The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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isbn: 9781785275227
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produced by or for those that cause said anxieties.

      1. The Anomalous Child

      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:

      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.