Will the Campaign Against the Word "Retarded" Make an Impact?: The Discomfiting Vision of Alice Munro's "Child's Play"

Recently, my friend Amy posted this and several other fliers being distributed by the Capital Area Downs Syndrome Association.  The fliers are obviously meant to raise awareness and also publicize the upcoming "Buddy Walk" in September to raise money to help local families who are raising children with Downs Syndrome. In a related incident, I noticed that Jane Lynch, or "Sue" from Glee was recently making a public service announcement comparing the use of the word "retarded" to an racial or ethnic slur. She quite rightly was trying to educate the community to dispense with lightly using a word that many of us feel is offensive and disparaging of those with cognitive differences, impairments, or whatever word it is we feel comfortable using now.  Ironically, in my historical work I have come across the word "retarded" quite frequently.  At the turn of the 20th century, the word meant that a child was behind in grade for any reason, that is, except for a cognitive impairment.  The more searing words then were "feeble-minded," "idiot," and "imbecile."  The word "retarded" did not carry a heavy weight.

This is a long introduction to my discussion of the extremely discomfiting story "Child's Play" by Alice Munro. I just recently read the prolific Canadian short story writer's book, Too Much Happiness, and to tell the truth there's not much happiness in this collection. This particular story grabbed my attention because it expresses a child's view of a mentally disabled girl with whom she is forced into contact when the girl named "Verna" moves into a house that is divided into two apartments.  Verna lives with her grandmother and is a few years older than Marlene, who is seven. The story is written retrospectively; the narrator is now a grown woman coming to terms with her past.  But she says about her first contact with Verna: "I had an aversion to her unlike anything I had felt up to that time for any other person." On telling her mother that she hates the girl, her mother responds: "How can you, what has she ever done to you?" and goes on, from time to time, trying to explain Verna to Marlene: "She is young for her age."  Marlene only notices Verna's strangeness: her inability to walk or talk properly, or to read and write.  The narrator explains: "Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable."  As the story goes on, Marlene's aversion to Verna only intensifies and she is encouraged in her antipathy by one of her peers at camp, who enthusiastically supports Marlene's twisted version of reality in which Verna "persecutes" Marlene, presumably because she dares occasionally to speak to her.

Children's monstrous conventionality, a natural condition of their stage of development, presumably makes them unable to embrace those who are different, who they imagine may be stigmatized by others, and whose acquaintanceship or friendship might put the social status of the "normal" child at risk.  Since one of my daughters is deaf, I have experienced this inexplicable aversion or distancing many times.   Children don't tend to "persecute" my daughter, and teachers have told me over and over that she is treated "just fine" by the other students.   But why did they never invite her to their birthday parties?  Why did she sit in a corner of the playground by herself?  Why was she victimized on the premises of the schoolyard by the older boys?  True, as a deaf child with some unique personality characteristics, she was "different."  But she was/is kind, funny, and very smart.  

What can we do to disrupt children's "monstrous conventionality"?  Can we really teach them to understand and embrace difference?  Munro implicitly raises this issue in her story, and I'm not sure that I know the answer to it.