‘The Swallowed Beloved’: Corporeality and Incorporation in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

Abstract

In keeping with the focus of this special edition of Humanities on the political child, this article builds on investigations into constructions of the child body in literature and society to examine how portrayals of the child body in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book repeatedly slip under the varying perspectives of the adults; that is, how adult politics are always at play in understandings of children and childhood both within and outside of the text. In taking this approach, this article focuses on two key texts in literary discussions of spectrality, bodies, and signification—Hamlet and ‘Fors’—to consider how the paradoxical child body in Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is both constructed within the adult perspective and constantly slips from it, and how Gaiman approaches the issue at the heart of this analysis: that of who gets to decide who or what a child is, should be, or can be.