SILENCING AND VOICE IN PHILIP PULLMAN’S NORTHERN LIGHTS
SILENCING AND VOICE IN PHILIP PULLMAN’S NORTHERN LIGHTS

Summary/Abstract: Children’s literature can be argued to expose its child readers and characters to certain norms because of its conventionally didactic quality, reverberation of adults’ nostalgic feelings, and tendency to create an image of the ideal child. This, however, creates a hierarchy between childhood and adulthood, rendering the child silent and passive both outside and inside the text. Published in 1995, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights destabilizes the hierarchy between adulthood and childhood, restructures archetypal renditions, and gives voice to the child that has been supressed in various ways in didactic children’s books. In this respect, this paper aims to analyse how such issues as silencing, voice, ideal child are employed in Pullman’s novel. It explores modern children’s fantasy as a fruitful ground not only for problematizing the hierarchies between binaries such as adult/child, adulthood/childhood, and maturity/immaturity but also for providing children with the voice and individuality they were deprived of in earlier examples of children’s literature.

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