In Dickensâs Great Expectations (1861), Pipâs entrance into the world beyond the blacksmithâs shop involves a confrontation with an upper-class bully who challenges him to a fight. What is strange about the encounter is that the bully who headbutts him in the stomach turns out to be none other than the mild-mannered Herbert Pocket who goes on to become Pipâs lifelong friend and confidante. In the fight scene, Pip and Herbert engage in a kind of class warfare as both are in effect attempting to win the favour of Miss Havisham, who has summoned them to her home. Unlike Pip, who recoils from his first encounter with violence, Herbert puts on a strange display of gentlemanly boxing, declaring, âRegular rules ⊠Come to the ground and go through the preliminariesâ (83). Ludicrously, he even comes back with a âbottle of water and a sponge dipped in vinegarâ (83), which he announces are âAvailable for bothâ (83). The other boyâs style is so formal and rehearsed that Pip feels he must be outmatched despite the fact that Herbert is all âelbows, knees, wrists, and heels, considerably in advance of the rest of him as to developmentâ (83). Pip lashes out instinctively to bloody Herbertâs nose but, despite the fact that he has acted entirely out of self-defence, he soon feels enormously guilty for striking a boy who appears to be better than him: âHe seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the contest I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing, as a species of savage young wolf or other wild beastâ (84).
The reason Herbert appears innocent is that his performance of fighting is ridiculously precocious in its replication of gentlemanly codes of conduct; fighting according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules makes him seem adorably quixotic, while Pipâs complete lack of artifice renders him brutish and savage. Later on, Pip concludes that Herbert, in the end, lacks the kind of aggression and ambition that are necessary to succeed in life: âThere was something wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the same time whispered to me he would never be very successful or richâ (162). Pip discovers that cruelty is central to identity formation, and that a boy who combines savage instinct with the decorum demanded by polite society becomes a powerful social actor indeed. What this incident tells us, found as it is in the pages of what is perhaps the most important narrative about child development, is that society is often more concerned with who performs the cruelty and how it is performed than with the cruelty itself.
Our collection challenges assumptions about children and cruelty by examining the cultural work that is performed by representations of cruel children. We do not seek to identify whether or not children are naturally cruel, or to provide a solution to child cruelty. Instead, we are interested in understanding why the cruel child looms so large in the cultural imagination, and in identifying the contours and boundaries of that representation. What actions on the part of young people get labelled as cruel? Are they held to a different standard than adults in this regard? And in what ways are constructions of the cruel child about denying, or supporting, child agency? At the heart of this collection, then, is the question of what representations of the cruel child mean, and what role the cruel child trope plays in delineating power structures and rules of behaviour along lines of age, class, race, and gender.
The Evil Child and the Rise of the Child-Centred Society
Recent scholarship has paid close attention to the figure of the evil child. Karen J. Rennerâs The âEvil Childâ in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2013) and her edited collection, Evil Children in the Popular Imagination (2016), as well as Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Sean Morelandâs Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters (2015) all grapple with âthe age-old question of the nature of humankindâ (Renner, Evil Child, 5) that children seem to offer the means of understanding: that is, whether those who are evil are âinherently soâ (2) or âhave been made soâ (3). The essays in Rennerâs collection connect the âevil childâ to âpredominant ideologies and presumptionsâ that help explain why different kinds of ââevilâ children prevailed during different eras and why their particular brand of evil was so compellingâ (6). With their focus on the âmonstrous childâ in film, Bohlmann and Morelandâs collection takes on a similar topic (9), highlighting âthe tremendous variety of intersections between monstrosity and childness in filmsâ (11). They assert, âMonsters are monstrous because they always escape human comprehension: they demonstrate what we do not know, and remonstrate against our presumption to knowâ (18). The figure of the child is useful for understanding concepts of monstrosity, they point out, because âOver the course of modernity, the child has served as both repository and emblem of our aspirations and fears, our dreams and our nightmaresâ (11). For Renner, Bohlmann, and Moreland, and the essayists in their collections, the figure of the child and its centrality to debates of nature and nurture plays a crucial role in defining the nature of evil.
We add to this discussion on the importance of the malevolent child with a focus on its role in the emergence of the âchild-centredâ society. In the nineteenth century, the construction of the child as that which is innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection challenged the construction of the child as that which is savage, sinful, and in need of constant correction. British Romantic writers posited that the child is born into the world possessing a kind of natural perfection: âThe more adults and adult society seemed bleak, urbanized and alienated, the more childhood came to be seen as properly a garden, enclosing within the safety of its walls a way of life which was in touch with nature âŠâ (Cunningham 3). Society, the Romantics argued, can only corrupt such perfection as it colonizes the innocent child for participation in the adult world. Religious writers of the evangelical tradition, in contrast, tended to view the child as born with original sin and in need of strict discipline in order to be kept on the path to salvation. Whereas the religious tradition often threatened children with damnation and expulsion, the Romantic tradition produced a more child-centred approach to education and development, one in which children are to be nurtured, indulged, and allowed to grow organically.
Clearly, the Romantic tradition of childhood intersects with the emergence of sentimentalism as a moral force in society, one that measures the health of a society by its ability to protect its most vulnerable members, but it also intersects with the emergence of the modern industrial state. These two structures of feeling came together to reimagine modern society as a space that is designed to conserve its citizensâeven its most criminal and corruptâas valuable resources. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution not only saw astonishing new inventions put to use in large-scale factory production, but also the need for enormous amounts of both skilled and unskilled labour. Consequently, it became both morally wrong and economically wasteful to use expulsion as a means of punishment when the offender could be trained and put to use within the workforce. According to Foucault, the old forms of discipline, such as corporal punishment and transportation, gave way to the modern penitentiary idea of incarceration and rehabilitation (114â131). Rather than expelling offenders, society would contain them within institutional spaces and retrain them as useful hands.
This emergence of the new psychology of inclusion had a profound effect on the lives of children as the home and school were also redesigned as spaces to conserve and rehabilitate young people. As Susan J. Pearson argues,
discipline was refigured as an affective and intimate process ⊠Once a child identified with an authority figure, he or she could be ruled through the granting and withdrawal of affection, and would eventually come to internalize the authority figures likes and dislikes, accepting the rules both as the condition of love and acceptance and as the right ordering of the world. (46)
Whereas the old punitive society used corporal punishment and expulsion as a means of disciplining children, the new child-centred approach was designed, at its most basic level, to keep even the most wayward of youths inside the social order. Consequently, the health of society became a measure of its ability to conserve its children by nurturing them, educating them, and encouraging them to invest themselves in capitalist society.
Not surprisingly, the emergence of the hyper-inclusive nation-state often came into conflict with the old desire to cast out that which is considered deviant, abnormal, and threatening. If we take an example from nineteenth-century US childrenâs literature, we can see quite clearly the tremendous anxieties that were produced by the new psychology of inclusion. In the figure of âInjun Joeâ from Mark Twainâs The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), for example, the old evangelical social order of the frontier town comes into conflict with the sentimentalism of the novelâs readership. In the narrative, Joe clearly thinks of himself as an abandoned child, playing into the popular theory of recapitulation that saw âan analogy between individual development and human historyâ (Straley 15), and that therefore linked civilizations seen as less advanced with childhood, and children with âsavages.â Injun Joe represents the abandoned child who takes revenge on a community that has continually denied him food and protection because he is a Native American, or, more precisely, a so-called âhalf breedâ who carries with him the threat of an infectious miscegenation. He tells the doctor before murdering him,
Five years ago you drove me away from your fatherâs kitchen one night when I come to ask for something to eat, and you said I warnât there for any good; and when I swore Iâd get even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for a vagrant. Did you think Iâd forget? The Injun blood ainât in me for nothing. (Twain 67)
When Joe is eventually walled up in the cave where he dies a horrible death having had nothing to eat but candle wax and bats, the narrator warns his readers that they must not be so soft-headed as to have sympathy for him. We are not to see him as an abandoned child who is made into a criminal by an uncaring society, but as a demonic figure who deserves only to be cast into the pit of hell. The novel is aware of an emerging taste for sympathy and redemption on the part of its readership but ultimately does not allow us to extend it to a vengeful âhalf breedâ who would only prey upon the innocent. In âInjun Joeâ we find the âsavageâ as exemplary evil child, a figure who would come to test the limits of sentimentalism and societyâs commitment to inclusion.
In the century after Twainâs frontier gothic, the figure of the evil child took up its primary residence in the US horror film. The prototypical evil child in US cinema is, of course, Rhoda Penmark in the film The Bad Seed (1956), adapted from William Marchâs novel. She presents a sweet and innocent face to the world but in reality she is, as the family soon discovers, a murderous psychopath. The familyâs duty to protect the child comes into direct conflict with the absolute need to be rid of the monstrous child. The parents are trapped as passive victims of the child-centred approach that demands they protect and nurture what is theirs even as the child has been visited upon them as a demonic curse from a pre-civilized past. The evil child subsequently went on to become a central figure in horror cinema, one that is continually deployed to frighten a society that, in its innocence and naĂŻvetĂ©, is so weak and soft-headed that it would attempt to include that which only seeks to destroy it. The figure of the evil child has become a well-established trope because it is the site where our belief in rehabilitation is tested. The evil child dares us to be tough enough to cast out that which is seemingly deserving of protection, and mocks us when we baulk at doing so. The evil child, in other words, warns the inclusive society that it can be played for a sucker.
The Cruel Child
What is the relationship between the âevilâ child and the merely âcruelâ one? Is one an aberration, an abomination that must be cast out, while the other is simply a normal, accepted part of life? One major difference between âInjun Joeâ and Rhoda Penmark, of course, is that the former is a Native American and the latter is a white girl. It is easy for a racist society to cast the evil âhalf breedâ into the pit of hell but it is not so easy to destroy a little blonde girl who is much closer to the centre of dominant culture. She is, in some ways, much more weird and horrifying because the expulsion of a figure invested with so much sentimental capital is entirely anathema to society. What becomes important, then, in discussions of evil children is the way in which violence and aggression are tolerated in some children but not tolerated in others. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, the term âsuperpredatorâ was used within the US criminal justice system to describe a type of juvenile offender so evil that he must be stripped of his juvenile status and cast into the hell of the adult penal system. The term was used, of course, primarily against black youths (Reed 223). Once the term was invented, it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby any sign of violence or aggression exhibited by a black youth was proof that he would inevitably become irredeemably evil. In contrast, white juvenile offenders were less likely to be denied their status as children, or if they were, far more likely to be labelled as mentally ill so as to distinguish them as individually, rather than culturally, aberrant. And indeed, white privilegeâthe idea that the young man has his whole life ahead of himâcontinues to be used in the court system as a mitigating factor when establishing punishment. Without the label of âsuperpredatorâ looming over them, the white youthâs violence and cruelty is considered much more tolerable and is much more likely to be rationalized as the folly of youth.
If we look at another example from nineteenth-century literature, we can see how cruelty in fact emerged as an important component of child development. In Charlotte Bronteâs Jane Eyre (1847), the saintly Helen Burns dies prematurely because she can only meet the cruelties of Lowood Institution with prayer and passivity. By contrast, Jane is able to survive because she learns that even as the institution is born out of English societyâs duty to take care of unwanted orphans, it will only perform the bare minimum. As Lowood attempts to fit her for the drudgery of domestic service, she learns to hold onto her ambitions and to protect them with an overarching sense of pride. Indeed, Jane develops a latent mean streakâBertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, being, as Gilbert and Gubar argue, her âtruest and darkest doubleâ (360)âone that allows her to resist the kinds of brainwashing used by the institution to break the spirits of its poor inmates. Saintliness and patience are not necessarily virtues within the capitalist economy if the child hopes, unlike Helen Burns, to achieve some measure of social mobility. Janeâs story teaches the middle-class child that she will have to be full of pride and even aggression if she is to climb the social ladder. If the institution seeks to construct Jane as cheap labour, then it is her duty to fight back against such mind control and to seek inclusion on her own terms. Cruelty and aggression are tolerated in her because she is a middle-class girl who has unfortunately found herself in the space of the state-run institution, the space that is normally the home of the poor and the marginalized.
While it is perhaps subversive of the novel to grant aggression and pride to a female protagonist, it is not particularly subversive to grant it to a member of the white middle class. The novel teaches us that while society often pays lip service to the idea that all children are innocent or blank slates, poor children are often judged according to the socio-economic conditions into which they are born. Another classic example of this double standard can be found in Dickensâs David Copperfield (1850). Uriah Heep is described as âother,â with strange red hair, clammy hands, and a look that is older than his actual years, indicating to us that the poor child who cannot resemble the white, educated, middle-class child is somewhat demonic. Heepâs acts of manipulation, which are designed to seize control over Mr. Wickhamâs law firm, result in his eventual imprisonment, but it is very clear that his social climbing closely parallels that of the middle-class Davy, who is able to ascend more properly through the ranks of society. Naked ambition is horrifying, while ambition wrapped in middle-class romance and ingenuity is respectable.
More currently, the figure of the bully provides an excellent means of understanding the delicate balance between child innocence and cruelty. Within the context of the education system where bullying is a hot topic, the bully is often thought of as a âbully-victim,â a child who abuses others because he or she has also been abused. Bullies are normally thought of as âmaladapted, troubled people, lashing out because they had been abused or harassed themselves or at least had dysfunctional home lives...