Victorian literacy advice has its own genealogy, which merits brief elaboration.
Images of the mother as teacher of literacy are ingrained in Christian social
history and Western thought. Raising children to participate in the literate
culture of Christianity was entwined with the role of the mother/Madonna as
nurturer. As Mace (1998) observed, “[I]n Christian morality, literacy
is something taught as precious, necessary and important”
(p. 175). Images
abound in the fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian Masters of the Madonna
reading to the Christ Child. We may recognize this iconic image of the Madonna,
reading to her son as she cradles him on his lap, in contemporary family literacy
images described in Chapter One. Manguel (1996) pointed out that in these medieval
family literacy images, we do not often see women or children writing. It was
the reading of “The Word”
that was important, and the remnants of
this message can be traced in contemporary family literacy advice which all
but ignores mothers and children as writers.
However, while patriarchal social systems in the West have historically promoted
women in the conflated roles of nurturing and teaching children, these discourses
were equally distrustful of the impact literacy could have on the “purity”
of both the Word and of women as suitable wives and mothers. Manguel (1996),
cited in Mace (1998), observed that “traditionally, in Christian iconography,
the book or scroll belonged to the male deity, to either God the Father or triumphant
Christ, the new Adam, in whose name the word was made flesh”
(Mace, 1998,
p. 175). It was not until the Fourteenth Century, according to Manguel, that
the Madonna was portrayed as literate and able to pass literacy on to her son
(or as Mace, (1998), wondered, perhaps she is learning literacy from her Son?).
This suggested the occupation of a conflicted space for the Christian Medieval
mother. It was important that she be literate enough to raise children as faithful
subjects of the Church (and hence able to read the Bible) but not to use literacy
practices to pursue or claim knowledge for herself. It is the association of
these idealized maternal images with literacy that has provided Western culture
with an early vocabulary for articulating ideal family literacy practices.5 Indeed,
in the conflation of mothering with womanhood, there is little sense in contemporary
or archaic images of family literacy that women’s literacy practices could
be distinct from their mothering roles.
5 Such are the associations among Christian ideals of literacy and the mother
as nurturer that Thurer (1994) speculates that Mother Goose, the fabled transmitter
of the stories of Western culture, is derived from the image of the Virgin Mary,
or her mother, St. Anne. She writes, “[This] lovely image of a seated,
benign maternal figure reading to children grouped at her feet took on a life
of its own in the eighteenth century persona of Mother Goose. Somehow, the popular
collection of fairy tales by the previous century’s Charles Perrault came
to be ascribed to this saintly figure….While we do not know Mother Goose’s
precise identity, we may reasonably speculate that she is a variant of the Virgin
Mary (or, more likely, Mary’s mother, St. Anne), yet another sacrificial
mother figure”
(Thurer, 1994, p.194-195). Other historians attribute the
identity of Mother Goose to Charlemagne’s mother, Queen Bertha of France,
who died in 773. According to one version of this theory, “Bertha was
supposedly called ‘Goose Footed Bertha’ because her feet reminded
her subjects of those of a goose. She is portrayed in French legends sitting
at a spinning wheel telling stories to children as she spun”
(Nana’s
pages, 2004).