Читать книгу The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children - Группа авторов - Страница 8
ОглавлениеSimon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie
The linkage between children and horror, or ‘horror-full’ children, would seem an almost natural connection to make given its popularity in contemporary horror films and novels. However, the intersection between the two categories has a long history going back beyond the more obvious Gothic reimaginings of the nineteenth century with its underage ghostly terrors revealing that the idea of the ‘little horror’ is seemingly an inherent demarcation within society between adults and those that are viewed as ‘not adults’. Beginning from the sixteenth century, this collection will consider examples of description and interpretation of little horrors from real life and popular culture to show the construction and consolidation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child which views it as being monstrous, dangerous and just plain evil.
Horror films, literature, games and graphic novels abound with evil babies, children and adolescents, so much so that Steven Bruhm notes, ‘These days, when you leave the theatre after a fright-movie you can’t go home again […] because you’re afraid that your child will kill you.’1 While this is about twenty-first century horror film, it rather fittingly captures something of the otherness of children even in an age when the ‘rights’ of the child are, arguably, more defined and children themselves more protected, recognized and listened to than in any other historical period. Somewhat contrarily, it seems that although the child and the associated categories of ‘youth’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘young adult’ are ever more controlled and provided with more scope for agency and self-determination in society, popular culture often sees them constructed as being ‘quintessentially inimical to the adult and adulthood, [signifying] “alien” and “absolute separateness”’.2 This obviously relates to more sensational expressions of youth in popular culture, particularly the horror, Gothic and fantasy genres, but all of which can be seen to be the expression of a deeper cultural anxiety around children, their place in our current historical moment and what kind of future they might embody. But it also points to a certain ambiguity and liminality within the construction of the child as a nexus of many conflicting terms and ideals imposed upon it by adults, from an idyllic (nostalgic) innocence to be cherished and protected to a manipulative, consuming predator to be exploited and broken.
The ongoing ambiguity in the attempts to define and regulate the child is partly seen in what might be termed the medicalization of the child’s body in terms of biological and mental growth and educational and development goals. Yet even this does not collapse the all-enveloping air of an unregulatable designation as the age one stops being considered a child is continually being reassessed with more recent studies identifying the upper limit as being 24 or even 29 years.3 The resultant anxiety caused by this resistance to categorization is, in part, due to the problem of trying to fit the child, and more specifically the problematic child, in a world meant for adults. Here, the youth or adolescent is defined by the qualities that make a ‘non-adult’, with the latter being the signifier of prudence, responsibility and accountability, that is, legal signifiers of being part of society (within patriarchy, part of the society of men). Consequently, childhood, and even more so adolescence, is a liminal space where the occupants are on their way to being adults – some closer than others at least age-wise – and so attempt to occupy both categories; they look and act like an adult but are not legally accountable in the same way. In a sense they are figures, ‘blanks’, as James Kincaid calls them, that are haunted by the adults they will become; at times innocent, inexperienced and naive and at others possessed, manipulated and traumatized.4
The child then becomes a nexus of positivity and hope but equally one of negativity and danger; the embrace of a past that will never grow old and a future that will destroy and consume the old. This makes them prime material within the popular imagination to be configured as problematic, naughty, deceitful and/or the agents of darker forces. While the cultural imagination is most likely to express itself via cultural artefacts such as film, novels and so on, it can also apply to real world, therapeutic and legal, often reinforcing the same tropes and revealing how much such associations have become entrenched in Western, and indeed other, societies. More interestingly, as seen in some examples given in this collection, specifically from sixteenth-century England, this has occurred in societies before the idea of children as a separate category was largely conceived. While class and/or wealth has always played a large part in the upbringing of those not old enough to be considered adults, children were generally allowed (forced) to work as soon as they were physically able to. However, from the 1800s, something of this began to change, and as noted by the historian Phillipe Aries, ‘youth [was] the privileged age of the 17th century, childhood of the 19th, adolescence of the twentieth’.5 Even as more categories of not-adults came into focus, the more anomalous members of that designation concentrated the anxieties felt by wider society over how to handle these others in their midst, unsurprisingly seeing them become central characters within contemporaneous popular culture, whether it be folklore, urban myth, novels or cinema. In the light of this, it is unsurprising that with the rise of popular fiction in the nineteenth century children have become increasingly important elements of more sensational stories. It should be noted here that this collection will largely consider examples that feature children as central protagonists rather than works or texts that are produced by children or specifically for children, mainly because the anxieties of a given group or society are more clearly seen in cultural productions about the focus/object of those insecurities than in the works/texts produced by or for those that cause said anxieties.
This process then reveals how the stereotypes associated with troublesome or anomalous youth and the cultural anxiety they produce not only find expression through literature and film but in the interpretation and understanding of everyday situations that centre on children and problematic or unexplainable (supernatural) situations that they find themselves associated with. This might sound like a statement more applicable to the sixteenth century than the twenty-first, but the connection between adolescents and online creepypasta phenomena, such as the Slender Man,6 seems not dissimilar to children communing with spirits in Elizabethan England. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, it is the driving impetus of this collection to show how the construction and representation of the monstrous child at the start of the twenty-first century, while being specific to our times and culture, has not been created from an historical vacuum, but is built upon a long history of generational stereotyping. This actually posits the anomalous child as an almost transhistorical manifestation whose core characteristics remain fixed with only the superficial details provided by particular cultural moments suggesting they are different. This is quite clearly revealed by the interdisciplinary nature of this collection where historical and contemporary studies centred on sociology, anthropology, psychology and media studies all demonstrate the intersection of children and horror/monstrosity.
1. The Anomalous Child
In considering anomalous youth, it is worth looking more closely at the idea of the child and why it might have been a category especially open to being viewed as different or monstrous in some way. The nineteenth century in general and the Victorian period in particular are often cited as being the period when childhood became a more clearly defined stage of the human life cycle. Before then, as observed by Margarita Georgieva, ‘child’ could denote many things that were largely separate from physical age, such as ‘persons of unstable perception and understanding’, those ‘lacking of affective maturity […] vulnerable or helpless […] under legal guardianship […] [or] parental will’.7 Equally, a child is one who is innocent, lacking knowledge, has a potential for development and is intellectually pliable.8 One’s sexual maturity and/or ability to work does not always affect this categorization, and Thomas Rutherforth went as far to claim, in 1754, that childhood lasts until someone’s parents are no longer alive.9 The notions of innocence, vulnerability and lack of knowledge – not to be confused with guile or the ability to deceive – grouped those considered as children alongside women, the mentally impaired and outsiders in general, all considered as other to the society of adult white males. Consequently, the child was viewed as a point of potential societal weakness and pollution10 and open to outside influence and moral corruption.
In many ways the Victorian period focused this otherness more tightly, just as it increasingly defined the child and its place under the intellectual and moral stewardship of adults. With increased industrialization the use of children in factories also grew as families moved from the countryside to the cities for work. While the moves to regulate this and protect the young from the unacceptable working conditions is seen as a largely philanthropic endeavour initiated by certain wealthy individuals such as John Fielden and Lord Ashley, the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, it can equally be seen as a way to separate and control a part of society. Thus, while such protection can be viewed in terms of preventing exploitation (psychologically, physically and sexually) by outside forces, it also becomes a way of enforcing controls and conditions upon humans of a certain age group or maturation whether they want them or not. Alongside this, the prioritization of parental control over the agency of the individual child allows for the society of adults to project their hopes, desires and anxieties upon the ideological body of the young. Nostalgia forms much of this projection and is very much seen in the work of the golden age of children’s literature and authors such as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling (and the slightly later J. M. Barrie) highlighting how the category of the child is not one that is defined by those that are actually contained within it, but by those who impose ideals upon them. This, of course, is not just in terms of social position, but also in regard to sexuality and the sexualization of children. As noted in the work of James Kincaid, the child on the cusp of puberty becomes the figure upon which patriarchal society could project all its repressed sexual desires and fantasies. Simultaneously, as Andrew O’Malley observes regarding Victorian society:
If the ideal figure of the age was the productive, moral, self-disciplined, healthy, male adult governed by the faculty of reason, the child came to be viewed in many regards as its opposite.11
Here the child, whether male or female, embodied everything that the adult male was not. In this way, childhood, as previously mentioned, becomes an ambivalent category, supposedly embodying all that is ‘good’ in a society, while also simultaneously becoming a dark mirror, revealing what is purposely kept secret. From this, Kincaid sees the child as an unformed or undecided individual, inevitably becoming radically ambivalent, even dangerous, and whose socialization becomes ever more imperative, not only for its own safety, but for society at large. Simultaneously then, what is represented as a means of protection for a nation’s most valuable asset can also be seen as a way of maintaining a culture’s universal sense of self-innocence and goodness above and beyond an individual’s personal choice (gender/ethnicity/geography). This has further wide-ranging implications for the way in which other categories are increasingly defined and controlled through the ways in which they are allowed to interact with and influence the child. Consequently, the protection of the child can also be a way to influence and regulate certain categories of adults, parents, businesses and even politico-legal systems in the kinds of relationships – emotional, physical and economical – that they are allowed to engage in with children.
Following on from this, the child is simultaneously the repository of all society holds dear about itself and something which is at once unrestrained and monstrous – not totally removed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s nature child12 – not to be loved and cherished but feared and expelled. One could infer a psychoanalytical interpretation to this where the child becomes something of a receptacle of societal repression. Indeed, Jacqueline Rose, in the middle of the twentieth century, leans towards such a reading via Sigmund Freud, but one where the child’s own sexual development points to a questioning of its own origins (‘where did I come from?’) and its identity (rather loosely read as ‘sexual orientation’ as to whether it is male or female).13 However, she sees this process as one of reflection rather than projection, and so the indeterminacy within the state of the child mirrors that of the adult audience considering it as opposed to being a means of eventual reintegration into the social body.14 Kincaid’s view of the child as ‘hollow’ and as a ‘receptacle waiting to be filled’15 comes closer to capturing the forces at play in this process explaining social constructions of youth. Within this, whether configured as supernatural or just plain wicked, the child becomes a liminal being, caught outside of normalized categorization; not mature, not socialized, not wholly accepted, not recognized as autonomous, not under the rule of law and not conforming to adult nostalgia and idealism over what they should be.16 The Victorian period, in particular, defined a view of the prepubescent child that was simultaneously nostalgic and savage; a time of unparalleled freedom, but also one in which the child had to be quickly socialized to be able to enter the adult world. Consequently, childhood becomes a site of the ongoing tensions between cultural ideals and collective guilt and repression, producing a fetishized body intimating social anxiety and what the future might hold if such hidden desires become manifest.
In this way it is possible to see that the more the category of the child is defined and controlled, the more strongly it represents cultural anxieties, however contradictory they might be. This is brought into a very specific focus at the start of the twenty-first century where childhood is believed to be an almost sacrosanct stage of life embodying all that is good and hopeful in a society that largely sees itself as corrupt and/or trapped in ultimately meaningless lives. Simultaneously, however, and more so within capitalism, children are a resource and a commodity to be exploited and often manipulated, sexualized and abused. Commenting on this, David Buckingham observes that not all aspects of this are necessarily negative: ‘Commercialization is seen to cause harm to many aspects of children’s physical and mental health, as well as generating concerns about issues such as “sexualisation” and “materialism”’,17 but, he continues, ‘the media seem to have erased the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, and hence to have undermined the authority of adults,’ where ‘children’s expertise with technology gives them access to new forms of culture and communication that largely escape parental control’.18 Indeed, new technology and communications is a particular point of anxiety allowing children far greater autonomy, ‘opportunities for creativity and self-determinism’,19 but often in areas that are viewed as unregulated or uncontrolled. As pointed out by Bex Lewix, the idea of ‘risk’ has largely been part of childhood and growing up, but this same risk, in the twenty-first century, is seen as unacceptable and to be avoided at all costs.20 In this sense, the conditions that created the forms of otherness that once kept the young in check now become the ones which allow it to exceed and evade regulation. This goes in the face of global organizations such as UNICEF and Save the Children who promote the sanctity of childhood as a fundamental human right and enforcing innocence on those in cultures that do not necessarily want it. Indeed, oftentimes, popular culture, empirical and sociological data, and even ecological survival intimate something else. Here children are not necessarily configured as the wealth of the family and the community but can be seen as a luxury or even an economic and environmental burden; no longer the bearers of the future, but a never-ending death knell for the world as we know it. This begins to delineate the dichotomies and oppositional tensions within the idea of childhood and adolescence in the twenty-first century where adults not only fear the transitional nature of youth, but also of humanity itself. It is a development that is inherently anxiety inducing as it can never offer a reproduction of what has gone before but is a new creation made to continue without the adults of today.
2. The Anomalous Body of the Child
The idea of the child, and more specifically the body of the child, as a transitional subject is of key importance here as is the way it further resonates with instability, liminality and becoming. All of these can be seen to inform the idea of the body’s Gothicization, that is, its ability to become something other than what it seems to be, to become the body of the other. In terms of the child, this is interesting as youth is often utilized to bring the family together (paternal and maternal (domestic Gothic));21 yet it also contains the notion of change and/or transcendence. It is a body in turmoil, starting as one thing but in a state of flux as it moves on to become something else. Kelly Hurley, speaking of the performative qualities of bodies within the Gothic genre, specifically the revival of the late eighteenth century going into the nineteenth, describes them as ‘abhuman’ and specifically where ‘abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other’.22 Here it is possible to replace ‘human’ with ‘adult’, and indeed ‘adult male’, as that would be considered the essential example of what constitutes normative mankind. As such then abnormal can speak of the body that is not quite adult and is constantly on the verge of change. Hurley further explains the term where ‘the prefix “ab-” signals a movement away from a site or condition, and thus a loss. But […] is also a move towards […] a site a site or condition as yet unspecified – and thus entails both a threat and a promise’.23 Again this can be read as the child’s body (virtually of any age that is not considered adult) that moves away from the adult body and towards something other, an other that is inherently anxiety inducing.
While Hurley very much sees such a definition in terms of Gothic fiction and its legacy, examples such as John Starkey from the late sixteenth century, as seen in this collection, show how historical accounts use similar language and establish stereotypes that have then inherently adhered to problematic or ‘naughty’ children. In relation to this, it is worth noting that Hurley sees the transformative qualities of the abhuman body in often almost supernatural terms where the subject, in Gothic texts, is often one that sometimes becomes something monstrous, such as a vampire or werewolf. This is a supernatural transformation that resonates with the kinds of human becomings laid out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, where vampires, wolves, magic and the supernatural describe more the human and subjectivities other than those offered by ‘mankind’.24 In the light of this, it is maybe not surprising that the supernatural, or at least the cloak of it, hangs around examples of the abhuman body of the child. Consequently, many of its problematic, anomalous qualities/gifts – bad or transgressive behaviour, violence, deceitfulness – are designated as being supernatural, evil or alien (not of this world) in nature.
The Gothic and the abhuman become very useful terms to describe the anomalous body of the various stages of not-adult in this collection, from the very young to those on the cusp of adulthood and/or sexual maturity. In fact, one could argue that the category covers all those that are ‘not yet’ adult no matter what their age – this is distinguished from those who are ‘no longer’ adult which could conceivably be applied to those no longer in command of their bodies or entering a ‘second’ childhood – and this collection leans towards that homogeneous reading, partly due to the limited size of the current volume. It is also worth mentioning that the anomalous, abhuman child’s body does also suggest elements of queerness in its configuration many of which will become apparent in the examples discussed in the book.
That said, sexual maturity and gender are featured within this application of the abhuman as an instigator or catalyst for anxiety in the social milieu around the child – something that is often imposed upon the anomalous body rather than a quality inherent to it. This can take the form of physical or psychic monstrosity caused by a form of becoming-womanhood but can equally signal a marked move away from masculinity and femininity into a queerness beyond gender categorization. This last is often configured as the child moving into a form of otherness that will never mature into an adult, a defined sexual orientation or gender categorization and remaining essentially ‘other’, or queer, forever, essentially exacerbating its propensity to be used as a site of adult projection and desire. As such, the child is sexually blank, queer, until adult fantasies are protected upon it. This queerness does not feature in many of the examples in this collection but is rather superseded by their anomalous state of otherness, the kind of monstrosity which is equally designated by adult society and similarly filled with its anxieties and, often transgressive, desires. Queer, as non-normative, is then an inherent part of the character of the abhuman child as are terms such as the abject, deviant, anomalous and even naughty as all of them describe a body that refuses to become adult, or even mature, under anything other than its own terms.
3. Anomalous Investigations
The chapters in this collection will be divided into four parts, with the middle two being two parts of a whole for reasons explained here. The division of the sections will largely follow the order established earlier with historical case studies at the beginning to set the stage for what is to follow. These precursors of the establishment of the category of childhood show societies trying to contain and control situations, and specifically ‘non-adults’, that they do not totally comprehend and so apply the default categories of their respective times. Consequently, this is rarely configured as simple bad behaviour or not following the rules as laid down by the adult population around them, although these features are inevitably involved, but are often explained through an association with dark, necessarily evil, forces. This creates an aura around all of them which sees them as equally vulnerable and contagious; a weak point open to the temptations of Satan and the supernatural but one that might also allow the evil to spread further and ‘infect’ others.25 Alongside this and as the occurrences that happened during the nineteenth century, there are attempts to temper such superstitious interpretations with more rational explanations, either via the law and legal judgement or the budding science of psychology and analysis. However, as described later, reason has similar recourse to stereotypical language of the dangerous, deranged or just plain ‘naughty’, who are equally monstrous and estranged from adult society. The first part, ‘Historical Case Studies’, consists of four chapters that cover this change from overly demonic interpretations to those that attempt to apply reason and science yet fall into very similar traps of monsterizing the child.
‘The Possession of John Starkie’ by Joyce Froome investigates the 1595 case of Nicholas Starkie and his children, John and Anne. Starkie was a wealthy man and when his children fell ill, he employed the services of Edmund Hartlay to help make them better. However, on spotting a way to ingratiate himself into the Starkie household, and make a considerable amount of money, Hartlay produced such conditions that Nicholas came to regard his son’s perfectly normal misbehaviour as something deeply sinister. At the heart of this matter is the purposely skewed interpretation of John’s behaviour, and rather than seeing it simply as a child ‘playing up’, it was given a far more ominous meaning – one which was in line with the anxieties of the society of the time. The 1590s were still a time of religious tension in England and had begun with the most notorious witch trial of the times – the ‘Witches of Warboys’. Here the 10-year-old daughter of Robert Throckmorton, the Squire of Warboys, accused the 76-year-old Alice Samuel of being a witch and causing the fits from which she suffered. In 1593, Alice and her family, a husband and daughter, were found guilty of witchcraft and were later hanged.26 The Starkie case plays directly into this rising fear of witchcraft, one that would see the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1604. So rather than searching further for the real reasons for John and Anne’s anomalous behaviour, necromancy provided a more ‘obvious’ answer.
This is followed by Renaud Evrard’s ‘The Naughty Little Children: The Paranormal and Teenagers’ which shows how these same tropes work in the mid-nineteenth century and the ways in which societal development actually reinforces certain themes rather than diminishing them. The Victorian period was particularly ripe for cementing the bonds between children and the supernatural, as the author observes:
At the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emerging field of psychology developed critical tools to explain somnambulistic states, behavioural automatisms and double consciousness. Several psychopathologists relied on teenagers to demonstrate the mechanisms behind the occult and the dangers it represents.27
Evrard’s study deals with the case of Jeanne, a teenage girl from France, who was at the centre of a series of disturbances in a dwelling in the South of the country. The interpretations of the events that ensued are particularly interesting as they provide both scientific and paranormal explanations for the same phenomena. Jeanne was simultaneously seen as a hysteric, a gifted medium, the victim of an evil curse or a spoilt brat looking for attention. What they all have in common, of course, is that they portray the adolescent as something ‘other’ than normal; the levels of monstrosity involved might vary, but Jeanne is someone, or something, that needs to be controlled. Again, this shows how these various threads of the supernatural, cultural environment, science and medicine not only intersect at various points in time but become entangled so that the connections made at that nexus reverberate long after the original encounter.
Leo Ruickbie’s ‘I Was a Real Teenage Werewolf: The Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trial of Jean Grenier’ continues and develops the themes of cultural environment and individual agency. Jean Grenier was a teenage boy who confessed to being a werewolf and was subsequently imprisoned for life, actually a rather lenient sentence given the times. Convicted of witchcraft, murder and cannibalism, he can equally be seen, Ruickbie notes, as
a pubescent boy, mentally disabled, psychologically troubled, in a distressed condition, cast out from a broken home to fend for himself, with a difficult relationship with his father (to say the least), with unfulfilled romantic longings and a fantasy life that he could not distinguish from reality.28
Unusually, Grenier continually confessed his own guilt, but in so doing he took some measure of agency over the situation unfolding around him. Unfortunately, in taking control of the narrative that the society around him was writing, he can be seen to have lost any sense of what was real or fictitious, and therefore, only reinforced the trope of childhood monstrosity that was placed upon him. Equally interesting here is the fact that many of the accusations were made by other children, not unlike that seen in the Starkie case and the Witches of Warboys mentioned earlier. Children ‘outing’ other children as monsters is something that continues in many such occult events up to the present day. As noted by Ruickbie, ‘The case also bears comparison with child-led witchcraft accusations, such as at Salem, Massachusetts, and so-called survivor accounts of satanic cult involvement in the modern period.’29 This resonates with Kincaid’s idea of the child as a blank, and where different kinds of monstrosity can fill the ‘container’ of the ‘bad’ child.
The last chapter in this part, ‘Deviance on Display: The Feral and the Monstrous Child’ by Gerd H. Hövelmann, approaches the problems of categorization from a very different perspective – one that determines the exact nature of the child’s monstrosity. Of course, an integral part of determining how one type of monstrosity differs from another also inherently contains the criteria for how they are both unlike the ‘normal’ child, or as Hövelmann observes:
The following presentations and discussions focus on the kinds and extent of the respective abnormalities as compared with the ‘normal’, unobtrusive or average child and on the ways these children used to be presented to, and sometimes hidden from, an expectant public.30
The notion of ‘presentation’ here is one that picks up on Kincaid’s idea of the ‘horror show’ child which is ‘the object of our gaze […] given little to do but enact the same old roles for our pleasure: the monster or acknowledged victim’.31 Seeing it as that is created, captured and gazed upon, one might even say consumed by ‘normal’ society. This highlights an important aspect of the monstrous child and one that is seen in all the historical cases mentioned earlier – that they all need to be observed to demonstrate or warn what is abnormal or not normal to the rest of society.32 Taking into consideration some of the earlier observations into the meaning of the monstrous child, we can then see how a culture needs to present its own ‘badness’ to itself, as a form of self-governance.33 Interestingly, in ‘Deviance on Display’ a difference is made in how each type of monstrosity can be observed and the ‘freak’ of the deformed child is displayed ‘in circuses, in sideshows and specifically in freak shows’, while the feral child was more likely to be ‘presented by scientists to fellow scientists only, and in small private or semi-public academic circles’.34 There are comparisons here with Evrard’s study and the explanation of monstrosity being controlled by either the realms of science – psychoanalysis and psychology – or more populist religious or spiritual interpretations. However, while one is more rational than the other, both constitute control and containment, with the medicalization of the monstrous child providing a more institutionalized system of othering.
Parts II and III, ‘Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Undead Child’ and ‘Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Monstrous Child’, respectively, are concerned with fictional representations of anomalous children, giving a more obvious form to the anxieties caused by youth and ‘non-adults’ in the society at large. More obviously, these sections describe the openly Gothic qualities of youth and the worrying qualities of the abhuman body that not only bother adult society but also threaten to literally consume it. Part II deals with undead children such as ghosts, zombies and vampires. Here children are just as likely to take the world around them into their abhuman bodies as they are to be held in an eternal moment by a world that will not release them. Part III more clearly views the abhuman child body as a queer one, denying categories placed upon it by adult society. This child is monstrous as it represents a future very different to the continuation of the present as envisioned by adult heteronormative futurity.
Part II begins with ‘Imprints: Forming and Tracing the Malevolent Ghost-Child’ by Jen Baker, and it returns to the tropes established in the Victorian period, as mentioned by Evrard earlier, showing the ways that they have ‘lived on’ into the twenty-first century. Baker focuses on the ghost-child within literature and the ways it has been used to express anxieties over cultural and individual identity. As she comments:
The child is potentially not ‘the child’ at all; rather it is a composite of the fears of the Self, and the corporeal ambivalence of the ghost-child is specifically is specifically indicative of the fragmented self, not only doubling, but consistently repeating the haunting of what cannot be whole.35
This highlights not only the link with the birth of psychoanalysis mentioned by Evrard, but also the almost spiritual fears around the Freudian idea of the doppelgänger where one’s identity is called into question by a double or copy of the self, or even a twin.
This links to Mattos Frisvold’s chapter on twins later in the collection, which shows how such fears of who and what the ‘self’ is cross cultural boundaries, but also indicate how the child ‘reflects’ the schizophrenic nature of the Victorian society around it. Equally, due to the way that the trope developed in the late nineteenth century and beyond, it intimates that the Victorian period becomes something of a twin to our own – created from a similar anxiety over the fracturing self and the disintegration of society. Curiously though, as Baker notes, ‘in contemporary fiction and culture the ghost-child is far more prevalent and is malevolent more frequently’,36 indicating that, possibly, contemporary society fears itself more that it has ever done previously.
This is an idea picked up by Anthony Adams in ‘Undead Role Models: Why the Zombie Child Is Irresistible’. The zombie child here functions in a way not unlike the ghost-child before, manifesting a society that fears itself and what it is doing to the world, necessarily turning the most basic image of hope, that is, the child, into one of hopelessness. The zombie child again forms something of a double to the healthy, good child, and rather than continuing the family line, it wants to consume it, as it quite literally does in films like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.37 However, with the recent boom in paranormal romance in young adults’ literature, the monsters that were once signifiers of evil, or dark occult forces bent on destruction, are now figures in need of understanding and sympathy. As Adams observes, in relation to some recent texts:
Zombie children are depicted as vulnerable, and deserving of protection, not attack. Indeed, it is both adults, who lack understanding, and bullying children, who might well be in need of sympathy themselves, who fail to see the genuine ‘humanity’ at the core of these undead.38
Here, the monstrous child is no longer a figure to be dreaded, but one deserving of protection rather than assault, and even as valuable symbols of difference. While this is an ideal that cases like those of Starkie, Grenier and Jeanne would seem to have been crying out for, to see the ‘problem’ children for exactly what they were, that is, individuals in need of understanding, it also contains its own problems, for the child here is still not allowed to speak for itself but is once again forced into a form that is not of its own making.
‘Children for Ever! Monsters of Eternal Youth and the Reification of Childhood’ by Simon Bacon picks up on this point, reflecting on the ways that even good constructions of the child can still be monstrous:
As such the manifestos and intent of organizations such as UNICEF and the Children’s Rights Movement can be seen to reify the idea of childhood, making it simultaneously protected and secure but also a signifier of difference and otherness.39
Reification, which is expressed in popular culture through the figure of the child as a vampire, ghost or zombie that can never age, necessarily monsterizes it, as the author further notes. The effect makes ‘it [the child] autonomous but also a separate and, potentially, dangerous entity, consequently, causing it to be the focus of social and adult anxiety around the “foreign” body that lives within it’.40 The child, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’, becomes something of an exception within the society in which it lives, relating it more to the ‘bad’ children of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than to an integrated member of a society.
Part III starts with Alison Moore’s ‘“Not a Child. Not Old. Not a Boy. Not a Girl”: Representing Childhood in Let the Right One In’. Here, the inherent queerness of the abhuman body is examined through the figure of the never-ageing vampire-child, questioning the developmental model of child growth and the forms and controls that society places upon youth, and the spaces they are allowed to inhabit. While children in Western culture are only allowed to form certain kinds of relationships or reside and move around unsupervised in particular spaces, the ‘children’ in Let the Right One In disrupt this. In contrast to the increasing ‘domestication’ of children and the requirements of constant adult supervision, the film’s child protagonists, Eli and Oskar, largely exist outside of these restraints. Subsequently, as Moore comments:
It might be argued that Eli and her relationship with Oskar reflect the growing recognition of the variety and multiplicity of children’s lives in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. It may represent an acknowledgement of the centrality of peer relationships in children’s lived experiences and the importance of children’s own cultural worlds.41
The result of this, as the author intimates, is that their refusal to be categorized as children actually puts them outside of that, and potentially outside of the remit of society itself, or at least its structures of control.
Similar kinds of queerness are seen in Anna Kérchy’s study, ‘Perverted Postmodern Pinocchios: Cannibalistic Vegetal-Children as Ecoterrorist Agents of the Maternal Imagination’. Relying more strongly on fictional representations, though ones that stem from far older folktales, it inherently infers an ongoing cultural tradition of tropes connected to the anomalous child. What this pinpoints though is not just the ongoing form of the monstrous child, but the means of its production – the maternal imagination. As Kérchy, quoting Shildrick, comments:
The astonishingly vulnerable maternal corporeality – endowed with an inherent capacity to problematize the boundaries of self-same and other – simultaneously represents the ‘best hopes and worst fears of societies faced with an intuitive sense of their own instabilities.’42
The maternal body here can just as easily be replaced with notions of the ‘motherland’ and the reproductive capabilities of a society. These monstrous children are then, more obviously, born of the cultural environment around them, but are signified as feral rather than freakish, creating a resonance with Hövelmann’s piece earlier. The children represented here are not freaks to be gazed upon in a circus, but ones to be studied under the microscope of institutionalized categorization. Not surprisingly then, in an age when even science is led by money, both examples feature acts of consumption, but ones where parents/society consume or are consumed by their children. The result is a tension between visions of the future, which is consumed by the present or in which we are consumed; something, which Kérchy notes, reveals the dark shadow of the death drive even in acts or regeneration.
Such concerns of children being an ambivalent view of the future form the basis of Marc Démont’s ‘From the Monster to the Evil Sinthomosexual Child: Category Mixing, Temporality and Projection in Horror Movies’. Based on representations of the child in horror films (the horror-show child), Démont’s study utilizes the work of Lee Edelman and, more specifically, his idea of the child being the reproduction of heteronormativity. Here the refusal to reproduce, or what we might call the denial of children, or the ‘face of the child,’ refutes any sense of a future, or as the author states:
Reproductive politics, educational reforms, interior defence strategy, all these sociopolitical discourses invoke with a consummate ability the imperative to protect the child, lest our future be filled by Evil ones.43
This future filled with ‘evil’ children is actually no future at all. It rather represents the child as death itself, though it might just as easily mean the death of heteronormativity rather than that of the human race. Démont then discusses the sexual politics behind cultural representations of children and the mechanisms of desire which fuel them, tentatively suggesting that the overemphasis on creating the ‘good’ child necessarily creates its opposite – the monstrous adult, or the paedophile. This Gothic economy of excess and desire then posits a question: does the queer, or uncategorizable, child (see also Moore) disrupt the rigid structures of the system that tries to contain it?
The final part, ‘Cultural Categorization in the Past, Present and Possible Future’, focuses specifically on twenty-first century examples of attempts to explain, monsterize or embrace the anomalous child. Using case studies centred on non-Western cultural history, legal perspectives and/or urban legend, the anomalous child is seen to be imbued with abhuman, almost supernatural, qualities that continue to defy easy categorizations and integration into adult society. The part begins with ‘Evil Twins: Changing Perceptions of Twin Children and Witchcraft among Yoruba-Speaking People’ by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold. It forms something of a bridge between the past and the present, and indeed the previous sections and this one being focused on more recent examples and attempts to understand and rationalize shared traditions as well as those from other cultures. Frisvold takes us to Nigeria and a society where spiritual beliefs are as strong today as they were hundreds of years ago, and the anxiety caused by the unusual is given varying interpretations, both good and bad. This is no more strongly seen than in the case of twin children. As Mattos Frisvold observes:
Twins […] represent the visible and invisible world colliding into visibility. It generates a psychological unrest to see two of the same, because you should only be able to see one while the counterpart lives in the invisible realm […] twins share together this supra-human condition as neither of them are understood to be human per se.44
Twins then are inherently ‘other’, be it good, the ‘spirit child’, or bad, the monstrous child. The children themselves have no say in how their existence is explained – or resolved – as they do indeed represent a problem to be solved. This problem is one of reflection, for, not unlike the ‘hollow’ child that acts as a container for society’s dark self (mentioned earlier), twins are the hidden or invisible part of a culture made real and, as such, requiring control. The attribution of witchcraft or occult powers in the appearance of such children provides an easy and established signifier that comes with a clear course of action to restore order, not unlike that provided for all ‘problem’ children from whatever culture they come from.
The attempt to find a ‘solution’ to problematic children continues in ‘Doli Incapax: Examining the Social, Psychological, Biological and Legal Implications of Age-Related Assumptions of Criminal Responsibility’ by Jacquelyn Bent and Theresa Porter. This chapter looks at the way in which the Western legal system deals, or does not deal, with ‘bad’ or monstrous children. As the authors point out, the current structure
seems to be based, in no small part, on the assumption that children are innocent and thus incapable of instrumental or premeditated criminality despite the lack of empirically tested, scientific observation to satiate this assumption.45
This resonate with Ruickbie’s earlier observation that age was also a key consideration in the seventeenth century as seen in the trial of Jean Grenier and ultimately contributed to the leniency of the sentence passed. The difficulty of Western society to consider children as anything other than pure and innocent is also reflected in popular culture from the 1950s onwards, where even the thought of a child being born ‘bad’, or viewed as a ‘bad seed’, is almost inconceivable, and it is in fact somehow monstrous to even consider the possibility. And yet there are many cases of violence, rape and murder committed by those legally defined as children and who, consequently, cannot be judged as responsible for their actions. This again keeps the child as a separate entity within society, one that is even tried in a court of law under different rules to everyone else. Once again, as noted by Bacon, what is meant to serve as a form of ‘protection’ becomes a way of ‘othering’ that inevitably monsterizes the child.
Brigid Burke’s ‘Black-Eyed Kids and the Child Archetype’ shows how the repressed or ignored societal ambivalence over anomalous children finds outlets in other areas, and if not through texts and films from popular culture, then via urban legend and creepypasta. Burke describes this process in relation to Black Eyed Kids (BEKs)46 as one that looks at similarities between BEKs (or any manifestation of the monstrous child) and other creatures like fairies and aliens, and uses Jungian theory to explain why this does not fit the existing Child archetype, or neatly fit into other archetypal categories. It represents either a new myth, or the metamorphosis of older ones. This quite neatly identifies the way in which new representations, and cultural anxieties, constantly refer to older ones and how existing forms of interpretation do not always fully explain the full significance of ongoing tensions in the relationship between society and its children. More often than not, the nearest ‘answer’ to the questions raised by the latest versions of childhood monstrosity are a mixture of the old and the new, myth and reality. Burke’s chapter is not necessarily a positive interpretation of the monstrous child and shows how anxiety over the unknown and the future seems to find an easy home within the form of a child. Interestingly here, the BEKs, which follow the recent phenomenon in popular culture of representing people who are possessed or demonic with black glassy eyes, are more of a universalization of the monstrous child, with little specific or individual detail to distinguish the various sightings apart. As such, and as Burke’s piece suggests, it makes an obvious comparison to Jung’s ideas around archetypes and the figure of the child, a shared signifier across cultures and time periods. But the fit with Jung’s interpretations is not an easy one and as Burke observes:
It is hard to know what Jung would have made of the BEK phenomenon, but it is clear that BEKs, whatever else they may represent, do not represent a hopeful or positive future. Their negative and soulless quality suggests they are something else: the shadow opposite of the Child archetype.47
Entanglements with contemporary nodes of anxiety then weave together with Jung’s theory and older embodiments of unwelcome children to create the BEKs, a projection, or vessel, into which twentieth and twenty-first century culture can pour its anxiety, a process Burke describes as an urban legend, as online folklore, which utilizes already existing tropes from vampire/faery/spectral tropes to give form to this psychological projection. The monstrous child in this view begins to give form to a growing feeling of disconnection between the past and the present, where adults fear the black-eyed or ‘soulless’ future that they are heading towards – a situation which is only exacerbated by the increasingly strict demarcations between childhood and adulthood.
‘Indigo Children: Unexpected Consequences of a Process of Pathologization’, by Gerhard Mayer and Anita Brutler, shows a positive solution to the ‘problem’ child that formed the basis for so many monsters in the past. Indigo children, a term which is contemporaneous with ‘BEKs’,
is a commonly used term for children who – according to the adherents of this concept – feature particular characteristics and talents […] ‘a new breed of children’ – who have a mission on earth, that is, to propel a global spiritual process of transformation, and, therefore, to herald a new era.48
Curiously, both BEKs and the Indigos are linked to contemporary folklore, or what we might call urban legend, but whereas the subjects of Burke’s study are interpreted as ‘bad’, those in Mayer and Brutler’s are seen as ‘good’, even to the point where they ‘should make right what went wrong in past’.49 More interestingly, the notion of the Indigo, rather than representing some unspecific generalization, is actually based on specific cases of actual children, and reinterprets what was, almost universally, considered in earlier cases as a problematic or ‘monstrous’ child in a positive light. Here then the child or adolescent who is ordinarily diagnosed as having ADD (attention deficit disorder) or ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is othered, but in a way that sees it as an evolutionary step forward, super-normal if you will, rather than devolutionary or subnormal. That does not mean that this new ‘myth’ does not still appeal to old ones, such as the gifted loner or ‘special’ child; nor does it prevent it from leading on to new ones – already Indigos have evolved into Crystal children.
It does show, however, that it is possible to see the anomalous child in a positive light, and that resistance to easy categorization can be embraced by wider society as a force for change. Something of this can be seen in a recent example of a problematic child/adolescent Greta Thunberg. A singularly focused individual, Greta, who is 16 years old at the time of writing, has consistently refused to act as desired by the adult society around her in pursuit of gaining recognition of the urgent need for action in regard to environmental change. She is simultaneously constructed as a symbol of hope, and the child as a futurity that will heal the world from the damage caused by its elders, and a ‘naughty girl’ with mental health issues, who is simplistic and manipulated by others50 and should sit quietly in a corner.51 In a different age one wonders if she would have been accused of consorting with devils – though in this one she has been accused of being used by big business52 – but here in the twenty-first century she is an anomalous youth with her direct manner and serious demeanour marking her out as different and curiously analogous to the Gothic child, and indeed her Asperger’s, which she describes as a ‘superpower’,53 conforms to the idea of the abhuman body, a subject on a trajectory of change, not to repeat what has gone before but become something different and unexpected. This points to a possible and welcome shift in the interpretation of the anomalous or monstrous child – using the Latin root of ‘monster’, monstrum meaning a warning or harbinger of change – where the difficulties it presents to adult society do not immediately cause anxiety or panic but lead to introspection and greater understanding. Naughty little girls and boys are not blanks within which to project the sins of the fathers but might just embody the future society that the world needs.
Notes
1Steven Bruhm, ‘Nightmare on Sesame Street: Or, the Self-Possessed Child’, Gothic Studies 8.2 (2006): 98.
2William Paul, Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 282.
3See Katie Silver, ‘Adolescence Now Lasts from 10 to 24’, BBC News, 19 January 2018, accessed 10 October 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42732442/; and Sarah Fader, ‘Adolescent Age Range and What It Means’, Better Help, 18 December 2018, accessed 10 October 2019, https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/adolescence/adolescent-age-range-and-what-it-means/.
4James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 8.
5Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 32.
6Richard Stockton, ‘A Modern-Day Myth: The Slender Man’, Allthatisinteresting, 16 May 2015, accessed 13 October 2019, https://allthatsinteresting.com/slender-man.
7Margarita Georgieva, The Gothic Child (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
8Ibid.
9Thomas Rutherforth, Institutes of Natural Law: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures on Grotius De Jure Belli Et Pacis Read in St. John’s College (Clarke: Lawbook Exchange, [1754–56] 2004), 161.
10Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, [1966] 2002).
11Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12.
12Michele Erina Doyle and Mark K. Smith, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Education’, Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, 7 January 2013, accessed 13 October 2019, http://infed.org/mobi/jean-jacques-rousseau-on-nature-wholeness-and-education/.
13Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 16–17.
14Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 234.
15Kincaid, Child-Loving, 12.
16It is also worth noting here that these considerations similarly essentialize children and the child by referring to them as an amorphous or homogenous group rather than individuals, and this is something that needs to be borne in mind throughout the present study. That said, one can argue that the term ‘society’ is equally as indiscriminate and unarticulated, which can either qualify using both terms or totally negate any notions of equivalence. At present, we will concur with the former, not least because many studies have used these categories to examine the ways each affects the other.
17David Buckingham, The Material Child: Growing Up in Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 1.
18David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 5.
19David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett, Digital Generations: Children, Young People, and the New Media (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1.
20Bex Lewix, Raising Children in a Digital Age: Enjoying the Best, Avoiding the Worst (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2014), 23.
21Georgieva, The Gothic Child, 87.
22Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.
23Ibid, 4.
24Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, [1988] 2004), 303. Not surprisingly, perhaps, they also describe ‘becoming-child’ at the same time.
25Douglas, Purity and Danger.
26Anonymous, The Most Strange and Admirable Discouerie of the Three Witches of Warboys Arraigned, Conuicted, and Executed at the Last Assises at Huntington, for the Bewitching of the Fiue Daughters of Robert Throckmorton Esquire, and Other Persons (rpt. BiblioBazaar, [1593] 2010).
27See p. x in Chapter 2 of this volume.
28See p. x in Chapter 3 of this volume.
29See p. x in Chapter 3 of this volume.
30See p. x in Chapter 4 of this volume.
31Kincaid, Child-Loving, 8.
32The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin monstrum, which in Late Middle English meant ‘portent or monster’, and from the French monere, ‘warn’. Taken from Oxford Dictionaries, viewed on 26 June 2015, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/monster.
33Not unlike those mentioned by Michel Foucault in The Spectacle of the Scaffold: The Body beyond All Possible Pain, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977).
34See p. x in Chapter 4 of this volume.
35See p. x in Chapter 5 of this volume..
36See p. x in Chapter 5 of this volume.
37Night of the Living Dead, dir. George A. Romero (New York: Walter Reade Organisation, 1968).
38See p. x in Chapter 6 of this volume.
39See p. x in Chapter 7 of this volume.
40See p. x in Chapter 7 of this volume.
41See p. x in Chapter 8 of this volume.
42See p. x in Chapter 9 of this volume. Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002), 30.
43See p. x in Chapter 10 of this volume.
44See p. x in Chapter 11 of this volume.
45See p. x in Chapter 12 of this volume.
46It is interesting to note that the anxiety around Black-Eyed Kids coincided with a shift in popular culture over the representation of demonic possession. In the late twentieth century, possession by supernatural or alien forces was often represented by the victim having white eyes (no pupils just pure white eyes) – the various versions of Not of This Earth example this where the alien in all three versions (Corman, 1957; Wynorski, 1988; and Winkless, 1995) has pure white eyes. But by the start of the twenty-first century this had changed to being shown by totally black eyes, the long running series Supernatural (Kripke: 2005–present) showing this to dramatic effect.
47See p. x in Chapter 13 of this volume.
48See p. x in Chapter 14 of this volume.
49See p. x in Chapter 14 of this volume.
50Katherine Jebsen Moore, ‘When Children Protest, Adults Should Tell Them the Truth’, Quillette, 23 March 2019, accessed 13 October 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/03/21/when-children-protest-adults-should-tell-them-the-truth/.
51Robinson Meyer, ‘Why Greta Makes Adults Uncomfortable’, Atlantic, 23 September 2019, accessed 13 October 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/why-greta-wins/598612/.
52Johnathan Watts, ‘Greta Thunberg, Schoolgirl Climate Change Warrior: “Some People Can Let Things Go. I Can’t”’, Guardian, 11 March 2019, accessed 13 October 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/11/greta-thunberg-schoolgirl-climate-change -warrior-some-people-can-let-things-go-i-cant.
53Alison Rourke, ‘Greta Thunberg Responds to Asperger’s Critics: “It’s a Superpower”’, Guardian, 2 September 2019, accessed 13 October 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/02/greta-thunberg-responds-to-aspergers-critics-its-a-superpower.
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