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Infantile Informers: The Child Narrator as Mitigator of Sentiment in

Sentimental Political Fiction

A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts
in
English

At Massey University, Distance

New Zealand

Anne May O’Donovan

2019

i
Abstract

From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tim’s Cabin to Charles Dickens’ Hard

Times, the genre of sentimental political fiction—fiction that tugs on our

heartstrings for socio-political end—is often circumscribed to the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. This thesis, however, traces the extension of this tradition,

widely condemned for its manipulative, moralistic and mawkish character, into

contemporary literary culture. Through close analysis of a series of politically-

charged twentieth- and twenty-first century literary novels that feature a child

narrator—Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite

Runner, Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New

Names—the thesis argues that the device of the child narrator has helped

these novels evade the accusations of “mawkish sentimentality” that tarnished

their nineteenth-century kin. As it will show, our western understanding of

childhood as naïve and unschooled enables the child narrator to disguise

sensationalism, subjectivism and didacticism, ensuring that, unlike their

historical counterparts, these novels tug on our heartstrings in the pursuit of a

socio-political agenda without foregoing critical acclaim.

Method: Other than close reading, the primary method employed to

substantiate this claim is reader response theory. Thus, reviews of the novels,

both reader and scholarly, feature strongly as evidence that these novels

escape aspersions of sentimentality.

Methodology: Though there are no studies directly addressing the work of

the child narrator in fiction, the two main bodies of work in which this thesis

intervenes are the literature on sentimental political fiction and the literature on

ii
the depiction of children in fiction. In addition, this thesis draws on two areas of

study that inform the research. The first is the field of childhood studies,

focussing specifically on the child narrator, rather than just the child. This field

provided the framework for interpretation of the various models of childhood

which inform the way that each novel constructs their child narrator. The

second is affect theory, which helped ground speculations about the way tonal

nuances in both the primary and secondary texts can affect our response to the

message these texts impart.

This thesis, then, not only fills a critical gap, but also suggests that the

very fact that critics have ignored the device testifies to its efficient subterfuge

and, in this sense as the child narrator has the capacity to foment genuine

social awareness, they should no longer be overlooked.

iii
Acknowledgements

I could not have done this without the tireless, sacrificial support and

intervention of my supervisor Pansy Duncan. I am so grateful for her constant

and timely reminders to “keep to my original concept”, but mostly I am humbly

aware that her belief in my ability is what spurred me on to finish.

Abundant thanks are also due to my family who were a patient and valuable

sounding board for my ideas, and who also never lost faith.

iv
Contents

Abstract ii
Acknowledgments iv
Contents v

Introduction 1
Chapter 1. A Sentimental Perspective 14
Chapter 2. To Kill a Mockingbird: Imparter of Knowledge 31
Chapter 3. The Kite Runner: Connector of People 51
Chapter 4. Mr Pip: Chronicler of History 69
Chapter 5. We Need New Names: Exposer of Social Wrongs 88
Coda 109
Works Cited 113

(Word Count Excluding Works Cited – 32 472)

v
 Introduction

He coughs some more and I listen to the awful sound tearing the air. His

body folds and rocks with each cough but I don’t even feel for him

because I’m thinking, I hate you for this, I hate you for going to South

Africa and coming back sick and all bones, I hate you for making me stop

playing with my friends. When the coughing finally ceases he is sweating

and breathing like somebody chased him all the way from Budapest and

up and down Fambeki, and I don’t even hear him because I am hating him

for making me stop my life like this. (Bulawayo 96)

Narrated by a ten-year-old girl called Darling, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need

New Names lays bare the realities and hardships of life for disadvantaged

people in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. Reminiscent of nineteenth-century

sentimental novels that aimed to engender social and political change by

leveraging readerly emotion (Tompkins J. xvii; Douglas 9; Burdett 187), this

deathbed scene exposes the terrible consequences of the disease that has

wrought havoc on Bulawayo’s native Zimbabwe. Darling’s father is dying of

AIDS, and in the wake of his death Darling will become the ultimate sentimental

emblem—the AIDS orphan, an “object of pity and charity appeals” (Adebe 460).

And yet, despite the sentimentality at the heart of this tableau, We Need New

Names has not been subjected to the same aspersive accusations of

mawkishness that plagued socially motivated Victorian sentimental political

fiction and that, according to many critics, resulted in the genre’s apparent

demise (Dillon 496; Jefferson 519 - 520; Tanner 128). In fact, reviewers have

1
unanimously noted Bulawayo’s refusal “to play the pity card” (Hewlett; Sanai)

and hailed the novel as a hard-hitting political exposé (Iweala, Muganiwa).

The question must be asked, then: how has this contemporary political

novel, and others like it, slipped the net and avoided the taint of sentimentality?

I would suggest that, although this book, peppered with deathbed scenes and

orphaned children, performs the traditionally sentimental task of intimately

exposing social wrongs in the domestic sphere (Burdett 190; Fisher 90; Howard

74-76; Wexler 9), the fact that the novel is voiced by a child narrator disguises

its sentimental rhetoric. Using the sort of straightforward candour that only a

child can get away with, she maintains our sympathy while effectively

dissimulating the sentimentality and obscuring the emotion evoked by the social

situations the novel exposes. As a preteen child, she is uniquely skilled for the

task: old enough to know something of what is going on, but too young to

understand the consequences. She is too self-centred to feel and express the

true pathos and, by virtue of her limited viewpoint, we are spared an overly

emotional account. Thus, the sentimentality of the novel is disguised and,

despite the fact that we understand the sadness of the subject matter, not a

tear is shed.

Situating Bulawayo’s We Need New Names alongside a handful of other

contemporary “politically aware” fiction that depend on the child narrator, this

thesis advances a simple, twofold argument about this small but significant

body of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century fiction. First, it contends

that these novels—all of them celebrated for their political force in documenting

or intervening in complex political situations—share a great deal in common

with the tradition of “sentimental fiction” discussed by critics like Nina Baym,

2
Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins. Second, it contends that these novels’

reliance on the child narrator has helped them avoid the taint of “sentimentality”

that has conventionally attached to sentimental political fiction. The tradition of,

what I will call “sentimental political fiction”—fiction that presents social and

political messages in a purposeful manner designed to make us feel and

motivate action—is a long one and has been known by many labels. In the

eighteenth century, “novels of sensibility” valorised feeling as a means to shape

society (McDowell 383), developing into overtly didactic “sentimental moralist

novels” (Munday 211-212) and then, in the nineteenth century, becoming

known as “social problem” novels (Guy 3) and “social conscience” novels

(Roberts chap.2). The terms “domestic fiction” and latterly “woman’s fiction”

define the particular strand of the genre written by women (Baym ix). Yet, since

the Victorian era, the “sentimentality” at the heart of this tradition attracts “an

automatic prejudice” (Tompkins, J 25). Indeed, understood as forfeiting the

“authenticity: the spontaneity, the sincerity” (Howard 65) of honest emotion and

“forcing [readers] to feel” (Noble 299)—sentimental appeals have been

dismissed as manipulative, moralistic, mawkish, didactic and sensationalist

(Dillon 496; Solomon 304; Tanner 128). This thesis’ aim, then, is to show that

despite sentiment’s fall from grace, as readers and writers, we have not

abandoned our designs on political and social reform through the manipulation

of readerly feeling and that many of the sentimental functions of eighteenth and

nineteenth-century fiction have been “smuggled in” to contemporary

sentimental political fiction through the device of the child narrator. The handful

of novels I will examine all participate in the sentimental political fiction tradition.

Indeed, amongst other traditionally sentimental functions, they work to impart

3
knowledge, connect people, chronicle history and expose social wrongs. What

sets them apart, however, is that reading alongside the child, readers and

critics are licensed to drop their guard and embrace these novels’ agendas

without dismissing them as sentimental.

We Need New Names is far from being an isolated example of fiction that

employs a child to bear our socio-political burden. Indeed, setting aside for the

moment the question of whether this work can be included within the

sentimental tradition, the ubiquity of the child narrator within politically-charged

twentieth and early twenty-first-century literary fiction is worthy of note. A

classic example of this literary tradition is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—a

novel often hailed for its political impact (Patel; Randall; Shapiro). Famously

narrated by the peppery and irreverent Scout Finch, it gives insight into life in

the American south during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and, because it

was published in 1960, instructs on the issue of racism at a time when the Civil

Rights Movement was very much in the public eye. Yet, over the last two

decades, a range of other novels have sprung up that also use the child

narrator as a device for mediating their complex political subject matter. The

Kite Runner, by Khaled Husseini, is another example of a novel narrated by a

child that readers assert has a socially transformative effect (Aubry 25, 28, 30).

Set in Afghanistan before and during Taliban rule and voiced by a young

Afghan boy named Amir, readers testify to its ability to personalise the lives of

Afghan people at a time when they were only viewed as the enemy

(Guthmann). Mr Pip, by Lloyd Jones, published in 2006, is set in 1989 during

the blockade of Bougainville when Papua New Guinea screened off the island

from the rest of the world for ten years, isolating the inhabitants. Young Matilda,

4
a native to the island, chronicles the atrocities experienced by her people and

the novel raises awareness for the disenfranchised and the marginalised in our

world (Byrt; Laing). Bulawayo’s We Need New Names is set in a post-colonial

African country which, for all intents and purposes, may as well be named as

Bulawayo’s homeland, Zimbabwe. The child narrator, Darling, exposes the

harsh reality of the poverty and political upheaval of Southern Africa and the

diaspora caused by hardship as citizens flee their homes in droves in search of

a better life on foreign soil. This prevalence of the child narrator in

contemporary political fiction suggests that children have been put to work as

agents of reform. A significant corollary to this observation is that the novels

listed in The Huffington Post’s “Listen to the Kids:12 Memorable Novels with

Child Narrators” all deal with either social or political subject matter.

In many respects this thesis has been motivated by an effort to account

for the omnipresence of the child narrator within this body of critically

acclaimed, politically-charged literary fiction. This effort has yielded two key

lines of argument. On the one hand, the thesis proposes that the novels under

discussion bear a great deal in common with the category of “sentimental”

political fiction—a mode that, while not always travelling under this particular

terminological banner, is usually described as dying out at the end of the

nineteenth century (Dobson 264; Dillon 495-496). As I show, like eighteenth

and nineteenth-century “sentimental” fiction, these works all have an agenda,

delivering discernible directives aimed at influencing the reader to care about

situations other than their own: To Kill a Mockingbird aims to impart knowledge;

The Kite Runner aims to connect disparate cultures; Mr Pip aims to chronicle

history and We Need New Names exposes social wrongs, allying them closely

5
with the purposes of sentimental political fiction. On the other, this thesis

proposes that the voices of their child narrators serve, at some level, to obscure

the novels’ participation in the sentimental political tradition, allowing them to

evade the damning label “sentimental”. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the information

and the social messages that the novel imparts are all delivered by the child

narrator Scout who, by virtue of her tender years and humorous delivery,

successfully avoids any accusations of the moral didacticism (Johnson;

Sullivan) usually affiliated with traditional sentimental fiction. In The Kite

Runner, Amir’s portrayal as a fallen child (Miles 207; Wyatt), whose actions we

deplore, helps dodge any readerly concerns about emotional manipulation. Mr

Pip, meanwhile, successfully avoids accusations of sensationalism and

didacticism often accredited to historical political fiction that aims at readerly

influence (Dekoven 138; Krull 695-697) because of Matilda’s limited,

uneducated, childish point of view. And Darling, the narrator of We Need New

Names, is too direct and churlish to be suspected of petitioning for pity

(Hewlett; Sanai) despite her circumstances which epitomise her status as a

“wounded child”.

In advancing this twofold argument over the following five chapters, I

intervene in two key bodies of literature. The first and most significant of these

is literature on the long tradition of sentimental political fiction popularly read for

pleasure as well as for insight. Nineteenth-century women’s novels recognised

as socially influential in the age they were written like Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s

Cabin (1852) (Tompkins xi) and Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850)

(Nelson 11), for example, have become devalued over the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries for their excessive use of emotion, resulting in their

6
dismissal under the sign of the “sentimental” (Dillon 496; Jefferson 519 - 520;

Tanner 128). Nina Baym was one of the first contemporary literary critics to

identify and give credence to sentimental political fiction since its debasement.

Her study, however, which focusses purely on women’s fiction, situates the

mode as existing between 1820 to 1870 and, though many subsequent novels

would fit well into her criteria, does not recognise fiction that continues the

domestic sentimental tradition. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins, who famously

sit on different sides of the fence when it comes to sentimental political fiction,

also limit the mode to the antebellum period. Though they see the effects of

these novels from different perspectives, both Douglas and Tompkins accede

to a view that, far from just being harmless melodramatic pap, sentimental

political fiction had readerly influence. As I will show, like their Victorian

predecessors, the novels of my archive have also been recognised as having

socio-political impact and, as such, contrary to the narrow chronological

boundaries outlined by scholars like Baym, Douglas and Tompkins, they belong

in the sentimental mode.

The second body of work in which I will intervene is the literature on

representations of children in sentimental political fiction. This body of work

generally concludes that, for children to be effective sentimental reformers, they

must be innocent and worthy; that to be powerful social influences, children

must be portrayed as powerless. Writing in detail about little Eva’s death scene

from Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin Tompkins, for example, notes how, because

Eva is such a good child, her redemptive effect on others is made stronger in

death (129). Tompkins’ work bolsters the assumption, which this thesis will

strongly contest, that a child’s social effectiveness lies in its purity and

7
innocence. Besides the depiction of children as ‘good’, literature on children in

fiction also centres on the idea that children are helpless and vulnerable. Joe

Sutliff Sanders, for example, in her discussion on orphan girls in turn of the

century narratives, points out how their lack of real power to control their worlds

elicits sympathy and because of this, they wield power, despite, and actually

because of their vulnerability(42). Claudia Nelson furthers this argument stating

that, in nineteenth-century fiction and non-fiction that exploited the helplessness

of children to promote social change, “the dependent child”(5) became

“reform’s most effective agents” (66). In the present day, however, scenes like

little Eva’s sad demise that moved so many nineteenth-century hearts to

reconsider their views on slavery, leaves readers squirming under the weight of

sentiment that the exploitation of her innocence and vulnerability evokes. In

fact, because we have grown wary of sentimental manipulation, descriptions

designed to focus on children’s helplessness are more likely to be despised for

their manipulative effect. Therefore, though indebted to observations on the

reformative action engendered by the image of a “dependent child” (Nelson 5),

this thesis subverts this view. More specifically, it claims that by entrusting the

child with the task of directing the narration, the novelists of my archive invest

children with agency and power that is not apparently reliant on the intervention

of adults. It further claims that, in doing so, these novels avoid accusations of

“sentimentality,” and are thus more effectively, if more covertly, able to carry out

the cultural and emotional work of sentimental political fiction.

In advancing this argument about the work of the child narrator within

contemporary sentimental political fiction, I draw on a range of theoretical

frameworks to construct a unique methodology. First, to delineate my account

8
of the various models of childhood on which each novel constructs their child

narrator, I turn to work associated with the rich, interdisciplinary field of

childhood studies. Recent work by Alison James and Alan Prout acknowledges

the changing nature of our conception of childhood, highlighting the

“problematic” (1) nature of their field, while Chris Jenks insists—against a

uniform, and romanticising vision of childhood—on its embedded and

historically variable nature (122). James and Jenks, meanwhile, examine how

our romantic vision of children as innocent has become the benchmark, and

that any deviance from this image results in an anxiety about the state of

society, which may explain why we hold so tightly to the vision of the pure child.

Finally, Hugh Cunningham points out the difference between children as

individual human beings and our concept of childhood. He seeks to clear up the

misconception that children are only children if they fit into our very constricting

ideals of childhood (2) and his argument allows for an alternative construction

as, children, for Cunningham, are not only innocent and vulnerable (though he

stops short at actually defining one). This suggestion of a more complex

conception of childhood fits well with the more realistic view of children that

emerges when attention is paid to the function of the child narrator in

contemporary fiction. As I will show, it is the naughty child, the fallen child and

sometimes the downright vulgar child who is able to breach our defences

against sentimentality.

Second, to interpret the effects of the child narrator on readerly

experience and judgment, I draw on the emerging interdisciplinary body of work

known as affect theory. Although I do not directly refer to many affect theorists,

my attention to affect and emotion at the level of tone and reader response is

9
inspired by the body of work on affect and emotion that has emerged over the

past two decades. At the heart of affect theory is an effort to understand how

we are touched, moved and mobilised under changing political and social

regimes, with an attentiveness, as Melissa Gregg puts it, to both the body’s

“potential” to be changed and its “capacity to affect” change in other bodies (2).

Particularly important for my work is Sianne Ngai’s account of affective tone.

Ngai supplies a critical vocabulary for describing how affect is baked into the

text itself in the form of “attitudes” or “orientations” (43). This approach will help

me read certain readerly or authorly moods and affects off the surface of both

my primary texts (the novels) and my secondary texts. More specifically, it will

help me ground speculations about the way in which, for example, when a child

narrator speaks with a humorous tone we are distracted into overlooking the

seriousness of the message they impart.

In applying these frameworks, the primary method I employ is close

textual analysis of the novels in my archive. The focus of my close reading is

the representation of the child as narrator, which reveals how the novels have

managed to carry out their sentimental function while appearing unsentimental.

Examination of the language and syntax voiced by the child narrators as they

present their unique viewpoints, for example, reveal hidden messages about

the social and political milieu that the novels expose. The same applies to the

authors’ use of imagery and motifs to describe the child narrator that discreetly

reveal political messages. The analysis of the novels also attends closely to

characterisation and narrative techniques. A significant revelation that surfaced

while closely examining the texts is the authors’ tendency to thematise the idea

10
that children are more effective political messengers than their adult

counterparts.

In the spirit of affect theory, which focuses on the role of affect in the

reception and evaluation of literary and other texts, I have also examined and

drawn conclusions from the published critical and readerly reception of my

chosen novels, focusing, in particular, on popular reviews. These sources

provide evidence of the novels’ influence on readers and their emotional

engagement with the texts. This method helped discern the affective results of

the novels on the audiences that they aspire to reach and, though anecdotal,

provided a gauge to monitor the efficacy of the child narrator’s ability to

disguise sentimentality.

My thesis will unfold across five chapters, with Chapter One providing

perspective on why the device of the child narrator is necessary as it reviews

the history of sentimentality and its fall from grace. It tracks the changing

reception of sentimentality in general and traditional sentimental political fiction

in particular, showing how the latter has come to be accused of whipping up

false feeling to heighten receptivity to social messages. As it shows, on the one

hand, critics have exhorted all rational readers to exercise reason and to

beware sentimentality’s manipulative agency, while on the other, moral

sentiment theorists have defended it as a legitimate tool to motivate social and

political action. It will also show how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

excessive emotion has been culturally devalued and dismissed under the sign

of the “sentimental” and how, for contemporary audiences under the influence

of modernism, the dialectic has been further complicated by an antipathy to

literature that seeks to sensationalise subjective domestic stories for didactic

11
purposes. Ultimately, it will highlight the need for the device of the child narrator

to sidestep the usual aspersions of sentimentality accompanying literature that

aims to influence societal change.

What follows are four further chapters, one for each of the novels in my

archive. Each chapter highlights one of the novels’ participation in a particular

element of sentimental political fiction, from didacticism and subjectivity to

emotional manipulation through sensationalism and the exploitation of the

wounded child, before going on to underscore how the child narrator—

mediated through a particular paradigm of childhood, from the Christian to the

Romantic tradition—enables the novel to evade the taint of sentimentality often

associated with this sentimental function. Chapter Two reveals how Scout

Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, who represents an image of the child as

humorously naïve and unschooled, imparts knowledge and instructs on social

inequality without seeming didactic. Because we see children as needing

education rather than as educators, we learn with her rather than feeling as

though we are being lectured. In Chapter Three, on The Kite Runner, I frame

the child narrator Amir through the lens of the “fallen child” . It is as a result of

this framing, I argue, that Amir helps the novel achieve its sentimental aim—to

help to connect westerners with Afghani people, usually seen as the enemy—

without attracting accusations of emotional manipulation. Chapter Four

examines Mr Pip where Matilda challenges the model that identifies childhood

with a lack of political power. Instead, her narrative performs a combative

function as she fights back against those who tried to cover up the atrocities

that she and her fellow villagers experienced. In the process, I contend, she not

only helps chronicle history, but helps the novel evade the accusations of the

12
sensationalism, subjectivity and didacticism often levelled at the historical novel

(Dekoven 138; Krull 695-697). Lastly, Chapter Five on We Need New Names

showcases how a de-romanticised child narrator in the form of Darling can

escape accusations of sentimentality, despite her status as a “wounded child”.

The chapter shows how the helpless victims of society can be de-objectified

when given a voice to narrate their own story and at the same time expose the

social wrongs that cause their circumstances, without seeming to descend into

mawkish pity gathering.

When Joseph Conrad wrote that his “task … by the power of the written

word, [is]to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see”

(preface), he confirmed what every lover of fiction knows—words affect our

sensibilities and arouse response by inspiring, informing and inciting

consciousness. If, through literature, we can “hear” the story of ‘the other’, then

might we not sympathise? If we can “see” life from another’s perspective, then

might we not understand their plight? And if we can be induced to “feel”, then

might we not be affected? History shows us, however, that fiction aspiring to

these heights often suffers the same fate as Icarus and is burnt by the very

emotions it encourages. Though the novels in my archive, like the novels of

nineteenth-century women’s fiction, do have a purposeful agenda—to make

readers care about the world’s socio-political problems—they are not held

under the same suspicion of manipulative agency. Instead, this thesis reveals

how each novel utilises an alternative view of childhood to allay our suspicion of

sentimental manipulation and drop our guard, allowing the cultural work of

sentimental fiction to continue.

13
Chapter 1: A Sentimental Perspective.

You may sparkle and dazzle, but you are fit only to throw people out of

their orbits. Now and then, there's a gleam of something like reason in

your writings, but for the most part they are unmitigated trash – false in

sentiment – un-rhetorical in expression.

— Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall, 166

To appreciate the success of the child narrator in circumventing derisory

accusations of sentimentality, we need to first understand why a covert

approach to sentimentality in fiction is necessary. Why is it that sentimental

political fiction, which engages our emotions and moves us, also makes us feel

uncomfortable? In everyday life, our sentimental attachments to objects and

persons enhance their perceived worth; syllogistic arguments and cold hard

reason fail to override the sentimental significance of a family photograph

album or a carefully preserved lock of hair from a child’s first haircut, for

example. Ascribe the label sentimental to fiction, however, and the value

plummets. Because of the pervasive clouds of confusion that this topic

generates, this chapter makes no claims to clarify or explain our ambivalence,

instead it aims to orientate this thesis’ intervention within sentimental political

fiction’s unsettled history. It will map its brief highs, in the guise of eighteenth-

century moral sentimentalism whose proponents promoted sentiment as a

means of affording moral instruction, and its more pervasive lows, like the

damning association with nineteenth-century women’s fiction that blatantly

14
exploited sentimentality to elicit emotional response. It will also discuss how, in

the twentieth century, the rise of modernism heightened the intensity of anti-

sentimentalism, waging a particularly vicious defamatory attack and firmly

establishing the pejorative bias which, to this day, taints our associations with

sentimentality. Indeed, as I will show, while feminist and postmodernist critics

have largely succeeded in salvaging the reputation of sentimental fiction in

academic circles, in the popular domain, sentimentality remains contaminated

by connotations of excessive manipulation of false feeling. Mapping these

mercurial attitudes to sentimentality, then, this chapter will prove the

expedience of enlisting a more subtle messenger in the deceptively

disenfranchised form of the child narrator so that the political work of fiction can

continue despite our chariness to sentimentality.

The repudiation of sentimentality has its roots in a longstanding tendency

in Western philosophical and artistic tradition to devalue emotion in favour of

reason. This bias can be traced back to the classical philosophies of Plato and

Aristotle. Plato saw emotional poetry as outside the bounds of rational thought,

claiming that tragedy and comedy manipulate feelings for no reasonable

purpose. He recognised “the excitement of poetry” but warned against its

effects saying, “we delight in giving way to sympathy,” and while we might think

“that the pleasure is a gain,” Plato saw this unreasonable abandon as feckless

(Book X). Aristotle’s stance was more ambivalent, however, as, while wary of

unbridled emotional manipulation, he believed emotional response elicited by

poetry to be cathartic, helping us to deal with and understand everyday

emotions. For Aristotle, emotions like “pity or fear” (461) experienced through

exposure to artistic representation promote intellectual response inspiring

15
thought and cognition and “learning or inferring” (458). As philosopher Peter

Levine puts it, according to Aristotle, “Moral reasoning cannot occur unless we

feel” (59). Believing that we reason with the data given to us by our immediate

visceral emotions, he exhorted orators to “make use of the emotions” (143).

However, balance was the key: emotion unschooled by reason translates into

sentiment, which, for Aristotle, could inhibit sensible decision making. In his

eyes, it was mainly women who are prone to be led by their emotions at the

expense of reason, as men are “naturally finer beings” (35)—a misogynistic

judgement of women’s emotional instability that may have influenced the

longstanding assumption that emotional response is unmanly. Despite

Aristotle’s defence of emotion, then, he still stresses the importance of a

rational interpretation of our emotions and highlights that emotion, untempered

by reason, should be dismissed as excessive and therefore, what later critics

would call, “sentimental”.

The dialogue over reason and sentiment was taken up in the eighteenth

century in England by two conflicting schools of thought, namely the moral

rationalists and the moral sentimentalists. Despite pursuing a common purpose

and belief in the reality and desirability of moral virtue, for the rationalists,

reason alone dictates our moral responses, whereas, for sentimentalists, moral

distinctions are identified by emotion. Rationalists declared that all morality was

based on reason and we should disregard feelings. William Wollaston, for

example, preached that “since [our] nature is not purely rational” our irrational

side, or emotions, “will mislead [us]” (British Moralists vol. II, 372). John Locke,

meanwhile, used mathematics as his benchmark to observe that “moral

principles require reasoning and discourse” and that, just as some geometric

16
truths are not obvious, so universal moral truths need to be learned and

understood as “they are not innate” (B. M. vol. II, 326 - 327). Thus, for the

rationalists, morality is not instinctive and must be driven by reason and not by

our emotions. Therefore, sentimental literature, which promotes emotional

response, could even be considered immoral as, by rousing emotion, it

obscures reason.

Moral sentimentalists, on the other hand, promoted sentiment as a

directive for morality, believing in feeling and not reason as the basis for moral

decision-making. David Hume, who was heavily influential in the movement,

famously sanctioned passion over reason when he wrote, “Reason is, and

ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other

office than to serve and obey them” (415). They also shared a belief that

humanity is basically social and connected by “fellow feeling” (Smith 13) and

that, unlike the rationalists, we all have an innate sense of what is beneficial for

society and it is this sense, when it is functioning morally, which promotes

positive feelings that motivate us to ethical action (Shaftesbury 248). For

sentimentalists, morality results from a virtuous sensitivity to the feelings of

others and to be sentimentally moved is a precursor for social action. Adam

Smith went so far as to contend that, literature which inspires imagination is a

means of conceptualising the plight of ‘the other’ “by representing to us what

would be our own if we were in his case” (9). Thus, for Smith, contrary to the

moral rationalists, literature that could make the reader feel for another’s plight

was an effective moral and political tool.

This championing of sentimentality as a means of moral influence was

taken up in a slightly different way by later Romantic philosophers like Friedrich

17
von Schiller. Schiller believed in the political power of aesthetics to cultivate

good moral citizens and, like the moral sentimentalists, he also advocated for a

calculated hortatory education through aesthetics, championing “the spiritual

merits of art” (Aesthetic Education letter 2). He stated that “The path to the

head must be opened by the heart. The training of sensibility is therefore the

more pressing need of our age” (AE Letter 9). Based on his conviction that

‘‘beauty alone can confer upon [man] a social character” and that “taste alone

brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual’’ (AE

Letter 27), he proposed that educating people to be more aesthetically minded

can bring about social change. Schiller elevated the efficacy of sentimental

poetry in this cause above all others in his treatise On Naïve and Sentimental

Poetry, praising the poetry of Ariosto (part 1). Thus, Schiller exalted sentimental

works which enable emotional identification for their worthy promotion of

appropriate moral response, seeing sentimental literature as purposeful and

political.

Eighteenth-century “novels of sensibility” embodied Schiller and Smith’s

belief that literature which targets the emotions can work towards moral and

political transformation. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and

Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), for example, were based on

the premise that man is inherently good and our feelings are a powerful guide

to morality. Nineteenth-century sentimental women’s fiction also celebrates the

effects of feeling and novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Maria

Sedgwick and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna openly professed a desire to

transform society, both morally and spiritually, through sentimentality (Carrere

34; Lenard 3; Nelson 66). In her concluding chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

18
(1852), Stowe wrote that she wanted her readers to learn to “feel right” and

then extend their circle of “sympathetic influence” (XLV 463) to change the

hearts of others, and she embraced a didactic reformation of society through

sentimental literature.

Historically, it appears that sentimental political fiction did in fact have the

socio-political influence often ascribed it by defenders of sentimentality. Stowe’s

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, was the first American novel to sell over a

million copies (Tompkins 124) and many believe that it went a long way

towards influencing an ethical response to the anti-slavery message it voiced.

When it was first published, freed slave Frederick Douglass, a black abolitionist

campaigner and journalist wrote:

We are well sure that the touching portraiture she has given of "poor

Uncle Tom," will, of itself, enlist the kindly sympathies, of numbers, in

behalf of the oppressed African race, and will raise up a host of enemies

against the fearful system of slavery (“Douglass’ Notice of Uncle Tom’s

Cabin”).

Abraham Lincoln is also said to have credited the novel with starting the

American civil war which ended in the abolition of the slave trade (Noble 297).

Sentimental writing found its niche in nineteenth-century women’s fiction and

the proliferation of novels that were written at the time testify to its popularity.

Other examples of politically influential sentimental novels are Sedgewick’s

Linwood (1835), which explored the politically charged notion of Republicanism

in America, and Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841), which exposed the

conditions of factory workers during the industrial age in Britain.

19
 However, even in epochs where some thinkers and philosophers were

rehabilitating sentimentality, there has always been a strong strand of popular

anti-sentimentality in Western culture. At the same time that moral sentiment

theorists and romantics believed proportionate sentiment to be honourable,

aesthetic philosopher and empiricist Lord Henry Home Kames, for example,

debunked what he judged “unnatural” sentiments claiming they are “pure rant

and extravagance” (342). In fact, prudential use of sentiment in literature

became a common call. Readers were urged to vigilance and eighteenth-

century women took up the charge against sentiment as vociferously as men.

Conservative religious writer Hannah More warned against a stirring of

passions as a threat to women’s virtue (Pinch 2), and feminist Mary

Wollstonecraft deplored sentiment as an enslaving force for women, causing

them to be “blown about by every momentary gust of feeling” (26). Even Adam

Smith, though a proponent of sentimental moral education, raised the issue of

“suitableness or unsuitableness in the proportion or disproportion which the

affection seems to bear to the cause or object which excites it” (18). In other

words, if we judge the cause of sentiment to be out of proportion with our own

sense of propriety, then “we necessarily disapprove of them, as

extravagant” (19). In the nineteenth-century, canonical writers like Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Mark Twain disparaged sentimental fiction as ‘a woman’s

thing’. Hawthorne famously complained that “America is now wholly given over

to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success

while the public taste is occupied with their trash” (73-76) and Twain linked

sentiment with feminine weakness (8565). Thus, criticism levelled against

unschooled exuberant sentimentality in fiction indicates that, despite its

20
popularity and perceived social advantages, eighteenth and nineteenth-century

sentimental political fiction did much to sully the reputation of the sentimental,

which became popularly seen as indulgent.

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the modernist movement took

up the fight against sentimentality. Excesses of sentiment in fiction were seen

as dishonest and criticised for cheapening sympathetic response and for

encouraging readers to wallow in sad deathbed scenes and tales of personal

hardship merely for the pleasure of feeling emotion. Proto-modernists like

Henry James and Oscar Wilde vociferously protested its evils. Wilde

combatively claiming that, “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have

the luxury of emotion without paying for it” (De Profundis 501), while James

declared that “nothing is more trivial than that intellectual temper, which for ever

dissolved in the melting mood, goes dripping and trickling over the face of

humanity, and washing its honest lineaments out of all recognition” (221-222).

James’ tirade was directed, not against “honest” emotion, “which is in strict

accordance with human life” (221), but rather against the licentious and

purposeful procurement of tear-jerking emotion employed by sentimental

novelists like Rebecca Harding-Davis, whose book, Waiting for the Verdict

(1868), prompted his tirade. James also links sentimentalism with the

consumerism of mass-culture when he says how “debasing” it is for writers who

“become an agent between the supply and demand of the commodity” (222).

African American writer, James Baldwin, vehemently attacked Stowe’s

sentimentalism, saying:

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious

emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist

21
 betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is

always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of

cruelty.” (14)

For Baldwin, Stowe’s novel was not a political force for good, but rather a

harmful wallowing in emotion. D.H Lawrence in his posthumously published

letters expanded on the modernist abhorrence of profligate sentiment. Writing

of the defiling effect sentiment has on raw passion he stated, “the instinct is

swamped and extinguished in sentiment” (265). For Lawrence, instinctive

feeling, akin to James’ “honest” emotion, is ruined by self-conscious sentiment.

Although modernist attempts to distinguish between real emotion and

mere sentimentality did not result in a clear-cut paradigm, there were

similarities in their beliefs. Michael Bell, in his exposé on sentimentality, goes

as far as to say that their “attack on sentimentality was one of the few threads

uniting the internal variety of modernisms” (160). For early modernists, a

dissatisfaction with the perceived inauthenticity of traditional sentimentality and

its associations with mass-culture resulted in Ezra Pound’s call to “make it

new”. Pound expressed the modernist desire to communicate emotion in a

more oblique, less realistic way, saying “I could not find any words that seemed

to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion” (Gaudier-Brzeska 87).

Pound also voiced the modernist dislike of “emotional slither” (Literary Essays

12) but concluded that “Only emotion endures” (LE14), which indicates that it is

not emotion itself from which he and fellow modernists shrink, but rather it is

manipulative, mawkish sentimentalism. T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative

describes modernism’s pressing need to be objective, about emotion where he

states that to express “emotion in the form of art” one must find “a set of

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objects” by which “the emotion is immediately evoked” (The Sacred Wood 7),

thereby advocating for a less direct, less personal and subjective mode of

expression. Modernists also stressed form as another indirect means of

expressing emotion in literature. Virginia Woolf, for example, stated that a novel

is “a structure leaving a shape on the mind’s eye” resulting in “the kind of

emotion that is appropriate to it”. Therefore, modernists saw the kind of direct

and subjective emotional writing that categorised nineteenth-century

sentimental political fiction as inappropriate and, despite modernism’s infamous

diversity, they upheld a united front when it came to the common enemy of

bourgeois sentimentality.

The academic debate about sentimentality has continued into the

postmodern era where the battle for acceptance of sentimentality in fiction is

still being fought. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins are often quoted as being at

opposite ends of the debate. Using Stowe’s account of little Eva’s death scene

as an example, Douglas sees Stowe’s description, and subsequent readers’

sentimental response, as self-indulgent. She perceives a strong link between

Stowe’s heroine and consumerism, contending that the high-modernist versus

mass-culture divide began with nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Douglas

criticises sentimental fiction’s focus on the everyday, which made it accessible

to the general public and therefore not high-brow enough to be considered

literary, remarking on “the exaltation of the average which is the trademark of

mass-culture” (4). Douglas remains firmly invested in maintaining the boundary

imposed by modernists between “high” and “low” literature. Victorian fiction can,

in her view, be easily classified into good or bad literature. To her mind, Stowe

belonged to the latter group which focussed on sentimental domestic, feminine

23
subjects, while authors like Hawthorne and Thoreau “turned their sights

principally on values and scenes that operated as alternatives to cultural

norms” (5) and therefore their work was seen as good. Thus, for Douglas,

fiction that embraces sentimentality for political ends is inferior.

Jane Tompkins, on the other hand, contradicts the popular and modernist

resistance to sentimental political fiction. While remaining non-committal on the

literary standing of nineteenth-century women’s fiction, Tompkins has made a

valiant attempt at ratifying the mode by focussing on the “cultural work” that

sentimentality performed. Tompkins’ approach is to view sentimental texts “as

agents of cultural formation rather than as objects of interpretation and

appraisal” (xvii). Thus, she does not ask us to decide whether or not they are

“good” literature, but rather to value their effect, which she believes is

intentional saying, “These novelists ha[d] designs upon their audiences, in the

sense of wanting to make people think in a particular way” (xi). According to

Tompkins, we cannot judge a text written in the mid nineteenth century by

contemporary standards and she requires a return to the historical context in

which they were written and received. For example, according to Tompkins,

contemporary critics who see the sentimentality of heart-wrenching death-bed

scenes as defective fail to understand the prevailing belief of Stowe’s time that

Christ-like sacrifice has “the power to work in and change the world” (130).

Tompkins upholds that nineteenth-century women’s fiction is worthy of study

because of its sentimental political impact, though she remains ambivalent

about its literary merit.

There has, however, also been a recent move towards questioning the

judgments made by modernist aesthetics about good and bad literature with

24
some academics proposing critical acceptance of fiction usually outlawed for

sentimentality. Many contemporary feminist critics have paved the way to a less

schizophrenic enjoyment of novels which pull on our heart strings and advocate

for a revision of the literary canon to include sentimental political fiction. Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick, for example, offers “reparative” reading as an antidote for

critique, which she terms “paranoid” reading. “Paranoid” reading and, what Paul

Ricoeur termed the “Hermeneutics of suspicion”, pre-empts textual problems by

anticipating them in advance so there are “no bad surprises” (Touching Feeling

130). Advocating a shift away from a reductive approach fuelled by a fear of

getting it wrong, Sedgwick leans towards affect, open to whatever delights a

text might offer. Rita Felski also calls for a revival of literary appreciation of

traditionally non-canonical texts by making a case for the uses of literature.

Floating the notion of “emphatic experience” (20), which she defines as

individual appreciation for literature unfettered by concerns over “high versus

low art” (20), stating, “There is no reason why our readings cannot blend

analysis and attachment, criticism and love” (22). For Felski, a text’s capacity to

move us lies in the application of four intrinsic uses of literature which she

defines as recognition, enchantment, knowledge and shock and the resulting

connection with the characters and situations described, affirms, rather than

debases, the value of sentimental fiction.

Other contemporary scholars have re-embraced the enlightenment era and

advocate for Smith’s and Schiller’s ideal of embracing sentimentality to

influence morality. Philosopher Charles Taylor believes that sentiment becomes

“the touchstone of the morally good” as it functions in “determining good and

bad” (284). For Taylor, sentiment can be corrected by reason when it deviates,

25
but the insight it yields cannot be substituted for by reason. This way of thinking

is part of a wider turn to neo-Aristotelean attitudes advocating emotion’s

relation to political life, known as virtue ethics. Following this school of thought,

ethical philosopher Martha Nussbaum has earnestly proposed a programme of

educative reading in schools “to foster an informed and compassionate vision

of the different” (Cultivating Humanity 89), confirming her belief that literature

plays a vital role in promoting good citizenship. Robert Solomon, who writes so

emotively about the value of sentimental literature is also a proponent (44). Like

the moral sentimentalists, these scholars recognise the power of sentimentality

and see social connectedness empowered by fiction as a necessary moral

compass to determine right and wrong. This contests the modernist view of

man in isolation, unaffected by society, exemplified by American modernist

author Thomas Wolfe when he wrote that “solitariness is by no means a rare

condition…but the inescapable, central fact of human existence” (467). Thus,

for some contemporary thinkers, like the moral sentimentalists, sentimentality

has the potential to forge connections through “fellow feeling” (Smith 13) and

thus play a vital part in social and political reform.

However, the argument against sentimentality in fiction is still being fought

on the grounds that its profligate use is ineffectual. Despite the fact that

scholars like Nussbaum see sentimental political fiction as an effective

motivator of social and political change, there are many present-day dissenters

who remain sceptical about the use of sentimentality to impact meaningfully on

society. Lauren Berlant, for example, perceives identification with characters

elicited through emotional response as fallacious as, in her view, it negates the

hurdles of geographical distance and racial difference. For Berlant, besides

26
ethno-geographical obstacles, the privatising and personalising of suffering in

sentimental political fiction precludes political discussion about the true cause

of the suffering and actually prevents action. She calls this “the politico-

aesthetic tradition of sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza” 638) and believes that:

Because the ideology of true feeling cannot admit the nonuniversality of

pain, its cases become all jumbled together and the ethical imperative

toward social transformation is replaced by a civic-minded but passive

ideal of empathy. The political as a place of acts oriented toward

publicness becomes replaced by a world of private thoughts, leanings,

and gestures.” (P.E. 641)

In other words, rewriting politics as feelings undermines the issues at stake and

results in a moral stasis. Echoing both Wilde’s and Baldwin’s views, Berlant

believes we are so caught up in the emotion that we become incapable of

looking beyond the embodied pain and suffering and identifying the social

problems which need to be changed, becoming incapable of meaningful action.

In a similar vein, Michael Tanner’s objection to sentimentality is that it “doesn’t

lead anywhere” (130). He favours “emotional generosity” as, for him,

sentimentality causes people to “avoid following up their responses with

appropriate actions” (140). Literature, from Berlant’s and Tanner’s perspective,

does have the power to influence, but only when it is not sentimental.

The work done by feminist contemporary scholars to recuperate

sentimental political fiction’s literary worth is also hindered by enduring

misogyny. Many anti-sentimentalists, in the manner of Aristotle, see women as

overly swayed by emotion, and cast sentimental political fiction as an extension

of this susceptibility. Only recently, Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, when

27
interviewed, called women’s writing “feminine tosh”, declaring that no female

author was his equal because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of

the world" (Fallon). Accusations of ‘girlie sentiment’ are still used as an insult,

implying weakness and a contravening of the Anglo stiff upper lip and the

American WASP mentality (Strandberg 60). Popular author of the Flavia de

Luce mysteries, Alan Bradley, goes to great lengths to distance his young

female protagonist from sentimentality in order to verify her stability. She voices

her scorn by saying that sentiment gets “in the way of simple logic” equating it

with “False feelings” (9). Science fiction writer Sheri S. Tepper also associates

a lack of sentiment with strength and pragmatism in her novel The Gate to

Women’s Country with the words “No sentimentality, no romance, no false

hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!” (9). In other words, sentiment is

fake and if women want to be seen as strong they must eschew it.

Criticism of sentimentality means that we are still afraid to romantically

embrace sentimental political fiction lest we look foolish. As English

aesthetician R.G. Collingwood wrote in his critique of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”,

“No one gives; no one will risk himself by sympathizing …The only emotion left

us is fear: fear of emotion itself, fear of death by drowning in it, fear in a handful

of dust (335). The enduring modernist bias persists, and sentimental political

fiction is too fraught with negative connotations to be freely embraced. It has

not yet shed its affiliation with kitsch, which twenty-first century author Milan

Kundera defines in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says:

How nice to see children running on the grass!

28
 The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind,

by children running on the grass!

It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch (251)

Like Oscar Wilde before him, Kundera condemns sentimentality’s self-

indulgence, its propensity in fiction to gratify the reader rather than the cause it

purports to advance. Modernism, which as a movement strove to set itself apart

from mass culture, has, ironically, influenced the mainstream to disregard

sentimental political fiction as “low art” and judge it as inferior literature. Its

assault on popular fiction in general, and in particular the sentimental mode,

has resulted in what Andreas Huyssen calls “the anxiety of contamination”

which “has remained amazingly resilient over the decades” (vii). The modernist

influential aversion to sentimental fiction is summed up by I. A. Richards who

states, “so many readers are afraid of free expansive emotion, even when the

situation warrants it… It leads them…to suspect and avoid situations that may

awaken strong and simple feeling” (269). So, it seems that the anti-

sentimentalist campaign was so successful that its effects are hard to

overcome (Perkins 257), in fact, as Tanner observes, “charges of it are made

very much more frequently nowadays” (128), suggesting that our aversion to

sentiment is stronger now than ever.

The recuperatory work done to ameliorate our lingering distaste for

sentimentality might one day overcome derision and negate the need for

devices of deception like the child narrator. However, for the moment, anti-

sentimentality is still alive and well and we remain indebted to their ameliorative

service. Sentimentality is known by different names, some call it kitsch, others

melodrama, but, whatever its label, it appears that when fiction fails to maintain

29
emotional and cultural distance or does not require intellectual gymnastics, then

it earns the appellation sentimental. However, we still seek illumination from

fiction and writers still turn to novels to deliver their message. Like Harriet

Beecher Stowe and her contemporaries who sought to enlighten readers

socially and politically, present day sentimental political fiction still has “designs”

(Tompkins xi) on the reader and there are countless readers who testify to the

positive effects of reading emotionally engaging literature. Where there is

demand, there must be supply, and thus, the child must continue to labour to

obscure sentimentality so that fiction can impart knowledge, connect people,

chronicle history and expose social wrongs without being dismissed as kitsch.

30
 Chapter 2. To Kill a Mockingbird: Imparter of Knowledge.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It

aggravates ’em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right,

they have to want to learn. (Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 130)

There are countless testimonies affirming the educative effects of novels, like

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, that seek to “impart knowledge”—that is, to

influence opinion on political and social injustice (Flood; Randall; Weber 233).

Indeed, many scholars agree that one of the functions of fiction is to teach and

that, consequently, one of the reasons we read is to learn (Felski 77; Gaut 141;

Nussbaum, Poetic Justice 6). Harper Lee herself affirmed the edifying function

of reading in a letter to Oprah Winfrey, saying, “I prefer to search library stacks

because when I work to learn something, I remember it”. However, although

many scholars concur that “instruction is an important literary value” (Repp

271), for many readers overt didacticism is off-putting, part of a constellation of

qualities that tend to invoke the appellation “sentimental” (Newcomer 215; Repp

272). The eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers of overtly exhortative

sentimental political fiction have been severely criticised by contemporary

readers for their openly didactic agendas ( Repp 272; Woodworth 38). Jane

West, for example, is accused of writing “‘thinly disguised conduct books with

obvious lessons” (Ty 87), and it is said of Maria Edgeworth that she failed to

make her plots interesting enough to disguise her novels’ didactic intent (Lee,

Sun 34). In addition to taking exception to overt sermonising, critics have also

railed against the sentimental strategies routinely employed by eighteenth and

nineteenth-century moralist novelists to manipulate readers’ emotions into

31
changing their moral stance—strategies whose omnipresence within didactic

fiction has served to link didacticism and sentimentality more generally (Havens

14, 26; Lee, Sun 35; Repp 272; Ty 10; Van Sant 5). Yet while To Kill a

Mockingbird takes on the traditionally sentimental function of imparting

knowledge and influencing readers’ moral stance, Lee’s novel has escaped

disparagement for didacticism, and, by association, sentimentality.

How, then, has Lee managed to avoid the fate of novelists like West and

Edgeworth, by making her readers—as Calpurnia puts it in To Kill a Mockingbird—

“want to learn” (130, my italics)? If this thesis argues that the child narrator has

served the purpose of dissimulating the sentimental functions of much

twentieth-century fiction, this chapter will bear this argument out in relation to

one element of sentimental political fiction in particular—namely, its

pedagogical or educational role. It will argue that the naïveté we ascribe to the

child in Western culture means that, by making Scout the narrator of the novel,

Lee disguises the educational logic of To Kill a Mockingbird in ways that have

made it palatable to both popular and academic audiences and that have

helped it elude the label “sentimental”. This chapter will advance this argument

as follows. First it will briefly prove the novel’s association with didactic fiction

before discussing the critical reception, both for and against, of traditional fiction

that aims to impart knowledge. It will then show the success of the child

narrator in avoiding accusations of sentimentalism usually ascribed to such fiction

by comparing the favourable reviews of To Kill a Mockingbird, narrated by the

childish Scout, to Lee’s less well received novel Go Set a Watchman, narrated

by an adult Scout. Next it will discuss how Lee’s portrayal of the child narrator

as “unschooled” and guileless enables her to achieve this obscuration of the

32
sentimental function of the novel, and provide a series of close textual analyses

illustrating how exactly this works. It will further contend that alongside this

analogy, Lee also reflexively thematises the idea that youthful innocence,

unclouded by experience, has more direct access to the truth and therefore the

ability to learn.

Lee’s widely read novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, tells the story of a young

girl, Scout Finch, growing up in the fictional Alabama town of Maycomb in the

1930’s and tackles the traditionally sentimental task of imparting knowledge.

The novel is a narrative of the South and as such instructs on difficult topics like

racism, classism and sexism. The experiences of life force the young

protagonist Scout and her brother Jem into a state of knowing and Lee uses

their experiences to impart moral lessons to the reader. The children gain harsh

knowledge about their world when Tom Robinson, a black man accused of

raping a white girl, is unfairly found guilty despite his defence by their lawyerly

father Atticus Finch. The didacticism of their experiential learning is reinforced

by moral lessons preached by Atticus, the voice of experience, as he lectures

Scout about empathy saying, “You never really understand a person until you

consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk

around in it” (35) and he lectures Jem about the Radley’s right to privacy, telling

him that ‘What Mr Radley did was his own business” (55). As we follow Scout

and Jem’s move from innocence to experience, the didacticism of the novel is

undeniable for, as they learn lessons in life, so too do we. In a New York Times

article, Sona Patel quotes reviews from contemporary readers who use words

like, “taught”, “formed”, “lesson” and “wisdom” to describe their response to the

novel and, as E.W. wrote in The Economist “The novel remains a testament to

33
the ways fiction can expose a society’s sins, alter consciousness, and advance

the gradual work of social change”. Thus, To Kill a Mockingbird allies closely

with didactic sentimental political fiction of the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries.

Though didactic fiction has enjoyed an ambivalent critical reception over

the years, there have been some periods of history when moralistic teaching

through fiction has been openly embraced. The enlightenment era actively

promoted fiction that instructed on moral behaviour (Schiller AE Letter 2; Smith

9) and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a period when

many critics actually denigrated novels that did not promote a moral message.

John Wilson Croker summed this up in Quarterly Review saying, “A novel

which is not in some degree a lesson either of morals or conduct, is, we think, a

production which the world might be quite as well without “(qtd in Munday 212).

This idea has persisted into the present day for many contemporary critics like

philosopher Martha Nussbaum who contends that the novel must necessarily

be an art form that is both “morally serious yet popularly engaging” (Poetic

Justice 6). Cognitive theorist Berys Gaut agrees that literature is made more

estimable when it teaches us something (141) and literary theorist Rita Felski

confirms that there exists “a widespread intuition that works of art reveal

something about the way things are” (77). Thus, many scholars acknowledge

that we come to learn about the world and its people while enjoying literature.

However, the fictional function of imparting knowledge is not celebrated

universally amongst academics and it has struggled to shake off its links with

the much-maligned sentimental moralist tradition. Oscar Wilde, writing at the

end of the Victorian era, was at pains to distance his work from the didactic

34
fiction of the day and in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray he wrote, “No

artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an un-

pardonable mannerism of style”. Edgar Allen Poe famously referred to “the

heresy of The Didactic” (11), in his essay “The Poetic Principle”, where, like

Wilde, he proposed that a true artist should eschew ethical instruction and write

with only aesthetics in mind. Modernist Virginia Woolf was so against

didacticism that she criticised not only fiction, but also openly exhortative

academic discourse claiming that all writing “must be so fused by the magic of

writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture”

(212). For many critics, the distaste for instructive literature has endured (Lee,

Sun 34; Ty 87), despite the efforts of those like Nussbaum who argue

otherwise. Charles Repp contends that this is because “heavy-

handed…instruction suggests its author is intellectually arrogant, dogmatic, or

prejudiced, giving the reader reason to distrust the lessons it seeks to convey”

(285). In other words, overt didacticism impedes rather than promotes the

acceptance of knowledge imparted.

Yet, despite the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird involves the sentimental

function of imparting knowledge and deals with powerful political issues, it was

remarkably well received by critics. Daniel D’Addario’s review observed the

risk involved in writing about contentious issues like racial prejudice saying that

“a faint catechistic flavor may have been inevitable. But it is faint indeed;

novelist Lee’s prose has an edge that cuts through cant”. So effective is Lee’s

nuanced approach in To Kill a Mockingbird that Richard Sullivan of The

Chicago Review went so far as to deny that Lee had an agenda at all, saying

“This is in no way a sociological novel. It underlines no cause. It answers no

35
questions. It offers no solutions. It proposes no programs. It is simply an

excellent piece of storytelling”. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee committed

wholeheartedly to the story of the Finch family and their Maycomb neighbours.

In fact, the first half of the book is almost exclusively given over to their

provenance and the minutiae of their lives. Lee said in a radio interview given

just after To Kill a Mockingbird’s release that she “would like to be the

chronicler of … small town middle-class southern life. There is something

universal in it. There’s something decent to be said for it and there’s something

to lament when it goes, in its passing.” (Qtd in PBS article). Despite her

domesticated and personal narrative—another link to eighteenth and

nineteenth-century sentimental fiction—reviewers do not accuse Lee of

sentimentality. In fact, in The Daily Telegraph Peter Green stated that To Kill a

Mockingbird “was neither sentimentalised nor played for clever laughs”.

In contrast to the reception of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s early draft of

the novel released in 2015 under the title Go Set a Watchman, was not as well

received and reviewers pull no punches in their common reproachful

assessment. Time Magazine’s D’Addario says that, “Go Set a Watchman is

alienating from the very start” and The Guardian’s Robert McCrum damns with

faint praise saying it “has a certain promise, but not much more” seeing Lee’s

prose as “raw, partisan and often clunky”. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker

accuses it of relying on “prosy debates about contemporary politics” and Gaby

Wood of The Telegraph refers to it as “barely a novel at all” complaining that “It

contains several passages of undigested shouting, the kind a student might

write in a political pamphlet”. Thus, Lee is taken to task for overt didacticism as

she barrages the reader with rhetoric. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, the novel sits

36
clearly within the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth-century “sentimental

moralist novels”, however, in Go Set a Watchman, Lee’s blind determination to

impart knowledge becomes the focus and results in the book being neither

aesthetically pleasing nor enjoyable.

The overt didactic nature of Go Set a Watchman also highlights the

sentimentality of the novel. Wood confirms this, accusing Lee of trying to

disguise her “more radical” political agenda by “bookend[ing], rather half-

heartedly, with sentimental scenes designed to obscure”. The narrator, an adult

Jean-Louise Finch, lectures us like a parent to a child; we block our ears to the

message and the novel becomes less an imparter of knowledge than an

impediment to learning. Switching from third person narration to self-conscious

internal monologues, the grown-up Scout awkwardly questions her family’s

beliefs, asking: “Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe

everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the

things they hear without throwing up?” (GSAW 118). The debate she has with

her father Atticus about whether African Americans are capable of equal

citizenship descends circuitously into abstract political patter and individual

people are taken out of the equation as she refers to “helping the negroes”

(167) as a faceless collective. When she reminds Atticus that “they’re entitled to

the same opportunities anyone else has” (169), it becomes an ‘us and them’

argument and perpetuates the divisive society she attempts to oppose. The

voice of the experienced Jean-Louise who descends on Maycomb touting her

liberal New York ‘straight talk’ is too blatantly hortatory, practicing no restraint,

and therefore cannot avoid derogatory accusations of didacticism. As

Calpurnia, one of Scout’s mentors in To Kill a Mockingbird and the Finch’s

37
African American housekeeper, so wisely teaches, “It’s not necessary to tell all

you know” (TKAM 130).

The question must be asked, then, how did Lee avoid the same

accusations of overt didacticism and sentimentality for To Kill a Mockingbird,

her revised version of the novel? Legend has it that when Lee first submitted

the early draft, later published as Go Set a watchman, her editor, Tay Hohoff,

“persuaded [her] to write [the] novel from the point of view of the young Scout”

(Gardiner). The original manuscript was told from the perspective of a grown-up

Scout, an opinionated 25-year-old returning home to Alabama from New York,

appalled by the racist attitudes of her home town. Because of the contentious

nature of the content, combined with the fact that it was written and set at the

height of The Civil Rights Movement by an author who was not only white and

female, but from the southern state of Alabama, Hohoff believed that the novel

would be too adversarial, its lessons too hard to digest. In her wisdom, Hohoff

recognised that the powerful political knowledge Lee imparts—confronting the

reader with discomforting issues like racial inequality, rape and the evils of a

discriminatory justice system—could be more subtly conveyed by a naïve child

narrator—through the voice of the loveable, tomboy Scout Finch—and the

novel was rewritten as Lee’s Pulitzer prize winning best-seller To Kill a

Mockingbird.

In contrast to her adult correlate, what special qualifications does the

childish Jean Louise Finch employ to impart knowledge without seeming

didactic? The answer is tied to the fact that the Western tradition has tended to

imagine the child as innocent and guileless, one who is yet to be educated, not

one who educates. As Susan Honeyman points out, “In the West adults have

38
generally insisted that childhood is innocent…, irrational and unschooled” (3)

and we accept that, as is the case in To Kill a Mockingbird, a child does not

know-it-all and is open to erudition. Scout herself voices this assumption

saying, “everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin’” (231). Thus, our

western view of children as “unschooled” makes the education she receives

during the course of the story acceptable and authentic and, although we are

learning at the same time, we are not aware that we are also being schooled

and do not feel patronised. Scout, who is about to turn six at the start of the

novel, and by the end is almost nine, states that, because of what they have

gone through, she feels “very old” as she muses that “there wasn’t much else

for [her and Jem] to learn, except possibly algebra” (283-284). The voyage of

discovery is framed in To Kill a Mockingbird as a narrative arc where Scout and

Jem move from innocence to experience; from ignorance to knowledge. They

live the learning, moving forward to a state of understanding as the novel

progresses, thus they do not pontificate from a position of moral superiority. It is

acceptable for Scout not to know, and because we are engaged by her story, it

becomes acceptable for us to learn from her epiphany. Thus, for generations of

Americans and millions of readers around the world, the message which To Kill

a Mockingbird delivers can be read, heard and enjoyed without offense.

Scout’s gentle and humorous narrative flows into and over and under the

harsh socio-political messages that underpin the novel and dissimulates the

sentimentality of To Kill a Mockingbird’s aim to impart knowledge. The narration

is openly a mixture of the immediate: Scout’s childish consciousness slowly

awakening to events around her, and the retrospective: a percolation of these

events by an adult co-narrator. Her guileless questions, while amusing, serve to

39
cut straight to the point uncovering truth and Lee, as adult co-narrator, cleverly

includes those that advance her message. Scout interrogates Calpurnia asking

why she changes her way of speaking when she is among her fellow coloured

folks “when [she] know[s] it’s not right” (129) and her ingenuous interrogation of

the men in the mob wanting to lynch Tom Robinson cuts through their blind

anger and exposes their humanity. Scout’s growing perception and her learning

that results from her naïve questioning is placed at the aesthetic centre of the

novel, as R.A. Dave observes, “What happens to the artist’s consciousness is

more important than the actual happening itself” (37), it takes precedence over

plot. Reviewer Robert McCrum says that “Lee executes a narrative sleight of

hand of genius”, referring to the fact that Lee harnesses Scout’s naiveté to

disguise the underlying adult perspective. As we are bewitched by Scout’s

amusing attempts to make sense of her world, so Lee’s direction becomes less

noticeably overt and, complicit with the adult narrator who encourages us to

laugh at her exploits, we are less aware that we are learning with Scout.

The child narrator also serves to temper the didacticism of the moral

teaching dispensed by her father Atticus, which could otherwise be perceived

as sentimental and be difficult to stomach. As already shown, he is free with his

opinions, delivering them from a vantage of moral authority. He even lectures

his own brother Jack about how to treat children, telling him that “When a child

asks you something answer him…But don’t make a production of it…they can

spot an evasion quicker than adults” (93). This moral authority is due, not only

to the fact that he is a respected lawyer and descendent of an esteemed

Southern family, but also by virtue of the observation from those who know him

that, “Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets” (Lee

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52), and therefore has integrity. His moral rectitude allies him with “good”

heroes in the sentimental political tradition, but, as a result of the dissimulation

of sentimentality achieved by the use of the child narrator, Lee gets away with

allowing him to share his wisdom. As Claudia Johnson points out, he is seen by

some as a saint and the lessons he imparts are among the most quoted

passages from the novel. As a single parent Atticus is Scout’s moral

touchstone, and even though she says she only finds him “satisfactory” (12),

her actions indicate she admires and loves him. The scenes where she finds

comfort in his lap “show” us their warm relationship and seeing Atticus from the

perspective of Scout’s love for him, we accept his lectures just as she does and

“we [hear] every word [he] said” (To Kill a Mockingbird 285). Thus, Atticus

remains firmly in people’s affections and his messages are remembered

because we see him through the eyes of the child narrator.

The genius of Lee’s use of the child narrator is that Scout, unlike her

father, is far from saintly and her “innocence” falls well short of the beatific pure

“innocence” of the romantic image of childhood. This ruse successfully

distances her from other sentimental political heroines like Little Eva in Uncle

Tom’s Cabin (1852) and helps cloak the sentimentality of To Kill a Mockingbird.

She cusses and tests Uncle Jack’s patience when she “asked him to ‘pass the

damn ham please’” (84). She solves conflict at school and home with her fists,

and Aunt Alexandra notes that she “was born good but had grown

progressively worse every year” (87). Scout is no virtuously angelic sentimental

heroine, instead, she comes far closer to James R Kincaid’s description of “the

naughty child” (246). Lee’s rendition of “the naughty child” is also distilled from

the many voices of Maycomb society and, exhibiting influence from those other

41
than the saintly Atticus, Scout bears the mark of the fallen people To Kill a

Mockingbird seeks to instruct. As an intelligent and curious little girl, she picks

up and cogitates on, not only Atticus’ wisdom, but the words of the townsfolk

around her, which make her partisan with their sin. It is Scout, for example, who

utters one of the most shockingly racist comments in the novel. When her friend

Dill is crying over the treatment the defendant, Tom Robinson, receives in

court, Scout says, “Well, Dill, after all he’s just a Negro” (203). With these words

Lee cunningly achieves two things. First, she shows how innocence can be

corrupted as Scout, just a young girl, repeats the rhetoric of the average dyed

in the wool white supremacist. Second, Lee again shows us that Scout is not a

saint, but a product of her Southern upbringing and, because of this, instead of

alienating those readers who have struggled with their own racist thoughts and

actions, the child narrator helps To Kill a Mockingbird to avoid accusations of

patronising moralistic didacticism and the traditionally sentimental objective of

imparting knowledge is more subtly achieved. Scout, like the readers Lee

hoped to teach, starts out prejudiced and grows towards tolerance. The growth

which Scout experiences in the novel is that by the end she “think[s] there's just

one kind of folks. Folks" (231), and the aim of the novel is that the reader will

think the same.

As readers we learn from the child narrator’s moral growth as she

consciously makes a decision to question the “knowledge” she has acquired

from the townsfolk. Scout’s narration gives insight into the town’s judgemental

views as she wrestles with her conscience, from her humble position as one of

these “folks”. The “knowledge” Scout has acquired from the town and has

assimilated into her discourse tells her that she should feel guilty about talking

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to a fallen man like Dolphus Raymond. Raymond suffers a self-imposed exile

from the rest of the town because of his dissident relationship with a coloured

woman. Despite her socially enforced “feeling that [she] shouldn’t be [there]

listening to this sinful man who had mixed children” (205), her actions counter

these thoughts and she is drawn to the man. Her childlike instinct, of which

Raymond himself speaks, leads her to find him “fascinating” and she overrides

the town’s voice. Scout’s indoctrination into the racial protocol of the South is

not yet so firmly entrenched that she cannot look beyond Raymond’s “sin” to

the man. Scout also “shows” her rejection of the racist dogma she has learnt

and sometimes spouts when she takes such delight in visiting Calpurnia’s

church. Her actions show that she sees nothing wrong with interacting across

the colour bar when she asks Atticus if she may visit Calpurnia’s home. It is

Aunt Alexandra, not Scout, who “tells” us the established Southern creed as

she explodes with “You may not” (139) as whites do not visit with Negroes.

Thus, Scout hears the bigoted discourse of the town, but her childish instinct,

coupled with the teaching she receives from Atticus on tolerance, overrides this

doctrine and she demonstrates her lack of judgemental attitude through her

actions. She stands as a sort of synecdoche for the readers Lee hoped to

educate and as she learns, so do we.

Thus, instead of advancing moral education through didactic preaching,

the child narrator models the lessons she imparts through her actions. Another

lesson that she teaches is that it is possible to change people’s actions by

treating them as human beings, rather than judging them for their appearance

and the rhetoric they spout. Because Scout is a child, her lack of guile is seen

as authentic and we can learn from her childish perspective in the scene

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outside the Maycomb jail where Tom Robinson is in danger of being lynched by

a mob from old Sarum. Despite their evil intent, from Scout’s viewpoint, the

mob are just men. “In the midst of this strange assembly”, Scout looks beyond

the men’s “sullen” faces and the “hats pulled firmly down over their ears”—their

attempts at disguise—and “sought once more for a familiar face” (156). Calling

out, “Hey, Mr Cunningham” when she finds one, she personalises the mob.

Scout reminds Mr Cunningham of his humanity as she reminds him of their

relationship, naming his son Walter with whom Scout goes to school, and

enquiring if the legal problems Atticus had helped him with were resolved. Her

childish attempts at neighbourly conversation disarm the man and Mr

Cunningham “squat[s] down” to look her in the eye giving the instruction to the

rest of the mob to “clear out” (158). Mr Cunningham steps down from his

tainted adult vantage point to take in the view from Scout’s level. When he does

so, he is no longer able to objectivise, and he looks at the person who is

looking at him. Unable to hide behind the anonymity of the group, he is forced

to back down. Because we see the scene through the child narrator’s eyes, the

mob, made up of “folk”, is no longer a frightening force and because Scout

does not treat them as such, they lose their power. It is not Atticus’ voice of

experience and attempts at reason that disperses the mob, neither is it Jem’s

brave defiance of his father to stand in unity with him, nor is it the newspaper

editor’s rifle aimed at the mob from the vantage of his office. As Atticus later

tells us “it took an eight-year-old child to bring ‘em to their senses … That

proves something – that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply

because they’re still human” (161). The lesson of relationship over judgement is

at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird and responds to those critics who saw the

44
novel as “not go[ing] far enough” (Gist 249) and “reimagin[ing] Southern

history…as something far more benign than its reality” (Ako-Adjei 185). The

child narrator demonstrates what so many positive testimonies of the novel’s

transformative effect prove—that addressing hatred and prejudice with more of

the same will not change hearts.

Thus, not only does Lee employ a child narrator to ameliorate the

sentimentality of her didactic message, but within the narrative of To Kill a

Mockingbird she also thematises the idea that a child’s unbiased perspective

can teach adults about prejudice without lecturing them. When Jem hears of

Tom Robinson’s guilty verdict, his youthful idealism is shattered by the result

meted out by the court. When attempting to comfort him, Atticus says “If you

had been on the jury, son, and eleven other boys like you, Tom would be a free

man…So far nothing has interfered with your reasoning process” (224). Jem,

whose trust was invested in justice, could see plainly and rationally that Tom,

as an innocent man, should go free and he rails against the unfairness. He has

not yet learned the hard lesson that justice has nothing to do with fairness and

everything to do with the interests of the people who hold power and administer

the law. He has yet to learn how the subjective bias of racism can muddy the

waters and obscure reason. The reader can take Atticus’ comment one of two

ways, we can either see it as indicative of a hopeful future, one where young

boys with a clear vision will grow into young men who remain reasonable and

stand against unfairness, or we can see it as a warning that, as young idealists

grow older, they too become tainted by experience and innocence is lost. Either

way, Lee’s message is clear, young eyes see reason untainted by rhetoric.

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 Lee investigates this theme further through Dolphus Raymond who, like

Atticus, explicitly identifies the advantage of seeing things through the eyes of a

child, but questions whether innocence is possible as experience intervenes.

To avoid interference from the town-folk for his relationship with a coloured

woman, he hides behind the lie that he is a drunk and cannot help himself.

When he confesses his subterfuge to the children, Scout asks, in her usual

unabashed manner, why he “entrusted [them] with his deepest secret”. His

answer is unequivocal, replying, “Because you’re children and you can

understand it”. He also goes on to elaborate, explaining that their “instinct” is

not yet clouded by the world which teaches us to accept and not to “Cry about

the hell white people give coloured folks, without even stopping to think that

they’re people too” (205). Scout’s friend Dill had been moved to tears after

witnessing the belittling of Tom Robinson in the courtroom by the prosecutor.

He rails against the injustice saying, “it just makes [him] sick” (203). Raymond’s

observation—that an “innocent” child can see, as plain as day, that black men

are not equal under the law and that this is unfair—might seem akin to

nineteenth-century romanticism in its reification of childhood innocence were it

not that To Kill a Mockingbird’s portrayal of childhood as less than innocent pre-

empts the inevitability of disillusionment and makes Raymond’s observations

more pragmatic than sentimental. As he says, “Let him get a little older and he

won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being – not quite right say,

but he won’t cry” (205). Experience will dry their tears as they get older and

they will no longer weep when injustice is done. Thus, unlike “sentimental

moralist novels”, To Kill a Mockingbird does not preach that the imparting and

46
acquiring of knowledge is unequivocally hopeful. Instead it teaches that once

you have acquired knowledge you can no longer be the same.

Lee’s confirmation of the effectiveness of narration through the

“unschooled” eyes of a child is further thematised by her setting To Kill a

Mockingbird in an earlier historical setting, a more youthful time when the

Southern states of America were more unaware and “innocent” of knowledge.

The decade in which Lee wrote both To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a

Watchman, was fraught with political and social anxiety. Television made sure

that all Americans knew of the unrest and “The Civil Rights Movement” was an

unavoidable reality. Her original manuscript, later to be published as Go Set a

Watchman, is set in the 1950’s and the burden Lee felt for the social problems

of the age weighs heavily on the reader as they are confronted head on by her

questioning of the status quo amidst an anxious background of unrest. In a

further stroke of genius, Lee’s visionary editor encouraged her to set her

revised novel in an ostensibly less political and more “unschooled” era than the

1950’s and return to her past—to the 1930’s when knowledge of the problems

inherent in the bigoted laws of the land could be denied. To Kill a Mockingbird

is set in a time when the Jim Crow “separate but equal” policy was not yet

openly challenged in the small-town Alabama of Lee’s childhood, in a time

when white Southern inhabitants could choose to remain blissfully oblivious to

the unjust regime under which they lived. It is in this setting of the figurative

childhood of the American South that the story unfolds, uncomplicated by the

contemporary politics of the mid-twentieth-century.

To Kill a Mockingbird’s return to a less politically aware time, a time when

people could bury their heads in the sand and say, “I did not know”, works

47
alongside the child narrator to conceal the sentimentality of the novel’s didactic

intent. The novel was not seen at the time as overtly political and the

subterfuge bore dividends as reviews from the Southern press praised To Kill a

Mockingbird as a story of every day Southern life. The Mobile Register spoke of

how it was successful in “chronicling little bits of ordinary life, and saying

sympathetically…that—small towns everywhere, North and South, are made up

of many ordinary people”. Wayne Flynt, a close friend of Lee, told PBS in an

interview that To Kill a Mockingbird had a subtle take on “the innocence of

childhood and about the corruption of most of the institutions that were

important like the church, the courts, the school.” Lee ran the risk of alienating

her Southern readers if she openly maligned and challenged these institutions.

Instead, at the time of its release, her fellow Southerners read To Kill a

Mockingbird nostalgically as a chronicle of a time thirty years in the past, a time

before their way of life was so openly threatened by change.

The success of Lee’s choice to follow Hohoff’s advice and utilise the child

narrator has been affirmed by reviewers, both when it was first released and

more recently in the wake of the release of Go Set a Watchman. Many early

reviewers single out the choice of child narrator as a reason for the novel’s

success. Sullivan, who lauded the book as “a first novel of … rare excellence”,

calls the narrator Scout “a pistol of a little girl” and describes the point of view

as “cunningly restricted to that of a perceptive, independent child, who doesn’t

always understand fully what’s happening, but who conveys completely, by

implication, the weight and burden of the story”. George McMichael of the San

Francisco Chronicle affirmed Lee’s choice of narrative point of view as the best

thing about the novel, saying “Best of all, Harper Lee has wisely and effectively

48
employed the piercing accuracy of a child’s unalloyed vision of the adult world,

to display the workings of a tragedy-laden region”. Both Sullivan and McMichael

endorse the artful effectiveness of Lee’s narrative choice, acknowledging how

she manages to disguise the informative content of the novel through Scout’s

unschooled voice, while not trivialising the gravity of the subject matter. The

publication of Go Set a Watchman reawakened interest in the older novel,

spawning new accolades for To Kill a Mockingbird which also focus on the

choice of Scout as narrator—a decision which, according to the New York

time’s Michiko Kakutani, was “crucial” to the success of the novel. Scout’s

“pistol” like narration finds its mark, and like her father Atticus, whom the

children discover was called “one shot Finch” (103) by those who remember his

youthful shooting prowess, her words are accurate and straight to the point.

Nearly sixty years on since it was first published, testimonials vouching for

the educative power of To Kill a Mockingbird continue to be voiced, confirming

this chapter’s assertion of the novel’s didactic purpose. Barack Obama quoted

Atticus Finch, when speaking out against racism and bigotry in his Farewell

Address to the Nation, saying “‘You never really understand a person until you

consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk

around in it.’” Alice Randall, author and professor of African-American and

Diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University, teaches the novel yearly. For

Randall, its relevance lies in the fact that “it explains to readers who don't

understand it why black people are afraid of the criminal justice system,

because we have not gotten, historically, justice in that system.” She agrees

with those who feel it relays an important message, saying, “I think it is an

elemental book…because it dares speak the truth that the problem in the South

49
is not the problem with black people, it's the problem with white people, and it's

coming from a white author's perspective”. Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has

survived the critics—the voices of experience who have said that the message

was not strong enough—precisely because she chose to soften the blow and

created a novel that engages readers, while still imparting moral knowledge.

Contained within the pages of the story is Lee’s own testimony to the power of

the child narrator with her youthful perspective and the power of “showing”

through actions, rather than “telling” with words.

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Chapter 3. The Kite Runner: Connector of People

I see the unique ability fiction has to connect people, and I see how

universal some human experiences are (Hosseini, Charney interview).

Believing that fiction facilitates an identification with the world of ‘the other’ that

is both desirable and transformative, many theorists have celebrated its ability

to build a bridge, connecting disparate cultures and social divides (Felski 40-43;

Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity 26; Ricoeur 158). Reviewers and readers of

Khaled Hosseini’s 2002 bestseller The Kite Runner—the first ever novel

published in English by an Afghan writer—also saw the novel’s perceived

capacity to connect Western readers with the people of Afghanistan as valuable

(Aubry; Guthmann; Miles). At the time of its post 9/11 release, for Americans

and those sympathetic to their cause, Afghans were the enemy, and the media

of the Western world was saturated with anti-Afghanistan rhetoric. Reception of

the novel indicates that, somehow, Hosseini’s study of everyday life in Kabul

prior to, and during, Taliban rule overcame negative preconceptions by

involving the reader in the world of “the other” and humanising the people who

live there. As Tim Aubry’s study of the novel’s reader reviews shows, many

claim that the novel helped reframe Afghans from a faceless foe to real people

(26). Much like “social problem novels” of the nineteenth-century that worked to

encourage readerly connection with fictional characters to help overcome

political and social divides, The Kite Runner reminds us that we all share

common bonds and traits and are all human.

However, nineteenth-century novels that focussed on humanising “the

other” in a positive way to inspire connection have earned the label

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“sentimental”. “Social problem” novels like Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854),

for example, portrayed poor factory workers in a favourable moral light

compared to the wealthier factory owners, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-

slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854) moved away from depicting slaves “as

savage beasts”—a method devised to incite fears of a rebellious slave

uprising—to characterisation as fellow citizens (Roth 100-109). By

sentimentalising the socially disadvantaged characters, novelists aimed to

inspire middle class readers to be more open to the moralistic messages of

acceptance that the texts aimed to teach. This mode has come under attack by

critics like Richard Simpson who questioned, not only the morality of Dickens’

message, but disparaged the sentimentality behind his attempts at creating

characters with which readers could forge an emotional connection, saying that

Hard times is “a mere dull melodrama, in which character is caricature,

sentiment tinsel, and moral (if any) unsound” (qtd in Collins 319). For novelist

James Baldwin, Stowe’s sentimentalising of the character of the slaves in Uncle

Tom’s Cabin did nothing to advance true connection as her depictions of the

good slaves, George and Eliza, were “as white as she could make them” and

when it came to Tom, he was made acceptable only because of his “humility,

the incessant mortification of the flesh” (16-17). Thus, he believed her

characterisation stripped the slaves of their true personalities and culture,

making any perceived connection “improbable” (14). Like its nineteenth-century

counterparts, The Kite Runner aims to “connect with [readers] in a personal

way, no matter what their own upbringing and background” (Guthmann) and

therefore risks being relegated to middlebrow status on grounds of

sentimentality.

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 Why is it, then, that, despite engaging readerly emotion in the service of

connecting people cross-culturally, The Kite Runner has found its way into

academic course reading lists at many universities and managed to rise above

accusations of “sentimentality” (Edwards 1)? As part of this thesis’ broader

exploration of the role of the child narrator in disguising the sentimental

elements of twentieth and twenty-first-century political fiction, this chapter

explores how the child narrator enables the novel to elude the accusation of

sentimentality often ascribed to novels that work to generate empathy and

promote connection with characters to conquer cultural and social divides. The

previous chapter showed how the child narrator can overcome the critics’

aversion to didacticism in art and this chapter, in turn, will demonstrate how our

diminutive storyteller deceptively obscures the sentimentality of his connective

function, for which some critics feel an equal distaste.

The argument will proceed as follows. First, this chapter will briefly explore

the critical and philosophical antipathy to novels that encourage emotional

connection with fictional characters. It will then show—by means of reviews and

plot examination— that The Kite Runner bears a strong resemblance to

nineteenth-century fictions in this vein. Despite this affinity, I will reveal that

popular and critical reception of the novel indicates that the novel has managed

to avoid relegation to “sentimental” status. This chapter will also show how

Hosseini’s casting of his child narrator as a “fallen child” helps obviate any

suspicions of being manipulated into empathetic response and connection with

the Afghan people whom, as Westerners, we have been primed to hate. It will

argue that part of the novel’s capacity to invite connection, while resisting

aspersions of sentimentality, is because the identificatory connection is with a

53
flawed, ambivalent figure—the morally defunct Amir—rather than the pitiable

innocent victim, Hassan. This chapter will also argue that because the novel’s

sentimental leanings are obscured by the sinful child narrator, the way is paved

for transformation of the Western reader as they connect with Amir, and

Afghans more generally, as fellow sinners.

There has long been strong opposition, on the grounds of sentimentality,

to novels that aim to cultivate engagement with characters through emotional

connection. Proponents of the modernist ideal of objective art, for example,

believe that any emotional connection is purely sentimental, and that true art

should not pursue such a response. The paradigm for this ideal was summed

up by T.S. Eliot when he wrote that good readers “should have no emotions”

(Tradition, para.14) and that “bad criticism… is that which is nothing but an

expression of emotion (Para. 18). Clive Bell, an art critic who influenced great

modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, cautioned that “the emotion that [art]

suggests is false” (21) and therefore readers should not trust any connections

formed through sentiment. This censoring of sentimental connection resulted in

modernist authors like Woolf eschewing what she called the “subjective”, calling

it “sentimental trash” (Vol. 2 26). Modernist author Thomas Wolfe’s statement

that “solitariness” is a “central fact of human existence” (467) confirms that, not

only did modernists question the veracity of emotional connection forged

through sentiment, but also the ability of humans to connect. According to

Marxist philosopher György Lukács modernist ideals imply that “man is

constitutionally unable to establish relationships with things or persons outside

himself” (397). A distaste for “sentimental” techniques that solicit emotional

connection has persisted and because, as contemporary critic Anthony Mellors

54
observes, modernism “is still a powerful force in aesthetic practice and cultural

ideals today” (285), the belief in “the division between human significance and a

chaotic universe” (285) endures, resulting in a lingering suspicion of fiction that

proposes to unite society by human endeavour.

Underpinning this suspicion of the “sentimentality” of novels that aim to

connect people emotionally are questions about the relationship between the

solicitation of emotional connection and the promotion of change. French

thinkers Emmanuel Levinas and Louis Althusser, for example, have asked

whether it is, indeed, possible for readers to connect with and be transformed

by fictive works. For Levinas, “writing does not lead to the truth of being…it

leads to the errancy of being” (“T. P. V.” 141) as there is always a chasm

“between seeing and saying” (“T. P. V.” 148). Therefore, connection, or

recognition, is always mis-recognition which actually results in an “evasion” of

“responsibility” (“Reality” 132) and no real transformation of the reader will

occur. Althusser also sees any exterior identification of the self as mis-

recognition as, in his view, even when we recognise someone as a “unique

subject” (263) and come to connect with them, we can only really achieve an

“ideological recognition” (263). The act of recognition necessitates the

transformation of the “someone” into a “subject” and as such they are removed

from us and we cannot meaningfully connect. We can never really know their

reality, no matter how closely we study them and, in the case of fiction, no

matter how much we read of their lives (263). Thus, much of the bias against

connection with art is encouraged by academics who see connection with “the

other” as impossible and therefore view any attempt at facilitating emotional

attachment to fictional characters as sentimental.

55
 Like Levinas and Althusser, many contemporary thinkers also specifically

question the ability of sentimental political fiction to forge cross-cultural

connections that result in meaningful transformation. Lauren Berlant and David

Damrosch, although for different reasons, agree that emotionally charged

literature is ineffective in this endeavour and, as such, the feeling it induces

equates with sentimentality. Berlant believes that recognition of difference

doesn’t lead to change in the behaviour of the reading subject and can indeed

shore up the subject’s identity precisely in and through the other’s difference.

For Berlant, feeling the pain does not result in change because we are too

invested in upholding an ideal of national identity which does not accede to

individual differences. She sees the result of connection with art as not

completely passive but rather an excuse to keep “the other” at bay and

maintain the national hegemony. Fences, rather than bridges (“The Subject”,

53-54). Damrosch, on the other hand, is concerned that readers lack the ability

to read texts from a foreign perspective in a way that is beneficial to societal

connection. He believes that when we read literature from other cultures we

may only view it through the lens of our Western sensibilities and therefore our

response will be purely sentimental and not transformative (10, 57). Both

theorists would question the claims of connection and consequent social

transformation made by readers of The Kite Runner, thereby relegating the

novel’s sentimental function to that of purposeless manipulation.

At the level of plot, Hosseini’s focus on “human nature” (Orwell) allies it

closely with those nineteenth-century novels maligned for their sentimentality.

The tale is essentially one of two brothers: one morally upstanding and the

other not, one legitimate and acknowledged, the other not. Interestingly, while

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the title of the novel designates the illegitimate Hassan as the true hero, as he

is the kite runner, Hosseini chooses to tell the tale from the perspective of Amir,

a privileged young boy growing up in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul

who betrays his friend, brother and servant—Hassan. The background of the

story is one of political upheaval, as the monarchy falls, the Sovietdevelpments

intervene, and Amir and his father are forced to evacuate to Pakistan,

eventually making it to the United States. However, these events, so exotic and

foreign to the average Western reader, merely form a backdrop to Amir’s

narrative as he shares with the reader the intimate details of his life with his

father, whom Amir affectionately calls ‘Baba’, and his closest friend, Hassan.

Neither boy knows the nature of their true relationship and, as both are

motherless, they grow up in the male dominated world of their father, a rich and

powerful merchant and Hassan’s adoptive father, the household servant, Ali.

Hassan is Hazara, a member of the despised serving class, and Amir is

Pashtun and therefore seen as socially superior. Their relationship, though

close, is defined by this hierarchy. Amir’s desire to win his father’s approval

drives him to acts of jealousy and betrayal towards Hassan, while Hassan

remains loyal and constant. Reviewer Aamer Hussein of The Independent,

admires the novel which helps readers learn about Afghanistan because “the

documentary elements don't overwhelm the personal”, however, it is this

representation of a world that Westerners know little about from such an

intimate and humanising perspective that puts it at risk of being written off as

“mere dull melodrama”.

By testifying to the power of The Kite Runner to overcome cultural

prejudice and forge connections between Western readers and the Afghan

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people, readers and reviewers confirm the novel’s affiliation with traditional

“social problem” novels with a similar purpose. Reviewers responded to both its

exoticism and its perceived universalism, claiming connection with the Afghan

people through both our similarities and differences as humans. Loyal Miles of

The Indiana Review, for example, wrote “It is this examination of self in the

context of culture and history that makes Hosseini's The Kite Runner a

compelling debut”. Examples from Aubry’s study of reader reviews from

Amazon bear this out. According to Amazon user “Stephanie Henry”, the book

"proves that human emotions such as love, loss, betrayal, and hope are

timeless and can be found anywhere, regardless of class or culture"(29) and a

reviewer named “Elspeth” said she “was afraid it would be about people I could

not in any way relate to…but if you are a human…you will find the themes in

this book are universal” (29-30). Hosseini himself is humbled by the reaction,

saying “[He is] honoured when readers tell [him] that this book has helped

make Afghanistan a real place for them” (Foreword). Public reaction to the

novel shows that it has helped many Westerners see the Afghan people as

human beings and performed the traditionally sentimental function of

establishing connection across cultural divides. Despite this, however, there are

many critics who are prepared to elevate The Kite Runner to a position beyond

the status of just a popular sentimental work of fiction and take it more

seriously. Stella Algoo-Baksh, observes that The Kite Runner is “a rewarding

addition to readings in Postcolonial or Cultural Studies courses at the university

level” and New York Times reviewer Edward Wyatt notes that “the book has

also been adopted for courses at Penn State, the University of Northern

Colorado, the University of Iowa and James Madison University”.

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 The most effective ruse Hosseini employs to achieve distance between

The Kite Runner and its sentimentally perceived nineteenth-century

counterparts is his fallen version of the child narrator. Instead of modelling the

child narrator on the innocent, romantic view of childhood so embraced by

nineteenth-century sentimental political fiction, Hosseini taps into the Judaeo-

Christian idea of the sinful child. This device is best explained by tracing the

history of our Western construct of childhood which has been torn between a

belief in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s more sentimental, romantic view of

childhood innocence and the puritan doctrine on original sin. Rousseau’s views

on the blamelessness of children are expressed in Emile where he wrote,

“Coming from the hand of the Author of all things, everything is good; in the

hands of man, everything degenerates” (11). In other words, God makes all

children good; man meddles with them and they become evil. His views were

highly influential in the writings of Romantics like William Wordsworth. On the

other hand, while Western readers may like to hold onto a romantic view of

childhood innocence, an aversion to sentimentality and a strong heritage of

Judaeo-Christian ideology predisposes identification with the puritan view of the

child as fallen being. The Bible states in Proverbs 22:15 that “Folly is bound up

in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far away” (NIV). Many

Christian theologians, including English Puritan minister John Robinson, have

interpreted this to mean that, far from being naturally pure and innocent, a child

is born into this world carrying the burden of original sin and needs to be taught

how to be good (330). Although Islamic teachings do not preach original sin,

they do believe it is natural for us to sin (Fernea 6;11), thus, both Christians and

59
Muslims reading the novel would not find Hosseini’s sinful depiction of the child

narrator difficult to accept.

Certainly, Hosseini could have chosen to unfold the events through the

eyes of an angelic child and nestled in more closely with novels like Hard Times

and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Hassan is trustworthy, as Amir tells us, he is someone

who “mean[s] every word they say” (51). Hassan is humble, constantly taking

Amir’s jibes and continuing to serve him lovingly. Hassan is courageous; it is he

who, armed with his slingshot, frequently saves the boys from the same

tormentors who raped him. In fact, he is a more heroic character in every way

and Amir knows that his father thinks this too as he overhears Baba

remonstrating that it is always “Hassan [who] steps in and fends off” the bullies

who plague Amir. The irony of the rape scene is that it is Hassan’s bravery that

leads to him being physically violated when he stands up to the bullies and,

determined to loyally defend the honour of Amir’s kiting victory, refuses to hand

over the kite. Thus, if the worthy Hassan were our narrator and hero, we would

be overwhelmed by pity for the unfairness of his plight. Representations of

children as innocent and blameless, as Sophie Bell points out, instead of

motivating transformation, result in a focus on feelings for the suffering child

that averts action (100-101). Little Eva’s father in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for

example, who stood by and watched her death was reduced to “but a hollowed

shell over a heart that was a dark and silent sepulchre” (313). He is so caught

up in his personal grief for her loss, that, despite his promises to Eva to

transform, he epitomises Ann Douglas’ view of sentiment as a “failed political

consciousness” (254). If the narrator of The Kite Runner was an innocent child,

then, the manipulative sentimentality would be impossible to disguise, and the

60
novel, like nineteenth-century “social problem novels”, would receive criticism

for caricaturing worthy characters to manipulate emotional response.

Hosseini, however, adopts a fallen, rather than a romantically innocent

image of the child for his child narrator. Indeed, Unlike Scout, Harper Lee’s

charming little rogue, Amir is not a ‘naughty, but nice’ child and the model of the

“fallen child” that animates Hosseini’s depiction of Amir in The Kite Runner is

cowardly, deceitful and elitist. Because of his betrayal of Hassan, the moral

hero of the novel, we struggle to like him. J. F. Spiegel, from The Vienna

Review, calls Amir “utterly loathsome” saying that readers “shudder to

recognise their own empathy”, noting that Amir provides “a much-needed

deviation from typical narratives of heroism and goodness”. He is no little Eva,

brimming with angelic virtue and Amir’s unrighteousness does not rest on just

one sin. Hosseini builds up a picture of entitlement and cruelty in Amir’s

behaviour towards the ever-patient Hassan that culminates in the lie he tells his

father to frame his devoted servant for the theft of his birthday present.

According to Baba, “when you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth,

when you cheat you steal the right to fairness” (17). Although Baba is not

portrayed as a religious man, his doctrine sits well with Islamic teachings

(Fernea 118). Thus, Amir steals “fairness” from his friend and the right to the

truth” from his father. Amir’s lie has terrible consequences as Hassan and his

father, knowing Baba’s aversion to theft, are forced to leave the household and

are thus robbed of their home and reputation.

Hosseini’s depiction of Amir as fallen is clever and multi-layered, helping

to establish the deceptively unsentimental impression he leaves and definitively

distancing him from the innocent characters of nineteenth-century sentimental

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“social problem novels”. While outwardly professing affection for Hassan, Amir

practices a deceitful one-upmanship. The scene where he tricks Hassan into

believing he is giving him a compliment while instead he is playing on Hassan’s

illiteracy by calling him an “imbecile” (27) is particularly duplicitous. Amir’s

“favorite part of reading to Hassan was when we came across a big word that

[Hassan] didn’t know” (27). Amir grins as he mocks Hassan by pretending that

“imbecile’ means “smart, intelligent” (27) and Hosseini juxtaposes this devilish

smirk with Hassan’s open “smiling face” (27). Further entrenching our dislike,

Amir excuses his one-upmanship of Hassan by virtue of Hassan’s ethnicity.

Amir tells us that as an Hazara, Hassan’s illiteracy “had been decided the

minute he had been born” (26), pardoning his blatant elitism on traditional and

cultural grounds. Amir’s acceptance of Hassan’s status as a mere servant,

“after all, what use did a servant have for the written word” does not endear him

to the reader, and his initial inability to face his wrongs leads him to further

iniquity. When Hassan is in danger of being raped, Amir chooses to cower

around the corner rather than intervene. Not only does this scene expose

Amir’s weak nature, but also seems to confirm his innate racism as his excuse

for his actions is “[Hassan] was just a Hazara” (73). It must be noted, however,

that Hosseini uses this otherwise damning statement to introduce a note of

ambivalence to Amir’s morality when he follows with the question “wasn’t he?”

(73). It is clear that Amir questions his own moral code and as readers we

question whether he is, indeed, irredeemable and whether this glimmer of

uncertainty might still lead to moral growth.

Before we can fully entertain the idea of moral growth, however, The Kite

Runner takes the child narrator’s characterisation as a fallen child to an

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extreme level in Amir’s solipsistic narration of the rape scene. What would

otherwise be an explosively sentimental tableau were it to fully explore the

feelings of the victimised Hassan, is reduced to a self-focussed account from

the emotionally immature viewpoint of Amir. A close look at the rape scene

reveals a setting, littered with detritus, highlighting Amir’s choice that he has to

make as he fixates on two items lying among the garbage. One is the kite,

symbolising “the key to Baba’s heart” (67), and the other, representing

Hassan’s helplessness, is “Hassan’s brown corduroy pants”70) ripped from him

and discarded by the rapist Assef. Amir chooses the kite as he “turned away”

(72). Turning away is what he continues to do to appease his conscience and

from that moment on the text holds numerous references to Amir’s not looking

at Hassan, afraid of what he would “see if [he] did look in his eyes” (73). Amir’s

narration of the scene foregrounds his egotistical self-centredness while at the

same time providing insight into Amir’s interior conflict motivated by his need for

acknowledgment from his strong and much-admired father. Amir’s yearning for

his father’s praise is his driving force, his Achille’s heel and, just as Amir turned

away from the spectacle of the victimised Hassan, so too do we as plot

becomes secondary to the child narrator’s interiority expressing his inner

struggle. Even after the rape has been perpetrated, Amir’s focus is the kite,

which he even took the time to “scan…for any rips” (73). Amir’s identity as the

dreamer and the poet, detestable to Baba who longs for him to prefer soccer

and more ‘manly’ pursuits, is confirmed in his unwillingness to give up his

“grand entrance, a hero, prized trophy in [his] bloodied hands” which would

cause Baba to “walk up to [him], embrace him, acknowledge his worthiness”.

As readers we can only concur with Baba’s observation overheard by Amir that

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“there is something missing in that boy” (21). Winning the kite race and

returning with the proof is Amir’s chance to receive praise and acceptance and

he selfishly will do anything to get it. His actions confirm his dissimilarity from

innocent nineteenth-century heroines like Sissy Jupe whose moral fortitude is

held up as an example (Hard Times) and further disassociates the novel from

the sentimental mode.

The Kite Runner achieves the ultimate exposition of the child narrator’s

fallen nature by symbolically contrasting Amir with Hassan whom Hosseini

represents as the innocent sacrificial lamb. Amir justifies his non-intervention in

Hassan’s rape by suggesting that Hassan’s sacrifice served a higher cause. He

autocratically and selfishly reasons, as if it was his decision to make, that

“Maybe Hassan was the price [he] had to pay, the lamb [he] had to slay, to win

Baba” (73). When he returns home with the kite, he has the blood of Hassan,

the sacrificial lamb, on his hands. When Amir catches a glimpse of Hassan’s

face as he is raped, Amir sees “the look of the lamb” (71) and, immediately

after Amir notes the martyrdom on Hassan’s face, Hosseini switches, in italics,

to a flashback memory of the ceremony of Eid-e-Qorban where a sheep is

slaughtered to commemorate the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his

own son to Allah. For Christian and for Muslim, the lamb is a symbol of sacrifice

and of purity. For Christians, Jesus is the innocent lamb that was slain to take

away our sins, and for Muslim, the innocent sacrifice of a lamb is a reminder of

the Qur’anic story of Ibrahim, who “almost sacrificed his own son for God” (71).

Hassan is thus cast in the role of the romantically innocent child, in contrast

with Amir’s fallen nature. Hosseini carefully builds up a picture of a sinful and

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entitled child who makes selfish decisions and as readers, because we do not

like him, we do not feel manipulated into sentimental feelings for him.

It is apparent that The Kite Runner’s fallen version of the child narrator

serves to obscure the sentimentality of the novel’s function to connect people,

but how, then, is this function realised when the hero is so objectionable? The

answer lies in the fact that, unlike little Eva’s distraught father, our

understanding of his plight is not motivated by pity, but by the fact that we can

all identify more easily with the imperfect than the ideal. According to Christian

creed, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23 NIV)

and so we feel an affinity with Amir, because of and not only despite his

iniquity. Although unnerved by Amir’s sin, Aubry’s reviewer study shows that

readers “take from the book a reactivated belief that their own flaws and

weaknesses are defining features of their humanity and thus deserving of

forgiveness” (31). We identify with his weakness on a human level, despite his

abominable actions, because we are all aware that we are not perfect. Thus,

the child narrator in The Kite Runner has a double role to play: he obscures the

sentimentality of the novel’s connective function and at the same time actually

facilitates this function.

Our acceptance of Amir is also linked to the fact that as a child narrator he

is a young sinner and can therefore grow out of his sinful ways and the belief in

the possibility of rehabilitation also serves to facilitate the connective function of

the novel. Linked to both the Judaeo-Christian and the Muslim view of childish

sinfulness is the idea that moral growth can occur. Christians believe that

children need “God’s grace, and men’s endeavour” (Robinson 330) to

overcome the sinful nature they are born with and Muslims trust that those who

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genuinely seek atonement—kafara—can receive forgiveness—ghufran (Fernea

10). For Muslims, as for Christians, the ideal is a moving away from evil

towards goodness which comes from maturity. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, who

writes on how literature influences social change says, “children’s imperfect or

unfinished socialization can serve as a mark of freedom and a source of power”

(16). She believes that those children in literature who are not perfect are

powerful vehicles for social change and we do not hold their imperfection

against them as they are only children. Much of the subtlety behind the reader’s

readiness to connect with the child narrator is that we can understand what it is

like to carry guilt for misdemeanours perpetrated when we were too young and

self-centred to make good decisions and we also acknowledge the possibility of

moral growth.

Another way in which The Kite Runner’s choice of child narrator helps to

serve the novel’s sentimental function more directly is that, no matter what their

cultural background, we still think we can understand and connect with children,

because we were all children once. Although, like Developmental Psychologist

Tim Morris, many believe that “Childhood is a form of Otherness” (9), this

“Otherness” is easily overlooked because, as adults, we already recognise that

children, even children within our own circle, are different; already primed to

their “Otherness”, we feel connected to them. Although the human child is

different to the human adult, we believe that as we have all had experience of

being a child, we know what it is like. As American Studies Professor Jay

Mechling explains, “The white, male folklorist recognizes that he will never

really know what it means to be a black woman, but we all think we know what

it means to be a child” (91). Thus, when it comes to connecting with The Kite

66
Runner’s child narrator, the first hurdle of difference is already overcome;

connection occurs at the basic level of identifying with the child we once were,

and any other foreignness or prejudice becomes less of a barrier.

Remarkably, the only section of the novel critics fixated on as sentimental

is the section not narrated by a child, which serves as the best evidence of the

effectiveness of the child narrator to obscure the sentimentality of The Kite

Runner’s purpose. Sarah A. Smith of The Guardian pointed out how “What

starts out as a fiercely moral but subtly told story becomes an unconvincing

melodrama, more concerned with packing in the action than with fictional

integrity”. The change occurs, she believes “in the final third of the book”—the

third narrated by the adult Amir. According to Aubry, many reviewers of the

novel reacted similarly, seeing the “array of tactics” Hosseini employs in this

section as “manipulative” (31). In this section, where he travels to Afghanistan

to free Hassan’s son finally freeing himself from his guilt, the adult Amir insists

on narrating an explanation of events for us. He laboriously tells us that the

expedition is expressly for the purpose of atonement unambiguously iterating—

"I was afraid that I'd let the waters carry me away from what I had to do. From

Hassan. From the past that had come calling. And from this one last chance at

redemption" (213-214). Rahmin Khan, Baba’s old friend also explicitly instructs

Amir and the reader when he writes, "And that, I believe, is what true

redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good" (214). Smith also describes

the section as having “a series of cringe-making coincidences that bring the

story full circle”. The coincidences start with the revelation that the Taliban child

abuser from whom Amir rescues Hassan’s son, Sohrab, is the very same Assef

who sodomised Hassan, and culminates in the remarkable circumstance of

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Sohrab felling the evil Assef with his slingshot, fulfilling his father’s threat made

years ago. Thus, compared to the “child's fresh perspective” (Hussein), The

Kite Runner’s adult narrator falls short. Still, these failings only reinforce the

work done by the child narrator in much of the book to disguise the

sentimentality of its personal and emotive connective function.

The fallen child narrator disguises the novel’s traditionally sentimental aim

of encouraging meaningful connection and a socio-political change of heart;

because he is not faultless, he unties bonds that might hold The Kite Runner to

account for its sentimental political agenda and allows the novel to be

perceived as literary fiction rather than as just a popular novel. We do not feel

emotionally manipulated into empathy because our narrator is ostensibly so

unlikable, thus suspicion of sentiment is allayed, and the novel can be left to

complete its work of connecting cultures. The complexity of the West’s

relationship with the Middle-East is represented by the convoluted relationships

and situations enacted between the pages of Hosseini’s novel and it is these

personal stories that allow us to connect with the people of Afghanistan despite

what we see on the news. The doubts raised about whether empathy through

fiction can make a difference are overcome because, as Westerners of Judaeo

Christian heritage, we are primed to believe that the lost can be saved. By

presenting us with the sinful Amir, our sentiment does not get in the way and

the novel reminds us that people are people and that we are all fallen and need

help, not hatred. Hosseini presents us with a country in need of repentance

rather than retribution and Amir’s sinfulness encourages transformation of our

feelings towards the enemy as our heart breaks not for him, but for the Afghan

situation.

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Chapter 4. Mr Pip: Chronicler of History

I do not know what you are supposed to do with memories likes these. It

feels wrong to want to forget. Perhaps this is why we write these things

down, so we can move on (Jones, Mr Pip 179).

The idea that fiction is important and functional is woven into the very texture of

Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip. Heralded as a study in “the power and formative influence

of literature” (Reid), the novel could be described as a story about a story,

within a story that chronicles history. Set in war-torn Bougainville in the early

1990’s during the blockade when Papua New Guinea screened off the island

from the rest of the world, Mr Pip was published in 2006, after the blanket was

lifted and the horrors experienced by the isolated island inhabitants came to

light. Twining into the warp and weft of both the fictional story of the island’s

characters and the historical story of Bougainville is Charles Dickens’ story of

the orphan Pip—Great Expectations—a device through which Jones overtly

entertains the idea of the functionality of stories. For Mr Watts, the last white

man on the island tasked with overseeing the school in the wake of the

evacuation of the existing staff, the story is useful as an educative tool to

engage his young students; for Matilda, his most attentive pupil, the story is

useful as a means of escape from the horrors of the war fought by the interim

PNG government soldiers and the local rebel forces; and, while attempting to

loosen the hold that Pip’s story has on her daughter, Matilda’s very pious

mother, Dolores, confirms her belief that stories are useful in general, saying

that “Stories have a job to do. They can’t just lie around like lazybone dogs.

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They have to teach you something” (74). Indeed, if reviews of the novel are

anything to go by, Mr Pip fulfilled Dolores’ educative requirement. As well as

serving to chronicle the sensational and shocking events of the Bougainville

conflict, readers have celebrated its didactic, edifying effects (Burleigh;

Goldsworthy)—effects reminiscent of nineteenth-century historical fiction by

authors like Sir Walter Scott.

Yet the didactic intent of Scott’s historical novels, which he aimed to

realise by sensationalising historical events to subjectively influence the reader

into political partisanship, has been labelled sentimental (Baker 443-446; Woolf

58), while Jones’ novel has not had to withstand such accusations (Laing; Byrt).

Even though Mr Pip is recognised for its edifying intent, which Jones achieves

by chronicling horrific events that shock the reader into taking the side of the

marginalised of this world, it has managed to slip under the radar of the

sentiment police. As in To Kill a Mockingbird and The Kite Runner, the reason

for this oversight lies, I contend, in the unlikely decision that Jones made to tell

the story through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old indigenous girl called Matilda

and this chapter will explore the implications of that decision. Unlike the

majority of critique written about Mr Pip, this chapter will not focus on Jones’

remediation of Dickens’ novel or his writing back to literature (Colomba 275;

Taylor 95; Walker 230). Rather, in keeping with the main argument of this

thesis—that the child narrator has served to fend off allegations of saccharine

sentiment—this chapter focusses on the way Mr Pip eludes the accusations of

sentimentalism that might otherwise attach themselves to a novel that

chronicles a sensational time in history and aims to influence reader’s beliefs,

confirming the power of the child narrator to overcome the charges of

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didacticism, sensationalism and subjectivity traditionally levelled against

historical novels. The particular skillset that the child brings to this task is that

"The position of childhood is typically constructed as prelapsarian, relatively

preverbal, outside empowered discourse, unsophisticated, unknowing,

irrational" (Honeyman 4). In other words, we do not expect a child to

understand the politics involved; we do not expect a child to be able to explain

the situation in words; and we do not expect a child to rationalise, take sides or

instruct on what is right or wrong, thus we do not feel that objectivity has been

compromised and we do not feel that our sentiments are being manipulated to

feel what they feel.

The argument will unfold as follows. After a brief look at the critical

reception of the novel confirming its escape from “sentimentality attribution”

(Sedgwick, Epistemology, 145), this chapter will give a short account of the

origins of historical novels; the problems encountered by subjective fictional

representation of historical events; and the ethical hurdles surrounding the

genre, which literary critics and historians alike have questioned. Then, through

close attention to the text itself, it will explore the efficacy of Matilda, Jones’

child narrator, to overcome didacticism, sensationalism and subjectivism and

enable fiction to function effectively as a chronicler of history without accruing

aspersive accusations of sentiment. This chapter will also show how Mr Pip

highlights the power of the child narrator to disguise sentiment by comparing

the child narrator’s storytelling to that of an adult’s, highlighting her

uncomplicated and unsentimental frankness, which ultimately proves an

effective weapon against forgetting. Mr Pip also thematises the effectiveness of

a child narrator by countering the romantic view of childhood as powerless and

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in need of protection, presenting us with an alternative view suggesting the

potential of children as active reformers and political antagonists.

The reception of the novel shows that, despite the fact that Mr Pip

narrates traumatically sentimental scenes chronicling a sensational time in

history to didactic end, it has not been reviewed as sentimental. In fact, far from

being discounted by critics, the novel has been recognised for its literary merit

and was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Jones also received the 2007

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and the 2007 Montana Medal

for fiction. Reviewer Anthony Byrt of The New Statesman confirmed the novel’s

lack of sensationalism saying, though he includes “some harrowing scenes,

Jones avoids being overly sentimental”. A review of Mr Pip written by historian

Anthony Regan, an expert on the origins of the Bougainville conflict, also

affirms Jones’ lack of romanticism in the novel’s account, but feels that “Jones

fails to convey…the complexity and horror of the reality of this multidimensional

civil war”(400), adding that, “those seeking to understand Bougainville and the

conflict better would be well advised to lower their expectations of Mr Pip”

(401). To be fair, Jones never claimed the novel to be an explication of events.

In fact, in an interview, Jones stated, “Mister Pip isn’t an attempt to explain the

conflict or the secessionist movement” (Bookgroup). As a journalist, Jones

openly professes his belief in “the persuasiveness of the voice” (Random

House) and he does not deny writing the novel, not just to chronicle the history

of what happened in Bougainville, but to motivate readers to care about “the

status of the orphan and the migrant” (Rintoul), thus his aim is more

sentimental than rigorously factual. And yet, Mr Pip, despite its political

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intention to motivate feeling for the disenfranchised people of Bougainville, has

managed to avoid accusations of sentimentality.

While so-called “women’s fiction”, like Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle

Tom’s Cabin (1852), is often touted as politically motivated (Wexler 15), it was

not the only body of work that actively sought to change hearts and minds

through sentiment. Walter Scott, who has been credited with creating “the

classical form of the historical novel” (Baker 443), also utilised classic

sentimental plots sensationalising history’s spectacular moments to didactically

influence cultural subjectivity among his fellow Scots. His success in this regard

is uncontested as he is often referred to as the man who ‘invented’ Scotland,

however, contemporary readers might find his lack of objectivity offensive. He

was not only a Scottish patriot, but also a Briton, loyal to the cause and Scott’s

letters testify to his overwhelming happiness over Britain’s defeat of the French

at Waterloo, saying how he could not contain “the thousand sentiments which

arose in the mind from witnessing such a splendid scene” (96). Scott felt no

need to muzzle his own social and political loyalties in his novels saying, “I

have myself long ceased to write in a work, the political sentiments of which do

by no means correspond with mine” (156). He unashamedly subjectively

chronicled historical spectacles to influence readers into aligning with his

beliefs. As Samuel Baker writes, “Scott portrays a Stoic virtuous enough to be

sentimental” (446). Convinced of his own and Britain’s moral correctness, Scott

wrote novels that adhered closely to the teachings of Adam Smith’s Moral

Sentimentalists and he brazenly practised didacticism in his novels seeking to

influence political sentiments through his writings. Thus, the traditional historical

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novel took a hortatory partisan moral stance, while utilising sensational

descriptions of valour and hardship to invoke sentiment.

The form of historical fiction epitomised by Scott with its leanings towards

didacticism, sensationalism, and the subjective portrayal of external events, has

been increasingly dismissed as sentimental in the twentieth century. The

reasons for this turn were threefold. First, for many, after the horrors of the First

World War, jingoistic fervour dissolved under pressure of questions about right

and wrong, and, as belief in partisan principles declined, so too did the

acceptance of moral instruction in fiction. For ardent modernists, the attempt to

retell life realistically for political effect was also anathema. Certain Modernist

scholars, like art critic Clive Bell, believed that art and politics should not mix as

“he who contemplates a work of art inhabit[s] a world with an intense and

peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance

of life” (27). In other words, the reader should not be confronted by reality as art

should be appreciated for its own sake, not for any other agenda. Second, even

before the First World War, under the influence of the Futurist movement and

modernists like Ezra Pound with his call to “make it new”, nostalgic dwelling on

the past became an abomination. Amongst modernists who were advocating

for a new, more scientific way of writing, there was a growing aversion to novels

that told sensational stories of the past, appealing to sentiment and glorifying

emotional response to the extraneous. Third, a certain sector of modernists,

like Virginia Woolf, became interested in the partial and situated nature of

perception, moving towards a focus on the interiority of individual

consciousness and began to criticise Scott’s writings because of their focus on

external events. While admiring him as an author, Woolf felt that his characters

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“suffer from a serious disability; it is only when they speak that they are alive;

they never think; as for prying into their minds himself, or drawing inferences

from their behaviour, Scott never attempted it” (“The Antiquary” 58). A less

direct model of writing about significant moments in history became more

intellectually acceptable and Marianne Dekoven cites Virginia Woolf’s To the

Lighthouse as exemplary of the more oblique modernist approach to historical

writing. As Dekoven says:

The complex, powerful techniques of figuration available to modernist

fiction writers allowed them simultaneously to turn History in Modernist

Fiction away from the devastating facts of modern History… and at the

same time to render those facts with greater power than direct

representation would give. (150-151)

If we look to painting for an example, Picasso’s Guernica, an image

representing the killing of civilians in the Spanish civil war, tells of a moment in

history while leaving realism behind through enigmatic refracted representation.

For many, then, the uncompromising certainty of the traditional historical

novel epitomised a sentimentalised way of thinking that needed to be “made

new”. Times had changed from the days when writer Joseph Strutt prefaced the

publication of his historical drama Queenhoo Hall with the words:

The chief purpose of the work is to make it the medium of conveying

much useful instruction imperceptibly to the minds of such readers as are

disgusted at the dryness usually concomitant with the labours of

the antiquary. (4)

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Critics are now very much aware that ‘the facts’ of history are contestable and

dependent on viewpoint and bias, making “useful instruction” more

questionable (Wesseling 70). Because literature has the power to influence our

feelings and engage our sentiments, many academics have also asked

questions about the ethics of fictionalising the darker moments of world history

and whether it is principled to tell stories about atrocities. Literary critic Cathy

Caruth believes that realistic accounts of historical atrocities fail to

communicate the full picture of an event and will always fall short, commenting

on “the possibility of knowing history…as a deeply ethical dilemma: the

unremitting problem of how not to betray the past” (27). She sees an indirect

modernist approach as more ethical, interpreting filmmaker Alain Resnais’

refusal to make a documentary about Hiroshima as implying that even the

direct archival footage he collected could not fully relay the enormity of the

atrocity. Jones himself said in an interview with Geraldine Bedell that “the past

is at best a fading photograph”. Outside the literary sphere, physician Judith

Herman, who writes on narrative as therapy for victims, believes that

“Traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context, rather they are

encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images” (19). Thus, any attempt at

retelling atrocities is bound to focus on the sensationalist aspects therefore

defying accurate representation and glorifying sentimentality.

However, in a literary environment that increasingly practices “a confusing

yet often pleasurable schizophrenia” (Halpern 51), while simultaneously shying

away from any hint of the sentimental, there remains a thirst for entertaining

fiction that chronicles stories of historical significance and fulfils a demand for

both education and sensational effect. As literary critic Susan Kossew points

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out, “In times of global ‘crisis’…the natural question that arises is what literature

can do in such a climate” (280). Before the reputational decline of sentimental

literature, Strutt observed that people like to read novels that “represent to them

a lively & pleasing representation of the manners & amusements of our

forefathers, under the form most likely to attract their notice” (4) and things

have not changed that much today. There are some scholars, like Paul Ricoeur

who actually endorse fiction as a means of providing information on the past.

He supports the narration of the "tremendum horrendum whose cause also

deserves to be pleaded” saying that "the role of fiction in this memory of the

horrible is…to address itself to events whose explicit uniqueness is of

importance" (187). Literature, in Ricoeur’s eyes, has a duty to relay our social

and political history. He believes that “What is surprising is this interlacing of

fiction and history in no way undercuts the project of standing-for belonging to

history, but instead helps to realize it" (186). For Ricoeur, narrating history, no

matter how harsh the subject matter, does not diminish the importance or the

veracity of the actual event, but rather gives it life.

Whether or not Jones was consciously aware of these arguments for and

against historical fiction—he has, by choosing to engage a child narrator as his

storyteller, achieved the illusion of indirectness favoured by those academics

more wary than Ricoeur of fiction’s ability to narrate history without moral

instruction, subjectivity and sensationalism (Reid). Our western view of

childhood dictates that children are unschooled, irrational and innocent of the

ways of adults and the machinations of politics. Being unschooled, usually

viewed as a disadvantage of childhood, becomes as much of an asset for the

child narrator of Mr Pip as it did for Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. As Susan

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Honeyman states, "Literacy has produced rationalist adults. We are trained to

impose linearity and analytical framing on our perceptions" (3). In contrast to an

“adult rationalist's tendency to categorize, explain, and pin truths" (3), the use of

the child narrator brings freedom from didacticism. Innocent of matters of state

and the politics of power, the child narrator does not have to instruct on right

and wrong or take a moral stance. Children are also seen as frank, observing

and relaying what they see without guile or interpretation. The child narrator’s

frankness allows for a simplicity of observation unmodified by personal

perceptions and imposed beliefs, resulting in what appears to be an objective

relaying of experience. This apparent objectivity also translates into candour of

expression that denies sensationalism, even when narrating horrors that, for

adults, would remain unspeakable.

As the child narrator speaks with the frankness which we associate with

children, distance from the traditionally sentimental historical novel—as

exemplified by Scott—is achieved by means of her unsensational delivery.

Matilda narrates the horrors as a child would, directly and with no prevarication,

painting an almost amusing picture of the rebels as they fell, “arms and legs

kicking in the air” (10). When her mother is brutally raped and then murdered by

the redskins, her telling of the event mimics the brutality of the atrocity in its

bluntness. “They took my mum to the edge of the jungle…and there they

chopped her up and threw her to the pigs” (179), she says with an unnatural

calm. Jones drives home the lack of sensation when Matilda says that when

“recalling these events [she does] not feel anything” (179). It is her apparent

lack of emotion which disguises the sentiment and allows the reader to choose

their reaction, as, when the horrors are relayed in Matilda’s straightforward

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lexicon, the reader is not overtly instructed in how they should feel. We also

excuse the lack of feeling because she is a child and we accept that children

are blunt. Thus, the lack of drama and sensationalism lets the reader take in

the scene without feeling manipulated and Jones’ use of childish narration

skilfully masks the sentimentalism of such sad and shocking scenes with its

straightforward simplicity.

The child narrator’s ability to mask any manipulative sentimentality is

further highlighted when Jones compares her forthright recalling of memories to

the adult’s more sensational reconstruction of events. Mr Watts’ request that

the children retrieve “fragments” of the novel when the book is destroyed

mirrors the new way in which the adult villagers now tell time: by counting back

to significant events of the recent past like “the day the redskins stood over

[them] while [they] torched their homes” or “back to their baby’s death from

malaria” (128). As Matilda tells us, “some would be forever stuck on that day”

which is exactly what experts tell us is the effect of trauma. The adult’s

experiences would, as trauma Physician Judith Herman contends, encode their

memories “in the form of vivid sensations and images” (19) making them

sentimentalise their recall of events, “stuck” in that moment. It is important to

note that Matilda separates herself from those who suffered such tragic loss by

referring to them as “Others less fortunate” (128). She does not get “stuck”,

and, remaining separate from these losses by virtue of her age and subsequent

lack of responsibility, she is able to recall the memories and tell the story

without sensationalism. Unlike the adults, whose memories start and end with a

traumatic event, the child narrator begins her story in the time of “waiting”,

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before the atrocities become a reality and thus she chronicles a more complete

and apparently less sentimental account of events.

This does not mean that Mr Pip’s child narrator educates us with an

accurate, perfectly objective version of events as because Matilda is

unschooled, and her understanding is limited, her attempts to interpret and

make sense of things that happen around her fall short of accuracy. Unlike

Scott, however, her subjectivity is not due to a belief that his “political

sentiments” (156) were correct, but rather because of her limited perspective. In

this way, the child narrator undermines the assured subjectivity of traditional

historical fiction that aimed to influence the reader, while at the same time

artfully avoiding any claims to objectivity in the novel. As a young,

unsophisticated, island girl, Matilda embodies our vision of the nescient child

and Jones portrays her as intelligent, but uneducated in the ways of the world.

When Mr Watts tells the children that they will be meeting Mr Dickens the next

day, she and all the other pupils think they are going to meet an actual white

man, one who might, as her mother suggests, fix the generator. Matilda’s

natural acumen immediately sets her wondering “Who was Mr Dickens? And

why, in a village population of less than sixty, had we not met him before?” (16),

but of course her naive mistake due to a lack of formal education becomes a

source of gentle amusement for the reader. Her lack of schooling also causes

her to conflate Pip, the narrator of Great Expectations, with Mr Watts. When he

starts reading the, to us, well-known lines “My father’s family name being Pirrip,

and my Christian name Philip” (18), she believes he is talking about himself.

Matilda openly admits her lack of knowledge saying, “There was a lot of stuff I

didn’t understand”, but, here again, Jones shows us her natural intellect as she

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ponders “what marshes were; and what were wittles and leg irons” (21). She

attempts to work things out by comparing these strange words from a strange

time and a strange place to those she knows from her own life in order to make

some sense of them, just as she compares her life to Pip’s, finding comfort in

the comparison. Thus, Jones presents us with the story of the atrocity in the

voice of an uneducated young girl who, though she tries to interpret her world,

cannot possibly understand the politics involved and therefore cannot possibly

influence the reader with her subjective account. Unlike Scott, whose moral

certainty led him to enforce his interpretation of history, the child narrator

imparts her own homespun and tentative representation and thus pre-empts

accusations of sentimental subjectivity that might otherwise be levelled against

fiction that aims to provide an account of history.

As well as portraying the child narrator’s tenuous grasp on the events

unfolding before her eyes, Matilda’s chronicling of the crisis from her

unschooled perspective serves to cloak Mr Pip’s didacticism which further helps

the novel to evade the taint of sentimentality. We are not instructed on how to

interpret the events, instead, Reid sees her “deadpan reporting of civil war

atrocities” as a “vehicle”, allowing the novel leeway to pose questions about

what happened. Unlike traditional historical fiction, no explanation is given and

so we are left to decide who is at fault and answer the questions to which Reid

refers as we see fit. When Mr Watts first tells the children that they will only

truly know Mr Dickens when they have finished reading the book, Matilda says,

“This was difficult information to bring home” (19). This difficulty is displayed

throughout the novel as Matilda’s narration of momentous events, remains

unexplicated and often incomplete. Thus, any suspicion of being didactically

81
instructed by her narration is averted because of her own lack of

understanding. When Matilda hears that the PNG helicopters that they see

flying overhead throw “captured rebels out the open door”, she observes that,

as a child, she only ever hears part of the story as “whenever us kids strayed

into range our mums and dads would stop talking”. Thus, though the children

knew “there was some fresh atrocity, the details [they] did not yet know about”

(10). Her fragmented knowledge is what is relayed to us, so we are always

aware that the full picture remains undisclosed and Jones subtly distances Mr

Pip from traditional sentimental historical fiction that didactically instructed the

reader on what was important and claimed to teach an uncontested reality.

More than simply showcasing the efficacy of the child narrator, Mr Pip

reflects on that force by contrasting the difference between a child narrator and

an adult narrator in ways that endorse the former’s less sensationalist,

obstructively subjective, and didactic approach. On the surface, Mr Watts might

seem the better choice as narrator since he is a natural storyteller, transfixing

his audience with his tales. However, there are moments in the novel when he

crosses the boundaries of sentiment and his expert raconteuring, juxtaposed

with Matilda’s simple childish perspective serves to endorse Jones’ choice. Mr

Watts’ tendency towards sensationalism first becomes clear when he is

introduced to us— “let the whimsy-phobe beware” (Maslin)—wearing a clown’s

nose and pushing his wife Grace around on a cart. This was a spectacle from

which the locals “looked away” (2) for, as Matilda says, in her usual blunt

manner, “They would rather stare at a colony of ants moving over a rotting

pawpaw” (2). Later we find out that his whimsy and sensationalist leanings are

in character as he was involved in amateur dramatics before coming to the

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island. He is, therefore, not averse to showmanship and when he says things

like, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe…For me, Matilda,

Great Expectations is such a book. It gave me permission to change my life”

(134), we can imagine the aging thespian being carried away by his own

feelings, and, in an effort to influence others to feel the same, sentimentally

sensationalising the history he chronicles as he woos his audience who find

themselves “seduced” by his words.

These words also affirm his belief in the power of stories to sentimentally

influence the listener and it also soon becomes clear that, like Scott, Mr Watts’

storytelling is highly subjective. However, unlike the child narrator’s inexpert

subjective interpretation of events, because Mr Watts comes from a vantage of

educated adult authority, it is difficult to work out what is fact and what is fiction.

Mr Watts’ Sheherazadeian story with which, night after night, he regales the

villagers and the rebels is not only full of this whimsy but is also filtered and

changed according to Mr Watts’ perspective and interpretation. Matilda alone

realises that “This wasn’t Mr Watts’ story [they] were hearing at all…It was a

made up story to which we’d all contributed” (163), a story woven together out

of the threads of his and the villagers lives. As Matilda says:

Around the rambo’s campfire, the world Mr watts revealed to us was not

from the island, or from Australia or New Zealand, or even from

nineteenth-century England. No. Mr Watts and Grace had created an

entirely new space which they called the spare room. (153)

It was entertaining for the audience, even the drunken rebels, who “stood as if

they might not stay (but they always did)” (148), but, Mr Watt’s ambiguous story

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is told from his subjective point of view and therefore presents the islanders

with his own personal spin on history.

Unlike the child narrator, Mr Watts also succumbs to didacticism. As an

adult, Matilda realises that even the version of Great Expectations that Mr

Watts read to them was an abridged version which he felt would “make it easier

on [their] young ears” despite the fact that he earlier insisted “you couldn’t muck

around with Dickens” (196). For Mr Watts, his didactic intentions for the children

come before his scruples about authenticity and he patronisingly and

hypocritically reads them a simplified version so that he can be sure they will

understand the novel. Unlike Matilda, he also explains what he says, further

displaying his didactic tendencies. When he lets slip during his tale that “white

is a feeling”, Matilda, despite her own lack of elucidation says, “Words written or

spoken aloud have to be explained” and Mr Watts obliges saying “We feel white

around black people” (156). Thus, Mr Pip highlights the didacticism of an adult’s

narration as opposed to the child narrator’s frank and unknowing relaying of

events.

Not only does Mr Pip utilise a child narrator to disguise the sentimentally

charged attributes of sensationalism, didacticism and subjectivity often ascribed

to the historical novel, it also validates the agency of the child narrator by

thematising the idea that children are not helpless sentimental objects. Mr Pip

negates the sentimentally charged notion of childhood as passive and in need

of protection (Rousseau 100), and embraces a new, unsentimental model that

acknowledges children’s capacity to act. Historian James Marten points out that

our past model, which still prevails, sees children as "without Political power"

(53) and as being "officially non-combatants" (59). This sentimental

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understanding of children results in literary and media exploitation of the

traumatised child to encourage affective response from protective adults eager

to save and help. As Lauren Berlant points out, if a victim:

can be infantilized, pictured as young, as small, as feminine or feminized,

as starving, as bleeding and diseased, and as a (virtual) slave, the

righteous indignation around procuring his survival resounds everywhere.

(52).

However, the idea that children are helpless and lacking agency has been

questioned by many academics in recent years (James and Jenks, “Public

Perceptions of Childhood Criminality”). Comparative literature expert Jane

Thrailkill makes the obvious observation that a powerless representation of the

wounded child equates with “sensationalism” (133) and Mr Pip eschews this

code in favour of a child narrator in possession of political agency in her own

right. In keeping with the old idea of the polite Victorian child who ‘should be

seen and not heard’, to try and keep Matilda safe when the redskins are taking

Dolores away to be slaughtered, Dolores instructs, “Don’t speak, Matilda. Do

not say anything” (178). At the time, Matilda listens and “pretend[s] that [her]

voice was [her] secret” (178). However, as the child narrator, she finds her

voice and tells the story for all to hear. Because Mr Pip gives Matilda an

operative role, it breaks from the sentimentalised idea of children as helpless

victims and allows Mr Pip to actively oppose the authorities’ desire to leave her

people’s story buried in obscurity.

This unsentimental view of children as capable of action is further

thematised as Mr Pip chronicles the incidence of village children enlisting as

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soldiers to fight the rebel cause. Anthropologist David M. Rosen’s book on child

soldiering raises the subject of a child’s capacity for action suggesting that

children are not just victims. In his view, children pulled into conflict are

desperate not to be victims and the proliferation of child soldiers is “driven by a

combination of necessity, honor, and moral duty” (55). When writing about

Jewish children who fought for their lives under Nazi oppression he says, “if

they were almost certain to die, they wanted to die under circumstances of their

own choosing” (55). The boys who melt into the jungle to join the rebels seem

to be as intoxicated by the excitement of wielding a weapon as they are by the

“jungle juice” (138) they imbibe to mitigate their fear. Their weapons,

representing their determination to stand up and do something rather than

remain victims, are contrasted with their childlike attention to Mr Watts’ story as

“the boys sat there, with their mouth and ears open to catch every word” (141 -

142). Though Mr Pip thematises the idea of childish agency, Jones does not

endorse child soldiering. Stories are shown to be more powerful than their guns

when they lose themselves in Mr Watts’ tale and “Their weapons rest on the

ground in front of their bare feet like useless relics” (142). By employing a child

narrator to tell the story of the Bougainville villagers in a novel that has been

read by thousands, Mr Pip shows that the power of stories trumps the might of

violence.

Stories of atrocities must to be told, and as Ricouer so provocatively

writes, “either one counts the cadavers, or one tells the story of the victims”

(188). The problem is often that we do not want to listen or, as trauma expert

Judith Herman says, we do not believe the storyteller (8). Psychiatrist Leo

Etlinger, whose special interest is Nazi concentration camp survivors, says that

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“War and victims are something a community wants to forget; a veil of oblivion

is drawn over everything painful and unpleasant” (159). Despite our aversion to

the “tremendum horrendum” (Ricoeur 187), Jones found a way to tell a story

that no-one thought they wanted to hear. He also found a way to tell the story

without appearing to lecture us and without sensationalising the story to

influence how we feel about either the perpetrators or the victims. By engaging

a pragmatic young girl to tell the tale without hype, sensation or judgement, we

are presented with a chronicle of barbarity and deprivation without feeling

manipulated into sentimental pity.

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Chapter 5. We Need New Names: Exposer of Social
Wrongs

But you are not the one suffering. You think watching on BBC means you

know what is going on? No, you don’t, my friend, it’s the wound that

knows the texture of the pain. (Bulawayo, We Need New Names 285)

Sentimental political fiction’s agenda in the guise of nineteenth-century “social

conscience” novels was to enlighten the privileged on the living conditions of

more disadvantaged members of society (Lenard 46). Aside from “moralistic

‘sermons’” and “deathbed scenes” (Lenard 4), these novels used

sentimentalised orphaned and crippled children to draw attention to the harsh

circumstances of the poor and the needy. Central to many nineteenth-century

sentimental political novels, then, from Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-

England Tale (1822) to Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850) was the use

of the figure of the “wounded child” as emblem of social wrongs. These novels

became known as effective activators of social conscience on behalf of the

children they immortalised and the causes they exposed (Lenard 46; Nelson

10; Sutliff Sanders 42). Charles Dickens also participated in the tradition,

sentimentally depicting the “wounded child” in the form of the orphan in Oliver

Twist (1837) and the physically deformed little crippled boy in A Christmas

Carol (184). Yet, while hugely popular in their day, the sentimentality of these

pity-invoking tales and their exploitation of the weakest and most vulnerable

members of society to expose society’s shortcomings is likely to register with

contemporary audiences as manipulative and mawkish. Like the sentimental

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functions of imparting knowledge; connecting divided people; or chronicling

history, tear-jerking reporting on oppressed children—reporting that, as Claudia

Nelson has pointed out, helped boost sales of popular periodicals in the latter

part of the nineteenth-century (66-67)—is now viewed with suspicion. Oscar

Wilde, referring to the serialised novel The Old Curiosity Shop, in a letter to his

friend Ada Leverson, mocked Dickens’ sentimental writing saying that “One

must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing”

(Oxford Dict. of Quot.147). Wilde’s words clearly show that the feelings evoked

by pitiable exposure of children’s suffering are not always the feelings they

were designed to encourage.

What recourse do we have, then, to tell the stories of vulnerable people

affected by poverty and political injustice if the world has grown deaf to

sentimental recitals of children’s woe? What “art” can novelists employ to gain

and keep our attention when writing sentimental political fiction to expose social

wrongs? As previous chapters have shown, many twentieth and twenty-first

century novels have successfully forestalled “sentimentality attribution”

(Sedgwick, Epistemology, 145) by employing a child narrator. By mediating

their narratives through the alternately humorous, naive, fallible, unschooled or

straight-talking voice of the child, the authors of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Kite

Runner, and Mr Pip avoid the taint of sentimentality while nevertheless

performing many of the traditional functions of nineteenth-century sentimental

political fiction.

This chapter will tease out a similar argument around NoViolet Bulawayo’s

2013 novel, We Need New Names, a post-colonial diasporic story of two parts

about a young girl called Darling who leaves behind her friends, family and

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cultural heritage for a supposedly better life in the United States. As I will show,

like many of its now disgraced predecessors, We Need New Names

participates in the sentimental tradition of employing the services of the

“wounded child” as emblem to expose social wrongs—specifically the economic

and political upheaval of post-colonial Zimbabwe. However, We Need New

Names is distinct from its predecessors in that it succeeds in drawing attention

to the effects of global inequalities on “the weak and unfortunate” (J.M.S

Tompkins 93) while avoiding the taint of sentimentality. At play here, I will

argue, is the fact that, in its endeavour to expose social wrongs, more than

simply depicting the effects on “wounded children”, it elevates one of these

children to the status of narrator. By thus de-objectifying and individualising the

“wounded” child the novel obscures this figure’s participation in a longstanding

sentimental tradition in which they come to figure social ills. Bulawayo also

achieves this obscuration by drawing on an alternative cultural history of

childhood to the romantic tradition, distancing the wounded children in the novel

from their historical counterparts who openly pursue our pity. As I will show,

unlike Wordsworth’s pure and innocent image of the child who, despite life’s

afflictions “still is Nature's Priest” (72), the child narrator and her friends are

depicted as pre-social, unfettered by society’s rules, and self-centred at heart,

removing them as far away from Dickens’ “Dear gentle, patient, noble Nell”

(599) as possible. Thus, Bulawayo’s clear-eyed, cynical child narrator

effectively achieves a double coup: she not only obscures the strong

sentimental political functions of this novel by taking charge of the narration, but

because she is a child, and as such we find it difficult to ignore her, she gets

away with straight-talking and sometimes offensive reporting, thus effectively

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facilitating the exposure of social wrongs. We Need New Names, then,

advocates for the plight of suffering people without the accompanying feeling of

being manipulated usually attributed to novels of this genre and exposes a

message about political and social wrongs that has not been written off as

“weak-minded pap” (Tompkins 124). Thus, We Need New Names, stands as an

example of fiction that, by changing the role of the ‘wounded child” from pitiable

emblem of social wrongs to forthright exposer, ensures that we do not take

exception to the sentimentality of its function.

The argument will unfold as follows. I will start with a description of the

historical, emblematic use of the “wounded child” in literature designed to

expose social wrongs. Following this, I will briefly discuss how sentimental

stories of the “wounded child”, based on a Westernised romantic image of

children as vulnerable, innocent victims, helped contribute to a protectionist

attitude to children, which I will then show how this attitude served to motivate

the formulation of the United Nations Declaration of Children’s Rights which,

because it is universalised from a Western world perspective, serves to

perpetuate the concept of childhood as innocent and vulnerable maintaining a

sentimental view of children, particularly those “wounded” by a fallen society.

Following this will come a brief description of the findings of scholars like

Lauren Berlant, Susan Sontag and Philip Fisher, who criticise the sentimental

objectification of children for social intervention, not only on ethical grounds, but

also because they do not see the device as effective in driving meaningful

change. Next, I will show how elements of the novel centre it firmly in the

tradition of sentimental political fiction that uses the emblem of the “wounded

child” to expose social wrongs, before taking a look at the critical reception of

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the novel to bear out my claim that We Need New Names is not seen as

sentimental. Finally, I will show how, by employing the “wounded child” as a

narrator rather than simply an object of narration, Bulawayo disguises her

participation in the sentimental tradition of using the “wounded child” as

emblem to expose social wrongs and, because of this dissimulation, achieves

her expositional goal without being accused of sentimentality.

The image of the “wounded child” as a cue to sentiment has a long history

in fiction aiming for social transformation. Orphan girl novels like Susan

Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850) and factory novels like Charlotte Elizabeth

Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841) aimed at exposing the wrongs perpetrated

against children in the early nineteenth-century industrial age with an eye to

encouraging reform and motivating action for society as a whole. Influenced by

Jean Jacques Rousseau’s romantic view that children are “without knowledge,

strength, or wisdom” and therefore need our protection because they are

“entirely at [our] mercy” (100), these novels’ descriptions of the “wounded child”

were aimed at stirring readers’ sympathies. A factory reformer in Tonna’s novel

exposes this purpose saying, “I hope it may please God, before long, to rouse

the feelings of our fellow countrymen on behalf of the poor children in these

mills. If that was done, we should soon see a change for the better"(326). The

exploitation of children to drive reform was not limited to fictional texts and the

sentimental portrayal of the “wounded child” also became a highly marketable

device in the hands of the mass-media. According to Claudia Nelson, reporting

on the suffering of children to inspire social reform in both literary and mass-

media contexts increased in the 1890’s. Yet, while the appropriation of children

for social purposes was accepted on the grounds that it resulted in good being

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done for the children who needed help, these stories also ensured sales of

periodicals (Nelson 66-67). This, then, was the beginning of a literary tradition

that objectified oppressed children as powerless victims of their harsh

circumstances for commercial as much as for reformist purposes, resulting in

widespread scepticism of the sentimental use of children as emblem of social

wrongs.

Whatever its ethical hazards, according to Philip Fisher, fiction oriented

around the image of the “wounded child” did serve to drive the move towards a

comprehensive set of human rights for children. As Fisher points out, “the

greatest achievement of sentimentality was the part that it played in creating full

human reality for children” (99). In the West, we believe implicitly in the rights of

the child to protection, education, food and shelter—a belief codified in The

United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child instituted in 1924. These

beliefs hinge on a conception of children as vulnerable and therefore in need of

assistance that derives, in part, from the labour of sentimental political fiction.

The DRC puts forward a singular, universal vision of children’s needs that has

been consigned cross-culturally so that, at least in theory, all the world’s

children can enjoy equal protection.

Yet, the move to protect children, as embodied in fiction that depicts the

“wounded child” to expose social problems, has been criticised as sentimental

because of its universalism. The problem, as Jenks argues, is “the misguided

and tacit assumption of a uniformity of childhood” (123). While acknowledging

the good intentions of those involved, Jo Boyden, social development

consultant for disadvantaged youth, also challenges this assumption saying,

the evidence shows that “some of the measures for child welfare—advocated

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often on humanitarian grounds—have the effect of…increasing [children’s]

social and economic disadvantage” (213). As sociologists Alison James and

Alan Prout observe, “The ‘world’s children’ united ‘our’ children and ‘their’

children only to reveal the vast differences between them” (1). Considering the

advanced world’s limited understanding of the developing world’s problems, is

a one-size-fits-all solution for our children viable? The imposition of a common

solution to a diverse problem is at best idealistic and simplistic and, in some

cases, as Boyden indicates, has had the alarming effect of making things

worse. For many theorists, then, the cultural and economic divide needs to be

taken into consideration (James and Prout 1; Jenks 123) and, for this to

happen, an understanding of individual differences is paramount.

In addition to the problem of universalism, there are many scholars who

see the emblematic use of the “wounded child” to advance reform as

exploitation on the basis that it strips them of their identity. Lauren Berlant

highlights the liberties taken with the privacy of the powerless pointing out that,

while for the average Westerner our “identity is private property” (50), the right

to privacy does not extend to the marginalised, and thus “the exploited child”

(52) becomes the ubiquitous emblem of reform. Susan Sontag’s ideas

regarding the exploitation of the “wounded child” in the graphic images of

atrocities used to shock people into cognisance of social wrongs are also

relevant here, and easily transferable to literature. She too stresses the loss of

individual identity in our use of the “wounded child” figure, noting that in the

Balkan conflict, “the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a

village” were used by both Serb and Croat propogandists. As she cynically

observes, “alter the caption and the children’s deaths can be used and reused”

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(10). Fisher similarly notes that sentimental political novels objectify “children,

slaves, and the old as central characters” (94) to stand in for the social topic

they address. In this reading, the character of the “wounded child”, is no more

than an emblem for the societal wrong the novel exposes, stripped of their

interiority. Thus, if we take these theorists’ ideas into account, we can conclude

that sentimental political fiction’s obsession with the emblem of the “wounded

child” denies the humanity and identity of the individual and that, in doing so, it

may fall short of the political goals that the exploiters of their images and stories

hope to realise.

In its depiction of wounded children as emblems of social ills, Bulawayo’s

We Need New Names fits snugly into the genre of pathetic tales of paediatric

woe so maligned by critics of sentiment. As impoverished victims of a flawed

political regime—children ousted from their homes and living in a squatter camp

with no running water, very little food to eat, and no recourse to medical care—

they are perfect candidates to take on the task of representing the social and

economic upheaval of Zimbabwe. Bulawayo’s wounded children are both

“displaced and at-risk” and as Nelson says, any writer “who [can] show the

effects of such wrongs on children [can] link outrage to sentiment” (65-66),

making them ostensibly ideal sentimental objects of reform. Darling’s father is

dying of AIDS after leaving Zimbabwe to seek employment in South Africa;

Chipo, only eleven, is pregnant by her grandfather; Sbho hopes to escape

poverty through prostituting her beauty; Stina does not even know his age as

he has no birth-certificate and Bastard and Godknows, angry with their lot, are

criminals in the making. Indeed, rather than denying the children’s role as

representatives of the problems in Zimbabwe, We Need New Names actually

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incorporates the idea within the narrative. When the aid organisation which

Darling calls “these NGO people” (52) comes to dispense charity to the people

of Paradise they take photographs of the ragged and dirty children. The reader

knows they are destined to become part of the ubiquitous images of the

“wounded child” screened into our living rooms to expose the poverty and

hunger and advertise for support.

When Darling moves to America, We Need New Names continues its

participation in the sentimental tradition of using the “wounded child” as an

emblem for social wrongs. Darling becomes the emblematic representation of

the effects of displacement on refugees exposing that what seems to be a

solution—leaving home and family to escape political upheaval— is really just

another social wrong. For the “wounded child”, despite the physical comfort in

which she now lives with her aunt, Fostalina, it is a place defined by what it is

not, a place where:

you will not see any men seated under a blooming jacaranda playing

draughts. Bastard and Stina and Godknows and Chipo and Sbho—will not

be calling [her] off to Budapest. You will not even hear a vendor singing

her wares, and you will not see anyone playing country-game or chasing

after flying ants. (147)

Instead of friends calling her out to play, all Darling can see from her window is

the cold snow, which she likens to “clean teeth” (148) because of its white

sterility, in stark contrast to “the flowers? The grass? The stones? The Leaves?

The Litter?” (148), the rich messiness of home. As in Zimbabwe, Darling is not

the only “wounded child” in America and second-generation Africans, like TK,

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the son of Aunt Fostalina’s partner, do not even speak or understand their own

mother tongue. We Need New Names suggests that when assimilated into their

new homes, displaced wounded children run the risk of losing their indigenous

perspective and thus will no longer have the language to report their story.

Though in the first half of the book the “wounded child” is used as an emblem to

represent the trauma of living in an unstable country, Darling remembers that

life with fondness as she fantasises about what she would be doing “if [she]

were at home” (153). The reason she stays in America is purely so she will not

be hungry again. Her preference for her old life is illustrated by the utterance “I

will stand being in America, dealing with the snow, there is food to eat here”

(153).

Yet despite its political subject matter and its focus on the effects of social

problems on children, We Need New Names has not been received as a novel

that practises sentimental exploitation by making the “wounded child” an

emblem of social wrongs. In fact, an examination of its critical reception reveals

that no reviewers have pointed an accusatory finger at the novel for sentimental

reasons. According to Heather Hewlett, “Bulawayo fully captures the daily

texture of characters' lives without adult judgment or pity” and Leyla Sanai

says, “Bulawayo refuses to play the pity card”. Author Uzodinma Iweala even

implied a modernist flavour when he noted that “Bulawayo’s portrayal of

Zimbabwe is notable not for its descriptions of Paradise and Budapest but for

those of Darling’s interior landscape”. Added to this, the list of awards garnered

by Bulawayo for the novel is impressive: its first chapter, originally published as

a short story, won the Caine Prize for African Literature in 2011 and the novel

was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and

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the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. In 2013 it won the inaugural Etisalat Prize

for Literature and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Award for first Fiction and

in 2014, the Hemingway Foundation Award for Debut Fiction, clearly marking it

as a literary success.

How does the author achieve this feat? As I have indicated above, this

chapter contends that while deploying the figure of the “wounded child” as

emblem of the effects of political upheaval on the people of her native

Zimbabwe Bulawayo evades “sentimentality attribution” by enlisting the

“wounded child” not just as narrative object, but as narrator. The effect of this is

to transform the “wounded child” from image to individual, enabling We Need

New Names to showcase the interiority of Darling’s thoughts and perceptions

rather than merely descriptions of her exterior circumstances. In turn, this

allows the novel to afford her a unique personality that obscures her affinity with

the objectified wounded children of yore. Indeed, we are not even told the name

of the country in which she lives, and details are limited to snapshot

experiences described from the perspective of their impact on the child

narrator. The exposition of the extreme poverty that defines the children’s

existence is not overt; rather it is shown to us through Darling’s unique

observations about the world outside that contrast sharply with her life in the

squatter camp ironically named “Paradise”. When she is out with the gang and

they pass the new fancy stadium, she describes it as having “glimmering

benches [they will] never sit on” (2); the wealthy neighbouring suburb they raid

for guavas to fill their empty bellies is nick-named Budapest because, according

to Darling, “it is like being in a different country altogether. A nice country where

people who are not like us live” (4); and the corporeal marks of her harsh

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existence are exposed in her description of a wealthy adult woman’s “clean,

pretty feet, like a baby’s” (6) that are so different from her own, despite the fact

that she is the child.

Part of the smokescreen obscuring We Need New Names’ kinship with

novels that pricked the tears of Victorian readers is Darling’s crude and

convincing streetwise parlance that contributes to the development of her

unique identity and sets her further apart from the innocent and vulnerable

version of the “wounded child”. Her thoughts are often crass and uncomfortably

confronting—at odds with our universal romantic image of childhood as

innocent and helpless. As reviewer Susy Wyss claims, “Despite her name,

Darling is neither a sweet nor an endearing child. She is rough, tough and at

times even cruel, shaped by circumstances that are unfathomable to most

Americans”. When Bastard mocks her planned move to America, she

expresses her desire to” slap him, butt him on his big forehead…slam [her] fist

into his mouth and make him spit teeth” (15). Wyss identifies something that,

for a sentimental novel hoping to engage the sympathy of the reader, should be

a disaster, saying, “while we want to care for Darling because she is a child, we

are repelled by some of the things she says”. Brought up in, what she describes

as “a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart” (49), Darling speaks in a

vernacular that is often coarse and scatological. For example, a central motif in

the novel is Darling’s reference to her home and country as “kaka”, which in

Southern Africa is a euphemism for excrement. Yet, though sometimes boorish

and rude, the naivety of her comments reminds us of her youth and we do not

take offence, rather, our attention is directed to the circumstances in which she

lives.

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 We Need New Names’ further develops the child narrator’s

unromanticised personality cloaking the novel’s sentimentality through Darling’s

narration of her and the gang’s anti-social behaviour. Rebelliously flouting the

image of the innocent sentimental heroine, Darling and her fellow “wounded

children”—Bastard, Godknows, Stina, Sbho and Chipo—take charge of the

streets surrounding their impoverished squatter camp, taking the filth and the

squalor of the place with them. Roaming the streets after stealing fruit off the

trees in the suburban gardens they:

just walk nicely like Budapest is now our country too, like we built it even,

eating guavas and spitting the peels all over to make the place dirty. We

stop at the corner of AU street for Chipo to vomit…her vomit looks like

urine, only thicker. We leave it there uncovered. (11)

Darling’s focus on leaving their mark “uncovered” highlights the novel’s

intentional insurrection against the sentimental image of childhood. The

insurgency is further exemplified in her account of their visit to the construction

site for a new shopping mall funded by Chinese businessmen, which they will

never have enough money to shop in. Darling makes the objectional and

xenophobic observation that the “fat Chinese man” who oversees the venture,

which the children call Shanghai, sounds like “he ching-chongs” (45) and when

the children’s request for gifts is denied Godknows threatens to “come at night

and defecate all over? Or steal things?” (47).

The aberrant behaviour and vulgar language that characterise Darling and

the other wounded children in the novel do more than de-sentimentalise the

child narrator’s identity, they also serve as a vehicle for exposing the novel’s

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message of social wrongs. When Darling refers to her country as “kaka” for

example We Need New Names draws attention to external social and political

wrongs that have shaped her and her fellow “wounded children”, without

actually discussing them. More importantly, her scatological language

challenges social norms, mocking authority and showing the reader that even a

child can see how bad things are for the disenfranchised people of Zimbabwe.

When they leave the Chinese construction site, Darling tells us that their voices

are raised in dissent against this capitalistic intrusion into a country more in

need of “A school? Flats? A clinic?” (46), “[they] are booing and yelling” (47).

The sad thing is that the “noisy machines” (47) drown out their protest. It is only

through Darling’s narration of the incident that we hear their dissenting voices

“telling [the Chinese] to leave [their] country and go and build wherever they

come from, that [they] don’t need their kaka mall, that [the Chinese] are not

even [their] friends” (47). In a country where the currency is so devalued that

her grandmother’s suitcase of money which she keeps under her bed is worth

less than nothing, what use is a shopping mall? Thus, Bulawayo invests Darling

with a political voice; she is not just an emblem of social problems, but a

narrator exposing how the state’s policies have resulted in a neglected and

powerless populace.

Because it is narrated by a child, We Need New Names is also able to

achieve the purpose of exposing social wrongs under the ostensibly apolitical

and unsentimental cover of Darling’s games with her friends. Childhood

scholars Allison James and Adrian James, point out that play is traditionally

seen as a way for children to learn (91). Ironically, in Bulawayo’s novel, it is the

reader who learns about the world’s unfairness under the guise of Darling’s

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cognoscenti narration of their childish games that mimic the adult world. When

playing country- game, for example Darling notes, “everybody wants to be

certain countries, like everybody wants to be the U.S.A. and Britain and

Canada and Australia…these are the country- countries” (49). As she says,

“Nobody wants to be the rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq…

not even this one we live in–who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and

things falling apart?” (49). Darling’s narration of the games she plays with her

friends exposes the contrast between herself and other children in more

affluent, stable countries and the reason for the social wrongs she and her

fellow children experience—some countries are more important, more

desirable, and more deserving of the label country because they function

properly, economically and politically, for their citizens. On the other hand, her

country, and others in a state of turmoil, do not and are therefore not real

countries.

Far from diluting the message, the horrific results of social wrongs

juxtaposed with childish games lend impact to the exposure. Darling’s friend

Chipo, for example, is pregnant and in the sentimental tradition of fictional fallen

women, like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), she is not married.

So traumatic is the situation for this preteen child, as, unlike her historical

counterparts, the father of her unborn child is also her own grandfather, she

loses the ability to speak. Darling tells a story about a girl called Nosizi, who “is

dead now, from giving birth. It kills like that” (78), which explains their fear that

Chipo might die in childbirth. This fear drives the girls of the gang to try and

help Chipo by “getting rid of [her] stomach” (78). The sensational nature of the

scenario is masked by the fact that Darling, from her childish perspective,

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narrates her experience of the attempted abortion as a game. The intervention

becomes embroiled in playful fantasies of television shows like ER, which Sbho

saw once when visiting Harare, and the fantasy fortunately comes to an abrupt

end when an adult appears on the scene and curtails any real action. Through

the eyes of the child narrator, what is really a very poignant and pathetic scene,

takes on a prosaic matter-of-factness that obscures its sentimentality and,

though the subjects of incest, child abuse, and the lack of medical care

resulting from poverty are never directly broached, these social wrongs are

exposed.

The child narrator’s’ blunt and often humorously delivered narration of

these games as playful imitations of the adult world, allows for exposure of

dangerously political social wrongs in a way that not only circumvents

accusations of sentimentality, but also censorship. The most disquieting

example of this is her retelling of their vivid re-enactment of Bornfree’s death

who was killed for opposing the existing political regime. The full force of the

fantasy emerges as she reports how Godknows enacts “the lorry that brought

the armed men who came for Bornfree” (140) as they all become “animals

wanting blood”(140) and as Chipo “has become Bornfree’s mother…a

possessed snake, screaming and screaming (142). The agency of the chid

narrator to voice the story is contrasted with the impotency of the adults as the

graves become “the people of Paradise who are standing there doing nothing”

(142). The adults’ eyes are full of “rage” (143), but they “don’t make any

sounds” (143). As Darling says, rage “does not count. It is a big terrible dog

with no teeth” (143). On the other hand, when a BBC reporter interrupts their

game asking, “What kind of game is that?” (143), Bastard replies, “Can’t you

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see this is for real” (143), which flags the effectiveness of Darling’s narration.

The wages of exposing social wrongs in a censored political environment like

Zimbabwe is death, but, under cover of the apparently innocent dissimulation of

play, We Need New Names is licenced to speak out.

The extraordinary capacity of the child narrator to expose social wrongs

through her games and her childish vernacular is best illustrated through

contrast with the verbal impotence of the adult slumdwellers. As a child, she

can address the social wrongs that afflict her nation—the direct cause of her

woundedness—as her youthfulness prevents her from being seen as political.

We Need New Names makes frequent reference to the adult’s silence as they

hold back out of fear. No passage in the novel shows this forced silence more

clearly than when Darling describes voting day. The children “are quiet” as they

will the adults to speak up and be effective. As Darling puts it, “we want them to

open their mouths and speak…but they are just silent…like something crept

upon them while they were sleeping and cut out their tongues” (68). According

to Darling, before President Mugabe’s administration turned the victory over

colonialism, into the defeat of democracy, the adults used to “talk-talk…about

elections and democracy and new country” (68), but now they have no voice.

The chilling reality of a despotic regime is that if the adults do talk, they risk

their lives. Bornfree, named for the euphoric joy felt when the country achieved

its independence from white colonial rule, becomes politically active, speaking

up for change and he is taken away to be permanently silenced. The warning

does not go unheard and as Darling observes, “that made the adults stop

talking about change” (135). Instead “the adults just returned quietly to their

shacks to see if they could still bend low” (135). Despite his name, Bornfree’s

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friend and fellow campaigner, Messenger, cannot speak either and Darling

likens his mouth to “a terrible wound” (135), reiterating the image of the cut-out

tongues. Thus, in the tradition of sentimental political fiction, if social wrongs

are to be exposed, the burden falls on the “wounded child”—the difference

here, however, is that it is the child that exposes the wrongs, rather than being

the one exposed as a symbol.

Although some critics have censured Bulawayo for representing her

homeland in a negative light (Ndlovu 133; Sibanda 75) the novel exposes that

the social problems experienced by those who escape to a “better life” are also

unfavourable. Away from the very real danger of Zimbabwe’s controlling

political regime Darling should feel free to be more openly vocal, but instead, by

muting Darling’s voice after her move to the United States, Bulawayo shows the

social isolation felt by a refugee forced to leave her country. Despite the

censorship in Zimbabwe, Darling’s voice when she is among her friends at

home in Africa is strong and vibrant, but now, speaking for all her fellow

migrants Darling says, “Because we were not using our languages we said

things we did not mean; what we really meant remained folded inside” (140).

This new-found reticence is due to the fact that they feel out of place and

different. The novel exposes this feeling of displacement as she says,” I felt

wrong in my skin, in my body, in my clothes in my language, in my head,

everything” (165). Such is her isolation that she stops writing to her friends back

home, embarrassed by the fact that her life in America is not “the one [she] had

dreamed of back in Paradise” (188) and when she speaks on the phone to her

mother there are long pauses because she is “not sure what’s the right thing to

say” (204). Darling’s voice in the second half of the novel is censored by her

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sense of alienation and We Need New Names exposes how refugees

exchange one sort of marginalisation for another. The failure of politicians and

philanthropists to make their home country a habitable place has resulted in

them becoming displaced in an alien world.

When in America, the child narrator also exposes the social problems

resulting from Western society’s addiction to virtual experiences. Unlike

Zimbabwe, children in America do not play games in the street with friends,

instead they shut themselves up in their rooms playing with a computer. When

Darling approaches TK as a possible friend he rejects her advances in favour of

his virtual computer world. Darling, of course, questions him asking, “What kind

of game do you play by yourself?” (153). Thus, the child narrator exposes an

image of social alienation in which real people have been replaced by avatars.

Bulawayo’s social commentary continues when Darling makes friends with two

girls from school who share a common bond of displacement. The three girls’

‘game’ becomes rushing home every day from school to stream pornography.

Their childishness is shown when they turn down the sound to parody the

voices of the actors as they pretend to climax. Bulawayo juxtaposes adult

themes with childish imagination, a comparison which serves to highlight the

social wrongs the “wounded child” represents. Instead of real human sexual

relations, what Darling and her new friends’ witness is fake as is any virtual

representation of human experience. Unlike the innocent children depicted in

the romantic vision of childhood, Darling is no stranger to copulation, sharing as

she did a one roomed shack with her parents and later with her mother and her

lover. The social wrong that motivates Bulawayo’s reporting then is not a

prudish concern for childhood sexual purity, but rather an exposure of the

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ersatz experience of a society obsessed with an impossible version of life

viewed through a screen.

Thus, We Need New Names successfully uses the emblem of the

“wounded child” to expose social wrongs, both in Bulawayo’s native Zimbabwe

and in her adopted home in the United States, without magnetising accusations

of sentimentality. Bulawayo’s own words successfully sum up her motivation for

her novel which ironically has its genesis in some photographs of a child taken

during one of Zimbabwe’s worst times. As she puts it in an interview with the

Guardian:

My protagonist, Darling, was inspired by a photograph of this kid sitting on

the rubble that was his bulldozed home after the Zimbabwean government

carried out Operation Murambatsvina, a clean-up campaign in 2005 that

saw some people in informal settlements lose their homes. As I looked at

image after haunting image, I became obsessed with where the people

would go, what their stories were, and how these stories would develop –

and more importantly what would happen to the kid in the first picture I

saw. The writing project essentially became about finding out. The country

was the backdrop, and of course it was at a time when it was unravelling

due to failure of leadership. Still, I was also inspired by what children can

stand for, by their innocence, their resilience, humanity and humour, and

what they tell us about our world. I think this is where We Need New

Names gets it pulse.

As an expatriate Zimbabwean she could identify strongly with the very

photographs that most of us would only glance at, and thus, set out to give the

107
emblems in the images an identity. She also obscured their sentimental force

as objects of pity by giving them feisty personalities that make them interesting

and funny individuals, but not necessarily loveable. In so doing she reminds us

that it is not only the nice children that deserve saving and also that the effort of

saving, if done effectively, requires getting to know the children as individuals.

In her critique of the plight of the refugee on foreign soil she also suggests that

the solution to the social wrongs caused by political upheaval should lie in

effective help to heal those wrongs at source. We Need New Names, while

using the emblem of the “wounded child” to expose the devastating social

wrongs that poverty can bring also shows us that wounded children are still

children playing childish games and having fun and therefore should not be

reduced to nameless objects. Neither should we assume that poverty equates

with unhappiness, nor, for that matter, that plenty equals happiness, as

Bulawayo foregrounds the importance of relationships over physical comfort.

By employing the services of a child narrator, who engages us with her

uncensored directness and lack of “political correctness” saying what adults

would not dare, Bulawayo succeeds in exposing the social wrongs of our world

without accruing accusations of sentimentality.

108
Coda

The focus of this thesis is to uncover how the child narrator serves to enable

fiction to carry out traditionally sentimental political tasks without the taint of

sentimentality. It has established that the discomfort and suspicion ascribed to

fiction that aims to impart knowledge; connect people; chronicle history and

expose social wrongs is ameliorated when we employ a child narrator. It has

also demonstrated that this is achieved because we view children as

unschooled, naïve and forthright and therefore above suspicion of manipulative

tactics, thereby masking the sentimentality of the political message they deliver.

In addition, this thesis, by proposing an alternative view of childhood to the

traditional romantic image as innocent, pure and vulnerable, suggests that the

success of these novels to advance their cause lies in the fact when children

are individualised and given the power to speak, rather than be spoken about,

they become highly effective agents of reform without the taint of sentimentality.

In the process, it has raised questions about the moral and ethical

responsibilities of the reader when faced with the apparent guilelessness of the

child narrator. When assessing the culpability of minors for criminal offences,

New Zealand law adopts the rule of doli incapax, which enables flexibility when

it comes to criminal liability for children. The “Crimes Act” states that:

No person shall be convicted of an offence by reason of any act done or

omitted by him or her when under the age of 10 years…No person shall

be convicted of any offence … when over the age of 10 years but under

the age of 14 years, unless he or she knew either that the act or omission

was wrong or that it was contrary to law. (38)

109
There is, therefore, recourse for a plea of diminished responsibility when

sentencing a child, and the same mandate seems to apply to the child narrator

in fiction as we do not judge them as harshly, forgiving any didacticism or

subjectivism because we see them as honest and plainspoken. Furthermore,

practicing a philosophy of diminished responsibility for child narrators, we, as

the reader, are also subject to diminished responsibility. In judging a character

or situation voiced through the mouths of babes it is excusable to take a less

cynical view, because our narrator is a child and therefore entitled to see things

from a more black and white perspective. Just as in law, a judge has recourse

to doli incapax, so too are we entitled to judge more leniently when a novel is

narrated by a child. Thus, the child narrator helps novels mediate social and

political issues more broadly promoting consciousness at a level that can be

enabling and productive.

Yet, while this thesis has emphasised the positive repercussions of the

use of the child narrator to surreptitiously influence our social and political

perceptions, it must also be acknowledged that their influence might not always

be beneficial. To be sentimentally moved opens the possibility of being led by

our emotions in an irrational and irresponsible direction. If we are less

conscious of this mobilisation of sentiment, because the motivator is a child,

then a child can broach issues, which, for an adult, remain in the realm of the

unspeakable. Yet, if we view these effects through the lens of narrative ethics it

also seems that these affordances may not always be productive as the politics

expressed could rest on a deeply problematic moral simplicity. Highlighting our

responsibilities as readers and writers, the work of Wayne C. Booth and Ross

Chambers explores the consequences of the narrative act itself, and the costs

110
incurred in exchanging person for character and representing others while

acknowledging the “power” of fiction to elicit emotion. Their work would provide

an interesting perspective for further study on the obvious paradox of a

diminished culpability for child narrators, which is that if we practice clemency

as readers, our benevolence might be misplaced as the child as sentimental

messenger can just as easily function as sentimental deceptor.

Another significant finding that surfaced during my research relates to

our perception of childhood. Close reading of the novels in my archive revealed

that the way the child narrator is portrayed appears to have developed over

time. It became clear that the reliance of the child narrator on the adult

characters in the novel is inversely proportionate with the age of the novel. In

other words, the more contemporary the novel, the more the child narrator

stands on their own two feet, the older the novel, the more the child narrator

engages with and receives support from adults. For example, in the oldest

novel in my archive, To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, Scout’s narration

is a complex mix of child and adult. The adult narrator’s voice props up the child

narrator’s naïve patter and helps to interpret her observations for the reader. In

The Kite Runner, published in 2003, over forty years later, the child narrator is

noticeably more in control, although there is evidence of adult interpretation in

the form of flashbacks, and he hands over the entire job to the adult version of

himself in the third part of the book. A similar surrendering of responsibility

occurs in the second part of Mr Pip, published in 2006, but in the first part of the

novel the child narrator is fully in charge of the narration. It is in We Need New

Names, the newest novel under discussion, published in 2013, that the child

narrator carries the burden of narration on her own without any apparent adult

111
intervention. Further study of the changes in the use of the child narrator in

fiction, if linked to the evolving field of childhood studies could provide an

interesting perspective on the politics of contemporary childhood—our

aspirations, perhaps, towards a more autonomous state for children in the

midst of an increasing protectionism in practice. James and Prout describe the

study of childhood per se as a field “in which the traditional confidence and

certainty about childhood and children’s social status are being radically

undermined” (1), while, as Jenks contends, “childhood remains an essentially

protectionist experience” (122). So, is the noticeable trend—to allow the child

narrator more independence—just an ideal that is reflected in fiction, a desire to

move away from the more romantic view of children as innocent and

vulnerable, to one that sees children as more self-sufficient and actively

involved in their own destinies?

Lastly this research has raised the questions: what devices, other than the

child narrator, might also be employed to ameliorate sentimentality and in what

capacity could the child narrator, and indeed any other devices, be used other

than in fiction to carry out their clandestine task? This line of questioning could

have significant consequences for charity and non-profit organisations that

need to find other avenues and methods to reach out to people and elicit

support while avoiding accusations of sentimental manipulation. After all, the

lessons we learn from sentimental political fiction need not be limited to the

traditional sentimental functions explicitly outlined in this thesis.

112
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