1The American author and poet Laura E. Richards (1850–1943) and the contemporary Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (1939–) share a passion for nonsense. It is thanks to the extensive research by Etti Gordon Ginzburg that Richards’s nonsense poetry, which fell into oblivion in the course of twentieth-century literary canonization processes, has been recovered in the past decade. In contrast, Atwood’s use of nonsense has remained underexplored although her works have garnered high critical appraisal and much scholarly attention. An exception is Glenys Stow’s examination of Atwood’s debut novel The Edible Woman (1969). Exploring the novel’s allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Stow shows that nonsense not only shapes the storyworld and behavior of the protagonist, Marian McAlpin, but also Atwood’s use of “major techniques found in nonsense literature, such as reversal, exaggeration, incongruity, and arbitrary sequence” (91). Nonsense, Stow further argues, functions as a social commentary on the absurdity of the social norm in Marian’s everyday life.
2This article enhances the investigation of Atwood’s use of nonsense and its principles in two of her novels, The Penelopiad (2005) and The Testaments (2019), which will be read alongside selected children’s poems by Richards. In doing so, this comparative study also contributes to the scholarship on Richards by subjecting her generally undervalued literary nonsense to serious discussion both formally and regarding its ideological entanglements and challenges. While the juxtaposition of Richards’s and Atwood’s nonsense across time might appear startling, it opens up a transnational and transhistorical dialogue between the two North American women authors and the ways in which they employ and shape nonsense. Richards’s nineteenth-century nonsense poetry offers insights into the nonsense of Atwood’s postmodern fiction and vice versa, while the juxtaposition of their shared passion for nonsense also illuminates issues of gender, sexuality, and the mis/education of young girls across time and space. The selected texts therefore display the authors’ prominent usage of nonsense techniques and focus on young girls as protagonists whose upbringing (as opposed to that of young boys) involves both their agency and the violence exerted upon them within and outside of domestic and educational settings. I argue that reading Richards’s and Atwood’s nonsense alongside each other highlights the continuity of the genre-characteristic “dialectics of subversion and support” (Lecercle 72) as well as the ongoing social and sexual violence that surrounds their young female protagonists, whose (sexual) agency belies the potent “myth of childhood innocence” (Jenkins 3). Yet where Richards purportedly relates her children’s poetry to the domestic sphere as the proper site to express nonsense and wields it as a creative educational practice, Atwood’s fiction self-reflectively insists that nonsense constitutes a powerful political instrument and weapon in and beyond the nursery.
- 1 While the complex process of canonization certainly cannot be reduced to unequal gender hierarchies (...)
3The recovery of Laura Richards’s nonsense poetry inevitably means to engage with questions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and culture and the literary canon. Whether in the form of verse or prose, in literary studies nonsense has been predominantly categorized as a genre for which anthologies commonly name Edward Lear (1812–1888) and Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) as its main representatives. Not surprisingly, the nineteenth-century establishment of literary nonsense as a genre worthy of canonization followed the at the time common cultural practice and logic that prioritized male-authored literature and “high” art over women’s (allegedly) “low” art and writings.1 While Lear and Carroll were studied alongside other canonical writers, Richards’s nonsense poetry was relegated to the lower rank of women’s literature and womanly concerns with the domestic sphere of maternal care and child education. Gordon Ginzburg has shown that the non-canonization of Richards’s nonsense poetry was supported by her own self-deprecatory definitions of her children’s verses as “cheerful rubbish” and “joyful noise” (Richards qtd. in Gordon Ginzburg, “There Once Was” 180). At the same time, the neglect of Richards’s nonsense poems by the high priests of literature during her lifetime had advantages as well: Not only did it afford her greater liberty regarding her constructions of child-and parenthood, it also granted her an artistic niche to voice maternal discontent and educational conflicts to the point of undermining such cherished Anglo-American values as child- or motherhood (181–184). In her later life, and in the course of the twentieth century, Richards’s writing faded into obscurity like that of so many other nineteenth-century woman authors.
- 2 Irving Massey likewise notes that “there is no simple definition of nonsense, or even one on which (...)
4Despite the inclusion of literary nonsense into the canon as a genre of high aesthetic value, nonsense has proven notoriously difficult to define. According to Michael Heyman and Kevin Shortsleeve, twentieth-century critics and scholars “have not been able to agree on how to classify nonsense as a literary and cultural creation” (168).2 While most approach it as a genre, some also view it as “a stylistic device, a literary mode” (Tigges 2), and “a quality” (Heyman and Shortsleeve 168). For my purposes of juxtaposing Richards’s and Atwood’s nonsense, and given that Atwood’s novels as well as the selected poems by Richards are “partial nonsense” (Tigges 86), i.e., prose and verse in which nonsense plays a significant albeit not always dominant part, this article will adopt a similarly loose understanding of the many faces and facets of nonsense. Moreover, in my approach to nonsense in Richards’s and Atwood’s works, I also rely on an older branch of what we have come to know as the elevated art of “pure and absolute” (Lear qtd. in Heyman and Shortsleeve 168) nonsense that Lear and Carroll helped establish in the nineteenth century. This older branch dates back to the fifteenth century and can be divided into the nonsense derived from oral folk traditions (including songs, ballads, and nursery rhymes) and nonsense “developed by individual poets and possessing a peculiarly close relationship—largely a parodic one—to the ‘high’ literary conventions of its day” (Malcolm). Where folk traditions constituted important “precursor[s] to literary nonsense” (Heyman, Satpathy, and Ravishankar, “Uncovering” xxxi) for children and adults, the latter branch was aimed at adults and involved “elaborate and boisterous rhetorical performances” (Malcolm). These performances mixed high diction with coarse vernacular and played with “a contradiction between form and content” by using “stilted diction, bathos, puns and exaggerated intensification” (Malcolm) while also anticipating such nineteenth-century key characteristics as nonsense language.
5The idea that nonsense aimed at a child rather than an adult audience did not emerge until the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was accompanied by new conceptions of childhood. In North America as well as in Europe, older moral, religious models of education began to give way to a pedagogy that reconceptualized children’s growth and maturation in mental, spiritual terms. As a result, the idea of children as inherently sinful began to be replaced by the powerful social construct of children as pure and innocent. This notion of childhood innocence was closely related to European Romantic writers and poets like Novalis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Mary Shelley, who linked childhood with an uncorrupted “pre-literate” (Heyman and Shortsleeve 167) developmental stage associated with unspoiled “primitive” peoples and cultures. Furthermore, the notion of childhood innocence that was “created in part in relation to nonsense literature” (Heyman and Shortsleeve, 166–167), established itself alongside the reform pedagogical key concept of the active child, which introduced “instruction with delight” (Ölkers 27) and combined education with play and entertainment. Yet as Gordon Ginzburg explains, although literary nonsense is generally associated with juvenile fun and play, it can be issue-rich and highly sophisticated as well (“There Once Was” 176–177). Indeed, in the course of the twentieth century, nonsense outgrew its exclusive link to childhood and became once again popular for an adult audience as “literary nonsense” in the “high” literature of post/modernist writers and poets, avantgarde artists, and even in philosophical discourse.
- 3 Marinette Grimbeek and Paula López Rúa have examined the coinage of neologisms and the satirical us (...)
- 4 In An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense, Tigges aims to establish a comprehensive nonsense repertoire (5 (...)
6Well-established linguistic nonsense techniques include neologisms, portmanteau, and reduplication, techniques whose wordplay and humor create tension between order and disorder, sense and nonsense, affectionate appreciation and disdainful mockery. These elements also feature prominently in Richards’s poetry and Atwood’s writing. For example, the dystopian, bioengineered storyworld of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy brims with such word-formations as “Crakers,” “fibracionous,” “rakunks,” “CorpSeCorps,” “HottTotts” (Oryx and Crake 47, 248, 42, 70, 101; emphasis in the original), or “bimplants” (MaddAddam 196) to name only a few.3 At the same time, it is the delight in the sound, rhythm, and “musicality of language” (Heyman, Satpathy, and Ravishankar, “Uncovering” xxvii) that defines nonsense, a feature employed in the titles of Richards’s nonsense poems “Eletelephony” (Tirra Lirra 31) and “Bobbily Boo and Wollypotump” (Tirra 136). These examples show that linguistic techniques of nonsense also play with sense and logic, in that they simultaneously uphold the two different meanings of “corporation” and “corpse” in Atwood’s fictitious enterprise CorpSeCorps; or “elephant” and “telephone” in Richards’s nonsense poem “Eletelephony.” Wim Tigges further lists mirroring, imprecision, exaggeration, and paradox as belonging to those elements of the “nonsense repertoire” (50) that manipulate and strain logical thought.4
7Considered more broadly, nonsense can be understood as an integral aspect of our everyday lives in a nonsensical world. As “the other side of sense” (Massey), it prompts us to make sense of the absurdities of human life and of the world we inhabit. Nonsense is, then, part of our human thinking and, according to Jean-Jacques Lecercle, “reflexive” (2). It allows us to stretch logic and rationalism beyond their limits and to toy with the dominant social and cultural norms. Yet Lecercle insists that nonsense is not inherently subversive but, on the contrary, characterized by a “dialectics of subversion and support” (72) that involves both oppositional and dominant tendencies in a “balancing act of an orderly and a disorderly” (25) use of language and meaning. On the one hand, nonsense subscribes to the deconstruction and destruction of rules—linguistic, logical, social; on the other hand, it remains deeply committed to the very constructs, structures, and rules that it purports to undo, all the more because of its ineluctable entanglement with the education and “acquisition of cultural capital” (Lecercle 4) for both children and adults. What forms and shapes this entanglement assumes in selected works by Richards and Atwood, specifically when related to young girls, will be explored in more depth in the following chapters. To do so, I first distinguish between Richards’s nonsense for and Atwood’s nonsense by “the girls” (chapters 2 and 3) before I then go on to investigate how nonsense relates to questions of education and violence in and beyond the nursery (chapters 4 and 5).
- 5 “Belinda Blonde” was originally published in Richards’s 1890 collection In the Nursery, whereas “Th (...)
8“The Maid of Timbuctoo” and “Belinda Blonde,” which are both reprinted in Tirra Lirra: Rhymes Old and New (1955),5 present us with two extraordinarily strong-minded and (sexually) active young girls. However, the pursuit of their desires ends with their cruel punishment and violent deaths respectively: the “lovely maid of Timbuctoo” (46) is hanged alongside her lover by her uncle; and Belinda, the “beautiful [blonde] doll” (154), is forcefully knocked up—to use a pun in keeping with the poem’s sexual allusions—before she is symbolically killed off by the graphically and violently phallic Jack-in-the-box. Both poems ultimately bring to the fore the normative, educational aspects of nonsense rather than its subversive tendencies despite the female protagonists’ (sexual) agency.
9In “The Maid of Timbuctoo” (Tirra 46) a young girl in far-away Africa places the passion for her “Arab” (l. 4) lover over the respect for her uncle’s prized possessions; whereas her uncle’s attachment to his precious “beetle” (l. 3) outdoes the devotion to his niece with fatal consequences: he punishes her theft by hanging both, the niece and her lover. Opposing the “lovely maid” (l. 1) to her uncle, “a savage chief” (l. 7), the poem centers on the young African maid and celebrates her agency and trickery while also deploring her murder by the cruel uncle in the following refrain: “Sing ba ha ha! and boo hoo hoo! / The lovely maid of Timbuctoo! (ll. 5–6).” Her lover’s death, although mentioned, appears to be of little importance, while the geographies of the African continent and the Arab world are melted into an unspecified, generalized whole. On a formal level, the poem purposefully upsets poetic diction and grammar—presumably to maintain the rhythm—by prominently inserting “withouten dread or fear” (l. 9; emphasis added) in the second verse, and by incorrectly stating that “[t]he uncle followed after she” (l. 14; emphasis added) in verse three. Moreover, the use of bathos in the first verse links the uncle’s exotic jewelry with “tobacco” as a base consumerist pleasure: “She stole her uncle’s choicest scarab / To buy tobacco for her Arab” (ll. 3–4). In the final verse, the romantic setting of an exotic bower—“a palm tree’s shady cover” (l. 21)—is bathetically contrasted with the gruesome sight of the “hanged” corpses of “the maiden and her lover!” (l. 22). In this way, the shocking revelation of the lovers’ execution mocks the conventions of a romantic, elevated style.
10With the help of the exotic setting of Timbuctoo as America’s “other,” the uncle’s savage punishment of the maid and her lover remain at a safe emotional distance from the known world of Richards’s child (and adult) readers. While the maid’s devotion to her beloved constitutes a relatable cultural frame of reference, the representation of the uncle’s brutal barbarism uses as well as reinforces contemporary nineteenth-century stereotypes of the “other” that “draw a boundary between the hegemonic center” of a “civilized” America and the exotic yet “savage” “periphery” (Gürsel 149). In such an “other” world, the poem suggests, the African maid’s agency and trickery will never become a threat to American nurseries and can, therefore, be wholeheartedly celebrated, especially since her death reassures America’s children (as well as mothers and, by implication, the nation) of their own cultural superiority and civilization.
11“Belinda Blonde” is directly set in the nursery. Belinda, the doll, is smitten with Jack-in-the-box and wishes he would come out. Jack does pop out, and her daydreams of their love quickly turn into a nightmarish experience of sexual violation and subsequent death. In contrast to “The Maid of Timbuctoo,” which locates the threat to the female protagonist outside of the American nursery, “Belinda Blonde” concludes with an explicit warning against the young girl’s sexual activity and agency. In a final verse under the capitalized header “MORAL,” Belinda’s “pain,” “terror” (l. 26) and death are put forth as the inevitable consequences of her “dreamings fond” (l. 16), i.e. her sexual curiosity. Formally, “Belinda Blonde” resorts to the rhyme patterns, rhythm, and musicality of the limerick, thus displaying a frivolity and lightheartedness that its violent, sexual contents belie. At the same time, the poem demonstrates nonsense’s penchant for graphically sexual puns, symbols, and images, aspects that, according to Sakari Katajamäki, Lear eliminated from his art of literary nonsense (276). Richards’s poem, by contrast, renders Jack-in-the-box in unmistakably phallic terms: rather than “shining with beauty and grace” (l. 8) as expected by Belinda, Jack emerges “[w]ith a crash and … a spring” as a “horrible thing” that, “half black and half scarlet,” glares and wags “wildly about” before he then kills her with a blow “on the head” (ll. 19–25).
12“The Maid of Timbuctoo” and “Belinda Blonde” thus initiate specifically their young female audience into the potentially disastrous physical and social deaths that await active and sexually curious girls. By projecting these threats onto an exoticized, “othered” Timbuctoo, however, a maid’s unusual (sexual) agency can be celebrated against the reassuring stereotypical background of a “savage” Orient. Similarly, Belinda’s doll nursery reproduces patriarchal violence in a parallel doll universe to maintain the “emotional detachment” (Gordon Ginzburg, “There Once Was” 178) characteristic of the genre of nonsense, which is further ensured by the explicit moral at the end. Both the maid of Timbuctoo and Belinda Blonde are disciplined to the point of being completely annihilated, and so are their desires and passions. But the poems also accentuate different forms of violence and punishment, assigning the girls different social and cultural positionalities. The “savage” (l. 7) measures of the uncle’s retributive “justice” in Timbuctoo places the African maid into the category of his “choicest scarab” (l. 3) and turns her into a piece of exotic property, also for the child audience; whereas the cautionary tale about Jack-in-the-box’s monstrously grotesque phallus aims to literally nip in the bud any sexual activity and curiosity in young American girls in the first place. Both poems, then, challenge the potent myth of “the innocent child” while exerting their dominant cultural and socializing powers. In both poems nonsense showcases its conservative, dominant side that reinforces normative ideas about female agency, sexuality, and national supremacy. Yet the cautionary moral tale of “Belinda Blonde” in particular contributes to young girls’ internalization of sexual passivity and feminine purity which, given the repeated references to Jack’s “horrible” (l. 20) blackness, also includes a racial component.
13The violent deaths of the young girls in Richards’s nonsense poems eerily resonate with the hanging of the twelve maids of Atwood’s revisionist mythmaking in The Penelopiad. In Homer’s mythologizing, Queen Penelope is commonly considered as embodying the faithful, virtuous wife, whereas her maids are often interpreted as promiscuous servant or slave girls who are executed by Penelope’s son Telemachus at the behest of his father, Odysseus, who feels betrayed by their disloyalty, i.e., their affairs with Penelope’s suitors during his absence. Atwood’s Penelopiad hands over the narrative agency to the queen and the slave girls. The story alternates between what Penelope defines—in a conventional gesture of female authorial modesty and disavowal reminiscent of Richards’s—as the “low art” of her own “story-making” (Atwood, Penelopiad 3–4) and the maids’ “Chorus Line” (5, 13, 51, 65, 93, 125, 147, 163, 175, 191). The collective voice of the maids finds expression in a variety of popular and authoritative cultural forms and genres, in which principles of nonsense thrive. For example, their Chorus Line includes a jump-rope rhyme, popular songs, a ballad, a drama, an academic lecture, a videotaped court session, and more, all of which parody the “high art” of myth and ancient Greek tragedy with its chorus in particular.
14Like Richards’s poems, the maids’ Chorus Line displays an inordinate amount of violence in the lives of the young girls. Also, and like Richards’s maids, Atwood’s servant girls demonstrate a remarkable (sexual) agency from an early age on. Speaking for themselves, however, they directly address Odysseus as their murderer when they introduce themselves as “the ones you killed” (Atwood, Penelopiad 5). In a satirical nod to their own deaths by hanging, they turn the jump-rope rhyme into a “Rope-Jumping Rhyme” (5). Consistent with their titular word play, and in opposition to the playful song that one would expect from the jump-rope games of young girls, the maids address their gruesome deaths head-on: “we danced in air / our bare feet twitched / it was not fair” (5). Here, the relentless staccato of the skipping rhymes underlines the violence and agony suffered by them all. The remaining rope-jumping rhymes reveal the pervasive double standard in Odysseus’s Ithaca. It is a world where gender and class sanction a powerful man’s sexual escapades, granting him the authority to wield power over the women as his property: “[Y]ou had the spear / you had the word / at your command” (6). The regular skipping beats are interrupted only when the maids point out how their fear gave Odysseus “pleasure” (6), resulting in a rhythmic irregularity that underlines the perverted gratification and gendered violence fostered in such a male-dominated world.
15It would be wrong, however, to think of the twelve maids as mere victims. In “Kiddie Mourn,” for instance, they provide a glimpse of their performative enactment of gender, sexuality, and class, which opens up spaces for resistance, limited forms of agency, even pleasure. Written in a style of prose whose brief syntax, simple diction, repetition, and alliteration draw on traditions of oral storytelling, the maids begin an intriguing play with words, sense, and nonsense relating to their status of abjection: “We were told we were dirty. We were dirty. Dirt was our concern, dirt was our business, dirt was our specialty, dirt was our fault. We were the dirty girls” (Atwood, Penelopiad 13). Their non/sensical word play eventually reclaims the initially involuntary status of abjection in a way that enables them to “re-intrude into society by appropriating the very politics and aesthetics of disgust that dominant society utilizes to expel them” (Keck 74). As the dirty girls, they now deliberately infiltrate and “contaminate” their social environment with their “dirty” bodies, disclosing how “we mastered the secret sneer. We swayed our hips, we lurked, we winked, we signalled with our eyebrows, even when we were children; we met boys behind the pigpens …. We drank the wine left in the wine cups. We spat onto the serving platters .… we crammed filched meat into our mouths …. We snatched what we could” (Atwood, Penelopiad 14). In doing so, they invade the “high” art of myth and literature with their “revolting nonsense” (Keck 76) that transforms their abjection into ways of resistance.
16One of the most paradoxical songs of the maids’ Chorus Line (because it is at once nonsensical and mythologically sound), is “The Wily Sea Captain, A Sea Shanty” (Atwood, Penelopiad 93). In limerick-style, the song celebrates one of the most powerful receptions of the Odysseus myth, namely that of “wily Odysseus” (133), at the same time that it consistently undermines his heroism by showing him in various undignified poses. If he is not out and about “[w]ith his lies and his tricks and his thieving” (93), he is found “stuck on a rock or asleep ’neath a tree, / Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea” (94; emphasis in the original), “bed[ing] the goddess [Circe] so fine” (95), or shipwrecked on a beach where “he did drip so!” (97). Odysseus the world-famous trickster is thus alternately mocked as “the saltiest seaman” (94), “that epical he-man” (95), Circe’s “blithe lodger” (95), and “the artfullest dodger” (96).
17But The Penelopiad features another form of nonsense which, unsurprisingly, surfaces in the nursery where the royal male offspring, Odysseus and Telemachus, is raised. Much to the irritation of Penelope, the nurse Eurycleia uses
a special language for them, a nonsense language—‘Uzzy woo,’ she would croon to Telemachus when drying him after his bath—‘A google woogle poo!’—and it unsettled me [Penelope] to think of my barrel-chested and deep-voiced Odysseus, so skilled in persuasion, so articulate, so dignified, as an infant lying in her arms and having this gurgling discourse addressed to him. (64)
18Penelope’s irritation points to several nonsense paradoxes. Firstly, Eurycleia’s gibberish used with the royal toddlers does not go together with the vast worldly power that these future kings wield in word and deed. Secondly, the nurse’s nonsense language exposes the discrepancy between the guileless crooning in the female nursery and the cunning eloquence in the sphere of male dominion. Thirdly, the special language contrasts Eurycleia’s “boundless” (64) delight in the male toddlers with Penelope’s detachment towards her own (baby) son Telemachus. Indeed, Eurycleia’s mollycoddling of the royal toddlers radically differs from the violent, abusive childhood experiences of Penelope and the twelve maids (regardless of the girls’ vastly different positionalities in society). Penelope’s father, “having failed to drown [her] in the sea” (27), hands her over to Odysseus “like a package of meat” (39); and the maids report that they were “[b]ought, traded, captured, [and] kidnapped,” “disposed of at will, / Sold, drowned in the well, traded, [and] used” (66). In the girls’ childhood, the “special language” (64) of nonsense is conspicuously absent and, instead, a code of violence determines their lives and deaths.
19Atwood’s Penelopiad thus satirically juxtaposes two different kinds of nonsense: There is the nonsense for “the boys,” whose absurd unworldliness and artless dullness the novel relates not only to Odysseus and Telemachus but also to such writers of “high” literature as Homer—and we might as well include Lear and Carroll; whereas the nonsense by “the girls,” albeit generally ignored and undervalued like the maids’ Chorus Line, Penelope’s “low” art of storytelling, or Richards’s nonsense poetry, impresses as well as challenges with its vulgar and violent contents, its wit, and worldliness.
20“To the Little Girl who Wriggles” and “Wouldn’t,” which were published in In My Nursery (1890), belong to those of Richards’s nonsense rhymes that are not only “for children, but also about them and their caretakers from the vantage point, as a mother, of an insider in the nursery” (Gordon Ginzburg, “Edward Lear’s” 296; emphasis in the original). They complicate not only the social constructions of “childhood innocence,” motherhood, and parent-daughter relationships, but also a simplistic notion of nonsense as “innocent fun” (Gordon Ginzburg, “Genre” 144) for children. While the poems highlight active girls and their disorderly behaviors, they also harness the orderly tendencies of nonsense to channel the insubordinate spirit of the defiant girls and the aggressions of their (maternal) caretakers.
21The speaker in “To the Little Girl who Wriggles” (Richards, Nursery 89) directly addresses the active, willful girl from an inside perspective of the nursery, a mother’s point of view, aiming to discipline the squirming toddler with gentle forms of coercion that involve affection, entertainment, and playful, nonsensical threats that blur the boundaries between human and animal life and nature: “It’s wriggle and jiggle, it’s twist and it’s wiggle, / Like an eel on a shingly shore, my dear, / Like an eel on a shingly shore” (ll. 3–5). The imagined transformation of the constantly moving girl into a slippery eel whom “the prawns and the shrimps, with their curls and their crimps” (l. 13) will look down upon, combines the delightful musicality of nonsense with its play with the boundaries of logic. At the same time, this transformation of the wriggling girl into a wiggling eel harbors the underlying threat that the eel’s slipperiness will attract the appetites of other inhabitants of the deep blue sea, “the crab” and “the lobster,” who threaten to take “a nip” and “a clip” (ll. 16–17). Even worse: “And perhaps if a shark would come by in the dark, / Down his throat you might happen to slip, my dear, / Down his throat you might happen to slip” (ll. 18–20). Here, the delicious onomatopoeia of the word “slip” simultaneously evokes the ease and the abruptness with which the girl’s as well as the eel’s constant motion will be forcefully ended.
22In the last verse, however, the poem returns to the maternal and paternal struggles to contain the girl’s ceaseless activity. The speaker shifts from “I” (l. 2) to “we” (l. 23) to strengthen the authoritative appeals to the toddler to comply and sit still while also—nonsensically—deprecating any identification with the eel on the part of the little girl: “For we really don’t feel like inviting an eel / Our board and our lodging to share, my dear, / Our board and our lodging to share” (ll. 23–25). Gone is the fascinating soundscape of marine life, caught up in the frustrations of paternal responsibilities and the exhausting task of disciplining an active, unruly girlchild. Indeed, I want to suggest that it is the transformation and immersion into the nonsensical, attractive soundscape of an imaginary marine world that can redirect and channel not only a toddler’s hyperactivity but also a caretaker’s aggression into imaginative, sensual delight and, thus, into a form of order. As Gordon Ginzburg reminds us, even if the nursery is still often devalued as a sphere without “existential struggles” (“Edward Lear’s” 297), Richards’s nonsense poems provide important glimpses into child-mother relationships that Victorian ideology constructed in such positive terms as childhood “innocence,” “natural” maternal affection, and a national duty that, rather than being a burden involving discipline and punishment, was seen as ennobling to mothers and beneficial for the American nation.
23In “Wouldn’t” (Nursery 85) we encounter an even more “obstinate toddler” (Gordon Ginzburg, “Genre” 147) whose disobedience turns into veritable tyranny as the second verse shows:
She would n’t look over her picture-book!
She would n’t run out to help the cook!
She would n’t be petted or coaxed or teased,
And she would do exactly whatever she pleased. (ll. 5–8; emphasis in the original)
24The non-compliance of this naughty little girl brings the speakers—another parental “we”—to their wits end: “And pray what could we do with a girl like this?” (l. 12). This time, the answer does not lie in the temporary escape into a delightful nonsense universe where a wriggling girl-eel meets potentially hostile marine animals before stepping up parental authority; this time, salvation rather lies in nonsensical displacements. One such displacement concerns the use of the word “naughty,” which turns up in various definitions of the girl’s possessions—her “naughty bib,” her “naughty crib,” and her “naughty rice to eat!” (l. 1, 2, 9)—rather than directly defining the girl herself as naughty. Another nonsensical displacement occurs in the final verse. Here, the female toddler’s staunch resistance to all appeals for obedience appears to be met with admirable parental patience and affection—except for one moment: “And we kissed her and tossed her until she was fain / To promise she wouldn’t say ‘wouldn’t’ again” (ll. 15–16). Embedded in the parents’ model behavior is an image that forcefully stops the little girl’s unruliness, namely their tossing the culprit until she is “faint” rather than “fain to promise” obedience. This image ruptures persisting ideologies of affectionate mother-/parent-daughter relationships and, for a brief moment, lays open the otherwise latent horrors that also reside in the nursery and the education of presumably “innocent” girls.
- 6 The novel is told by three alternating homodiegetic, intradiegetic narrators: Aunt Lydia, who is th (...)
25In Atwood’s The Testaments (the sequel to her famous dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale published in 1985), nonsense makes an appearance not in the nursery but at school. Here, the “daughters” of the theocratic, authoritarian state of Gilead are taught by a group of women called the Aunts, who constitute the female ruling elite of Gilead’s “separate sphere—the sphere for women” (175). They are subordinate only to the state’s male ruling elite. Hence, when Agnes Jemima, one of the novel’s three homodiegetic female narrators, remembers various nonsense rhymes and singing games from her time at school, her perspective is that of a teenager who has imbibed and been socialized into Gilead’s ideology of separate spheres from early on.6 Not surprisingly, these nonsense rhymes, songs, and games cannot be confined to the domestic realm of women and children, nor can they be separated from the state’s ideology at large.
26According to Agnes Jemima, the childish verses, chants, and games that she looks back on conjoin “the sinister and the frivolous” (107). One of the girls’ counting rhymes, for example, interlinks womanly occupations, marriage, and—nonsensically, or seemingly so—a killed husband, who is immediately replaced by another: “Knit one, purl two, Here’s a husband just for you; Knit two, purl one, He got killed, here’s another one” (106; emphasis in the original). A husband who “got killed” raises further questions: Who or what killed him—an accident? the regime? his dissent? the knitter, i.e. the wife? the handmaid? the daughter? Likewise, the quick appearance of a substitute husband is baffling. Is such a quick replacement in keeping with Gilead’s religion, and are husbands so easily replaceable for a loving wife? Who selects the substitute husband—the widow? another woman? a priest? the state? Are husbands a commodity that can be picked up like the knits and purls of the rhyme? The paradoxical simultaneity of the everyday, marriage, and the violence of the killing is just as perplexing.
27Similar nonsensical puzzles inhere in the singing game “Hanging” that Agnes Jemima remembers:
Who’s that hanging on the Wall? Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
It’s a Handmaid, what’s she called? Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
She was (here we would put in the name of one of us), now she’s not. Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
She had a baby in the pot (here we would slap our little flat stomachs). Fee Fie Fiddle-Oh!
The girls would file under the uplifted hands of two other girls while everyone chanted: One for murder, Two for kissing, Three for a baby, Four gone missing, Five for alive and Six for dead, And Seven we caught you, Red Red Red! (Atwood, Testaments 106–107; emphasis in the original)
28The caught seventh girl, Agnes Jemima adds, was then slapped on her head in a symbolic enactment of her execution. While it is not clear what types of torture the final rhyme imitates, the characteristic “emotional detachment” (Gordon Ginzburg, “There Once Was” 178) of nonsense underscores the absurdity of little girls playing at the execution of a Handmaid (a woman designated by the state of Gilead to “breed” children). But even the initiated Agnes Jemima feels obliged to rationalize this particular game and, even more, its immense popularity among the preteen girls, and she adds apologetically: “[C]hildren will make games out of whatever is available to them” (Atwood, Testaments 107). Available for playful imitation in the state of Gilead are obviously murdered and substitute husbands, the torture of handmaids and their deaths by hanging, forced pregnancy in a forced marriage (indicated by their name change, e.g., from June to Offred, meaning the breeder “of Fred”), and, as Agnes Jemima muses, the nonsensical sequence of “one for murder” before “two for kissing.” Perhaps her comment is one possible answer to this enigma: Gilead’s violence against women just does not make any sense.
- 7 The following is an example of an official rhyme taught by the Aunts. Although less abrupt or disjo (...)
29While there appears to be little that is subversive in these nonsense games and songs, Agnes Jemima makes an important distinction between the school’s “official” and the “unofficial” education about “God and the special sphere of women” (106).7 The girls’ nonsense songs and games constitute the latter: an unofficial nonsense education that even if it does not make sense nevertheless passes on important knowledge about women’s lives and the power games of the theocratic state of Gilead. The Aunts evidently know about these unofficial educational scripts. Rather than forbid them, they allow them to circulate and use them as “a beneficial amount of warning and threat” (107) among Gilead’s youngest girls.
30Yet as Michel Foucault famously posited, “[w]here there is power, there is resistance” (95), also among the “daughters” of Atwood’s Gilead. While educated about their future womanly roles when taught about the proper table manners, food preparation, and meal prayers, they amuse themselves with the following “pretend prayer”:
Bless my overflowing cup,
It flowed upon the floor:
That’s because I threw it up,
Now Lord I’m back for more. (Atwood, Testaments 165; emphasis in the original)
31Like the twelve hanged maids in Atwood’s Penelopiad, the girls’ nonsense infiltrates the core of Gilead’s separate sphere with their mock prayer and vomit. Their nonsense is ‘revolting’ in a twofold sense: the girls intermingle their food—a “national scarcity” and “God’s bounty” (164) in Gilead—with their excretions, a repulsive act that directly infiltrates the state’s core ideology, i.e., its religion. The punch line leaves open whether the speaker of this nonsense prayer is back for more food and blessings, or whether she is back for more food and blessings in order to vomit them up again. Notably, however, Atwood uses one of the most powerful images of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), according to which “[i]n the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values [of the colonizers], insult them, and vomit them up” (43; emphasis added). In like manner, the girls’ unofficial nonsense mocks and vomits up Gilead’s central educational tenets and ideological values.
32Richards’s and Atwood’s shared passion for nonsense illuminates important formal and discursive aspects of nonsense as a literary genre, aesthetic experience, and a lived, embodied cultural practice across time and space. In the specific context of gender, sexuality, and the mis/education of young girls in North America, both authors emphasize the dual usage of nonsense, engaging in its disorderly and ordering formal aspects at the same time as they utilize its delightful and disturbing tendencies. It is notable, however, that although Richards’s nonsense poems deliberately violate grammatic and poetic conventions as well as Victorian notions of propriety such as “childhood innocence,” virtuous motherhood, and a female sphere devoid of violent conflicts, her verses also contribute—at times forcefully as “Belinda Blonde” shows—to affirming dominant values and norms. Atwood’s use of nonsense, furthermore, recovers its older roots of vulgarity and mockery with a vengeance. In her novels, she uses as well as displays nonsense as an instrument of power as well as a means of resistance, while also drawing attention to the double standard in literature and its criticism when it comes to questions of gender, genre, and the literary canon, a double standard that Richards’s poetry undermines in much more subtle ways.
33One of the perhaps most striking insights derived from the juxtaposition of Richards’s and Atwood’s literary nonsense is the violence that becomes visible in the mis/education of their young female protagonists. Both their literary nonsense discloses cultural spaces and practices permeated by different forms of gendered violence (e.g. physical, psychological, sexual, or epistemological). This does not mean that the young girls represented in their texts become pitiful, “innocent” victims. On the contrary, Richards’s as well as Atwood’s young girls are active, sexually curious, willful, and obstinate to the point of becoming little tyrants themselves or—if they belong to the powerless underclass—resorting to meaningful acts of resistance. Moreover, both women authors represent the girls’ childhood and socialization, including its violence, as deeply embodied experiences, which find their aesthetic expression in a nonsense that is not “sanitized or sterilized” (Gordon Ginzburg, “Edward Lear’s” 294). Indeed, Atwood’s nonsense consistently draws on an aesthetics of disgust and the abject in the girls’ attempts to exercise some agency and resistance; whereas Richards uses an aesthetics of disgust and the abject (e.g. in her representation of the phallic Jack-in-the-box) to drive home her moral message of young girls’ sexual purity and passivity. Clearly, and despite of Richards’s disclaimers, the significance of nonsense and its entanglements with ideology reach far beyond the circumference of the nursery and childhood.
34Hence, reading the two women authors’ literary nonsense alongside each other enables a recalibration of our reception of Richards and her works, especially regarding the spatial and discursive separation of the womanly sphere and subject matters from the “serious” realm and “high” art of “mankind.” Since Atwood’s novels and nonsense insist on the relevance of all sociocultural interactions and relationships for power and politics no matter how insignificant, or (sexually) intimate they might seem, it is high time that we begin taking Richards’s nonsense poetry seriously and place her into more conversations with authors whose works, like Atwood’s, are considered worthy of critical consideration and discussion, including their seemingly trite, playful nonsense.
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