‘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,