Victorian children’s literature

Ruth Y. Jenkins

VI CTO R I A N
C H I L DR EN’S
L I TERATU R E
Experiencing Abjection, Empathy,
and the Power of Love


Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Series Editors
Kerry Mallan
Faculty of Education
Children and Youth Research Centre
Kelvin Grove, Queensland, Australia
Clare Bradford
School of Communication and Creative Art
Deakin University
Burwood, Victoria, Australia


Aim of the series
This timely new series brings innovative perspectives to research on children’s literature. It offers accessible but sophisticated accounts of contemporary critical approaches and applies them to the study of a diverse range
of children’s texts – iterature, film and multimedia. Critical Approaches
to Children’s Literature includes monographs from both internationally
recognised and emerging scholars. It demonstrates how new voices, new
combinations of theories, and new shifts in the scholarship of literary and
cultural studies illuminate the study of children’s texts.

More information about this series at

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Ruth Y. Jenkins

Victorian Children’s
Literature
Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power
of Love


Ruth Y. Jenkins
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, California, USA

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
ISBN 978-3-319-32761-7
ISBN 978-3-319-32762-4
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32762-4

(eBook)

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for
Katws and Pys Cyw



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project originated, appropriately enough, from reading to my older
daughter, Katie. Her passion for horses evolved into a deep love of listening to our reading Sewell’s Black Beauty to her, night after night as she
imagined his story and later played it out with her toy horses. Katie even
became Beauty one Halloween. For her, Sewell’s book offered endless
possibilities of imagination. For me, the narrative revealed the degree to
which the desires and anxieties that saturated the literature written for
adults during the Victorian era were present in these groundbreaking
stories collected as literature for children. This realization, together with
the focalizing lens offered through Julia Kristeva’s theories of abjection,
formed the seed for this book, which has grown beyond the joy of reading
to her to include the pleasure of recognizing the extent to which Victorian

literature for children remains a vital source of imaginative experience for
adolescents today.
I want to thank Brigitte Shull and Critical Approaches to Children’s
Literature series editors Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford at Palgrave for
their guidance and thoughtful readings and responses to the project. I also
want to acknowledge the original publication of a version of Chap. 2 as
“Imagining the Abject in Kingsley, MacDonald, and Carroll: Disrupting
Dominant Values and Cultural Identity in Children’s Literature” © 2011
by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in
The Lion and the Unicorn 35 (2011). I also want to acknowledge that
a version of Chap. 6 was published as “Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The
Secret Garden: Engendering Abjection’s Sublime” © (2011) by the Johns
Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Children’s Literature
vii


viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Association Quarterly 36:4 (2011). Martha Westwater’s constructive reading of Kristeva theories in Giant Despair meets Hopeful proved especially
helpful in realizing a framework for that hopeful dimension to Kristeva’s
theory, an aspect, though fundamental, that is often overlooked from discussions of her concepts. I also want to recognize the students from my
senior seminars on Victorian Children’s Literature for their frank observations and challenging questions about these narratives.
I especially want to thank my husband, John Moses, for his tireless patience in listening to my ideas evolve and willingness to read and
respond to drafts with honest questions and astute observations. I want
to thank my daughter Emily, whose critique of the original title for this
project proved extremely helpful. Finally, I want to acknowledge Emily’s
own capacity for imagination and empathy, reminding me daily of the
power of love.

CONTENTS

1

2

Introduction: Emerging Identities and 
the Practice of Possibility

1

Imagining the Abject in Kingsley, MacDonald, and 
Carroll: Disrupting Dominant Values and Cultural
Identity in Children’s Literature

21

Gender, Abjection, and Coming of Age: Games, Dolls,
and Stories

45

4

Constructing the Self: Connection and Separation

65

5

Giving Voice to Abjection: Experience and Empathy

97

6

Engendering Abjection’s Sublime: Frances
Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden

3

119

ix


x

7

CONTENTS

Embodying Herethics: Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses

145

Conclusion—Abjection’s Sublime: Imagining Love

173

Bibliography

177

Index

185


ABBREVIATIONS

AWL
BB
CI
LP
SG
PC
PG
R
SL
STS
TI
WB

Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland
Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty
Ballantyne, R.M. The Coral Island
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden
MacDonald, George. The Princess and Curdie
MacDonald, George. The Princess and the Goblin
Tucker, Charlotte. Rambles of a Rat
Rossetti, Christina. Speaking Likenesses
Nesbit, E. The Story of the Treasure Seekers
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island
Kingsley, Charles. The Water-Babies

xi


CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Emerging Identities
and the Practice of Possibility

“Everything’s a story. You are a story—I am a story. Miss Minchin is a
story,” Sara Crew explains to her younger companion Ermengarde in
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1911).1 The novel pivots on
this assertion, made nearly at the narrative’s center. Initially, Sara thrives
through her ability to play at possibilities, but after her redefinition as
orphaned and destitute, she survives through her capacity to construct
alternative narratives in which to reconceive her harsh experiences. With
her imaginative renderings, Sara eventually re-creates her world, embraces
an elevated, if hybrid, cultural position, and realigns worth and value as it
affects her. As a direct result of her ability to transform her life as abject
into narratives of possibility, Sara counters oppressive social scripts by constructing competing orders that acknowledge and value her rather than
deny or devalue her.
Sara Crew, however, is not the first child protagonist of British children’s literature to affirm the power of story to construct reality. Before

Sara, Victorian fictional characters offered readers models of creative alternatives in the context of their culture’s normative scripts. The chimney
sweep Tom in The Water-Babies (1863) or Ralph Rover from The Coral
Island (1858), Princess Irene and Curdie from MacDonald’s Princess
adventures (1872, 1882) or Sara Crewe in A Little Princess (1905), Jim
Hawkins in Treasure Island (1883) or Oswald Bastable in The Story of
the Treasure Seekers (1889), or Beauty in Sewell’s Black Beauty (1878) or

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
R.Y. Jenkins, Victorian Children’s Literature, Critical Approaches to
Children’s Literature, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32762-4_1

1


2

R.Y. JENKINS

Ratto in Ramblings of a Rat (1857), Flora, Edith, and Maggie in Speaking
Likenesses (1875), and even Alice in Carroll’s Wonderland (1865), all
reveal competing desires from dominant cultural discourse in the narratives of their adventures. Whether affirming, negotiating, or even rejecting
offered narratives of experience, these fictional children and creatures
enable their readers the imaginative opportunity to experience a variety
of potential scripts, free from prohibition even when challenging those
constructs endorsed by culture.
Literature targeted toward the readers we now conceptualize as adolescents is an especially apt discourse with which to consider these dynamics.
As readers transitioning between children and adults themselves, questions
of individual identity and social development frequently frame the story
as well as the plot of these narratives. Children’s literature written during
the Victorian era in Britain, with the period’s own transforming identities

affected by social, economic, religious, or national energies, offers rich
opportunities in which to analyze this relationship between identity and
transformation, individual desire, and cultural scripts for acceptable patterns of behavior.
Although literature has long enabled the translation of desire into culturally readable forms, often sublimating culturally abject energy into discourse, Victorian children’s literature provides an especially useful place
in which to consider the intersection of language and culture, desire and
prohibition, the exalted, and the abject in constructing identity. Reading
Victorian children’s literature in the context of Julia Kristeva’s theory of
abjection reveals the presence of the cultural anxieties and social tensions
that inform normative values and the dominant social order. Understood
from this perspective, these texts also offer access to multiple scripts of
possibility and provide opportunities for potential constructs of self that
are unique from or in confrontation with those endorsed by culture.
Given imaginative options for scripts of identity, young readers benefit
from increased comfort in and familiarity with multivalent subjectivity,
deconstructed absolutes, and creative possibility that are articulated in this
discourse written for Victorian children.
At the heart of this study is this question: What is the relationship
between Victorian children’s literature, its readers, and their psychic development? The Victorian convergence of advancing technologies, greater
leisure time for emerging middle classes, and increasing literacy rates2
propelled narratives written for children into a recognized literary genre
and a burgeoning industry. Heralded as the “golden age” of children’s


INTRODUCTION: EMERGING IDENTITIES AND THE PRACTICE OF POSSIBILITY

3

literature,3 this period invites continued study of these texts as cultural
responses that give us insight not only in what concerned Victorians but
why they remain viable narratives for readers today. How do these narratives contribute to their readers’ maturing ego constructs? What do they

reveal about social values, scripts for behavior, and responses to those culturally abject?
In responding to these questions, Victorian Children’s Literature:
Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power of Love considers two
foci—what the literature illustrates about the period in which it was created and how the narratives serve young readers in their own ego developments. At times, creating the narrative as a means to create the self will be
considered, and at others, how the reader participates in this dynamic. As
a result, this project will variously turn to cultural analysis and Kristevan
theory to argue for the continuing importance of these specific works as
well as the essential value of literature in creating more compassionate and
inclusive cultures as an ethical process, specifically what Kristeva names as
Herethics.

CONSTRUCTION OF SELF
This study builds upon constructs of the speaking subject located in autobiographical and identity theories. Fundamental is the understanding that
the “self” is constructed through discourse, that no coherent self can
exist prior to the self-story.4 Regardless if that self is an autobiographical
design, fictionalized character, or imagined construct, language as narrative creates its existence. Language is, as Regina Gagnier notes, one of the
key determining systems of culture with which the writing subject must
mediate to establish the self5; such mediations, James Paul Gee contends,
are necessary to create or alter any culturally recognized discourse.6 In
other words, how a constructed self is appraised—as possessing or lacking
value—determines both its social and rhetorical worth: Narrative experience that both recognizes and is recognized by cultural discourse will be
perceived as credible and of value; that which counters normative values
or is perceived as such will be determined unreliable or abject. That is,
readers evaluate and determine a narrator’s authority to articulate experience and how that discourse relates to existing scripts of experience.
Narratives that resonate with scripts determined comfortable or appealing
and acknowledged by the reader would be perceived as possessing greater
authority or credibility. Narratives that either challenge those scripts or


4

R.Y. JENKINS

are deemed unreadable meet with resistance or rejection. Thus, narrators must construct their stories in response to or in conversation with
authorized scripts of experience—if they want to be read as part of cultural
discourse.7 If one’s story, one’s construct of experience, is not culturally
recognized as discourse, that experience, that self, can be denied or dismissed.8 Consequently, identity (as constructed self) is contingent,9 existing in the context of what Martin Sökefeld posits as more than the self and
built upon the “networks of power and discourse” that Michel Foucault
describes.10 It is this intersection of individual and institutional power,
Gagnier notes, that determines how the self is understood.11

CRITICAL CONTEXT: CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
This project focuses on the process of that intersection, between culture
and the individual as well as between the writing subject, the text, and
the reader. As Deborah Thacker notes, all readers, including children and
adolescents, are “subject to the power relations” within language.12 With
this in mind, children’s literature may provide a unique opportunity to
examine the tensions between culture’s normalizing discourses and those
offered in response. Victorian children’s literature is especially interesting
in that it offers evidence of an increasingly complex dynamic between cultural and individual scripts.
With Artful Dodgers, Marah Gubar has provided scholars of Victorian
children’s literature an invaluable study of the historical context in which
to understand the relationship between cultural and literary productions of
children both in the genre’s “Golden Age” and the era’s cult of the child.
Doing so, she fills a critical vacuum by offering substantial scholarship
that explores the period’s obsession with the child. Gubar also debunks
continuing assumptions that Victorian writers uncritically embraced the
Romantic, Rousseauian construct of the child; instead she delineates competing Victorian representations of children and childhood as well as cultural attitudes concerning them.13 Part of this complexity surfaces in what
she names a collaborative relationship between the writer and the child,14
an observation that offers scholars a fresh approach to exploring the genre,

the historical context, and the reader.
Positing a subject continuum rather than a stable, distinct construct,
Gubar allows for greater flexibility and originality when readers negotiate cultural discourse. Specifically, she considers the relationship between
extant constructs of childhood and the degree to which those scripts can


INTRODUCTION: EMERGING IDENTITIES AND THE PRACTICE OF POSSIBILITY

5

be rewritten, suggesting that Victorian authors allow for a child reader
who can “resist and reconceive” that discourse.15 With her allusion to
D.W. Winnicott’s theory of potential space, Gubar nods toward the crucial
contribution psychoanalysis can make in understanding the relationship
between the narrative, the child reader, and cultural constructs. Beyond the
idea of collaboration, however, she does not pursue the insights that psychological theories could contribute toward understanding this dynamic.
Jacqueline Rose’s provocative 1984 study, The Case of Peter Pan: The
Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, provides a starting point for psychological approaches toward children’s literature. There she concludes a primarily unidirectional relationship between author and reader, asserting that
children’s literature constructs a linear relationship beginning with the
adult author and followed by the child reader. Because Rose asserts that
a child’s experience is “impossible to gauge,” she does not focus on the
dynamic between the author and reader.16
Karen Coats’s 2004 Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and
Subjectivity in Children’s Literature provides scholars with a much-needed
poststructuralist reading of the genre. One of the most valuable contributions Coats makes is that, in addition to offering Lacanian readings of
the literature, she illustrates how narrative scripts contribute to one’s construction of self; she demonstrates effectively how literature can reveal tensions and anxieties in adolescent ego development.17 Coats thoughtfully
delineates the relationship between language and self, the crucial splitting
during the mirror phase that enables participation in the Symbolic and
the relationship between Lacan’s Imaginary, Symbolic, and subject formation—all of which can be found in children’s literature. Consequently,
Coats foregrounds the importance of children’s literature in subject formation, focusing on the crucial process through which subjectivity is formed.

It is in the process of subject formation that an individual experiences a
series of splits, each with the potential for anxiety and loss.18 Lacan identifies the mirror stage as the primary splitting; it is during this period of
development that an individual’s consciousness can recognize both the
self and the self being watched. The advent of language initiates a secondary split when one can both talk and listen. Jeanette Rhedding-Jones
posits a further splitting with the introduction of writing and the ability
to read and to write.19 Each split represents an increasingly sophisticated
relationship with language, the Symbolic, and text. Rhedding-Jones continues, describing writing as a “mirror of many kinds” because it creates
both the watched and the watching.20


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R.Y. JENKINS

Adolescence itself can be understood as a subsequent developmental
split, a second mirror stage of identity construction Coats explains, the
adolescent “moves back in developmental time to the mirror stage, when
questions of alienation and identification, separation and the establishment of boundaries between the me and the not-me, need to be resettled.”21 Crucial to this process is the ability for the individual to create an
awareness of possible selves through the Imaginary before she can successfully transition into the Symbolic. This necessary feature of subject
formation can be achieved when, as Coats explains, the “child uses fictional small others to mirror back to him his own possibilities for identity
construction”; such re-forming, Coats reminds us, is a lifelong process.22
Although she devotes a chapter to Kristeva in Looking Glasses, Coats does
not, however, develop aspects of her theories that are especially applicable
to adolescent development.
Perhaps most important here is Kristeva’s theory of a more dynamic
relationship between the emergent subject, paternal prohibition, and
maternal desire. Kristeva describes the relationship at this stage as one of
love, not one of fear or prohibition: It is the mother’s love for the child
acknowledged by the beloved authority of the father, not fear of penalty,
that propels the emerging subject into the Symbolic Order. This process

also disrupts binaries in contrast to a Lacanian model in which subduing the abject is of primary importance to reinforce those distinguishing
boundaries.23 Because dynamic love informs the movement toward the
Symbolic, not the tension between desire and prohibition, the experience
remains a more fluid process.
As a result, Coats misses a key aspect of Kristevan theory that would
illustrate the immense value adolescent literature may play in diffusing
violence and psychic isolation. Victorian Children’s Literature details how
Kristeva offers a more inclusive and hopeful approach to understanding
subject consolidation. Kristeva’s work on abjection, adolescence, and analysis offers a timely approach to understanding the relationship between
identity and language. Especially important is Kristeva’s work in detailing
how the experience of narrative contributes to subject consolidation and
how adolescence becomes a crucial illustration of this.

THE OPEN PSYCHIC STRUCTURE OF ADOLESCENCE
Few periods of development are as rich with possibility or as fraught with
tension as adolescence. In her important Giant Despair Meets Hopeful,
Martha Westwater notes that during adolescence, “the individuation


INTRODUCTION: EMERGING IDENTITIES AND THE PRACTICE OF POSSIBILITY

7

process, the ability to cope with changing life situations, and growth in
self-esteem are pursued.”24 To achieve this, the adolescent experiences the
second mirror stage where he or she repositions the self in relation to an
absolute Other; in short, the adolescent separates from and replaces the
parents with others who evoke an ideal.25 The loving dynamic relationship
that Kristeva theorizes enables separation during the primary mirror stage
also comes into play for the adolescent. Consequently, Kristeva offers an

alternative description to that of the Freudian model of adolescent development. Rather than describe the experience as one of rejection or one
of replacement, Kristeva posits the idea that a “creative bond with others”
is the goal of healthy development.26 This can be achieved by adolescents
because they seek for connection, “convinced that [the absolute ideal]
must exist.”27 Adolescents identify with this idealization and its accompanying jouissance28 because, Kristeva theorizes, they believe in the existence
of that absolute as well as believe in absolute satisfaction; this presence of
and power from belief characterizes what Kristeva identifies as the open
psychic structure of adolescence.29
In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva develops the concept of the open
psyche with her chapter on the “Adolescent Novel.” Here, she describes
the open structure that makes the adolescent psyche especially adept in
imaginatively engaging with scripts of possibility. Because an open psyche
is not subject to rigorous prohibitions or laws, the subject in process can
experiment with alternative constructs of self without risk of sanction. In
other words, the adolescent’s open psychic structure allows for a “freeingup the superego”; as a result, adolescents receive a series of “representations between the various psychic registers” that resist rigid demarcations
of identity.30 This enabled psychic fluidity allowed by an open psychic
structure can be understood as interactions with possible identities, as
psychic reorganizations that incorporate as-if personalities into the adolescent’s identity repertoire.31 In other words, the open psychic structure
enables experimentation with personalities that endorse or challenge, test
or develop responses to cultural values.
The potential of the as-if personalities also allows the subject in process
a sanctuary from potential rebuke. Developmental experimentation, even
if extreme values are embraced as part of the process, inevitably progresses
to more measured constructs of self.32 The freedom to experiment with
identities or values in ego construction, just what an adolescent’s open
psychic structure enables, allows for an individual to experience a psychic
moratorium, enabling healthier, sturdier identity constructs of self.33


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R.Y. JENKINS

THE SIGNIFYING PROCESS
Kristeva’s description of the signifying process helps describe how an open
psyche contributes to a more resilient self. With her refinement of Lacan’s
concept of the Imaginary, Kristeva offers a more complex model of the
subject in process. Although she reiterates the crucial role the Imaginary
plays in childhood development as well as its dependence on the mirror
stage, Kristeva distinguishes the affective and drive-related energies from
the linguistic significations, renaming Lacan’s Imaginary as the Semiotic
chora.34 Kristeva’s description of the dynamic relationship between the
Semiotic (non-communicative articulations) and Symbolic (signification)
is useful for understanding the signifying process for the adolescent with
an open psychic structure. As part of this process, Kristeva identifies the
thetic phase as located at the threshold between the Semiotic and the
Symbolic. The thetic phase posits the signifiable object, the deepest structure of possibility, and acts as a filter to organize the Semiotic energy into
the Symbolic Order. 35 The thetic filter releases into the Symbolic the
energies and drives that can be transposed into culturally recognized signs
and articulations.
Affective and drive energy that cannot be organized into culturally recognized linguistic signs, however, remain in the Semiotic, blocked by the
thetic filter. In this way, the Semiotic also functions as a repository of
pre-Symbolic, non-Symbolic, and abject energies. Kristeva identifies those
untransposable energies as abjection, that which the dominant culture
must expel or repress to sustain its Symbolic Order; it is the “defilement”
that must be “jettisoned from the symbolic system.”36 What a culture deems
abject reveals the anxieties and fears that threaten the maintenance of that
culture. This is, in part, because Kristeva notes that “above all” abjection is “ambiguity” and “acknowledges [the subject] to be in perpetual
danger.”37 As Westwater notes, “Abjection uncovers the ambivalence of
drives and the instability of language,” and reveals a “want, a lack… which

must be recognized before identity is grasped.”38 Consequently, abjection can be understood as the liminal space between the pre-oedipal and
the conception of the self; Elizabeth Grosz describes it as “repulsive and
attractive,” a “space of simultaneous pleasure and danger.”39 In short,
“Experiences of abjection expose to the emergent ego its own precarious
hold on identity.”40
The presence of abjection in the Symbolic Order is thus a failure of
boundaries, an instance of an incomplete repression or an unsuccessful
denial of the desires contrary to its order. Abjection in the Symbolic


INTRODUCTION: EMERGING IDENTITIES AND THE PRACTICE OF POSSIBILITY

9

continually threatens the reshaping of the Symbolic.41 Consequently, the
abject threatens the Symbolic Order doubly—both as energies contrary
to dominant values and as evidence that a fixed, exclusionary construct of
order cannot be maintained. In an attempt to contain and control abjection, the Symbolic Order produces exaggerated social scripts to reinforce
values and secure boundaries. The greater the threat the abject poses, the
greater the efforts to restrict or subdue those energies. Kristeva describes
this reaction as an “unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law” of religious and secular dictates to limit the “perverse interspace of abjection.”42

ABJECTION
What is significant in Kristeva’s theory, however, is that the Symbolic Order
can neither fully nor finally rid itself of the abject; rather, the Symbolic
remains haunted by abjection.43 Despite concerted energy to eliminate it,
the abject remains, haunting or shadowing the dominant order. Denying
the abject is doubly dangerous: Refusing the abject, in fact, intensifies its
power.44 With the adolescent, for instance, rigid, exclusionary prohibitions
may provoke them deliberately to choose a negative identity, one in striking opposition to those acknowledged as culturally compatible, if forced

to choose between stark binary constructs.45 However, as Westwater
develops, “naming abjection may be simply a healthy acknowledgement
of the chaos, turmoil and malice that lie deep within the heart and mind
of humankind.”46 Acknowledging abjection may serve to defuse its power.
Acknowledging abjection may also provide the necessary generative
capacity to the subject in process. Kristeva develops abjection’s creative
potential by also focusing on the value of acknowledging rather than
repressing the abject; this is because, as she describes, the abject is “edged
with the sublime.”47 Kristeva describes the sublime as a “something added
that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects,
and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bonding.”48 The process of sublimation affords the individual the experience
of both acknowledged desire and connection. This process, built from
the common root between the sublime and sublimation, reveals how
and why facing abjection can be productive. That is, through sublimation, one can embrace yet control abjection.49 By sublimating the energies
and drives denied by the Symbolic Order, one can creatively incorporate
them into a nonetheless functioning relationship with culture. In other
words, the value of acknowledging the abject is that it can perform like
a “resurrection” in that it is an “alchemy that transforms the death drive
into a start of life, of new significance.”50


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For the adolescent with an open psychic structure, the potential exists
for a greater capacity for facing abject desires. As a result of the open
psychic structure, the thetic filter that regulates drives and energies may
be more permeable and less restrictive in response to the Semiotic and
therefore unsocialized drives. This can result in a great range of articulation emerging into the Symbolic with which the adolescent may experiment through as-if narratives. Consequently, the adolescent psyche opens

itself to repressed energies or desires, reorganizing itself in the freedom of
a relaxed super ego as well as connecting to the role of the Imaginary.51
Embracing rather than resisting this period of psychic moratorium contributes not only to healthier constructs of self but also to more creative
means by which to respond to anti-social energies and drives.

IMAGINATIVE TRANSFERENCE
The question at this point may be how we facilitate adolescents’ productive acknowledgment of abjection. This is where Kristeva’s theories are
especially useful. In the context of what she names the “incredible need
to believe” in something beyond and above the self, the adolescent, faced
ultimately with an ideality crisis, must discover a means to “metabolize”
abject desires into creative responses. For Kristeva, it is with the help
of transference love that analytical or creative narrative can enable this
metabolism.52
The relationship between the analyst and the analysand can illustrate
this dynamic, facilitating a healthy response to the pre-Symbolic energies
and desires experienced in adolescence as subjects in process. In Tales of
Love, Kristeva describes transference love as the “optimum form of interrelation germane to any stabilizing-destabilizing” experience.53 Kristeva
defines the analyst’s role as one who will “listen and confirm belief.”54 That
is, the analyst’s role is to hear the adolescent’s need to believe in as well
as accept the possibility of an idealized construct and so authenticate it.55
The productive relationship depends on “hearing,” not dismissing, censoring, or foreclosing such possibilities. Analysis, Kristeva insists, should
enable transference and so “metabolizing the need to believe not through
acting out but through the pleasure that comes with thinking, questioning and analyzing.”56 That is, accepting and recognizing the adolescent’s
pre-Symbolic desires may facilitate his or her ability to sublimate rather
than enact them. Creating the self through a narrative exchange offers
acknowledgment and possibility. The constitutive aspect enables a fluid


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11

identity, one that continues in process. The function of the psychoanalysis,
Kristeva contends, is to “reawaken the imagination and to permit illusions to exist … the resurrection of the imagination [must] be given first
priority in the treatment.”57 Consequently, Kristeva posits that the result
of therapy is not to prepare one for some transcendental existence but for
openness toward as yet undefined possibilities in this world.58
Kristeva draws explicit parallels between the relationship that produces
analytic truth and narrative fiction,59 noting that the novel replicates the
“working-out [of] … transference and interpretation.”60 That is, at its core,
Kristeva explains that the psychoanalytical dynamic will “resemble” narrative fiction.61 For Kristeva, the adolescent in crisis benefits from the ability
to explore possibility through sublimating trauma and desire into language, to “screen individual fantasies” and “Evade … the judgment of the
other.”62 As sublimated desire and energy, literature provides both author
and imaginative reader the opportunity to experience possible constructions of self as well as a safe means by which to confront and account for
abjection.63 Whether between analysis and analysand or between adolescent author and his or her own written story, this process can contribute to
a psychic moratorium that enables a healthy identity construct. Adolescent
readers, who embrace imaginative narratives, should benefit from experiencing this discourse in a similar way; with their own open psychic structures, adolescent readers can try on disparate identities, experiment with
the scripts, and even transgress cultural expectations without sanction.
By providing as-if scripts for young readers to explore possible constructions of self without risking prohibition, narrative may enable them
to renew their identity through the dynamic relationship that results
between the reader and the potential scripts of experiences. In this way,
the text offers a means of “survival” for the adolescent, Kristeva posits, by
“maintaining a renewable identity through interaction with another.”64 In
short, imaginative discourse—oral or written—may not be a luxury but
necessity for adolescents.
Understood in this way, discourse, whether between analysis and analysand or that constructed by an author for a reader, is more than simply
Symbolic representations of grammar and syntax but rather as complex
psychological event.65 Kristeva posits that imaginative activity and writing enables the subject to develop discourse that is perceived as authentic,
not empty or artificial.66 Imaginative narratives, then, can be understood
as the products of “perpetual subject-adolescents” who use narrative to

replace acts and thereby keep “madness, chaos, emptiness” at bay67 offering


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R.Y. JENKINS

a working out of abjection and coming close to catharsis.68 For Kristeva,
as Westwater explains, literature constitutes rather than reflects reality. As
a result, the reader does not “extract” a text’s meaning but “participates
in the creation of that meaning.”69 Westwater clarifies, Kristeva’s theories
reinforce the value of literature as a means by which the reader can “lose
self in chaos and then negotiate an ongoing identity.”70
The process through which this engagement with the texts enables this
is detailed in Christine Wilkie-Stibbs’s recent book, The Feminine Subject
in Children’s Literature. Here, Wilkie-Stibbs provides an invaluable explanation of this dynamic relationship that narrative offers in children’s literature. Although focusing on the feminine in fantastical literature for
children, she delineates a model of reading “analogous to the psychoanalytic process of Transference.”71 Important in this model of reading is the
dialectical process that Wilkie-Stibbs likens to reader-response: The “dialogic struggle” between the reader and text creates possibilities of meaning, but rather than interpret the text in the context of a passive text and
an ideal reader, she focuses on the “act of reading” as a process in which
the text and reader are understood as the je and the moi.72 That is, WilkieStibbs adopts a model of literary transference influenced by Lacan where
the “literary exchange is not so much interested in identification as a mode
of literary engagement” but focuses instead on the concept of projection;
the exchange is the “projection of the subject’s ego (moi) upon the text”
as well as the projection of the “textual ego upon the subject” that creates a “continual struggle with the dominance of the signifier and under
the control of that other aspect of the conscious subject, the je: the ‘I’
that is the speaking subject.”73 Consequently, through the act of reading,
with literary transference, both the reading subject and the text itself are
“sites of desire in the Symbolic.”74 For Wilkie-Stibbs, it is the “semioticized
notion of language” through which a reader, by engagement with the text,
“activate[s] possibilities.”75 Specifically, Wilkie-Stibbs locates the act of reading in the “gap between the textual Imaginary and the Symbolic … between

… the textual conscious and the textual unconscious.”76 The reading subject engages in the dynamic process of transference and countertransference, tapping into both the present and the possible.

AN ETHICS OF LOVE
Process is vital in Kristeva’s theories. This is especially true in her emphasis
on the process of signification, not just the result. In Desire in Language,
Kristeva suggests that by the very act of narration, the “subject of narration


INTRODUCTION: EMERGING IDENTITIES AND THE PRACTICE OF POSSIBILITY

13

addresses an other,” that narration is structured in relationship to the other.77
For Kristeva, literary form reveals the Subject in process.78 At the heart of this
process is the transference love already discussed. This is because, as Kristeva
contends, a story can only be constructed when a beloved authority acknowledges the speaker. As Kristeva explains, “‘I’ am only if a beloved authority acknowledges me.”79 Love, whether in the form of a beloved authority
or transference, is therefore central to Kristeva’s theories of healthy identity construction. Belief in that love, not fear of prohibition, is what propels
the subject in process toward separation from the Other. For Kristeva, this
process is dynamic because she recognizes a “mother-father conglomerate,”
allowing one to feel love even after becoming separate from the mother’s
body.80 For the emergent subject, being recognized by the Symbolic father
as a result of maternal love recasts the father not simply as arbiter of cultural rules but also as beloved authority. The subject, then, exists as a result
of the acknowledgment by this beloved authority.81 That is, “Without the
experience of love in transference with the imaginary father,” however, “the
subject remains attached” to its “borderline element” and unable to function in the Symbolic domain.82 The emerging subject will be then unable to
separate from the Other to construct the self. The Symbolic father, Kristeva
theorizes, who recognizes and loves me via my mother implies I am not her
but an Other, who makes me believe I can believe.83 At issue is not just the
series of psychic splitting that Lacan describes as an individual’s access to the
Symbolic or the tertiary split that Rhedding-Jones theorizes in her study of

adolescent girls; at issue is also the necessity of the beloved authority and
love that Kristeva identifies as crucial for the subject’s ability to construct an
independent identity.
For Kristeva, love is an open system because it enables psychic space
to be reorganized. Love can transform an individual.84 Transference love,
what she names as the anchor of analysis, “implies that one hears the discourse that is performed there starting with the limit of advent-and-loss
of the subject—which is Einfühlung.”85 In other words, Einfühlung, or
empathy, requires an imaginative connection, a splitting of self to experience the other in the self, not just the self in the other. This emphasis
on experience and connection reinforces Kristeva’s insistence that it
is the process of transference, not the object of transference, where the
emerging human subject is located. As Westwater rightly asserts, “In a
Kristevan sense, storytelling itself becomes an act of hopeful love because
it engages the listener/reader in an osmotic bond of identification with
the speaker/writer.”86 With language, discourse, narrative, the self can be
“re-constituted, re-shaped.”87