Panopticon and Elf on the Shelf

Since I was a high school student, I have loved Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It spoke to me a in a way that was more real, more possible and more terrifying then George Orwell ever was. When I became an AP Lit teacher, it was one of the novels I was moved to teach.

One of the companion pieces I like to excerpt and teach is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. I have given the whole text before, but what is most compelling is from letter V when Bentham states:

You will please to observe, that though perhaps it is the most important point, that the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so...

. In other words, for the panopticon to work, a person need not always be watched, but the person should have a sense that they might always be watched.

There are many fascinating aspects of panopticon, but the most important, to me personally is that society is, in many ways, a giant version of one. What keeps most of us in check is not actually being observed, but the idea that we might be observed. (E. Lockheart uses this idea to great effect in her YA novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks).

Imagine my pleasure, then, to discover a fantastic article about how Elf on the Shelf is a twisted holiday/kid version of the panopticon at WaPo. Peter Holley examines Laura Pinto's paper on how Elf on the Shelf prepares kids for a surveillance state.

There is much to disagree with here. This may not be an obvious stretch if you are not a dystopian literature scholar or a reader of Jeremy Bentham. But it is provocative.

My friends with whom I've shared this point out that this is not the first weirdness of surveillance state apparatus in the Santa Industrial Complex..."He knows when you've been sleeping/He knows when you're awake/He knows when you've been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake." (And yes, I just wanted to write Santa Industrial Complex).