Hemmings-A Taste of Nostalgia
AbstractThis essay interrogates nostalgia along pathological lines by attending to its medical origins and following its migration into psychoanalysis, empire and children's literature. It demonstrates how nostalgia, in its particularly sensory embodiment, works in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, and Winnie-the-Pooh to cover over aspects of childhood distasteful to adult sensibilities—with only partial success.
I
Children's books published from the mid-nineteenth century until the first few decades of the twentieth are consumed with nostalgia. In 1962, Roger Lancelyn Green coined a new term for British children's books of this period: "golden age" literature. Humphrey Carpenter follows Green's period definition, stretching the end point from the First World War to include A. A. Milne,1 whose vision he attributes to the Victorian and Edwardian cultural movement that embraced the myth of an Arcadian rural England, a pastoral counterpoint to industrialization and modernization (210). Like the imperialist discourse with which it was linked, golden age children's literature was founded upon and continues to evoke nostalgia. I wish to draw three key cultural texts from this nostalgically configured period—Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh—and demonstrate how nostalgia, in its particularly sensory embodiment, works to cover over aspects of childhood distasteful to adult sensibilities, with only partial success.
I begin my interrogation of nostalgia in three enduringly popular texts along more specific and pathological lines than have been previously pursued by attending to the medical origins of nostalgia and following the migration of the term into psychoanalysis, empire, and children's literature. The psychological, medical origins of nostalgia can be traced to Johannes Hofer, a young Swiss physician who coined the term in 1688: "Greek in origin . . . nostos, return to the native land, and . . . algos, signifies suffering or grief" (381). Likening his newly minted disease to home-sickness, Hofer observed that young Swiss nationals on foreign soil were particularly susceptible to this disorder of "an afflicted imagination" (381), which could be incapacitating and potentially fatal if untreated. Svetlana Boym adds about this Age of Enlightenment condition that "the nostalgic had an amazing capacity for remembering sensations, tastes, sounds, smells, the minutiae and trivia of the lost paradise that those who remained home never noticed" [End Page 54](4). In his reading of Hofer, Jean Starobinski finds proto-psychoanalytic insights in the constellation of symptoms the seventeenth-century physician identifies: the deprivation of and longing for the tastes and smells of thick milk from an Alpine valley, of the traditional breakfast soups that signified no less than "the loss of childhood, of 'oral satisfactions,' of motherly coaxing" (87). At its very roots, nostalgia is linked with the trauma of deprivation and loss. By the late eighteenth century, Starobinski argues, the nostalgic yearns not so poignantly to return to the place of one's childhood—a treatment favored by Hofer—but to childhood itself (94). In other words, nostalgia is a function of the imagination, steeped in temporal and spatial longing, and the illusive object of that longing is childhood.
By the turn of the twentieth century, in the midst of the golden age of children's literature, hegemonizing pressures of modernizing European society reduced provincial particularisms and local rituals of village life (Starobinski 102), and the pathological theory of nostalgia had faded from medical texts. But the notion of a thwarted desire to return continued in psychoanalytic discourse in Freud's theory of regression, which is predicated upon an individual's "return retrogressively" to an earlier stage of development, implying that the nostalgic becomes the neurotic (Freud, Lectures 385). As Starobinski has it, "the neurotic regresses within his own history. The village is interiorized" (102–03). The kind of childhood invoked by key texts from the golden age of children's literature (which coincides fairly closely with the ascendancy of Freudian psychoanalysis) is profoundly nostalgic along these very lines. The interiorized village to which the adult writer, and also the reader, regresses is not only the imaginative space but also the time of the childhood. More specifically, it is not their actual childhood but an impossibly sanitized and Edenic time and space.
This imaginative destination is perfectly invoked by the single illustration within the pages of the first edition of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows published in 1908 (fig. 1). It depicts a pastoral idyll: fronds of lilies and a bushy-leaved aged tree are the backdrop to a short and gentle waterfall in the center that gently pours into a river leading out to the foreground and the stylized caption which reads, "And a River went out from Eden." An otter nestles in the reeds on one riverbank, a rat on the other, but the most arresting image of this illustration rests at its center. At the edge of the waterfall, a meter or so above the river, are three naked children, two watching one stretch a hand into the tumbling water—three innocent babes in the woods.[End Page 55]
I begin my interrogation of nostalgia in three enduringly popular texts along more specific and pathological lines than have been previously pursued by attending to the medical origins of nostalgia and following the migration of the term into psychoanalysis, empire, and children's literature. The psychological, medical origins of nostalgia can be traced to Johannes Hofer, a young Swiss physician who coined the term in 1688: "Greek in origin . . . nostos, return to the native land, and . . . algos, signifies suffering or grief" (381). Likening his newly minted disease to home-sickness, Hofer observed that young Swiss nationals on foreign soil were particularly susceptible to this disorder of "an afflicted imagination" (381), which could be incapacitating and potentially fatal if untreated. Svetlana Boym adds about this Age of Enlightenment condition that "the nostalgic had an amazing capacity for remembering sensations, tastes, sounds, smells, the minutiae and trivia of the lost paradise that those who remained home never noticed" [End Page 54](4). In his reading of Hofer, Jean Starobinski finds proto-psychoanalytic insights in the constellation of symptoms the seventeenth-century physician identifies: the deprivation of and longing for the tastes and smells of thick milk from an Alpine valley, of the traditional breakfast soups that signified no less than "the loss of childhood, of 'oral satisfactions,' of motherly coaxing" (87). At its very roots, nostalgia is linked with the trauma of deprivation and loss. By the late eighteenth century, Starobinski argues, the nostalgic yearns not so poignantly to return to the place of one's childhood—a treatment favored by Hofer—but to childhood itself (94). In other words, nostalgia is a function of the imagination, steeped in temporal and spatial longing, and the illusive object of that longing is childhood.
By the turn of the twentieth century, in the midst of the golden age of children's literature, hegemonizing pressures of modernizing European society reduced provincial particularisms and local rituals of village life (Starobinski 102), and the pathological theory of nostalgia had faded from medical texts. But the notion of a thwarted desire to return continued in psychoanalytic discourse in Freud's theory of regression, which is predicated upon an individual's "return retrogressively" to an earlier stage of development, implying that the nostalgic becomes the neurotic (Freud, Lectures 385). As Starobinski has it, "the neurotic regresses within his own history. The village is interiorized" (102–03). The kind of childhood invoked by key texts from the golden age of children's literature (which coincides fairly closely with the ascendancy of Freudian psychoanalysis) is profoundly nostalgic along these very lines. The interiorized village to which the adult writer, and also the reader, regresses is not only the imaginative space but also the time of the childhood. More specifically, it is not their actual childhood but an impossibly sanitized and Edenic time and space.
This imaginative destination is perfectly invoked by the single illustration within the pages of the first edition of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows published in 1908 (fig. 1). It depicts a pastoral idyll: fronds of lilies and a bushy-leaved aged tree are the backdrop to a short and gentle waterfall in the center that gently pours into a river leading out to the foreground and the stylized caption which reads, "And a River went out from Eden." An otter nestles in the reeds on one riverbank, a rat on the other, but the most arresting image of this illustration rests at its center. At the edge of the waterfall, a meter or so above the river, are three naked children, two watching one stretch a hand into the tumbling water—three innocent babes in the woods.[End Page 55]
Significantly, the children are genderless and sexless, and represent a version of childhood far removed from an actual child's experience of the world. Sexuality is effaced, wiped clean from this representation, leaving no evidence of, for example, "widdlers" and "bottoms," which so preoccupied Freud's patient known as "Little Hans" in the same year that Grahame's novel was published (Freud, "'Little Hans'" 170ff). Clearly Robertson's children represent an adult's version of childhood, a sanitized, ordered childhood that deploys tropes of purity and innocence to foster the myth of unsullied origin. As James Kincaid argues about the late Victorian period, this "concocted . . . quality of [childhood] innocence was . . . inculcated and enforced" by adults upon children (72). This myth of innocence figures children as functionaries serving the needs of the adult writer and reader for whom childhood signifies escape from the pressures of a modern, industrialized, polluted, [End Page 56]and exploitative adult world. Grahame himself states as much in a blurb he was asked to write for a publisher's catalog:
It is a book of Youth, and so perhaps chiefly for Youth, and those who still keep the spirit of youth alive in them: of life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides; free of problems, clear of the clash of sex; of life as it might fairly be supposed to be regarded by some of the wise small things, "That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck."(Paths 19)
Here Grahame conflates childhood2 with the innate wisdom of creatures of the natural world and sets them both against problems of adulthood, namely sexuality. Those readers free from "the clash of sex," free from questions about widdlers, are enticed by the caption of Grahame's illustrator and friend Grahame Robertson from Genesis 2:10—"And a River went out from Eden"—to enter a world that can be traced back to a site of primary innocence. Readers are invited to embark upon a journey of, to borrow Linda Austin's phrase, "inchoate nostalgia" (86). And here the exclusion of children from the function of the childhood construct is laid bare.
Children's books from the golden age3 are nostalgic also in their conspicuous construction of childhood as a personal golden age, rich in retrospective longing for a past not as it was, but as it might only have been. This longing is commonly referred to by critics of childhood and children's literature as nostalgia that in Perry Nodelman's words "defines children primarily for the benefit of adults" (Nodelman and Reimer 96).4 Nodelman has argued that the nostalgic impulse of such books is imperialist by nature ("Other" 32). The adult is the imperialist who shapes childhood as subjugated "other" with his own values and desires, and anxieties about those desires. This argument has particular purchase in books of the golden age since imperialist values are in many respects the ideological basis for upper-middle-class writers like Carroll, Grahame, and Milne writing during (or just after) the golden age of the British empire.5 To see empire as "golden" is at once problematic and nostalgic, nostalgic in a particularly modern—that is to say, contemporary—way. Historian Svetlana Boym writes about nostalgia at the turn of the twenty-first century as it relates to the collapse of empire. While she focuses on the Soviet empire, her take on nostalgia applies equally to the lingering appeal of the British empire: "Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values" (8). The "enchanted [End Page 57]world" of imperial order and clearly defined "borders and values" is as inaccessible as the enchanted world of childhood. Instead, the imperialist adult, whether the writer steeped in values of empire, or the subsequent adult reader mourning lost order, can reconstruct an imagined childhood, shaped by his own values, desires, and anxieties.As nostalgia migrates to the discourse of empire, intriguing parallels arise. In Renato Rosaldo's articulation of "imperial nostalgia," the imperialist comes to strangely long for the indigenous culture empire has ruined. Or as he puts it more generally, it is "the curious phenomena of people's longing for what they themselves have destroyed" (87). This observation rings true whether one considers the historical case of colonizers mourning the pre-contact colonial cultures they have destroyed, as Rosaldo does, or the psychoanalytic case of the civilizing forces of adulthood retrospectively reshaping childhood experience, and thereby "destroying" it, or at least driving its unruly forces deep into the unconscious, in order to suit its own sense of decorum. Rosaldo implies that adults "feel nostalgic about childhood memories" in order to cover over or obscure with a veil of innocence the turbulent, disturbing recollections of childhood (70). From the social sciences comes an insight with perspicacious application to psychoanalysis. Rosaldo's perspective accords with Freud, who states that these recollections are repressed by adult "civilizing" forces in a child's life. As he puts it in his Introductory Lectures, the majority of a child's "experiences and mental impulses" are covered over by an act of forgetting, "which veils our earliest youth from us and makes us strangers to it" (Lectures 368). Sexual energies, Freud argues, "have provided the motive for . . . this forgetting, [which] in fact, is an outcome of repression" (369). With psychical repression, or cultural oppression, nostalgia can be deployed to ease one's relation to an unwieldy past. In the realm of imperialist discourse, as in the realm of children's literature, nostalgia functions with ostensible benignity which serves to undercut in the eyes of imperialists, or adults, their own complicity in the violence of domination or repression inherent in the controlling and limiting of the experience of the colonial, or the child.
That the golden age of children's books coincides with the rise of psychoanalysis is not perhaps surprising. I agree with Kenneth Kidd, who claims that it is "productive to treat psychoanalysis and children's literature as discourses that revolve around similar concerns and themes, and which may be mutually constitutive" (110). Both discourses involve a return to childhood, with different goals. Children's literature of the [End Page 58]