The Child That Haunts Us

Symbols and Images in Fairytale and Miniature Literature

Susan Hancock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317723707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The Child That Haunts Us focuses on the symbolic use of the child archetype through the exploration of miniature characters from the realms of children's literature.

Jung argued that the child archetype should never be mistaken for the 'real' child. In this book Susan Hancock considers how the child is portrayed in literature and fairytale and explores the suggestion from Jung and Bachelard that the symbolic resonance of the miniature is inversely proportionate to its size.

We encounter many instances where the miniature characters are a visibly vulnerable 'other', yet often these occur in association with images of the supernatural, as the desired or feared object of adult imagination. In The Child That Haunts Us it is emphasised that the treatment by any society, past or present, of its smallest and most vulnerable members is truly revealing of the values it really holds.

This original and sensitive exploration will be of particular interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics engaged in Jungian studies, children's literature, childhood studies and those with an interest in socio-cultural constructions of childhood.

Chapter 1

Introduction

---

Aspects of ‘the child’

In the title and at the heart of my book is an idea, perhaps an entity, that I have called ‘the child’. Despite such apparently simple terminology – referring, on the surface, to a human being at a particular stage of development (beyond infancy, but not yet adolescent or adult) – a deeper examination reveals that ‘the child’ is so very far from a simple term. ‘Children’ may be represented at any moment in time by ‘real’ physical bodies, as socio-cultural constructions, as inner memories or echoes of the past or hopes and plans for the future, as the ‘other’ that is feared or desired or loved or hated by adults who have left the state behind (perhaps) and can now only approach it, warily, from the position of an outsider. Beyond this, as Dewar (1992) and Eekelaar (1991) point out in relation to children’s rights, adult–child interaction is itself based upon an acute adult sense of ‘difference’ and a concomitant perception of the unequal status of children, a perception which may result, at opposite ends of the spectrum, in acts of ultra-protection or in a sense of adult power over a vulnerable child. The socially and culturally defined category of ‘childhood’ is the broadest category of ‘other’ which is known to the adult world, and the treatment by any society, past or present, of its smallest and most vulnerable members is truly revealing of the values it really holds.

James, Jenks and Prout (1998) suggest, with some justification, that ‘with an intensity perhaps unprecedented, childhood has become popularized, politicized and analysed in a series of inter-locking spaces in which the traditional confidence and certainty about childhood and children’s social status are being radically undermined’ (James et al. 1998: 3). In a postmodern world one may enquire why children should be ‘known’ with any more certainty than adults ‘know’ each other or even themselves; nevertheless, parents and other care-givers, educators, legislators and numerous other professionals experience the pressing need and desire to have some understanding of childhood in order to negotiate its space in their lives and within society at any given moment.

Paradoxically, there is an increasing sense of the need to protect children, as vulnerable beings, from predatory adults and a host of influences identified as potentially hostile, but this has gone hand-in-hand with a heightened fear of children. James et al. highlight popular conceptions of a ‘lost innocence’ and a ‘decline in the standards of morality’ (James et al. 1998: 52) and a corresponding movement toward increased state control over children’s lives. Unlike the situation that pertains when children are the victims of abusive adults, the abduction, torture and murder of 2-year-old James Bulger in 1993 by two 10-year-old children burned upon the public consciousness in Britain conjoint images of ‘innocence’ and ‘evil’, visions of the child as sacrificial victim and of the child as demonic perpetrator, images indissolubly linked in a single act (also see the discussion in James et al. 1998: 52). Contemporary images of child soldiers are similarly potent, this time linked in a single body, as the desire to protect and free ‘innocent’ children from such a fate is aroused, simultaneously, with fear of the idea of a child with a gun.

The potency of such fears is likely to be fostered by a lack of belief in the moral competency of childhood, fuelled, in turn, both by literary images, such as the cruel and murderous child characters of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), and by extensive news-media coverage such as that dealing with children and adolescents who turn guns upon classmates and teachers. In an online database detailing ‘A Time Line of Recent Worldwide School Shootings’ (Information Please® Database, accessed 18 July 2007), twenty-four incidents (1996 to 2006) are listed in which the perpetrator is noted as being a child of 16 years or under (the youngest on the list is 6 years of age). These children are recorded as having shot other students, teachers and/or family members, with forty-three victims catalogued. That such information has been compiled and made available in this way is surely an indication that there is an acute awareness of and interest in children who kill, but there is little to draw readers’ attention to the fact that although the database records very real and traumatic events, it also focuses on an incredibly microcosmic proportion of the global child population.

Against such a background it is evident that symbolic and actual are, to no small degree, intertwined in public consciousness, centring on a paradox between a fear for and a fear of children that has little to do with actual children and everything to do with adult perceptions of the childhood state. At a cultural moment in which sweet and ‘cute’ images of toddlers throng magazines and television advertisements, and the news media ensure that the public are increasingly aware of the vulnerability of small children, there exist the darker constructions of demonic children in the horror genre of novels and films. Against the babies advertising nappies, toilet paper and washing powders are such books and films as John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and Wolf Rilla’s later film version, The Village of the Damned (1960), Ira Levin’s novel and Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Richard Donner’s and David Selzer’s The Omen (1976) and John Moore’s remake of the latter in 2006 – to name but a few better-known examples. The children depicted in these may be fictional constructs, but real children act out the filmed roles and real writers and directors imaginatively give life to the protagonists that create such a vivid and enduring impact upon audiences.

It would be wrong, however, to think that this is solely a modernday phenomenon. As Carol Clover suggests, in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Movie (1992), horror stories revisit, constantly, the same basic tale. Even the changelings of folktale and fairytale may well be the precursors of the demonic children mentioned above (and equally, if not more, available to be violently disposed of).

Religious and artistic movements have had a major impact on the ways in which childhood has been viewed in different times and in different groupings within society. Writing in The Origins and Development of Children’s Literature, Pat Pinsent (2005) speaks to the influence of Calvinism, which, in the late sixteenth and early seven-teenth centuries, ‘stressed children’s potential depravity’ (Pinsent 2005: 20) on early writers of ‘improving’ works for children. Parents were regarded as having a ‘responsibility for conveying to children a sense of their sinfulness’ (Pinsent 2005: 20, citing the views of Cotton Mather (1663–1728)) and literature of the time, together with later works by Evangelical writers such as Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851), bear evidence of such views of childhood. Yet these views could be seen as equating, at some level, with the ‘moral’ outrage aroused when media reports cite instances of children’s behaviour, which is deemed to deviate from constructions of the ‘ideal’ state in today’s society.

Romantic notions of childhood, originating in the Romantic movement in art and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (exemplified in the works of writers such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and so on), are, similarly, a construction. These coexisted at times with Evangelical texts but offer a completely opposing perspective on childhood. While the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge invokes images of the child as an innocent creature of nature as he tells his slumbering infant: ‘But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze/ By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags/Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds/’ in his poem ‘Frost at Midnight’ (Coleridge 1798/1959: 70), Mary Martha Sherwood’s child protagonists (in ‘The Story on the Sixth Commandment’ from The History of the Fairchild Family, 1818) are taken to view the body of a man hanged for fratricide, as a stern warning to reflect on a – comparatively minor – breakfast-time sibling disagreement. In another contrast with Sherwood’s tale, Hesba Stretton’s child protagonist Jessica (Jessica’s First Prayer, 1867) is the epitome of uncorrupted innocence surviving in a corrupt environment, and is able to ‘save’ a more morally suspect adult.

So it can be seen, even in this very brief summary, that from at least as early as the seventeenth century, images of the state of child-hood have veered between the divine and the diabolic – children seen as ‘gifts from god’ or the ‘spawn of the devil’. The existence of such a deeply rooted paradox seems to be evidence of a concern with images of ‘the child’ that, while they may influence ideas on child rearing at any given time, actually only bear lip-service to ‘real’ children and to the practical issues involved in sharing home and society with those deemed at any given moment to be children.

In A History of Childhood, Colin Heywood (2001) summarises current assumptions about the history, not of childhood but of views on childhood, in saying

there is no essential child for historians to discover, rather … commentators have shuffled around a limited repertoire of themes stemming from the biological immaturity of children [he does not, however, engage with what might constitute, definitively, such ‘biological immaturity’].

(Heywood 2001: 170)

Indeed, the idea that there might or might not be such an entity to look for is, in itself, supportive of the notion that there is something far beyond the existence of real children at the centre of this debate. If historians cannot resolve the paradox of setting competing views into a linear developmental pattern and sociologists regard all such views as shifting socio-historical constructions, one is driven to ask whether any other mode of thought can move deeper into exploring the need to possess and control a knowledge of childhood and possible origins of the desires and fears surrounding images of ‘child’ as they arise in adults’ minds. Rather than charting competing theories concerning views on the state of childhood it may be more helpful to accept and examine the opposing images of childhood that erupt periodically and to further explore the ways in which such imaginings become entangled with the ‘real’ world of living, breathing, human children.

Taking a step back and attempting to view this maelstrom of competing ideas from a distance, it seems that in talking about ‘the child’, regardless of the type of discourse, the debate is, more often than not, less about children per se, but (whether explicitly or implicitly) about the relationships the child is deemed to be a part of or enveloped within. At one level there is the idea of the child in some form of familial bond: mother–child; father–child; sibling–sibling (whether that relationship is biological or circumstantial). At another there is the child in some form of relationship with wider society: authority-figure–child (whether the authority-figure is constituted as a rule enforcer, for example a representative of the police, or a guardian of welfare, for example social worker or educator); adult–child (in any encounter); peer–child (friend or foe).

At a deeper and more abstract level, there is also the possible relationship between an adult subject and an ‘inner child’ posited in books such as Jeremiah Abrams’ (1991) Reclaiming the Inner Child. Here Abrams, in his introduction, speaks to appearances of images of an inner child, not only arising in personal dreams, but also given form in art, literature and myths, as a positive and vibrant symbol of eternal, ever-self-renewing life and vigour. While I would hesitate over the overwhelmingly positive tone of Abrams’ words (where is the negative side of this wonder child? – but more of this in later chapters) there seems to be much to suggest, as I will expand upon in the next section, that the human unconscious does give rise to images of what Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) terms the ‘child archetype’, as discussed in some depth in his essay (1939–40) ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’ (published in Essays on a Science of Mythology).

It seems to me, and this is the guiding impulse at the root of my book, that there is one area of discourse in which one can begin to see all the ways in which the adult world imaginatively constructs adult–child relationships, whether familial, social, cultural or inner, and that is the area of children’s literature, where adult writers frequently create child characters in such relationships. In particular, narrative fantasy fictions allow writers free reign to the impulse to create complex images entangling the attempted child-in-the-world re-creation with the symbolic content posited by the idea of the inner child. It is therefore my intention to examine certain texts from the realms of fantasy fiction for children (a more detailed rationale follows later) with the aim of discovering both what their adult creators say (consciously and unconsciously) about the children (and their relationships) imaginatively constructed in their fictions and to the children who encounter such fictions as young readers.

Jungian psychoanalytic criticism as it may be
applied to fantasy children’s literature

In my view, the ideal tool with which to explore the symbolic subtext of images of children in narrative fantasy fictions is psychoanalytic criticism. My aim is not, however, to use a Freudian approach, but rather to focus upon the insights that may be offered by Jungian psychoanalytic criticism and more recent developments in the field of Jungian literary theory (see, for example, Rowland 1999; Baumlin et al. 2004) and post-Jungian thought. My reasons align with Brian Attebery’s insightful comment in Strategies of Fantasy: ‘Whereas Freud looks to origins, Jung looks to ends: not where we came from but what we may grow into’ (Attebery 1992: 30).

There has been much public interest in Freudian ideas and in Freudian psychoanalytical criticism, perhaps symbolised in popular consciousness by images such as the phallus, the sexualised infant and the Oedipus complex on the one hand, and the ego, superego and id on the other (the latter even featuring, metaphorically, in Fred Wilcox’s fascinating science fiction film Forbidden Planet, 1956). While this is a wildly oversimplistic summary of a major body of thought, nevertheless it is probably true to say that when Freudian theory focuses on the infant and child, it is, predominantly, in the manner of looking back to these stages as the source of later neuroses. Interest centres upon a developmental awareness of infants and children as inevitably incomplete adults-in-the-making rather than engaging with the idea of child – together with its futurity – in the form of the child motif.

Jung was a complex thinker, whose insights derived from widely differing sources: his own practical work as an assistant doctor working for the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler; his lifelong involvement with spiritualism; his extensive scholarship in the fields of comparative religion and mythology; a fascination with alchemy and its metaphorical potential; and, perhaps most significantly, his sustained period of self-analysis (see, for example, Rowland 2002: 1–22). In his writings, Jung puts forward, persuasively, a model of the psyche which comprises both conscious and unconscious levels, the latter being further layered into the personal uncons...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index