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John Levi Martin: Department of Sociology University of Wisconsin, Madison "Party Simply, so that Others may Simply Party." |
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Data and programs getting page The John Levi Martin Company Story FreeCell Puzzles: A Tribute to EOW
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“In anthropomorphic picture books, species difference easily depicts disparities in size and therefore power; however, species difference also indicates class in more complex ways, especially in terms of cultural divisions of labor. John Levi Martin has examined animals as signifiers of class in his analysis of Richard Scarry's Busytown. Martin employs research from the fields of anthropology and psychology to demonstrate that children may be predisposed to "use the formal characteristics of the animal kingdom to develop the empirically valid sense of classification that can then be used to order the social world" (227). He then claims that "the content of that mapping is to some degree determined by the socialized form in which structured oppositions between animals are presented in literature, a form which bears the imprint not of the natural divisions between animals, but the naturalizing of the division of labor" (227). Martin's reading of Busytown as demonstrating that animal species work like an "objectively coded world of occupational stratification" (223) is applicable in the Mr. Lunch books and, arguably, very many children's texts in which animals stand in place of human subjects. For example, the dominance of the predatory lions, positioned at the top of the food chain, as a metaphor for political power is central to Disney's use of this brand of anthropomorphism in The Lion King. That Mr. Lunch occupies a midpoint in his world's class hierarchy necessarily has an impact upon the support he offers capitalist agendas. As Erik Olin Wright explains, managers like Mr. Lunch occupy "contradictory locations within class relations" (20, emphasis in the original) as a function of their position of authority and subsequent domination over the workers. This power is then weighed against the subordination of managers to CEOs. As Wright explains, he uses the term "contradictory" rather than "dual" "since the class interests embedded in managerial jobs combine the inherently antagonistic interests of capital and labor" (20). In this formulation Mr. Lunch occupies a contradictory (and ambiguous) position as both subject to and perpetrator of oppressive capitalist agendas. My claim here has two levels. The first is that the trope of the underdog is inherently contradictory in occupying both left and right manifestations. The second is that the trope brings those contradictions into the construction of Mr. Lunch as both oppressor and oppressed. These contradictions inevitably unsettle narratological political structures in the Mr. Lunch books in ways that challenge the overtly capitalist ideology propounded therein. This unsettling allows for a range of left-wing subtexts to inflect the stories.” -“The Appeal of the Underdog: Mr. Lunch and Left Politics as Entertainment.” Elizabeth Parsons. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 30.4 (2005) 354-367, p. 357f. JLM: Wright is wrong. Mr. Lunch is not a manager. He is a professional bird chaser. I would place him in the declining petit bourgeoisie associated with craft production. He has no advanced degree. |