“Pfui! Garstiger Struwwelpeter!”
When I studied German in France and moved to Germany in the early sixties, the first books I discovered were some of the traditional children’s books that were being read by German parents to their children. My knowledge of German was good enough for me to enjoy the adventures of mischievous boys like Max und Moritz and the abundant cartoon-like pictures that accompanied the stories. But the book that intrigued me most was Der Struwwelpeter [Disheveled Peter], written and illustrated by the doctor and psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffmann for his 3-year-old son Carl Philipp, and published in Frankfurt in 1845 under the title “Der Struwwelpeter. Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder für Kinder von 3 bis 6 Jahren”[Disheveled Peter. Funny stories and humorous pictures for children between 3 and 6 years old] (Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann1986). The book contains nine stories about unruly children and their punishment for bad behavior, for example, the story of little Pauline who plays with matches, Conrad who sucks his thumb, Kaspar who will not eat his soup and Philipp who fidgets on his chair. The book was an immediate success both in Germany and abroad and has been translated in more than 40 different languages.1
At the time, I took an anthropological interest in those stories and took them for the cultural icons they had become in German culture. They were, in my view, representations of over-the-top punishments that today one could only laugh at. It was only when I came to the United States in the late sixties and encountered the indignation of my American friends at my reading such “authoritarian” and “violent” stories to my children – even for fun – that I realized there might be more to these narratives than I thought. Indeed, while corporal punishment was still alive and well in many rural schools in the southern parts of the United States, it had largely become politically incorrect in many urban schools and families in other parts of the country,2 and cases of “child abuse” were very much in the public consciousness (Hacking Reference Hacking1999b, chapter 5). But then, I thought, why were American children exposed to so many violent films on television? And why were many brutal Westerns not equally politically incorrect?
My children were by then five and three, and I was trying to get used to American child-rearing practices: do not let your children play outside without any clothes on; do not scold them, do not spank them; do not make them feel guilty; always give them a choice of what to wear, what to eat and what to do. But it didn’t seem to work. My children just wouldn’t do as they were told; in my view they were unruly and ill-behaved. A well-intentioned neighbor suggested I consult a child counselor. After listening to my story, the counselor looked at me and said with a calm voice: “‘Mrs Kramsch, you have a communication problem’.” I burst out laughing: “What do you mean? Should I speak louder? Slower? In a different language?” I came out of the counselor’s office thinking: “Ils sont fous, ces Américains!” [Those Americans are crazy!]3
It was clear that the counselor and I had quite different representations of what it meant to raise a child and I certainly did not understand the symbolic value of “good communication” for an American. What I perceived as a challenge to my authority as a mother, he seemed to take as a technical problem; where I saw it as my responsibility to transmit our family values to my children, he seemed to suggest that I adopt the clear, precise, informative communication style of a tape recorder. Why couldn’t he see that my problem as an immigrant to the U.S. was my loss of control over my own children? But what exactly had I lost and how did I lose it?
In this chapter, we continue our exploration of the power of symbolic representation to shape people’s perceptions of the social world. We examine in particular how children’s books represent and transmit social and moral values. This will lead us to consider the role of narrative representation in shaping children’s symbolic identities and, ultimately, their actions.
3.1 A Narrative of Power: Der Struwwelpeter (1845)
The picture on the cover page is startling. A strapping young lad standing on a pedestal, arms extended and legs apart, looks at the reader straight in the eye, his hair like a lion’s mane, his fingernails like animal claws. This is “Disheveled Peter,” who has refused to have his hair cut and his nails trimmed for almost a year. The expression on his face is serious but inscrutable: Is he proud? Dejected? Sad?
On the front of the pedestal, decorated on both sides with aesthetically pleasing pictures of scissors and combs, we can read the following inscription.
| Sieh einmal, hier steht er, | Look at him! Here he is! |
| Pfui! Der S t r u w w e l p e t e r! | Pfui, disheveled P e t e r! |
| An den Händen beiden | On both his hands |
| Ließ er sich nicht schneiden | He has not let anyone cut |
| Seine Nägel fast ein Jahr; | His nails for almost a year; |
| Kämmen ließ er nicht sein Haar. | He has not let anyone comb his hair. |
| Pfui! ruft da ein jeder. | No wonder everyone says: Pfui! |
| Garst’ger Struwwelpeter ! | Ghastly disheveled Peter! |
The book, written for 3–6-year-olds, is not meant to be deciphered by children who have not yet learned how to read. It is meant to be read aloud by parents or grandparents, who perform the text while pointing to the pictures and encouraging children to repeat the words after them: “Pfui! Ghastly disheveled Peter!” The text refers to two practices that children are known to dislike − haircut and nail trim, but that they have to undergo if they are to be respected by others in their community. By representing these practices and the opprobrium incurred for neglecting to perform them, the child is socialized into identifying with the person uttering these words and hopefully becomes that very person when he grows up. In Bourdieu’s terms, the child develops a habitus that will value a neat and clean appearance by having his hair and nails cut in the proper way. How does this story achieve this?
“Sieh einmal” [“Look!”]. Addressed directly by the parent in the second-person singular intimate form of address, the child is enjoined to turn his attention to his delinquent counterpart. “Hier steht er” [“Here he is”] is on the page, visible to the child’s scrutiny and stigmatizing judgment, together with the derogatory compound name: “Struwwelpeter”. This coinage affixes the epithet “strubbelig or struwwelig” [“disheveled”] to a boy called Peter and makes it into an intrinsic attribute: “Peter-the-disheveled.” A living boy called Peter thus serves as a negative image or “myth” (see Chapter 1) of what the child will become if he doesn’t do as he’s told. The child is invited to point to this boy while exclaiming: “Pfui!” – a kind of hurled speech addressed to this negative image (see Chapter 2). By adopting this discourse, the child embodies the values of his parents with proper manners and acceptable behaviors. The amount of exclamation points enhances the indignation that such bad behavior deserves. The symbolic power of the stigmatizing “Pfui!” is increased by the avowed complicity and social consensus of all well-behaved persons (“ein jeder” [“everyone”]) who cannot fail to cry out, like the child: “Pfui! Ghastly Struwwelpeter!”
Pierre Bourdieu has used the term “symbolic violence” as a synonym of symbolic power to underscore the fact that the power to construct social reality “does violence” to persons and practices by persuading them to change their behavior. In this sense, the story of Struwwelpeter, read aloud at bedtime by a loved parent, does violence to the child by mobilizing not only his or her cognitive understanding but his emotional self as well, that is, his embodied mind (Johnson Reference Johnson1987). The child recognizes his own desires (not wanting to have his hair cut), and in part he empathizes with Peter, in part he rejects him for fear of being called names and suffering the same fate as the boy. The representation of bad behavior is meant to help replace the natural desires of the child with the self-discipline of the cultured adult who has internalized the values of the surrounding middle-class culture.
Symbolic violence is nowhere more visible than in educational endeavors where to educate is to e-ducere, that is, to lead out of a state of dangerous desires to a state of cultured discipline.4 But in the case of Struwwelpeter and the other anti-heroes in Hoffmann’s book, is this violence physical or symbolic? Each story in the book represents a different incarnation of the disheveled Peter archetype and the punishment the character gets for his/her bad behavior. I want to examine in particular four other characters in the book − Pauline, Konrad, Kaspar and Philipp, and how their story reinforces the message we get from the Struwwelpeter case. I first summarize each of the four stories; I then explore in each case the nature of the offense, the nature of the punishment and the workings of symbolic power.
The Very Sad Story with the Matchbox
Aesthetically displayed across two pages, we have a story in rhyming verse that starts with “Paulinchen war allein zu Haus’/die Eltern waren beide aus” [Little Pauline was alone at home/ both parents had gone out] and that serves as a commentary to four graphically illustrated scenes:
1) Pauline, dragging her doll, spots a box of matches on the dresser and decides to strike one as she has seen her mother do, while in the same frame Minz and Maunz the cats raise their paws in warning: “Father has forbidden this! / Miau! Mio! Miau! Mio! / Don’t touch! Or else you will go up in flames!.”
2) Pauline doesn’t listen to the cats / “the match burns with a lovely light / exactly the way you can see it in the picture.” The cats again raise their paws in warning: “Mother has forbidden this!”
3) “But alas! Her dress catches fire, her apron burns, you can see the flames / her hand is burning, her hair is burning / Indeed, the whole child is burning!” The picture shows Pauline engulfed in flames, arms outstretched, her mouth opened to a scream. The cats continue to wail and scream for help.
4) The last picture shows the two little kitties sitting on both sides of a neat little pile of ashes, their tears running in two dainty rivulets around two little red shoes. The text reads: “Everything is totally burned / The poor child, skin and hair / Only a little heap of ashes remains / And two shoes, so dainty and fine… Where, oh where are the poor parents?”
Unlike Struwwelpeter of whom we are told directly the nature of his delinquency but not the punishment he received, Pauline’s story is a vivid narrative of what happens to children who play with matches. But what lesson is the child supposed to take away from that story? At three years of age, most children are not able to comprehend what it means to die, let alone to be burned alive. Moreover the attractive images with their flowery framings, the memorable rhymes, the repetitions and refrains, the predictable outcome, the jolly metaphors and the aesthetic staging of Pauline’s remains transform a gruesome fate into an entertaining story. So where is the punishment?
The Story of the Thumbsucker
This story too is told over two pages with four illustrations corresponding to the four episodes of the story. Like Pauline, Konrad finds himself alone one day, his mother having gone out for errands. Despite her warnings not to suck his thumb or else the tailor will cut it off, Konrad sticks his thumb in his mouth as soon as she is gone. Suddenly the tailor jumps into the room and rushes towards the thumb-sucking boy. The third picture features an outsized tailor with an outsized pair ofscissors slicing Konrad’s thumbs as if they were paper; we see drops of blood falling into a puddle on the floor. “Alas! Now it’s klipp and klapp / the great big scissors cut Konrad’s thumbs / the great big sharp scissors!! Hey! You should hear Konrad screaming.” In the last picture a dejected Konrad stands facing the reader, arms outstretched, displaying two hands with missing thumbs. The text reads: “When the mother returns home / Konrad is in a pretty sad state / There he stands, without his thumbs / Both of them are gone.”
As in Pauline’s story, the punishment for disobeying parental injunctions is severe: physical death in the first case, disfiguration in the second. And yet, apart from the drops of blood and Konrad’s screams, the boy is not represented as being in physical pain. And when his mother comes back home, he is said to be “in a pretty sad state,” but not to be hurting very badly. We didn’t see Pauline’s physical suffering while burning to death and so it is here – we are invited to look at Konrad, not to feel his pain. So here again: what kind of punishment is this?
The Story of Soupy Kaspar
This story is told in four illustrated episodes, the last one of which is smaller than the other three for reasons that will become clear. Kaspar, a healthy, fat boy with red and healthy cheeks, used to eat his soup well when it came to the table. But one day he decided he didn’t want to eat his soup. He stomped the floor screaming: “I won’t eat my soup! No! I won’t eat any soup!/ No, I don’t want any soup!” The next day, he was already much thinner and yet when the soup arrived on the table he went into the same tantrum again: “I won’t eat my soup! No!…” on the third day, “alack and alas! Look how thin and weak Kaspar has become!” and yet the same happened again: “I won’t eat my soup! No! / I won’t eat any soup! No! I don’t want any soup!” “On the fourth day at last, Kaspar was as thin as a thread / He weighed at most a half a pound/ And on the fifth day he was dead.” The first to the third pictures show an ever-thinner Kaspar; the last picture features only a soup tureen with “soup” written on it and placed on a tomb with a cross that says “Kaspar.”
The story of Kaspar, who over four full days refuses to eat his soup and on the fifth day dies of hunger, is equally intriguing. From the cross in the cemetery with his name on it to the soup tureen placed prominently on his tomb, we know exactly what the misdemeanor was, but we are uncertain about the legitimacy of the punishment, which seems to be out of proportion with the crime. Moreover Kaspar, like Pauline and Konrad, doesn’t seem to suffer physically even though his body changes shape as he becomes thinner and thinner. The Struwwelpeter stories have horrified present-day educators as creepy and bizarre (e.g., Radeska Reference Radeska2018), and that story seems to be one of the more bizarre, if it is meant to encourage children to eat their food.
The Story of Fidgety Phil
With the story of Fidgety Phil, the intriguing nature of these stories becomes even more apparent. Philipp, a fidgety 4- or 5-year-old, is trained, like all children in well-to-do middle-class families at the time, to sit still at table and develop well-brought up table manners. In three graphic tableaux, we see that Philipp does not behave as expected. The first tableau sets the scene: At a time when the family was expected to dress up for dinner, we see a formally dressed mother, father and son sitting at a round dinner table, covered with a white tablecloth, having their evening meal. All three have white napkins; the parents have their napkins on their laps, Phillip’s is tied around his neck. On the table are a loaf of bread, a tureen of soup, a bottle of red wine, plates, silver, two glasses half-filled with wine. The Mother, wearing a fancy dress and a flowery hat on her head holds up a lorgnon and observes what is going on, deferring to her husband to reprimand the boy. On the left of the picture, the Father, in topcoat, high collar and silk cravat, is seen in profile holding a knife upright in his right hand. He appears to address the boy who faces him on the right of the picture, but in fact he addresses the reader:
The father’s opening statement, hurled at the misbehaving “pivot” in the third person, seems to refer to Philipp’s past misbehaviors, but as we can see on the picture, that statement must be understood as sarcastic or even offensive because it is obvious that Philipp is not sitting still at table. Indeed, he is shown in that first tableau as gripping the table and pushing his chair backwards and forwards, while the father reprimands him: “Philipp, I am most displeased!” This can only end badly. In the second tableau, we can see the results.
Philipp hangs on to the tablecloth, falls backwards, dragging with him plates, bottle, bread and soup bowl, which crash to the floor. Philipp “screams but to no avail.” Surprisingly for a modern reader, the mother still doesn’t say anything, and this tableau concludes only with: “Vater ist in grösster Not” [“Father is in dire need”]. Finally, the third tableau shows the full consequences of Philipp’s misbehavior. The Mother stands upright, still holding her lorgnon to survey the disaster; the father also stands, with arms raised in the air as he stomps the floor in anger. Philipp has disappeared under the tablecloth, buried under broken plates, scattered forks and knives, spilled soup and shattered wine bottle and soup bowl. The last lines of the story are the most surprising to the modern reader:
We understand the child’s bad behavior, but its effects are unclear. It seems that the parents are the ones being punished, as they no longer have anything to eat. Philipp has not suffered physically, he has only fallen under the table cloth. How are we to understand all this?
3.2 What Struwwelpeter is Really About
The stories in Struwwelpeter seem to be about physical violence and its potential to serve as a deterrent to children’s bad behaviors. Indeed, they have been called “morbid” and “scary” (Radeska Reference Radeska2018). It is difficult today to grasp the educational value of such outrageous forms of corporal punishment; they seem to elicit less fear than uneasy laughter − the same kind of laughter that seized Foucault upon reading Borges’ fictitious Chinese encyclopedia (Foucault Reference Foucault1970:xv). Surely our children can’t believe that! In our disbelief we tend to fall back on stereotypes: “antiquated child-rearing,” “child abuse,” or even “typically German authoritarian practices.”
If, however, we read these stories through a symbolic lens, their meaning becomes clearer and so do the forms of punishment they represent. In the same way as La Fontaine’s fable of the “Wolf and the lamb” was not about a wolf eating up a lamb, but about the exercise of symbolic power to legitimize political power (Chapter 2), so do the stories in Struwwelpeter represent the symbolic violence exercised by a society’s culture to inculcate in children its social and moral values. What these bad boys and girls lose through their transgression is not so much their physical lives than the perception by others of their symbolic worth, their social presence as respectable, legitimate members of a social group. A social symbolic analysis can illuminate the deeper meaning of these stories.
By playing with matches, Pauline is avowedly imitating what she has seen her mother do several times, but she fails to heed the warnings of her two cats who act here as surrogate parents and who, like a Greek chorus, urge her explicitly not to do so or else she will “go up in flames.” What happens to Pauline, however, is not just that she dies of physical death but that she is no longer visible as a social being and that her parents are nowhere to be seen (“Where oh where are the poor parents?”). The little pile of ashes represents her ultimate and definitive disappearance, that is, exclusion from the social community. In fact, Pauline’s name doesn’t even figure in the title of the story that seems to focus more on the matchbox than on the girl.
Konrad, who disobeys his mother’s injunctions, gets his thumbs cut off, but in the last picture the illustrator represents him standing there, like Struwwelpeter, his hands spread out for all to see, castrated and shamed. While he is represented in the very same posture as in the first picture, the two situations are radically different. In the first, he is recognized by name as a member of the family and addressed as such (“‘Konrad!’ spoke the Mother”); in the last, he is displayed alone to face the reader who becomes his judge. His mother is not there to comfort him. The point here is not to commiserate about the fate of the child, but to pillory his abnormality, brought about by his disobedience. Konrad’s punishment is to be publicly seen as abnormal and forced to carry this stigma for the rest of his life. In fact, even his name becomes changed in the title to the derogatory name “the Thumbsucker.”
If Pauline was punished through absence and Konrad through shame, Kaspar gets punished through the progressive loss of his identity as a full member of his family. His rapid and drastic reduction in size illustrates his growing irrelevance. While Pauline’s name will be forgotten, Kaspar’s name will be remembered by the inscription on the cross but only in conjunction with the soup bowl that is prominently placed on the tomb and will be forever associated with it. Indeed, the title of the story refers to Suppenkaspar [“Soupy Kaspar”], yet another derogatory nickname meant to tarnish his social identity, as it did to Daumenlutscher Konrad [“Thumbsucker Konrad”].
Philipp’s story picks up on the themes of punishment through exclusion, shame and loss of social identity. His punishment, which seems at first sight harmless enough, reveals upon closer inspection a more serious form of sanction. Philipp has not only dragged down with him the tablecloth with all the food, he has in fact “starved” his parents. Physically considered, such a statement is laughable, as one could say that the parents can always pick up the pieces or replace the spilled food. But the symbolic reality is anything but funny. By depriving his caregivers (“who now have nothing to eat any more”) of the means of exercising their homemakers’ role, Philipp has shattered the foundations of the family that provides for his very existence. His disappearance under the tablecloth echoes that of Pauline, Konrad and Kaspar who are also rendered socially invisible or differently visible. The name he is given in the title, der Zappel-Philipp [“Fidgety Phil”], is emblematic of this stigmatization.
The punishment in these four stories is therefore only superficially a physical one. What we see at work here is a symbolic power that strives to create in the minds of children a representation of the social reality they will grow up into. This reality is inculcated through do’s and don’ts that children have to internalize if they want to become legitimate members of a cultural community and representatives of this community’s values. Unruly children reflect badly not only on themselves as worthy group members, but also on their parents. In small tightknit communities of neighborhoods in small German towns around 1840, parents were held responsible for bringing up well-behaved offspring that would enhance the symbolic capital of their family. A boy who would not behave at the dinner table would shame his family in front of friends and neighbors (“What will the neighbors think?”). A girl who would do something forbidden would incriminate her mother (“What will people think of the way I brought you up?” and “How could you do this to me?”). The very reputation of the family would be at stake with their children’s misdemeanors and that meant that they might not be able to rely on the trust and support of their neighbors in times of need. Read in this light, the stories in Struwwelpeter don’t sound as outlandish as they seem. Shame and stigmatization are still practiced nowadays, even when they are no longer coupled with physical punishment (Riezler Reference Riezler1943).
The social values of docility, obedience, respect of norms and social conventions promoted by the Struwwelpeter stories correspond to a conservative period in German history, die Biedermeierzeit, ushered in by Metternich after the Vienna Congress of 1815 that put an end to the Napoleonic wars and to the French influence in Europe. The post-Napoleonic Restoration was a time when Germans discovered their rich folkloric heritage of folktales, collected by the Brothers Grimm across the German countryside, their folksongs and local dialects, at a time when the educated middle class was gaining in power. Family customs and traditions, such as Christmas trees and Christmas carols, were valued and promoted, and children’s education was part of a Protestant ethics of social stability and continuity.5 This would explain the main concern in Heinrich Hoffmann’s stories with inculcating in children a sense of community and warning them about the consequences of violating the norms of that community.6
Different times call for different stories. Let us examine now two children’s books that have been equally influential in shaping generations of children into an understanding of language as symbolic power, this time in the United States.
3.3 From The Little Engine That Could (1930) to The Cat in the Hat (1957)
Two classical American children’s books are equally reflective of the ideology of the period in which they were written: The little engine that could by Watty Piper, published in Reference Piper1930, and The cat in the hat by Dr Seuss published in Reference Seuss1957.
The Little engine that could opens on a familiar picture around Christmas time in the United States. A long freight train is making its way up the mountain, its cars filled with toys and dolls as Christmas gifts for children who live on the other side of the mountain, when all of a sudden its engine breaks down. The toy clown jumps off the train and flags down a shiny yellow passenger engine that comes along. The yellow engine says it has much more important business than helping carry toys over the mountain and refuses. He then asks a black freight engine that passes by, but that engine too has more important things to do. A big rusty engine comes along but says he is too old. In the end, a little blue switcher engine agrees to help. “I think I can” he says and hitches himself to the task. As he puffs up the mountain, he repeats “I think I can I think I can” and, as he triumphantly rolls down on the other side, he exclaims: “I thought I could I thought I could” and saves the day.
It is easy to see how this story captured the imagination of generations of American children raised on the notion that with determination and hard work “you can get it if you really want it,” and that the future belongs to the young entrepreneurial spirits who live up to the challenges that come their way. The refrain “I think I can” brings together the quintessential American faith in youthful individualism, ingenuity and resourcefulness, while remaining faithful to the older values of compassion and solidarity in times of need as well as to the Christian tradition of gift-giving at Christmas time. The book reflects the optimistic spirit of the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt following the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The symbolic power of this story is evidenced by its enduring success in the United States and more recently in the strong resonance of American voters to Barack Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes, we can.”
The Cat in the Hat is one of the first of the many children’s books published by Theodore Seuss Geisel, under the pen name of Dr Seuss, in quite a different period in U.S. history. The late fifties and sixties were marked by a reaction against any form of authority. Its radical political agenda fought for civil rights, women’s rights, minority rights, reproductive rights and the right to civil disobedience and conscientious objection to the military draft. The spirit of anti-authoritarianism permeates Dr Seuss’s The cat in the hat.
Peter and Sally, two well-behaved 6- and 4-year-olds, are sitting at home and watching the snow fall outside while their parents are away. The story is narrated in the first person by Peter, the older of the two children.
As they are getting increasingly bored, in marches the cat with a big red and white hat. The cat both horrifies and seduces them by doing all the things their parents would disapprove of, for example: eating cake in the bathtub while the water is running, washing the walls with Mother’s best dress, messing up the kitchen. What will their parents say when they return? After a day of mischief, the cat says not to worry and proceeds to clean the house and put everything back in its proper place for when the Mother comes home. Peter and Sally can only marvel. The cat in the hat has shown them the power of mischievous creativity and imagination while ultimately respecting the values of cleanliness and orderliness of the middle-class world they live in.
Thus ends The cat in the hat. Turning to the readers and bringing them into the action is a subtle way of exercising the symbolic power of suggestion in the education of children in the late fifties/early sixties. It engages the children in contemplating various modes of action and in making moral choices. The cat in the hat offers a glimpse into a parallel world of unconventional and even illicit behaviors and activities in the margins of established norms – a child-centered world of fantasy and “fun” from which adults might be excluded. Unlike some Anti-Struwwelpeter variants that were published in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Germany and that featured children turning the tables on adults and taking their revenge against persons in authority (see note 1), The Cat in the Hat does not encourage children to subvert the norms of social discipline in the name of anti-authoritarian education, but instead it bypasses norms by proposing that children can find a space of their own in the realm of the imagination and in playing with language and crazy pictures.
This theme has been used since then to promote intercultural tolerance and understanding (e.g., Seuss Reference Seuss1953; Berenstain and Berenstain Reference Berenstain and Berenstain1994) and has been picked up again in recent years in books that reflect the multiethnic urban environments in which many American children live today. For example, in the award winning Last stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña (Reference De la Peña2015), a little boy and his grandma enjoy the pleasures of a bus ride in multicultural downtown San Francisco. Complaints by the child about the rain and the dirt in the streets are met by the grandmother with humor and creativity rather than with rebuffs.
Through all these books, children are socialized into recognizing the nature and function of symbolic power through engaging with its verbal and visual representation. They learn how to find their place in a social order that they will uphold, even as they sometimes seek to subvert it. And the stories they are told stake out the range of their own power in acting upon their environment and affecting the course of events.
3.4 Different Tribes, Different Scribes
We saw in the Introduction that symbolic power is the power of making people see and believe a certain view of the social world, by mobilizing their hearts and minds, and appealing to their belief in the legitimacy of words and those who utter them. The children’s narratives in this chapter have potentially that power. They seek to obtain through entertaining stories the child’s observance of social norms that would have been obtained in earlier days through force and corporal punishment. In the same manner as the House of young prisoners in Paris around 1837 reeducated young offenders through written regulations that modelled the orderly conduct of a normal citizen’s daily life, the Struwwelpeter stories educated young children in Germany around 1840 through entertaining negative models of behavior with which they could identify because they represented the reverse of a world they recognized as legitimate. Like the French regulations that represented an improvement over the more brutal forms of physical punishment depicted by Foucault in the execution of Damiens 80 years earlier (see Chapter 2), being read Struwwelpeter on the lap of a grandmother represented a more humane and literate form of child-rearing than in earlier historical periods where children would have been beaten into obedience. The disciplining processes represented in Struwwelpeter however had the desired effect only if their intended addressees were invested in them cognitively and emotionally, if they recognized themselves in them and accepted the worldview they represented as legitimate. With changing social conditions, the same children’s stories were likely to have a different effect.
The horrified reaction of many parents in the sixties to the Struwwelpeter stories is evidence of the changed socio-cultural conditions and values of urban communities at the time. By the 1960s’ in Germany, these stories were interpreted as an unacceptable authoritarian form of education; they elicited disgust or laughter, not fear. Today, they are read as cultural exotica. Similarly, in the United States, the stories of the 1930’s and 1960’s no longer transmit the values they illustrated at the time they were published. The Little Engine that Could has become a national myth and the anti-authoritarian The Cat in the Hat remains popular as a cultural icon of the educated middle class but has been mostly replaced by pixel videos and cartoon-like fantasies in the lives of children today. With regard to the effectiveness of these stories as instruments of socialization, not all teenagers today would find heavy-handed shaming preferable to a quick and honest corporal punishment for misdemeanors.7
We find a similar shift in the value of social and cultural diversity in children’s books since the fifties. While intercultural books like The Sneetches by Dr Seuss (Reference Seuss1953) and The Berenstain Bears’ New Neighbors by Stan and Jan Berenstain (Reference Berenstain and Berenstain1994) seek to promote tolerance to cultural diversity because “deep down we are all the same,” recent multicultural books like Last Stop on Market Street by de la Peña (Reference De la Peña2015) strive to celebrate diversity for its own sake and for the richness of experience it offers.
3.5 From Moral Prescriptivism to Ethical Perspectivism
The diversity of children’s books already discussed is a good opportunity to reflect on the moral worlds that children are being raised in through such books, and on the ethical responsibility of parents and educators. The moral values that were transmitted through Struwwelpeter in nineteenth-century Germany and through the various American children’s books in the twentieth century were meant to develop in young children a habitus that would conform to the morality of the time and to the child’s social class, and to endow children with the symbolic capital that would make them and their families legitimate and respected members of their communities. These values are, however, historically contingent and they vary from culture to culture. Should parents and other educators transmit unquestioningly the normative values of the institutions of which they are members: the Family, the School, the Church? To what extent can they deviate from the dominant discourse of their society and challenge the authority of custom and convention?
Questions of morality are generally posed in stark binary terms: either you obey the rule or you get punished; either you solve the problem or you are part of the problem; either you play the game or you are a social outcast. Morality in our day has often turned into political correctness or into moral relativism and expediency (anything goes as long as it “works”). Clear-cut rules of behavior, like clear-cut rules of grammar and stereotypical cultural conventions are convenient, but they cannot guide us any more in the complex encounters that now take place in multilingual, multicultural families, workplaces and classrooms (Kramsch Reference Kramsch2014). We realize in hindsight that the symbolic power of any institution is precisely to remain invisible, and to make people believe in its monolithic nature, its permanence and arbitrariness – to persuade people that it speaks with one voice; that it is consistent and predictable; and that it is natural, not historically constructed.
By contrast, a post-structural ethics of symbolic power is a dialogic process that takes paradoxes in stride and makes people aware that the sources of symbolic power are not singular but multiple, not unitary but diverse, not permanent but changing and conflictual. Nowadays children can grow up in a family with strict moral values, move to another city and attend a school with loose entrepreneurial values and end up in a workplace whose co-workers hold a diversity of ethical values that require tolerance and an historical and multidimensional perspective. How should language educators best prepare them for such a life trajectory?
Symbolic power theory calls for a theory of ethics that takes into account the diverse, historical and subjective nature of norms and the need to understand the world from the perspective of others – ethical perspectivism rather than moral prescriptivism. As we shall discuss in Chapter 9, this does not mean that all perspectives are equally valid for a particular time, place and historical reality. While members of institutions have to abide by the norms of the institution that tend to have the effect of uniting its members under one code of conduct, they also have to be aware of the historicity of those norms and to contribute to possible changes within their institution. For this, they have to become aware of the heterogenous nature of institutional structures and their inherently paradoxical or conflictual nature. For example, the Struwwelpeter stories are quite clear about children’s misbehaviors and are meant to promote compliance with social norms, but their attractive pictures and flowery illustrations, together with the rhymes and memorable lines, also encourage a spirit of mischief and poetic creativity that fires up the imagination and glorifies subversive behavior. Similarly, a strict educational system can at once spawn conformity and resistance – a paradox that might prompt students later on to turn against the system when the opportunity arises.8
But if one could argue that it is parents’ responsibility to inculcate in their children the moral values that they hold dear, what kind of moral values is it the responsibility of the language teacher to transmit? The question has become more acute in recent years with the increasingly multicultural composition of communities and classrooms. Several suggestions have been made. Many Anglo-American educators tend to favor social and political responsibility (Byram Reference Byram2008; Macedo Reference Macedo2019; Chun Reference Chunforthcoming). Their motto would be: Open up the classroom; engage students in service learning; encourage them to find examples of the relevance of the subject matter to real life; engage them in political action. Many French language educators, by contrast, tend to advocate an epistemological or scientific responsibility rather than social engagement, and if engagement, then in the form of social contestation or critique rather than political activism (see discussion in Beacco Reference Beacco2013; Coste Reference Coste and Beacco2013).9 Their motto would be: Sharpen your students’ social and historical consciousness; reflect with them on the power of the written word; spark their interest in language and their critical appreciation of texts.
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who was steeped in both French and American educational traditions, promoted an ethics of personal responsibility rather than morals of conviction based on institutional rules (see Kerlan and Simard Reference Kerlan and Simard2012). His philosophy echoes in that respect the dialogic ethics of Mikhail Bakhtin and of Judith Butler that will be discussed in Chapter 9. In his essay “The task of the political educator” (Reference Ricoeur1991), Ricoeur argues that the educator has to mediate between the three different levels that we call “culture”: the techno-economic level – technical efficiency, economic profitability of learning languages; the political-ideological level of entrepreneurial neoliberalism, that is, human capital development and multilingualism as symbolic capital; and the ethical level of intercultural mediation. He clearly favored this last form of ethical responsibility. “Ricoeur’s reflection on the tasks of the political educator can remind language teachers how important it is not to let themselves become technocrats of the classroom, or promoters of an ideology of language commodification or professional expertise, but to draw instead on their personal experience as multilingual multicultural mediators.” (Kramsch Reference Kramsch2015:100)
3.6 The Political Power of Narrative
As we leave the politics of representation for the politics of action in the next chapter, narrative provides a bridge between representation and action through the way it constructs the space of the possible, and the way it serves to define the identity of the social group with which the adult will be identified.
The narrative genre is the quintessential tool of symbolic power. On the one hand, as Jerome Bruner stated eloquently in his canonical article “The narrative construction of reality,” “narrative is a form not only of representing but of constituting reality” (Bruner Reference Bruner, Mateas and Sengers2002:5). It does so in various ways:
– It presents us with a mental model of the patterned way events occur over time (the absence of parents leads children to mischief; one mischief leads to another). This patterning makes for outcomes that seem reasonable and thus legitimate.
– Its protagonists are endowed with intentions and reasons for acting the way they do, even if they are cats or steam engines. This engages the listener’s emotions, memories, fantasies.
– It encourages interpretation of actors’ motives and actions.
– Because of its breach component (e.g., transgression, disobedience, crisis), which makes the story worth telling, it has a problem-solving quality to it that creates suspense and captures the listener’s attention.
– Because a breach presupposes a norm, a narrative is necessarily normative, it has a moral dimension.
– Single narratives “accrue” (p.18), that is, they contribute to and eventually create larger cultural narratives or traditions, for example Struwwelpeter in the 1850’s fed into a German narrative of law and order. The Little Engine that Could in the 1930’s accrued into an American narrative of self-reliance and can-do spirit.
On the other hand, because narrative both “formulates and objectifies a constituted reality” (Feldman Reference Feldman, Bruner and Haste1987:135), it can make people “(mis)recognize” its constructed nature. Feldman writes: “Through its power to encode and clarify one stipulated version rather than another, [language] has the power to entrench one version rather than another. In addition, since language embodies conventional cultural categories, it can impose culturally shared (and shareable) meanings on its constructions” (p.135). The very features that enable the storyteller to draw people into the story can make people hostage to that story’s one perspective on events and its way of categorizing them. As Bruner has argued, the power of one mode of thought (the narrative or well-wrought story) needs to be accompanied by the power of the other (the paradigmatic or well-formed logical argument) (Bruner Reference Bruner1986:12).
This is particularly necessary given the accrual power of narrative into larger national narratives that give symbolic unity to a national community. We shall return in Chapter 8 to the search for unifying national stories at a time when globalization and worldwide migrations have complexified traditional understandings of history and are confronting nation-states with the need to invent a new shareable common narrative (Feldman Reference Feldman, Brockmeier and Carbaugh2001; Freadman Reference Freadman2014). As Freadman noted:
If we understand by culture the way intergenerational memories pervade present conversations, if we gloss “worldview” as resulting from narratives, and identity as the answer to the question “What story or stories am I a part of?”, then traditions of representation must be brought into clear focus.
While the Struwwelpeter mode of representation of German cultural values has been superseded today by a European narrative of “Unity in diversity,” in many countries today national narratives are in search of self (Brooks Reference Brooks2017a, Reference Brooks2018; Delbanco Reference Delbanco2018). In the United States, George Packer identified four rival American narratives:
– the libertarian narrative that free individuals are responsible for their own fate (see The Little Engine that Could) “The libertarian idea in its current shape regards Americans as consumers, entrepreneurs, workers, taxpayers – indeed everything except citizens” (Brooks Reference Brooks2017a).
– the Silicon Valley narrative of a globalized America, “an exhilarating ideology of flattening hierarchies, disrupting systems, discarding old elites and empowering individuals” (Brooks Reference Brooks2017a) (see The cat in the hat).
– the multicultural America narrative, that sees Americans as members of different racial, ethnic, gendered groups seeking to be included in the national identity (see Last Stop on Market Street)
– the Trump’s America First Narrative that strives to go back to national identity free of “the contamination of others, foreigners, immigrants, Muslims” and standing up to the globalized elite.10
Some cultural critics feel that none of these narratives provides an adequate basis for the United States of the twenty-first century. Brooks proposes two other narratives that will be competing for attention in the years to come: a “mercantilist” model of the United States in economic competition with rival powers, and a “talented community” model of the United States leading the world into an open and harmonious information age. These two models are indeed vying for symbolic power right now with the narratives of other nations, whether it is the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” or the European “Unity in Diversity.” But mostly he is calling for a return to common human myths “which offer templates of moral progress” and can fill the moral and spiritual void that he feels has invaded our lives today. Reflecting on the amounts of trauma experienced today around the world, he writes: “Trauma is a moral and spiritual issue as much as a psychological or chemical one. Wherever there is trauma, there has been betrayal, an abuse of authority, a moral injury” (Brooks Reference Brooks2018), in other words, a symbolic injury, not just a physical one. We return to these ethical aspects of symbolic power in the Conclusion.
Suggestions for Further Reading
The field of narrative inquiry is a tremendously rich field of research into the symbolic world that constitutes human culture and the power of language to construct social reality. Bruner (Reference Bruner1990) explores what he calls “narrative thinking” and the way it shapes our conception of ourselves and of the social world in which we live. For the value of narrative in language education, canonical readings include Bruner (Reference Bruner1986, Reference Bruner1990, Reference Bruner, Brockmeier and Carbaugh2001), Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur and Mitchell1980), Mishler (Reference Mishler, de Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg2006) and White (Reference White and Mitchell1980). The edited volume by Brockmeier and Carbaugh (Reference Brockmeier and Carbaugh2001) offers a particularly illuminating use of narrative in the construction of identity and culture. Bruno Bettelheim (Reference Bettelheim1975) is a classic study of the beneficial use of fairytales in children’s education.
