The World in Play by Matthew Kaiser

Author:Matthew Kaiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Modern Ideology of Child Play

Before turning our attention to the cosmological features of Brontë’s future-negating model of child play, to the tension between the profane logic of play as paideia and the sacred logic of play as fate, I would like to take the opportunity here to place Brontë’s idiosyncratic views on child play in historical context, to provide an account of the evolution of the modern ideology of child play over the last four centuries. How did the modern ideology of child play come to saturate Victorian representations of childhood? Why is it so difficult for us to separate child play conceptually from the logic of play as paideia? Why do “Westerners” in particular, Sutton-Smith notes, have a tendency to “cherish” the notion that children “adapt and develop through their play”?46 From middle-class common sense, through modern pedagogy, to early expressions of evolutionary psychology: Brontë confronts them all in her struggle to achieve critical distance from the all-encompassing modern ideology of child play. She shakes the normalizing foundations of modern consciousness and causes the cosmic vault to collapse upon her head. In the pages that follow, I explore the historical vicissitudes not of actual child play, which routinely subverts cultural expectations, but of its representations in pedagogical discourse over the last four centuries. It is against this backdrop that Brontë unleashes Heathcliff and Cathy.

We should resist the urge to project onto ancient and premodern child play prelapsarian authenticity. The belief that child play socializes children and trains them to be productive citizens is ubiquitous in educational treatises in early and late antiquity. In Latin, ludus mean “school” as well as “play” and “game.” The Roman ludus is a site of physical and mental exercise, an institution of ludic development. Unlike modern educationalists, however, ancient pedagogues make no attempt to obfuscate the coercive, prescriptive quality of the ludic regimen to which children are subjected. Greek and Roman tutors compel productive and socially viable play in their pupils. In The Republic, Plato views the childish will to play as a mimetic impulse, which can and should be harnessed by a “system” of musical training and gymnastics for purposes of producing “well-conducted and virtuous citizens.”47 It is an impulse, however, which can just as easily be channeled by irresponsible guardians, or by “pantomimic gentlemen,” toward less virtuous ends:

And when [children] have made a good beginning in play, and by the help of music have gained the habit of good order, then this habit of order, in a manner how unlike the lawless play of the others! will accompany them in all their actions and be a principle growth to them, and if there be any fallen places in the State will raise them up again.

From antiquity to the early modern period one sees the indelible handprint of a teacher, tutor, or mentor on the productive play of children. Although debates about when the modern child—and by extension the modern ideology of child play—first emerged are far from settled, when it comes

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