aspirations. Christian-Smith and her colleagues (1993) explore similar dualities and
demonstrate the complexity of the problem. For instance, in her analysis of the Baby-
Sitters Club books, Meredith Rogers Cherland shows how the characters are placed
securely within feminine roles and functions, being prepared for domestic life and work
in lowly paid ‘caring’ jobs. The 11-year-old girls who are reading them, however, ‘saw the
baby-sitters making money that they then used to achieve their own ends. They saw the
baby-sitters shaping the action around them so that things worked out the way they
wanted them to. They saw girls their age acting as agents in their own right’ (Cherland
with Edelsky 1993: 32). By contrast, horror, Cherland argues, which these girls were
also beginning to read, casts women in increasingly helpless roles. In its association of
sexuality with violence it seemed to offer the girls in Cherland’s study a position of
increasing powerlessness, living in fear and thus denied agency.
Research into the meanings that young people actually make of the books they are
reading demonstrates the plural nature of the texts we are dealing with. While it was
often claimed that texts within the canon had complexity and ambiguity, it was always
thought that popular texts pandered to the lowest common denominator, and offered no
purchase on complex ideological formulations. The evidence does not bear that out.
Popular texts too are discovered to be open to more than one reading, and the
deconstruction of those texts, and the readings young people bring to them, proves be a
productive tool of analysis for exploring the ideological formulations which constitute
them. There is yet to be a large mainstream study of what readers make of the more
traditional central canon of children’s fiction, though John Stephens and Susan Taylor’s
exploration of readings of two retellings of the Seal Wife legend (Stephens and Taylor
1992) is a useful start.
Ideology and Children’s FictionWe have learned from the debate in literary studies that ideology is inscribed in texts
much more deeply and in much more subtle ways than we at first thought in the 1970s.
The initial emphasis in the criticism of children’s books was on the characters, and
addressed questions of representation. The relationship between reader and text was
assumed to be one of simple identification. Literary merit was an unproblematic notion
built upon Leavisite assumptions. This was set in question by reconsideration of
characterisation itself, and then by the revolution in literary studies. Hollindale (1988)
made an initial attempt to explore the complexity of the problem, and Stephens (1992)
has taken it further. Stephens brings powerful ideological perspectives to bear upon the
themes of children’s fiction, the ways in which the stories are shaped, as well as the
ways in which implied readers are constructed by the texts. He looks at a range of texts,
including picture books written for the youngest readers, and examines specific titles by
a number of writers in the central canon—Judy Blume, Anthony Browne, Leon Garfield,
Jan Mark, William Mayne, Jan Needle, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Maurice Sendak and others.
The debate has been informed by a rerecognition of the moral/ didactic role of children’s
fiction, now recoded as its ideological role. Unresolved conflicts remain between those
who want to retain or renegotiate some literary criteria for judging the quality of children’s
fiction and those who are more sceptical of such judgements.
IDEOLOGY 51