Constructions of childhood

Abstract

This dissertation comprises six case studies that examine particular constructions in word and image of the child. The children it puts into play differ so radically as to constitute incommensurate beings thereby revealing the concept of childhood to be unstable, provisional, constructed and changing. Chapter one takes up the anti-abortion movement's definition of the fetus as autonomous child. I argue that this formulation violates the rights of the pregnant woman from whose body and life the fetus cannot be divorced physiologically or ethically. I interpret the history of anatomical illustration and two Hollywood science-fiction films as diverse aspects of a masculinist ideology which serves to maintain "the right to life" as the prerogative of the male despite the fact that women, not men, bear children. My second chapter addresses the vexed issue of Lewis Carroll's erotic relations with young girls in such a way as to relate his literary achievement with the most troubling aspects of his photographic practice. I interpret his texts, drawings and photographs as creative productions which bear the traces of child sexual abuse, both suffered and inflicted. My third chapter counters the prevailing interpretation of Hine's child-labor photographs as enacting an exemplary, exchange between a Progressive reform photographer and his working-class subjects. I argue that this work constitutes an ideological expression of a middle-class conception of the child as an economically useless yet emotionally priceless being. Chapters four and five examine how Freud's case histories of Dora and the Wolf-Man portray childhood as a joint reconstruction of analyst and analysand. I reassert the importance of an intersubjective family history which Freud downplays in favor of a theoretically productive yet narratologically oppressive explication of the individual psyche. My last chapter takes up the figure of the wild child, who, without language, remains closer to animal than to human nature. At stake in the effort to teach the wild child to speak and write are competing theories about children, language and pedagogy. These children are all changelings and thus allow childhood to be conceived in tension with whatever threatens or promises to come into being in its place.