Imperial and National Space in British Children's Fantasy
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Newcastle University eTheses There and Back Again: Imperial and National Space in British Children’s Fantasy Aishwarya Subramanian Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Newcastle University May 2018 Abstract This thesis examines the construction of space in a series of canonical British children’s fantasy novels published over the period of decolonisation. The end of empire necessitated a dramatic shift in the understanding of what constituted the territorial boundaries of “Britain,” and the location of national identity. Though the centrality of empire to nineteenth and early- twentieth century children’s literature has been studied at length, until now little attention has been paid to the postimperial context of the twentieth-century British children’s canon. Through an analysis of texts published between 1930 and 1980, the thesis argues that these novels utilise the fantasy genre to create heterotopic spaces—connected to but not of the dominant British space—within which changing ideas of “imperial” and “national” space can be negotiated. Organising the texts chronologically, I demonstrate a shift in focus over the period, from an outward-facing conception of British space as imperial space, to a domestic and inward-facing one. However, I trace the presence of both impulses (“there” and “back again”) in each of the texts under discussion, showing that the two are often intertwined, and that the fantastic spaces analysed here frequently slip between or exist simultaneously in both registers. This “Janus-faced ambivalence,” as Homi Bhabha has described it, creates an understanding of national space and thus national identity as unstable, contradictory, and in a constant state of negotiation that, I argue, underpins postimperial British children’s literature. My introduction undertakes to provide critical and cultural contexts, and demonstrates the heterotopian functions of imperial space. The early chapters offer detailed examinations of individual works or series—Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930–1947), J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956). I trace the spatial relations of the nineteenth-century adventure novel within these texts and analyse the functions of the heterotopic spaces created by them. Chapters Five and Six respond to a flowering of children’s literature during the decades following the Second World War (the “second golden age”) through an analysis of particular types of British spaces, namely the home and the natural landscape, in a number of contemporary works by major writers of the period, including Mary Norton, Penelope Lively, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner. Though these texts engage less directly with the end of empire than those discussed previously, through a series of contrapuntal readings I demonstrate the centrality to these novels of a changing discourse of nationhood and national space. Throughout the thesis I argue for the significance of children’s literature to this shifting discourse of nationhood. In undertaking to fill the gap in scholarship on the relationship between empire, nation, and children’s fantasy writing in the context of decolonisation, this thesis also contributes to larger contemporary debates about the construction of British national identity, imperial memory, and the place of immigrants in the national imaginary. Acknowledgements First, I’ve been very lucky in my supervisors, Dr Neelam Srivastava and Dr Lucy Pearson, from whom I’ve received guidance, friendship, and near-infinite patience over the last four years. The members of the Children’s Literature Unit Graduate Group asked difficult questions and provided brilliant feedback on sections of this thesis—I’m particularly grateful to Dr Kim Reynolds for all her advice and support. My thanks also go to all those involved with Seven Stories’ Diverse Voices Symposium, as well as the various Carnegie shadowing groups of the last three years, for conversations that have helped me ground this project within a larger context. My thinking about this thesis has been refined by conversations with Nandini Ramachandran, Niall Harrison, Nicola Clarke, Marie Stern-Peltz, Erin Horáková, Samira Nadkarni, and Kate Schapira. Maureen Kincaid Speller and Dara Downey offered both expertise and editing skills. A group of committed, kind, clever friends in Delhi and elsewhere did their best to keep the world running. Finally, my parents and Shikha Sethia provided support, soothing voices, and were (and are) the best family in the world. Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction: Fantasy, Space, and Children’s Literature in Britain ….….1 1.1 Children’s Literature, Space, and Empire ……………………………………..……… 1 1.2 Mapping Empire ………………………………………………………………………. 7 1.3 Empire and the Postimperial …………………………………………………...……... 11 1.4 Empire and Heterotopia ……………………………………………………………….. 14 1.5 “Prizing” children’s literature and selection of texts ………………………………….. 17 1.6 Chapter Breakdown ……………………………………………………………………. 19 Chapter 2. Unmapping Empire: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons Series ….22 2.1 Imperial Ambitions …………………………………………………………………….. 23 2.2 Going Native …………………………………………………………………………… 35 2.3 Realistic Fantasy/Fantastical Reality? ………………………………………………….. 43 Chapter 3. Imperial Adventure and English Myth: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit …….55 3.1 There …………………………………………………………………………………… 56 3.2 And Back Again ………………………………………………………………………... 72 Chapter 4. Empire and England: C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia ………………….. 84 4.1 The Magician’s Map …………………………………………………………………… 85 4.2 Further Up and Further In …………………………………………………..………… 107 Chapter 5. The Empire at Home: Domestic Fantasies ………………………………… 121 5.1 The Country House …………………………………………………………………… 124 5.2 The Home and the Secondary World …………………………………………….…… 144 Chapter 6. From Place to Race: Landscape Fantasies ………………………………… 156 6.1 Reenchanting and Reinscribing ……………………………………………………….. 156 6.2 Belonging and Unhomeliness …………………………………………………………. 172 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………... 194 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...… 200 Chapter 1. Introduction: Fantasy, Space, and Children’s Literature in Britain This thesis takes for its subject the production of imperial and national spaces in a series of British children’s fantasy novels published between 1930 and 1980, a period which witnessed the fragmentation of the British Empire. It argues that the presence of the empire in earlier British children’s books was largely constructed in spatial terms. Drawing on recent critical work by Jed Esty, Ian Baucom and others, which examines British national identity in the wake of empire, this thesis argues that there exists a fundamental instability to definitions of “British” and imperial space and the boundaries between them. As I will show, the fantastic heterotopias created in the children’s literature of this period provide conceptual spaces within which these unstable identities can be negotiated. Using major works of British children’s fantasy, I will argue that there is a broad shift in focus from an outward-facing understanding of empire to a domestic and inward-facing one during this fifty year period. I will show that earlier works of fantasy, such as Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), owe much of their structure to the adventure novels of the nineteenth century which marked a narrative movement outward into imperial space; later works, like those of Penelope Lively and Alan Garner, demonstrate a slippage between imperial and domestic spaces. However, in each of the chapters that follows I will be tracing the presence of both impulses, and will show that the tension caused by an ambivalent and inherently contradictory understanding of imperial and domestic space underpins twentieth-century British children’s literature. The section below maps out some of the major connections between modern British children’s literature, ideas of empire, and the fantasy genre, all of which I will develop in the chapters that follow. 1.1 Children’s Literature, Space, and Empire The tradition of British children’s literature can be said to have been intertwined with imperial ambitions since its inception—though academic work on this subject has until now been limited to an analysis of texts produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nineteenth century saw the growth of a popular literature for children in England, with books and magazines being produced for and read by a mass audience for the first time. Young 1 readers formed a big part of this audience; Richard Phillips attributes this to an increase in juvenile literacy due to the wider availability of primary education, general prosperity, and particularly high birth rates. He notes that the number of under-14s in Britain during this century “nearly doubled between 1841 and the turn of the century, rising from 5.7 to 10.5 million, and never falling below a third of the total population. Many of these young people— a higher proportion than ever before—went to school and learned to read” (Phillips, 50). The British Empire was at the height of its power in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it is therefore unsurprising that the literature of the period is rooted in this imperial context. Much of the children’s literature of the period is explicitly didactic in