‘What Will Sophie Mol Think?’: Thinking Critically about the Figure of the White Child in Arundhati Roy's the God of Small Things

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which discourses of whiteness and childhood intersect in Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things to position the Indian children in the novel in inferior relation to the figure of the white child. Drawing the novel into discussions of the ideal of the universal child that shapes hegemonic educational and international development responses to children, the author suggests that the discursive dominance of such a child figure is radically disempowering for the child who is not contained within its boundaries. In The God of Small Things the Indian twins' experiences of ontology are consistently rendered invalid and inauthentic by the spectre of the white child, who appears as their British cousin, Sophie Mol. The author argues that the figuration of the child in this novel highlights the ways in which the universalism of the white child can work to exclude childhoods that exist outside this normative position. At the same time as it draws out the politics of exclusion, the novel can be seen to posit an alternative way of performing/enacting childhood subjectivity, which allows for multiplicity and the privileging of difference.

Innocence, Protection and Failure: Bringing the Child Subject to the Centre of the Politics of the Family. A Response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson

“…Kerry Robinson (2008) argues that 'the child continues to be constituted as a "universal child" -a state of nature -in which understandings of what it means to be a child are viewed to be a shared "human" experience' (p. 115). This powerful discourse of the subject as shared across 'humanity' works to naturalise a white, middle-class, western subject position, to the exclusion of others (Castañeda, 2002;Hopkins, 2011). In drawing on Butler's notion of the imposition of the universal moral value on diverse cultural and social spaces as an act of violence, then, I situate my reading in terms of the doubleness of innocence as it works both to shape the child subject, and as a regulatory force that harnesses moral weight.…”