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