Schoolgirl Fictions

by Valerie Walkerdine, Verso 1991, 216 pp., $22.50
Review by Gail M. Hilyer

"So they tell you that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and then, when you've clone it (got the job, become clever, got the 'things you wanted,' 'married the prince'), they tell you it's all bad" (p.172). This sentence says so much about this book and so much about its author's perception of life. The conflict of "class" and "clever" rages throughout Schoolgirl Fictions.

Walkerdine struggles to convince the reader, by the complexity of her written language, that she has "become clever" and, therefore, left "the very ordinariness of my past" (p.161). She often writes in obtuse academic language. Some of the work defied ail of this reviewer's efforts to engage with the content and/or to comprehend it at ail. Reading the book, with the intent of considering it as a textbook, was a discouraging process. Theories of gender-based differences in both learning and life experiences become lost in "clever" language and complex sentences.

The human story, however, is compelling. The safe world of the academic, from which the writer speaks early in the book, gives away to an intimate look at the person in Part III, "Working-Class Rooms." One is immediately struck by the conflict with which the author struggles: she writes about being ordinary and then clearly draws the framework that "To be clever is to be chosen" (p. 169).

Talented intellect and discipline are evident, Jet Walkerdine does not appear to be able to find the value of herself as woman and teacher, daughter and friend. Her roots are described as being of "supreme ordinariness" (p.161). She tries to tell a story that is different from her personal one through theory and analysis. In a most poignant paragraph, Walkerdine describes the wish of her working-class father that his daughter become a doctor. She speaks of taking her Ph.D. to his grave as a trophy - now a doctor, yes, but not one who could have cured him. She seems to say that she cannot move outside of her working class background and she cannot be comfortable as a gifted educator, given her background.

The material is filled with images well-known to us whose life experience covers the same decades ... images of the quiet and proper little girl who was a pleasure to her elementary school teachers, a restrained rebel in the 1950s and beyond, always looking for the reassurance that she has succeeded at something, wearing the coat of "special" with dignity and a sense of appropriateness. Walkerdine struggles to find the right in the dichotomy of Right and Left. She looks to authority to give power back and in the end breaks through the barrier of her language when she allows that we carry a "burden of pain" and that education has made "the ordinary girls of the fifties ... dangerous" (p. 170).

Her willingness to let us see the little girl still struggling to grow into her Ph.D. may be a sign that there is a beginning place of comfort for her, both within her working- class background and within the academic world that holds such importance for her in its applause. The value of this book lies Dot in its portrait of the one working-class woman who wrote it; it lies in the challenge to us who read it to learn and grow in understanding.

It would be wonderful to have traveled with the whole person throughout this text. Perhaps someday, someone will join her on her journey and write a diary for all of us to share.

Gail Hilyer is Dean of Instruction at Arctic College in the North West Territories. She has an Masters of Education from the University of Toronto and plans to continue work on a Doctorate as a retirement project.