Childhood and the Non-Human in Modern Scottish Novels

Abstract

This paper provides a postcolonial-ecocritical reading of Scottish
novelists Neil Gunnís ìThe Green Isle of the Great Deepî (1944)
and Sue Sextonís ìMavisís Shoesî (2011). It specifically focuses on
the representation of the concepts of childhood, identity and space
in the two novels as symbolized in the experiences of nine-year-old
Art in ìThe Green Isle of the Great Deepî and nine-year-old Lenny
in ìMavisís Shoesî. The paper argues that since ìMavisís Shoesî
and ìThe Green Isle of the Great Deepî represent the psycho-cultural,
environmental and social effects of the Clydebank Blitz and Nazi
violence against Scotland during the Second World War, they not
only question Scotlandís position as a distressed nation recovering
war traumas and mobilizing a palpable resistance against obvious
forms of colonial violence, but also explore the complicated, hierar-
chical relationship between human beings and authorities on the
one side and between human beings and nature on the other. This
paper examines Gunnís and Sextonís representations of the Nazi
violence and atrocities experienced by Scottish characters in the
selected novels. It argues that the two novels memorize the victims
and their personal sufferings as a shared memory resistant to erasure
and offer a public reading of Scotish national experience and of
changes under Nazi attacks. It argues further that although the two
novels deal with the Nazi violence differently as Sextonís narration
of Nazi attacks on Clydebank Blitz resonates with contemporary
participation of Scottish troops in wars on Iraq and Afghanistan while
Gunn uses myth to reflect on Scottish cultural identity under intense
forms of imperialist competition between the UK and Germany, the
two novelists articulate a particular awareness of the everlasting,
devastating effects of western imperialism on the environment and
human relations in modern Scotland.