Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in A. L. Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781)

In this article I explore the possibility of a dialogue between cultural studies and cognitive science by proposing a ‘‘cognitive’’ reading of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s  book Hymns in Prose for Children. Literary critics have pointed out that the tacitly catechistic mode of Barbauld’s Hymns implicates it in the eighteenth-century ideological project of socializing children, particularly those coming from working-class families, to their proper stations in life. I investigate possible cognitive underpinnings of one particular aspect of Barbauld’s ‘‘catechist,’’ namely its reliance on a functional approach to human beings (i.e., ‘‘children are made to praise God whomade them’’). I argue that, to get an integrated account of the rhetorical appeal and the ideological potential of such a functional approach, we should inquire into the ways it mobilizes the contingencies of our evolved cognitive architecture involved in our differentiation between natural kinds and artifacts. Dr. Johnson did not approve of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s writings for children, less on account of his general dislike for people who wrote for ‘‘infants’’ than because he regretted her ‘‘voluntary descent frompossible splendor to painful duty’’ (quoted in Ellis : ). As awell-educated, promising young author, she should have chosen a worthier field for her creative enI am grateful to Robert Markley, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Jay Stemmle, and Meir Sternberg for commenting on earlier versions of this essay. The mistakes contained in this essay are all mine, and the above scholars do not necessarily subscribe to the ideas I develop here. Poetics Today : (Spring ). Copyright ©  by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. 124 Poetics Today 23:1 deavors, or as Johnson put it after reading the  installment of herLessons for Children:1 Miss Aikin [A. L. Barbauld’s maiden name] was an instance of early cultivation, but in what did it terminate? In marrying a little Presbyterian parson, who keeps an infant boarding-school, so that all her employment now is ‘‘to suckle fools, and chronicle small beer.’’ She tells the children, ‘‘This is a cat, and this is a dog, with four legs and a tail; see there! You are much better than a cat or a dog, for you can speak.’’ (Quoted in Boswell  []: –) Johnson refers here to A. L. Aikin marrying in  the Reverend Rochemont Barbauld and moving with him to a small Dissenting congregation at Palgrave (Suffolk), where they managed a boarding school for boys. He goes on to imagine his chagrin had his (hypothetical) daughter thought of marrying ‘‘such a fellow’’ after receiving ‘‘such an education.’’ Miss Aikin’s intellectually degrading marriage seems to account for her attenuated literary ambitions. Several of Dr. Johnson’s friends (including Charles Burney and his daughter Frances) considered this comment unjust. Barbauld herself seemed unperturbed by criticism and in  published her next book dedicated to the religious education of young children, Hymns in Prose for Children, which contains passages much like those that had irked Dr. Johnson in her Lessons. Referring to ‘‘young animals of every kind,’’ she notes that they ‘‘may thank [God] in their hearts, but we can thank Him with our tongues; we are better than they, and can praise Him better’’ (Barbauld  []: , emphasis added). The birds ‘‘can warble,’’ she goes on, ‘‘and the young lambs can bleat, but we can open our lips in His praise, we can speak of all His goodness’’ (ibid.). The observations on the hierarchy of living things (warbling and bleating beasts versus articulate humans) that Barbauld stubbornly made in book after book and that Dr. Johnson thought the epitome of triteness have become a subject of renewed critical attention in recent years. Far from dismissing such observations as a sad symptomof awriter’s intellectual inertia, scholars of eighteenth-century culture increasingly view them as complexly implicated in what Isaac Kramnick (: ) broadly characterizes as the period’s project of ‘‘socializing’’ children to the ideological creed of bourgeois society.2 Alan Richardson () points out that the dialogic structure . Lessons for Children came out in several installments: Lessons for Children of Two to Three Years Old and Lessons for Children of Three Years Old (), Lessons for Children from Three to Four Years Old (), Lessons for Children part  (), and Lessons for Children part  (). . See Alan Richardson :  for a critique of Kramnick’s vision of the unified bourgeois ideology. Zunshine • Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in A. L. Barbauld 125 ofHymns and the fixed character of the provided answers, for example, ‘‘But who is the shepherd’s Shepherd? who taketh care for him? . . . God is the shepherd’s Shepherd . . . he taketh care for all,’’ in fact align the book with eighteenth-century catechistic discourses (Barbauld  []: ). The catechistic teaching method, with its stress on the ‘‘mechanical production of set answers, obedient behavior within the educational setting, and (for the lower classes) passive literacy,’’ engendered a system of education that remained a ‘‘means of maintaining class distinction rather than facilitating social mobility’’ (Richardson : ; –). Indeed Barbauld’s ( []: , ) elegant rhetorical closures neatly translate into the hegemonic ones: ‘‘The father, the mother, and the children make a family; the father is the master thereof. . . . Many towns, and a large extent of country, make a kingdom . . . a king is the ruler thereof.’’ One unexpected effect of situating Barbauld’s Hymns within the eighteenth-century catechistic tradition is that it nudges scholars toward a fresh assessment of the rhetorical undercurrents of the deceptively smooth surface of Barbauld’s narrative, an analysis that until recently seemed almost pointless. Barbauld’s reliance on common biblical imagery prompted some critics to call her scriptural emblems ‘‘conventional, explicated, and as familiar as the iconography of the cross’’ (Summerfield : ). Coupled with what Dr. Johnson saw as a dumbed-down style of writing, the conventionality of Barbauld’s iconography appeared to hold no surprises for students of eighteenth-century prose. I suggest, however, that the rhetorical appeal of Hymns resides not in the originality of its scriptural images (the originality that her intended three-to-five-year-old readers could hardly appreciate) but in thewayBarbauld selects and juxtaposes the hymns, complementing and legitimatizing the ideological coercion implied by the book’s catechistic structure. With its series of leading questions and undeviating answers, the catechism seems to circumscribe intellectual (and ultimately political) initiative, indeed, to define what constitutes an acceptable initiative. So does Barbauld’s framing of particular biblical images, though in a much more subtle and practically imperceptible way. In what follows I argue that, by deploying a conceptual framework made available by recent theoretical breakthroughs in cognitive anthropology, we can get amore nuanced perspective of Barbauld’s rhetorical engineering. I particularly consider the keymessage of the first part of herHymns—‘‘Man ismade to praise the God who made him’’—and examine possible cognitive underpinnings of such a functional approach to human beings (Barbauld  []: ).3 . By referring to cognitive anthropologists and psychologists as a cohesive group, I dramatically downplay of course the fact that scholars working in the field of cognitive studies represent a broad variety of paradigms and frequently disagree with each other. 126 Poetics Today 23:1 Before I proceed with my argument, however, I want to point out what, inmy opinion, is at stake in investigating the cognitive aspects of theHymns. It is my general contention that a cognitive approach can be useful in our analysis of ideologically charged cultural representations because part of the appeal of such representations comes from their ability to tap into certain cognitive contingencies that arise from the constant interplay between the human brain and its environment. As an effort to influence human beings, ideology will always be attuned to the intricacies of human cognition, and because of this the exploration of our cognitive makeup becomes increasingly important for scholars invested in cultural studies. Once literary critics, such as Richardson, have identified Barbauld’s Hymns as participating in the eighteenth-century project of socializing children to their ‘‘proper’’ stations in life, we should move further and analyze the cognitive dimension of the ideological stance of her book. Barbauld’s ( []: –) book opens with the following paraphrase of the first chapter of Genesis: Come, let us praise God, for He is exceeding great. . . . He made all things; the sun to rule the day, themoon to shine by night. Hemade the great whale, and the elephant; and the little worm that crawleth on the ground. The little birds sing praises to God, when they warble sweetly in the green shade. The brooks and rivers praise God, when they murmur melodiously amongst the green pebbles. I will praise God with my voice; for I may praise Him, though I am but a