According to Phillips and Jorgenson (2002), “the strategy of multi-vocality
consists of the delineation of different voices or discursive logics within
a text”
(p. 151). The strategy of multi-vocality brings out for analysis
the links between inter-textual conversations and discourse formations, but
also, importantly, changes in discourse formations.
A multi-vocal strategy asks of texts: Who are the different voices in the
text? What characterizes these voices? What meanings do these voices bring to
the text? How do these voices and silences shape the discourse? This strategy
is particularly fitting in the analysis of parenting advice texts. As Mills
(1997) pointed out, because advice texts for parents are meant to advocate particular
practices, we can assume they are, at least in part, written in response to
a perception or a reality that parents do not conform to these practices. These
parents constitute a “voice”
that shapes literacy advice
discourses, even when they do not dominate it. For example, a common statement
of literacy advice is “[i]t is important to make quality time to read
to your children everyday. It only takes fifteen minutes of your time for an
impact that will last a life time”
(Trelease, 1982, p. 34). Parents
who do not or cannot make time to read to their kids shape advice that emphasizes
“how little time it takes,”
thus introducing a discursive
conflict in the ideal that home storybook reading is a natural part of everyday
life, embedded in domestic routines.
This attention to “official” but also implicit voices within and between texts, and their clashes and contradictions, is central to understanding the ways in which discourses construct ideal mothers and ideal literacy practices but also how discourses are mediated and changed through everyday mothering and literacy practices. However, in practice, analysing texts from a multi-vocal perspective proved much easier when I was working with contemporary advice texts and could draw on my experience of the daily tensions and practices surrounding mothering and literacy in playgrounds, daycares, schools, newspapers, and various other social and political dialogues. Without this contextual knowledge, it was much more difficult to attend to mothers as embodied subjects and to the inter-textual relationships in advice texts of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. To compensate for this it was necessary, as Foucault observed (1977, 1984), to read deeply and broadly across a range of texts to appreciate the place of advice in the lives of mothers who were the intended audience, and of those who were not. While other forms of knowledge such as empathy and sympathy also shaped this analysis, my interpretations were nevertheless limited to the analysis of the texts that I did include and to the forms of knowledge that textual analyses can contribute. Indeed, as Mechling (1975) reminded historians, advice texts say much more about the literacy ideals of the society that produced advice texts than of the literacy practices of the women, men, and children who were the explicit and implicit audiences for these texts. This point is elaborated later in this chapter.