Author: Mark Froud
Genre: Biography
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Figure of the Child
The figure appears so frequently in our culture, in films, television drama and documentaries, news media and novels, and yet we bury the trauma of the lost child deep within us. The lost child is everywhere and nowhere. By definition absent, lost children are a constant presence in our culture. Society buries the vast numbers of lost children that it removes from the world but the vast ranks of the forgotten boys and girls haunt us, reappearing in stories and images across time.
At the time of writing, the long-awaited Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in Britain is underway, having begun on 27 February 2017. The aims are to expose institutional failings and collu- sion regarding child sexual abuse in the past and present, to enable vic- tims and survivors to give testimony and have their voices heard, and to provide initiatives for the future to prevent subsequent abuse. The loss of a child takes many forms. Even when a child grows into an adult and lives into old age, any damage inflicted upon him or her, emotionally, physically or mentally, can mean that a child is still lost.
The scope of the IICSA inquiry indicates the scale of the problem of child sexual abuse, but also how shocking the extent to which such a widespread and horrific issue has been buried from view for so long. For many victims, they too have buried the effects of the abuse deep inside them. This book is not an example of trauma theory, although I will make some reference to psychoanalysis. Much has been written about how the effect of experiencing trauma often results in repression of memories and the inability to articulate what has happened. It would appear that our society as a whole has suffered from this repression, denying the abuses within it. However, the psychosis of the collective is not so easily categorised: society, as the IICSA inquiry makes clear, is also the perpetrator of trauma. Established, responsible institutions have been guilty of not only allowing abuse to occur under their auspices, but, in examples such as child migration and the ‘Stolen Generations’ of indigenous children in Australia and Canada, state-run and independent authorities have actively encouraged and facilitated the removal of chil- dren from their families.
In this book I will analyse the figure of the lost child as it appears, dis- appears and reappears constantly through our cultural history. It is firstly important to set the scene of how the figure of the child was formed (so we know what we have lost). Two seemingly distinct concepts emerge: the representation of the child into images, and the absorption of the child figure to make him or her a signifier of the interior self. Awareness of the child within has found expression in the projection of that child out onto the world. It is as if the deeper the child figure is as an aspect of our self, the more we need to position it outside of ourselves so we can look at it. The prevalence of the lost child figure would suggest that the internal child is the part of ourselves that we mourn, or that we are afraid of, or that we despise, and because of this we must eject it from our mind and body, like a contagion.
The formulation of the concept of memory is asserted by many to have developed in the late eighteenth century, at the same time as that of the concept of childhood. Breithaupt cites several critics who ‘have added to Charles Taylor’s insight that the model for the self and its interiority since the eighteenth century was the figure of the child’ (Breithaupt 2005, 78). Breithaupt’s view is that the development of the idea of childhood was linked to the concepts of selfhood and the psychology of memory and he connects this with the assertion that trauma was ‘invented’ in the late-eighteenth-century period of roman- ticism. During this period, the concept of selfhood ‘becomes a prereq- uisite for the modern man’ (77–78). However, conversely, this notion of the self causes the German Romantics suffering because they perceive themselves as too weak to achieve the creation of a self. To remedy this situation, Breithaupt argues, trauma was invented as a means of pro- ducing strength from weakness, making the absence of a self desirable (77–78). He goes further by asserting that ‘the notion of the psycho- logical as a whole comes about as the recipient of the demand to give ashape, a recognizable form to a process of an individual’s reversal’ (81). This argument makes loss a prerequisite for the definition of selfhood: absence is necessary for presence.
Breithaupt argues that there is a connection between this emergence of the self and ‘the promise to turn weakness into strength’ with ‘the sudden emergence of childhood as the model of selfhood in the late eighteenth century; the child’s weakness and absolute reliance on the outside turns out to be the condition of possibility for selfhood’ (78). In this formulation we have the simultaneous concepts of vulnerability to external (traumatic) force and the potential for growth and (self) devel- opment. It is the potential, in other words, for the child to become lost, which is essential to a modern psychological identity.
Larry Wolff, referred to by Breithaupt, discusses the relationship between developing concepts of childhood and the emerging beliefs about memory from Hume, Locke and, particularly, Rousseau (Wolff 1998, 378). This period saw the development of the autobiography (following Rousseau’s Confessions) which also involved reaching back through memory to try to recover the childhood self. Rousseau denied that children themselves have memory in the same way that adults do, instead absorbing sensations from objects around them in a particular type of memory which then awaited entry into ‘mature consciousness’ (Wolff 1998, 378). Wolff asserts that, for Rousseau, the child ‘was always the object, never the subject of memory, that children could not con- sciously remember anything of consequence, and yet childhood itself was recognized essentially in remembrance’ (379). It is this reclamation of childhood which becomes the source of literature in the form of auto- biography. In this conceptualisation, children are made into representations on the page as signifiers of an interior self.
The centrality of the child to a psychology of the self continued in the following century when Freudian psychoanalysis formalised the concept that ‘the core of an individual’s psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood’ and ‘discovered’ the ‘unconscious’ as a ‘formulation to the idea of the lost child within all of us’ (Steedman 1995, 4). This development of conceptualising the interior self in the figure of a child was intricately entwined with the image of the child. The mental pro- cesses of memory and imagination form around the figure of a child and then project that child into the world through autobiographies, novels, poetry and art.
Steedman develops Raymond Williams’s theory that the experiences of hearing or seeing poems, stories and plays are ‘real processes … physi- cal and material relational processes’ and that these processes can actually bring into being ‘networks of understanding and belief and relation- ships’. The figure of the child in particular, ‘released from the many texts that gave birth to it, helped shape feelings, and structure feeling into thought’. Steedman goes further in asserting that the ‘idea of the child was the figure that provided the largest number of people living in the recent past of Western societies with the means for thinking about and creating a self: something grasped and understood, a shape, moving in the body … something inside: an interiority’ (Steedman 1995, 19–20).
Steedman, in her study of the historical development of a child figure which came to represent the development of the self in adults, asserts that literary and theoretical creations of a child figure became ‘a central vehicle for expressing ideas about the self and its history’, though the conception that ‘there was such a thing as childhood focused new forms of attention on actually living and real children, from the late eighteenth century onwards’ (Steedman 1995, 5). These real children then influ- enced imagined children who in turn were used to represent aspects of real children’s lives (Steedman 1995, 5). Reality and the imaginary were bound together, and my study will necessarily discuss both.
It must be remembered, as Buckingham asserts, that ‘the notion of childhood is itself a social, historical construction’ formed largely by ‘cul- ture and representation’ (2000, 6). Peter Coveney argues that ‘the child- image contains not only the response of the artist to his condition, but the response of a whole society, to itself ’. Individually and socially, this
‘response’ is often seemingly contradictory; the child is represented ‘as a symbol of growth, life, and fertility, as a means for establishing human values in an increasingly secular age’ but also frequently ‘as a symbol of dying, as life that is “better dead”’ (Coveney 1957, 340). Throughout this book, I will relate the cultural and literary creations of the lost child figure to those many very real children in society who have become vic- tims of this ‘response’, where the ‘symbol of dying’ is rendered in their flesh and blood.
The child figure is central to a society based on Christianity, or, more precisely, based on Christian dogma as it evolved in the centuries after St Augustine. Augustine introduced the doctrine of original sin, which asserted that everyone was born inherently sinful, and this connection of ‘childhood and sin, made the infant an adult of sorts, and surrounded him with a fallen nature, which existed in that condition because of man’s fallen will’ (Pattison 1978, 19). Through this doctrine, the child becomes an embodiment of man’s ‘fall’ and of his sinfulness in the world.
Previously, the dominant doctrine in Christianity was that of Pelagius, who argued that ‘man was endowed with sufficient grace from birth to lead a perfect life, if he could; that Adam’s sin was not binding on his posterity’ (Pattison, 12–13). The notion that children are sinful, even further that they carry the whole ‘fall’ of humanity within them, can easily become converted to a sense that children are to be feared, mis- trusted, even loathed. Perhaps it is this notion that leads to a desire to rid the world of children, to destroy children’s lives, to abuse and murder them. These conflicting attitudes centring on the child are themes that will be discussed through the following chapters. They appear to me to be important in understanding the cultural importance of the lost child figure through the centuries to the current era.
The concepts proceeding from this doctrine started to influence evolving literary forms. Many critics regard Augustine’s Confessions as the first autobiography, a literary form that therefore emerges alongside the principle of original sin. At this early stage in history, a re-creation of childhood through memory is associated with a loss of innocence intrinsic to the child. The figure of the child is represented as retrievable through memory and writing despite being ‘lost’ in time; however, this interior child self is also an embodiment of evil.
Pattison argues that Augustinian doctrine took centuries to become dominant in British culture: where the classical view largely ignored children, by the time of the Reformation ‘the child emerge[s] as a liter- ary figure around whom ideas of our original nature, our fallen condi- tion, and our hopes for salvation cluster’ (20). This was a sign that the masses of the population accepted the doctrine ‘not simply as belief but as metaphor and symbolism’ (20). During the course of the following chapters I will discuss how the figure of the lost child has assumed similar symbolic and metaphoric importance. The dual notion of a child figure representing the loss of an original innocence, and yet also representing the possibility of redemption, ‘salvation’, is interesting to consider with our current conflicting attitudes to children. We are in a society today which sees children as ‘threatened and endangered’ (from various threats such as child abuse and neglect) but simultaneously as a cause of dan- ger to the rest of society—‘as violent, anti-social and sexually precocious’ (Buckingham 2000, 3). Buckingham uses an analogy which uses Edenic imagery to encapsulate this dilemma: ‘the sacred garden of childhood has increasingly been violated; and yet children themselves seem ever more reluctant to remain confined within it’ (4). The loss of childhood has become a state of being to be both mourned and desired.
This double-edged attitude to children is not new. Cunningham dis- cusses certain laws enacted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, partly due to a rapidly increasing population which led to an increase in unemployment, vagrancy and begging. These laws were intended to stop children begging and engage them in an occupation. However, the nature of that occupation was often to the great detri- ment of the child: most notably, an Act of Parliament of 1547 allowed for ‘children of recalcitrant vagabonds and any beggar children aged between 5 and 14 wandering on their own’ to be removed from their parents by ‘any manner of person’ who promised to keep them occu- pied up to the age of twenty for women and twenty-four for men. If the apprentice escaped his or her new master but was recaptured, the master was permitted to put the child in chains and ‘use him or her as his slave in all points until it came of age’ (Cunningham 2006, 95). Slavery was made legal in England, with children the ones threatened with enslave- ment. This legalisation of child slavery is important to remember in the context of enforced child migration, which I will discuss in Chap. 3.
Although this particular legislation was withdrawn two years later, the principle of removing the children of beggars from parental care remained (Cunningham, 95). Other laws, such as that of 1536, gave local authorities permission to take ‘idle’ but able beggar children from the streets and apprentice them to masters of a craft or husbandry. There were dual motives behind such laws:
In these laws and policies rank social fear seems the dominant motif. Children are dangerous. They need to be put to work. But alongside this fear there is a concern for children. The two concerns, to bring order to every community and to provide care for impoverished individual children, are the two sides of a coin much in evidence in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries. (Cunningham 2006, 95–96)
Cunningham’s use of the word ‘coin’ is appropriate as the laws described are also clearly establishing children as units of production and commerce. Developing with this economic subjugation of children, alongside but also often in opposition to it, is another type of ‘produc- tion’: that of image, representation and symbol.
In the eighteenth century it was considered a matter of national pride when thousands of ‘charity children’ were paraded through the streets of London annually. Cunningham asserts that the children ‘were being commandeered to the service of the nation’ (105–106). There were strict regulations prohibiting the children’s parents from attending because the authorities wanted them to be presented as orphans rather than the offspring of destitute parents (Cunningham, 106). It is a curious concept that a nation wanted to present these children as lost but now found and made presentable: ‘no nation upon the face of the earth can produce its parallel’ (Cunningham, 107). There was no inten- tion that the children be encouraged to develop themselves beyond their established place in society but ‘descended from the laborious part of mankind, they may be bred up and inured to the meanest services’ (Cunningham, 196).
The display was described by William Blake in his ‘Holy Thursday’ poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Experience, he con- demns the ‘Babes reduc’d to misery,/Fed with cold and usurous hand’ (Cunningham 2006, 107–108; Blake1986, 73). Cunningham also asserts that Blake’s verse in Songs of Innocence which ‘gives voice to a baby, talking with his mother’ reveals an ‘almost revolutionary percep- tion that a child is not a piece of paper or wax that adults can write or mould at will, not scarred by original sin. There is, at birth, an indi- viduality, a voice, which we can hear’ (Cunningham, 129). Carolyn Steedman, referring to the importance of William Blake to our cultural heritage, asserted: ‘Who is able to avoid the Little Girl Lost, the child left “among tigers wild”, when writing of childhood destitution?’ (Steedman 1995, 124).
The denial of a voice to children is the subject most specifically cov- ered in my final chapter. I am conscious that this study is principally about the way adults react towards, cause, and try to represent the lost child. Our culture is almost entirely written by adults, and therefore the voices of children, when they do appear, are filtered through, if not com- pletely imagined by, adults. As Kate Douglas asserts, with reference to Henry Jenkins and Henry A. Giroux, ‘children’s life narratives, like chil- dren’s literature and culture’, is almost always written by and marketed by and for adults. Even in a wider cultural context, ‘experiences of youth are rarely narrated by the young’ (Douglas 2010, 173). It is importantto note this absence of the child from writing, to note the lost children within our system of signification (something I will also discuss further in the final chapter).
Together with the real children who are daily made into victims, I want to acknowledge the many people who work tirelessly and often at great danger to themselves to help or give voice to traumatised chil- dren. A book compiled by David Maidment (founder of the charity Railway Children and Co-Chair of the Consortium for Street Children 1998–2008) from first-hand accounts of street children from around the world is entitled Nobody Ever Listened To Me. The title is taken from a comment by a teenage girl in the UK who told a charity researcher that they were ‘the first person in my life who’s ever listened to me’ (Maidment 2012, n.p.). Maidment also quotes a Moroccan ‘street boy’ who told an interviewer for a report produced for the UN Human Rights Commissioner: ‘I can’t think of anyone that I can go and speak to if I have a problem. No way. If I have a problem I just deal with it, I don’t tell anyone’ (Maidment, n.p.). These children who have been forced into terrible lives through circumstances outside of their control produce most strongly the contradictory responses referred to above. They are often seen as victims who deserve sympathy and help and yet are frequently viewed as dangerous delinquents. Society’s response (as individuals or in collective institutions) reveals our troubled relationship with the child within us.
Undoubtedly children such as those above are lost children: lost lives, broken pasts, presents and futures. They may be lost to their families (although often because of abuse within their own family) or lost to mainstream society. Different authorities in different parts of the world deal with the problem of street children in different ways: some ignore them completely, some treat them violently or simply try to move them away from areas of commerce or tourism; some do attempt to provide the children with some assistance or means of improving their lives. There is reference in James Miller’s 2008 novel Lost Boys, which I dis- cuss in Chap. 4, to the gangs of disaffected youths around the world, victims of ‘religious wars, the child soldiers, the AIDS orphans’ in Africa, along with teenage gangs in South and North America (194). Children become lost in many ways, throughout the world and across history.
The Scoping Report into Missing Children of 2011, commissioned by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, states that there are many causes of missing children, ‘whether that it is simply losing them in a crowd or a busy shopping centre, through to family break- down, becoming detached from society, looking for a better life in another country, being abducted from the street or lured by a “stranger” on the internet’ (5). There are many other forms of lost child which I will discuss in this book. The examples above are of children who have physically gone missing, but it is important also to consider those chil- dren who are emotionally and mentally damaged and can be regarded as having lost childhoods. Emotional and mental harm will be a factor caus- ing, or deriving from, most of the categories listed above, but there will also be children who never leave home or never abscond from the insti- tution or guardian who is supposed to look after them. Many will not be counted in any official statistics, but they will still suffer separation from society, from other people, as well as disassociation within themselves.
Much of the socio-historical academic studies on childhood base their research upon representations in art and literature (Buckingham 2000, 34) and it is significant that many of these representations reflect the mourning of adults for their own lost childhoods. Buckingham asserts that contem- porary ‘family’ films such as those associated with the Disney corporation and the director Steven Spielberg share with much nineteenth-century lit- erature the presentation of ‘the figure of the child [as] at once a symbol of hope and a means of exposing adult guilt and hypocrisy. Such films often define the meaning of childhood by projecting its future loss’: they are fantasies in which both children and adults ‘mobilize anxieties about the pain of mutual separation, while offering reassuring fantasies about how it can be overcome’ (Buckingham, 9).
These representations are powerful because they ‘convey a cer- tain truth’ about the real lives of adults and children’ beyond the illu- sory. They are attempts by adults not only to control children but also to control our own childhoods ‘which we are constantly mourning’ (Buckingham, 10). The actual, real lost children of our societies are pro- jections of, and attempts to reclaim or control, the lost children within ourselves. Steedman makes the important point that up until the middle of the twentieth century, infant mortality rates were so high that ‘any adult contemplating a small child was sharply aware of the immanence of death in growth’. Steedman argues that this ‘old perception’ developed beyond the immediate and real threat to the child’s life so that death was also understood ‘as the inevitable outcome of the very process the child embodied, which was growth itself ’ (Steedman 1995, ix). A positive hope for the future, containing within it the inevitability of extinction, is embodied in the (image of) the child.
The child figure is an imaginary creation (Steedman 1995, 5–7). In the next chapter I will discuss how the lost child figure has been central to the stories which have been intrinsic to Western culture for centuries, being led into the forest in countless oral folk tales. As imaginary con- cepts the ‘child’ and the ‘lost child’ are still powerful, but it is important not to lose sight of real children’s lives. As Buckingham argues, a ‘par- ticular idea of childhood may well be disappearing; but it is much harder to identify the consequences of this in terms of the realities of children’s lives’ (2000, 35). One of the tragedies of our time and perhaps all times is the denial of a voice to children. Our basis for assumptions about children in past eras is largely based on representations of them (writ- ten or pictorial) (Buckingham, 34) which are made by adults. Tragically, so many children have suffered behind walls of silence, the abuse often inflicted upon them by the adults who should be there to protect them, either within the family or institutionally. In recent years there has been a growth, at least on the surface, of awareness of this suffering and of the corruption or incompetence which has caused or allowed the abuse. It is important to hold in mind Buckingham’s assertion that ‘even for those who purport to represent children’s interests, there is a real danger of assuming that adults can easily speak or act on behalf of children’ (116). I will discuss real life examples of institutional child abuse in Chap. 3 and also consider the media representation of high-profile cases of child mur- der or abduction in Chap. 4.
I do not wish this book to flatten children into representations which will further contain them. I will refer to real life cases where children have been lost or their lives have been negated and connect these to the imaginary and symbolic. My argument is that the symbolic power attrib- uted to lost children within fictional works of representation is inextri- cably linked to the causes as well as the effects of those tragic real lost children. My juxtaposition of real and imagined lost children is necessary because when I discuss actual cases it is to analyse their connection to the symbol, and when I analyze the symbol it is to discover what it reveals about the world which ‘loses’ so many lives.
Wolff argues that previous studies about attitudes to childhood have analysed social and cultural attitudes to children and not ‘the child who waited to be discovered within each adult as an aspect of self ’ (Wolff 1998, 381). In this book I will seek to connect the interior child with those cultural and social perceptions of children. If adults have a lost child within them then it could be said that we are all lost children, which would go a long way to explaining the lost child figure’s prolif- eration in our culture. In Chap. 5, I will argue that the large number of texts and films which use lost children at the centre of ghostly or uncanny narratives do so to represent this lost child within us. The lost child figure disrupts our perception of time as linear and stable, and from this uncertainty ghosts emerge.
In Chap. 4, I will discuss how the lost child figure permeates recent culture and society, from the late twentieth century to today. Two of the novels discussed are Lost Boys by James Miller (2008) and Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates (2014) which use the figure of the lost child to criticise the post-9/11 society in Britain and America. The destruction of the ‘twin towers’ in 2001 has been discussed as a cataclysmic event which has changed the world and affected everything that followed it. It is probably true that people living in any era will feel that their time is one of particular significance in the world, that they are living within a schism which irreparably changes everything which has gone before and which will come after. It is probably also true that human history is for- ever changing with destruction and rebirth, churning lives within it; and yet that revolution is a circle which continually repeats the same terrors and truths. But having discussed how the lost child figure has continually disappeared and reappeared throughout history, I want to analyse what it tells us about our lives now.
In Chap. 5, I will argue that the lost child figure is equivalent to the absence within language postulated by Derrida and other post-structural theorists. This gap in signification is, on a material level, a cause for the crushing silences which rob children of their voice and enable oppressive institutions and individuals to obscure their abuses. On a deeper, met- aphysical level, the silence is an opening to the ground of being from which everything is created.
RefeRences
Blake, William. 1986 (1968). In English Romantic Verse, Intro. and ed. David
Wright. London: Penguin Books.
Breithaupt, Fritz. 2005. The Invention of Trauma in German Romanticism.
Critical Inquiry 32: 77–101.
Buckingham, David. 2000. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. 2011. Scoping Report on
Missing and Abducted Children. www.ceop.police.uk. Accessed 10 July 2014. Coveney, Peter. 1957. The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A
Study of the Theme in English Literature. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Cunningham, Hugh. 2006. The Invention of Childhood. London: BBC Books. Douglas, Kate. 2010. Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and
Memory. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press.
Maidment, David. 2012. Nobody Ever Listened to Me. London: www.lulu.com. Miller, James. 2008. Lost Boys. London: Little, Brown Book Group.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 2014. Carthage. London: Fourth Estate.
Pattison, Robert. 1978. The Child Figure in English Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Steedman, Carolyn. 1995. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of
Human Interiority, 1780–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolff, Patrick. 1998. When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the
Philosophy of Memory in the Enlightenment. Eighteenth Century Studies 31:
377–401.
No comments:
Post a Comment