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jackiehorne's review
4.0
Drawing upon theorists of space (Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre), Gargano examines Victorian novels for both children and adults that feature schools, structuring her book in four chapters that each look at a different space within the school: the schoolroom; the teacher’s room; the garden and playing fields; and the sickroom. In such novels, Gargano argues, “fictive schoolroom scenes ritualistically dramatize a perceived imbalance between the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction” (1). She argues not for a progressive, linear shift from domesticity to institutionality, but rather for “a series of circuitous engagements between domesticity and institutionality, as defined and circumscribed by distinct yet mutually supportive school sites” (9). Invoking Foucault, Gargano also links the construction of the child to the construction of the school, arguing that “[i:]f the schoolroom enters the modern world through a complex mapping of spatial partitioning and subordination, the modern child’s sensibility is dramatized as similarly divided and regulated. In this sense, Victorian fictions increasingly cast the space of school as analogous to the experiential spaces of modern childhood” (10). I found this second claim less well supported than the primary claim, which is cogently and compellingly argued.
Chapter 1 examines how “supposedly scientific teaching methods and changing conceptions of school architecture meshed with a new idea of the child’s mind,” one drawn from association psychology, which constructed a “linear, highly schematized picture of childhood learning” (12). Primarily historical, rather than literary, in scope, the chapter opens by discussing two different styles of school architecture – the ornamental Gothic, associated with traditional classical education, and more modern, utilitarian, rectilinear architecture, associated with emergent scientific pedagogy. Gargano explores the ideologies behind the emergent model, contrasting it with ideas about schools before the Victorian period. Earlier, schools had often been connected to the home, church, or work site, but increasingly during the period schools were built as stand-alone institutions. The period also saw a shift away from a single large classroom toward subdivided spaces. Soon “smaller classrooms became the norm, replacing the single schoolroom. Curriculum design was reflected in school architecture, as both became increasingly sub-divided and hierarchical” (19). The chapter then shifts to a discussion of association psychology and its influence on pedagogy, as well as its links to school design. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of Farrar’s Eric, or, Little by Little, and a more extensive discussion of Dickens’s Hard Times in light of their critiques of the modern utilitarian schoolroom. Applying the wealth of historical information that Gargano marshals to more than two literary texts would have been welcome in this chapter.
Chapter 2 shifts to a consideration of the teacher’s room. A “nurturing annex to the classroom, the teacher’s room fosters a different set of spatial practices,” Gargano suggests. In the teacher’s room, students do not have to sit quietly or recite collectively; instead, they can speak as individuals (48). Thus, the teacher’s room “evokes the less regimented space of home” (49). But “the teacher’s room is a home that is temporary and provisional, and admission to it must be earned by the diligent pupil; thus the space reveals the provisionality of domestic attachments, the germs of institutionality located at the very heart of home…. Often cast by Victorian novelists as oppositional to institutional space, the teacher’s room more accurately illustrates the link between home space and institutionality,” Gargano asserts (49).
Gargano first analyzes the “teacher’s room” of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Felix’s cottage, to introduce the concept of “domestic education,” figured as the family circle rather than the linear “train” of institutionalized education and associationist psychology. She argues that in the Victorian period, “the dream of ‘domestic education’ is continually invoked as a normative ideal enshrined in an individual’s earliest memories of family life, as well as in the collective vision of a utopian, familial society yet to be achieved” (54). She then analyzes the educational theories of Rousseau and Herbert Spencer regarding the concept of “domestic education.” The chapter ends with a return to the literary, arguing that “[i:]n their attempts to idealize domestic education, fictive portrayals – even more than Spencer and Rousseau – minimize the inspective aspect of the teacher’s parental role, casting the process of internalization as invisible or mysterious. This crucial erasure of the inspective aspects of domestic education certainly enables Victorian novels to benefit from a false dichotomy, to carve out sanctuaries of familiar inclusion, staged as utterly uncoercive alternatives to the harsh and coercive lessons of institutional schools. Novels are then free to offer their narratives as unproblematic instruments of an individualized domestic instruction, promising a wholehearted and pure identification with the child against adult disciplinary institutions” (68). Gargano argues that, more importantly, “such selective erasure also permitted novels of education to make relative judgments about various educational institutions and institutional possibilities” (68), for “the bildungsromanic tradition within the novel emphasizes individual development to such a degree that any form of standardized and institutionalized education was questioned and qualified by the novel as a genre. Further, in more specific terms, the novelists I investigate frequently make their stand in favor of a private, domestic, and individual education” (69). She demonstrates this through insightful analysis of Miss Temple’s room in Jane Eyre and a comparison of the schools in David Copperfield. Her analysis highlights “the complex ways in which the novel’s self-consciously naïve picture of domestic innocence enables a limited critique of social institutions, while simultaneously tempering widespread social anxieties with its consoling fictions of a supposedly liberating domestic instruction” (69).
Chapter 3 moves outside, to explore the gardens and playing fields of the schoolyard. Gargano demonstrates the ways in which “the garden aimed to reintegrate the lessons of nature into the institutional domain” (89). On the one hand, “[t:]he garden minimizes or obscures the role of adult authority figures, allowing children to interact in allegedly ‘natural’ ways – to run, shout, fight, work, and play… the garden builds a bridge between cultivated and wild nature; it aims to domesticate nature and childhood simultaneously. In this sense, the garden becomes a quasi-domestic space that embodies elements of Rousseauian education” (89). Yet paradoxically, the link between childhood and nature reveals inhibiting as well as liberating aspects. First, “assumptions about child-nature reveal and reinforce self-perpetuating gender stereotypes” (89-90); boys’ gardens signal open transparency, while girls gardens equate to opacity (98). Second, “exuberant games in the boys’ school garden also open vistas into adult fears about children’s ‘natural depravity’” (90).
The body of the chapter opens with a discussion of the concept of property as linked to the garden in Rousseau. Gargano then analyzes the gender assumptions underlying the different views of gardens for boys and for girls in Herbert Spencer’s writing. Both of these themes (gender and property) weave their way in the chapter’s subsequent analyses of the gardens in Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Dickens’ David Copperfield, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice. In these novels, “[a:] moralized and domesticated nature is invoked as an inspiring guide, elevating students beyond worldly social arrangements even as it sets the pattern for an improved, more natural sense of community. In contrast, undomesticated nature is dangerous, erupting in the tortures imposed by bullies, a disruptive premature sexuality in adolescent girls, and the reckless selfishness that ignores or openly defies adult precepts” (123). In addition, “[t:]he conversion of nature into property makes the garden a safe territory even as it serves to domesticate child-nature…. At the same time, of course, the concept of gendered nature enforces growth in the proper direction. Boys master an inner wilderness in preparation for the mastery of chaotic raw nature and the claiming of property in the external world…. In the girls’ garden, on the other hand, young ladies learn to tend themselves as property, to cultivate either virtue or the appearance of virtue, to veil nature as an opacity suitable to the private sphere” (123).
The final chapter focuses on the school sickroom, suggesting that “[t:]he child’s body serves as the ground upon which the health or toxicity of the institutions and social arrangements controlled and monitored by adults” are judged…. [T:]he bodies of injured, enfeebled, or dying children serve as iconic emblems of contemporary concerns about consigning the domestic work of child raising to institutions, which, for better or worse, would forever shape their inmates” (127). The cultural work performed by the “diseased child” undermines specific educational ideologies, points to educational reforms, or sometimes “call[s:] into question the value of any and all institutionalized education” (129)
School sickrooms in fiction also demonstrate the debates between the new germ-based model of disease and an older zymotic view, which held that “illness is the result of effluvia, an organic residue of all living things, which lethally collects in the close and cramped spaces of houses, hospitals, and schools” (134). This older model pointed to sick buildings, not just sick patients; reforming the buildings (and their educational practices) can improve the health of their students. In literary texts, reforming school buildings most often means incorporating some aspect of the domestic into the institution. Gargano analyzes the sick child/children in multiple novels, but devotes the most space to May’s Dashwood Priory and Dickens’ Dombey and Son, arguing that “[i:]n novels of successful education, the sickroom offers neither a thorough domestication of illness nor a retreat to exclusive domesticity, but rather a final, redemptive chance to right the balance between institutional and domestic space” (155). In contrast, for “novels that condemn outright a particular form of school education…, no cure is available within the precincts of the school; the whole institution is revealed as an unhealthy house, and may become, at least temporarily, a species of sickroom or hospital, a house of incurables” (155).
Gargano ends her book with a brief conclusion, in which she acknowledges both the reformist nature of many of the novels she’s examined – “mid-century novelists fight a rearguard action against the institutionalized lessons and standards they so often stage as antithetical to novelistic ways of seeing and knowing; specifically, novelists associate their art with the erratic and errant trajectories of narrative in contrast to the hierarchies of the new pedagogy’s classificatory ‘grid’” (158) – and their implication in the Foucauldian partitioning of space in modern institutional sites – such novels “inevitably help to further the spatial partitioning that many of them implicitly oppose” (159).
The conclusion ends by noting that once obligatory school attendance had been implemented, school novels lost their reformist edge, and functioned primarily in a sentimental mode. Yet Gargano’s analysis of these stories remains relevant, she suggests, for “the contradictions implicit in our drive toward the oppositional goals of institutionality and domesticity, social cohesion and individual possibility, standardization and playful improvisation, continue to beset our educational discourse in profound ways on both sides of the Atlantic” (161).
Troy Boone’s review of the book (ChLAQ 33.4) praises it for the wide range of works it discusses, including fiction for adults and children and nonfiction works. While I valued the interdisciplinary of Gargano’s work, the literary texts she chose to analyze never strayed too far from the canonical. I found myself wanting more of an explanation for why she chose the literary texts she did, and whether other now forgotten but popular school stories of the period support or call her claims into question.
Chapter 1 examines how “supposedly scientific teaching methods and changing conceptions of school architecture meshed with a new idea of the child’s mind,” one drawn from association psychology, which constructed a “linear, highly schematized picture of childhood learning” (12). Primarily historical, rather than literary, in scope, the chapter opens by discussing two different styles of school architecture – the ornamental Gothic, associated with traditional classical education, and more modern, utilitarian, rectilinear architecture, associated with emergent scientific pedagogy. Gargano explores the ideologies behind the emergent model, contrasting it with ideas about schools before the Victorian period. Earlier, schools had often been connected to the home, church, or work site, but increasingly during the period schools were built as stand-alone institutions. The period also saw a shift away from a single large classroom toward subdivided spaces. Soon “smaller classrooms became the norm, replacing the single schoolroom. Curriculum design was reflected in school architecture, as both became increasingly sub-divided and hierarchical” (19). The chapter then shifts to a discussion of association psychology and its influence on pedagogy, as well as its links to school design. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of Farrar’s Eric, or, Little by Little, and a more extensive discussion of Dickens’s Hard Times in light of their critiques of the modern utilitarian schoolroom. Applying the wealth of historical information that Gargano marshals to more than two literary texts would have been welcome in this chapter.
Chapter 2 shifts to a consideration of the teacher’s room. A “nurturing annex to the classroom, the teacher’s room fosters a different set of spatial practices,” Gargano suggests. In the teacher’s room, students do not have to sit quietly or recite collectively; instead, they can speak as individuals (48). Thus, the teacher’s room “evokes the less regimented space of home” (49). But “the teacher’s room is a home that is temporary and provisional, and admission to it must be earned by the diligent pupil; thus the space reveals the provisionality of domestic attachments, the germs of institutionality located at the very heart of home…. Often cast by Victorian novelists as oppositional to institutional space, the teacher’s room more accurately illustrates the link between home space and institutionality,” Gargano asserts (49).
Gargano first analyzes the “teacher’s room” of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Felix’s cottage, to introduce the concept of “domestic education,” figured as the family circle rather than the linear “train” of institutionalized education and associationist psychology. She argues that in the Victorian period, “the dream of ‘domestic education’ is continually invoked as a normative ideal enshrined in an individual’s earliest memories of family life, as well as in the collective vision of a utopian, familial society yet to be achieved” (54). She then analyzes the educational theories of Rousseau and Herbert Spencer regarding the concept of “domestic education.” The chapter ends with a return to the literary, arguing that “[i:]n their attempts to idealize domestic education, fictive portrayals – even more than Spencer and Rousseau – minimize the inspective aspect of the teacher’s parental role, casting the process of internalization as invisible or mysterious. This crucial erasure of the inspective aspects of domestic education certainly enables Victorian novels to benefit from a false dichotomy, to carve out sanctuaries of familiar inclusion, staged as utterly uncoercive alternatives to the harsh and coercive lessons of institutional schools. Novels are then free to offer their narratives as unproblematic instruments of an individualized domestic instruction, promising a wholehearted and pure identification with the child against adult disciplinary institutions” (68). Gargano argues that, more importantly, “such selective erasure also permitted novels of education to make relative judgments about various educational institutions and institutional possibilities” (68), for “the bildungsromanic tradition within the novel emphasizes individual development to such a degree that any form of standardized and institutionalized education was questioned and qualified by the novel as a genre. Further, in more specific terms, the novelists I investigate frequently make their stand in favor of a private, domestic, and individual education” (69). She demonstrates this through insightful analysis of Miss Temple’s room in Jane Eyre and a comparison of the schools in David Copperfield. Her analysis highlights “the complex ways in which the novel’s self-consciously naïve picture of domestic innocence enables a limited critique of social institutions, while simultaneously tempering widespread social anxieties with its consoling fictions of a supposedly liberating domestic instruction” (69).
Chapter 3 moves outside, to explore the gardens and playing fields of the schoolyard. Gargano demonstrates the ways in which “the garden aimed to reintegrate the lessons of nature into the institutional domain” (89). On the one hand, “[t:]he garden minimizes or obscures the role of adult authority figures, allowing children to interact in allegedly ‘natural’ ways – to run, shout, fight, work, and play… the garden builds a bridge between cultivated and wild nature; it aims to domesticate nature and childhood simultaneously. In this sense, the garden becomes a quasi-domestic space that embodies elements of Rousseauian education” (89). Yet paradoxically, the link between childhood and nature reveals inhibiting as well as liberating aspects. First, “assumptions about child-nature reveal and reinforce self-perpetuating gender stereotypes” (89-90); boys’ gardens signal open transparency, while girls gardens equate to opacity (98). Second, “exuberant games in the boys’ school garden also open vistas into adult fears about children’s ‘natural depravity’” (90).
The body of the chapter opens with a discussion of the concept of property as linked to the garden in Rousseau. Gargano then analyzes the gender assumptions underlying the different views of gardens for boys and for girls in Herbert Spencer’s writing. Both of these themes (gender and property) weave their way in the chapter’s subsequent analyses of the gardens in Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Dickens’ David Copperfield, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice. In these novels, “[a:] moralized and domesticated nature is invoked as an inspiring guide, elevating students beyond worldly social arrangements even as it sets the pattern for an improved, more natural sense of community. In contrast, undomesticated nature is dangerous, erupting in the tortures imposed by bullies, a disruptive premature sexuality in adolescent girls, and the reckless selfishness that ignores or openly defies adult precepts” (123). In addition, “[t:]he conversion of nature into property makes the garden a safe territory even as it serves to domesticate child-nature…. At the same time, of course, the concept of gendered nature enforces growth in the proper direction. Boys master an inner wilderness in preparation for the mastery of chaotic raw nature and the claiming of property in the external world…. In the girls’ garden, on the other hand, young ladies learn to tend themselves as property, to cultivate either virtue or the appearance of virtue, to veil nature as an opacity suitable to the private sphere” (123).
The final chapter focuses on the school sickroom, suggesting that “[t:]he child’s body serves as the ground upon which the health or toxicity of the institutions and social arrangements controlled and monitored by adults” are judged…. [T:]he bodies of injured, enfeebled, or dying children serve as iconic emblems of contemporary concerns about consigning the domestic work of child raising to institutions, which, for better or worse, would forever shape their inmates” (127). The cultural work performed by the “diseased child” undermines specific educational ideologies, points to educational reforms, or sometimes “call[s:] into question the value of any and all institutionalized education” (129)
School sickrooms in fiction also demonstrate the debates between the new germ-based model of disease and an older zymotic view, which held that “illness is the result of effluvia, an organic residue of all living things, which lethally collects in the close and cramped spaces of houses, hospitals, and schools” (134). This older model pointed to sick buildings, not just sick patients; reforming the buildings (and their educational practices) can improve the health of their students. In literary texts, reforming school buildings most often means incorporating some aspect of the domestic into the institution. Gargano analyzes the sick child/children in multiple novels, but devotes the most space to May’s Dashwood Priory and Dickens’ Dombey and Son, arguing that “[i:]n novels of successful education, the sickroom offers neither a thorough domestication of illness nor a retreat to exclusive domesticity, but rather a final, redemptive chance to right the balance between institutional and domestic space” (155). In contrast, for “novels that condemn outright a particular form of school education…, no cure is available within the precincts of the school; the whole institution is revealed as an unhealthy house, and may become, at least temporarily, a species of sickroom or hospital, a house of incurables” (155).
Gargano ends her book with a brief conclusion, in which she acknowledges both the reformist nature of many of the novels she’s examined – “mid-century novelists fight a rearguard action against the institutionalized lessons and standards they so often stage as antithetical to novelistic ways of seeing and knowing; specifically, novelists associate their art with the erratic and errant trajectories of narrative in contrast to the hierarchies of the new pedagogy’s classificatory ‘grid’” (158) – and their implication in the Foucauldian partitioning of space in modern institutional sites – such novels “inevitably help to further the spatial partitioning that many of them implicitly oppose” (159).
The conclusion ends by noting that once obligatory school attendance had been implemented, school novels lost their reformist edge, and functioned primarily in a sentimental mode. Yet Gargano’s analysis of these stories remains relevant, she suggests, for “the contradictions implicit in our drive toward the oppositional goals of institutionality and domesticity, social cohesion and individual possibility, standardization and playful improvisation, continue to beset our educational discourse in profound ways on both sides of the Atlantic” (161).
Troy Boone’s review of the book (ChLAQ 33.4) praises it for the wide range of works it discusses, including fiction for adults and children and nonfiction works. While I valued the interdisciplinary of Gargano’s work, the literary texts she chose to analyze never strayed too far from the canonical. I found myself wanting more of an explanation for why she chose the literary texts she did, and whether other now forgotten but popular school stories of the period support or call her claims into question.
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