Beyond the Secret Garden: Animal Fables and Dehumanization in Children’s Books?
September 2019 sees the release of the second Reflecting Realities report by the CLPE (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education). Whilst the first report has had a clear impact on conversations in UK children’s publishing, there were a number of challenges, of varying thoughtfulness, posed in response. One of those was that many children’s picture books depict non-human animal characters and that this is a positive, inclusive way forward for children’s literature.
This link between children and animals goes back a very long time in many cultures, with scholars even noting similarities between the Indian ancient classic Panchatantra and the ancient Greek Aesop’s Fables. Animal characters were often used to “provide examples of good and bad behavior” (Talking Animals 73), as Tess Cosslett puts it, for child (and adult) readers in an indirect fashion. It is certainly a common trope, particularly in picture books. Excellent recent examples of fables drawing on Indian traditions include Chitra Sounder and Poonam Mistry’s You’re Safe With Me (2018), and Sufiya Ahmed’s Under the Great Plum Tree (2019).
However, the use of animals in children’s stories about racial and cultural diversity runs into major problems that do not always seem to have been given due consideration of historical context. “They are not people” – Mary Lennox’s words about her Indian servants in The Secret Garden – goes some way toward capturing many British writers’ attitudes to People of Colour in the Golden Age of children’s literature. Beginning with Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719), often regarded as the first novel in the English language, those racialised as other than white were deployed as dehumanized counter points to the humanity of white protagonists.
The dehumanisation of non-Europeans by white people has a long history. Many who engaged in it during the 18th century were regarded in Europe as the leading scientists, anthropologists and philosophers of their time - people whose work still impacts their disciplines. In the Age of Enlightenment we see a desire to classify the world along with a desire to justify colonialism and imperialism. An important factor in attempting to square the brutal inequality of slavery and colonialism with the claim that ‘all men are created equal’ was the deployment of narratives that non- whites were not fully human.
This ranged
from Thomas Jefferson’s reference to ‘merciless savage Indians’ in the US Declaration of Independence to the development of racial pseudo-science such as Franz Iganz Pruner’s claim that African people has similar brains to apes. Whilst the latter is an extreme example, the development of scientific racism and offshoots like phrenology were part of mainstream European scholarship, culminating in the development of eugenics in the early 20th century. After the horrors of the Holocaust, much of this scholarship disappeared from public view. But racist connotations have a way of outliving the ‘scholarship’ from which they emerged – witness for example, the number of
14 Books for Keeps No.238 September 2019
recent news stories about Black footballers in Europe subjected to racist abuse that includes monkey chants.
Amy Ratelle writes in Animality and Children’s Literature and Film (2015) that comparing animals and people can “marginalize certain groups as animalistic, atavistic and subhuman” (33) but at the same time “the representation of animals as inherently subordinate to humans buttresses the cultural marginalization of people characterized by nonhegemonic identity
traits” (33).
While Victorian era publishing, such as the advertising campaign for Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), made explicit comparisons between animals and enslaved African people (Sewell’s novel was called “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the horse” according to Peter Stonely), later comparisons were both less direct and less focused on engendering sympathy. Take Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (which won the 1922 Newbery Medal); in this book, Chee-Chee the monkey delights in escaping from Africa by dressing up in stolen human clothes after he sees an African girl who “looks just as much like a monkey as I look like a girl”.
In the USA, librarian and literary activist Edith Campbell has compiled a collection of “books and articles about the racism and hatred expressed when people of African descent are equivocated with monkeys, apes or gorillas” along with “children’s books with anthropomorphic monkeys and apes that do nothing to end this racism” (Campbell). In the UK, one of the most prolific creators of books of this kind is the former children’s laureate, Anthony
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