and the widespread English belief in discipline, law and force. Yeats would later repent of his rather English-style sentimentalization of
This has the unintended but undeniable effect of infantilizing the native culture. Within British writing, there had long been a link between children's fiction and the colonial enterprise, which led to an identification of the new world with the infantile state of man.Captain Marryat, that ultimate purveyor of lands of heart's desire, had once exclaimed: "what a parallel there is between a colony and her mother country and a child and its parent!" 9 All through the nineteenth century, the Irish had been treated in the English media as childlike – "broths of boys" veering between tears and smiles, quick to anger and quick to forget – unlike the stable Anglo-Saxon. In the words of historianPerry Curtis: "Irishmen thus shared with virtually all the non-white peoples of the empire the label childish, and the remedy for unruly children in most Victorian households was a proper licking".
In an age when children had few legal rights, the Irish and the child were victims of a similar duplicity of official thought. Present-day readers are often amazed at the fact that those same Victorian adults who wept copiously for the innocent outraged children of Dickens belonged to a generation which still sent children up into chimneys and down into coal-mines. The powerful have an instinctive desire to be entertained, and even accused, by their subjects. How else to explain the preponderance of female forms in the art galleries of a world so clearly run in the interests of men? Or the continuing popularity of Irish writers and media-personalities in England? The manipulation of childhood by sentimental Victorians was just another example of such functional hypocrisy: and it was no accident that the cul-de-sac into
which writers on childhood were led was blown open not in England but inMark Twain'sUnited States.
Such renewal could not come from nineteenth century Ireland, because to write book-length celebrations of an Irish childhood was to flirt dangerously with the stereotype of the childlike Hibernian peasant. A shrewd awareness of this probably accounts for Yeats's growing reluctance to exploit the image of the child after the comparative success in the London theatre of The Land of Heart's Desire. Revival writers were caught in a double bind. Disenchanted with the growing murderousness of their land, they sought relief amidst the scenes of childhood memory, only to discover that the very act of dreaming that dream was itself tainted with the politics of Anglo-Irish relations. The inspired solution turned out to be part of the underlying problem.
So Yeats, though he devotes more than seventy pages ofautobiography to "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth", uses the space to challenge English preconceptions by depicting himself as a gifted, mature child among rather juvenile, derivative English boys. At school in London during election time, he was amused at the way in which classmates covered the walls with the opinions relayed by their fathers from newspapers, whereas he, an artists son, thought things out for himself. One of his recurrent narrative strategies is to reverse many traditional manoeuvres. Where the English had used the Irish as a foil to set off John Bull's virtues, Yeats now deploys the English boys as a measure of Irish intellectual superiority. He marvels, for instance, at the contrast between his father's view that it was bad manners for a parent to speak crossly to a child and the widespread English belief in discipline, law and force. Yeats would later repent of his rather English-style sentimentalization of
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