The overlap with the discourse of child rearing, and in particular, education, reveals
another conflict, that between determinism and agency. One view of fiction is that it
constructs readers in specific ideological formations, and thus enculturates them into
the dominant discourses of capitalism—class division, paternalism, racism. Such views
are not totally fatalistic, but do require of readers a very conscious effort to read against
texts, to deconstruct them in order to reveal their underlying ideology. This then
becomes the educational project. The opposing view is that readers are not nearly such
victims of fiction as has been assumed, and that the fictions that are responsible for the
transmission of such values are more complex than was at first thought. Evidence from
the children and young people themselves is beginning to be collected in order to explore
this complexity. The argument is that readers are not simply determined by what they
read; rather there is a dialectical relationship between determinism and agency. With
reference to her discussions of girls’ reading, Cherland quotes J.M.Anyon:
The dialectic of accommodation and resistance is a part of all human beings’
response to contradiction and oppression. Most females engage in daily conscious
and unconscious attempts to resist the psychological degradation and low self-
esteem that would result from the total application of the cultural ideology of
femininity: submissiveness, dependency, domesticity and passivity.
Cherland with Edelsky 1993:30Applied to language itself, this analysis of a dialectic between individual identity and the
ideological formulations of the culture within which it finds itself can be traced back to
Volosinov. Within children’s literature the dialectic will be found within the texts, and
between the texts and the reader.
The collection of papers edited by Christian-Smith explores this dialectic in the
greatest detail. There is initially the dialectic within the texts between feminine agency
and patriarchy, traced by Pam Gilbert (1993) and Sandra Taylor (1993), who show how
the female characters are agents of their own lives, finding spaces for decision making
and autonomy within the gendered discourse of the culture, and in the case of younger
characters, within the adult child power relationships of the family. They generally insist
that boys treat them with respect, in an equal and caring relationship, yet they are
trapped within stories that in their closure, suggest futures in domesticity, in poorly
paid service and ‘caring’ jobs, and in monogamous heterosexual relationships.
There is, further, the dialectic between the mode of production, distribution and
dissemination of the texts, and the fact that the girls themselves choose to read them
despite whatever ‘better’ alternatives may be available (Christian-Smith 1993b; Willinsky
and Hunniford 1993).
There is finally the dialectic in school itself as readers appropriate such texts as
oppositional reading, and use them both to renegotiate their own gender roles in their
writing (Moss 1993) and in their discussions (Willinsky and Hunniford 1993). Yet the
schools’ own rating of such reading as being beneath attention, and the tendency to
regard the readers as therefore—and already—constructed by their reading in such a
way that those readings do not merit serious attention, means that the young women
52 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES