Beautiful monsters,strange children and the problem of making distinctions

Abstract

Inviting questions about our emotional entanglement in relationship to childhood opens new space to think about how and why we construct the child in the way we do. I propose that the figure of the child stands in for our wishes, regrets and anxieties. And perhaps, one of the reasons we phantasize about childhood is because it can be used as a revolt against actual experience. Children, according to Steedman, are the most temporary of all social subjects and so are by their very nature impossible to capture. I suggest that the fascination with the inner world of the child acts as an antidote for lost memories and our inability to consciously access the emotional experiences of the past. To introduce these ideas, I begin with Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, as provocation for thinking about the figure of the child. To explore this further, I have created a dialogue between Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Carolyn Steedman’s discussion of the elusive history of child acrobats in Strange Dislocations. The narrative of Frankenstein’s monster is considered in contrast to Shelley’s ideas about childhood, hoping to animate tensions in her mythology. I also see the monster as a representation of the child, who then comes to represent childhood and exists as a figure beyond the page. Steedman’s work acts as a tool to support the complicated process of thinking about a child figure, its manifestation and its purpose. Lear’s ideas about loss and enigmatic objects find their way into the conversation as I attempt to build an understanding of how a timeless figure, and one without distinctions, can somehow help us when the concepts we use to function in the world have stopped making sense. Paradoxically, the child is both the concept we have lost and the enigmatic object that mobilizes our capacity to dream and search for the lost child.

Introduction

History and childhood, as ways of thinking and ways of knowing, both strenuously attempted to delimit and resist the implications of growth, and both ways of thought pushed these questions to the interior. The vast, historicised world was turned inside, so that history itself might be de-historicised, removed from the time that allowed growth and decay, so that they might be overcome, in the lost and – crucially – timeless place within. (Steedman, 1994: 95)

Steedman (1994) complicates the way we think about the child as she presents childhood as an idea connected to our ways of conceptualizing history. Childhood, for Steedman, is a way of being in the world, a form of knowledge and a quality that adults want to possess, control and manipulate. In this construct, childhood can be removed from ideas of time and history, and in turn growth and development, by being pushed inside so that these ideas become lost in the unconscious. The process Steedman describes places our questions of childhood deep within but recognizes that they are brought to the surface both consciously and unconsciously when exposed to particular triggers. As we continuously reunite with what Meltzer and Harris Williams (1988) call the aesthetic conflict, these questions may re-emerge slowly or they can appear as dramatic eruptions. In this article, I explore what happens if we think about the ways we construct childhood as directly reflecting the wish of the adult. Inviting questions about our emotional entanglement in the adult’s relationship to childhood opens new space to think about how and why we construct the child in the way we do. It also makes room for a new philosophical approach to thinking about childhood that combines ideas of subjectivity, memory, temporality, loss and imagination. I propose that the figure of the child stands in for our wishes, regrets and anxieties and that one of the reasons we phantasize about childhood is because it can be used as a revolt against what cannot be known about actual experience.

The way that we invest in child figures is deeply rooted in our emotional histories and transfers onto our relationships with actual children. Steedman’s work acts as a tool to support the complicated process of thinking about a child figure and its manifestation and purpose. This conflict makes itself known through the difficulty adults have in perceiving difference among real children, historical children and figurative ones, that do create a collapse of our ideas of time and posit the child simultaneously as our past, as current concern and as potential future. The most pressing problems that arise from this collection of ideas are as follows: Why would we want to push the child inside? And when the idea of the child is activated, yet again through our encounters with the aesthetic conflict, why does the child resurface in a completely different form and without distinctions? The method of thinking that Steedman demands of us is partially built on exploring places inside that we cannot easily access and requires us to make distinctions between, in and around the very things that challenge us to differentiate. De-historicizing allows the idea of the child to be influenced by adult phantasy rather than linked to truth, accuracy and authenticity.

Sendak’s kids

The loss of our childhood is a traumatic experience, and the longing we have for the child is something we unconsciously work to recover or repair throughout our adult lives. In Klein’s (1959) paper Our adult world and its roots in infancy, she reminds us that ‘both the capacity to love and the sense of persecution have deep roots in the infant’s earliest mental processes’ (p. 249) and reinforces that

love and hate towards the mother are bound up with the very young infant’s capacity to project all his emotions on to her, thereby making her into a good as well as dangerous object. However, introjection and projection though they are rooted in infancy, are not only infantile processes. (p. 250)

Klein’s paper helps us understand that the development of phantasy and the sculpting of the child’s understanding of the world begin in infancy, but the process of introjection and projection, a dance between internal and external factors, continues throughout life.

Our phantasies of natality remain buried deep within but are enacted symbolically in our play, our imagination and our neuroses. If our concepts of childhood are repressed and almost hidden from our conscious daily functioning, they still remain a force that guides our thinking about childhood, informs our constructions of the child and impacts how we engage with actual children. While playing with these ideas, I thought of Maurice Sendak’s famous children’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are. I remember this story from my childhood, as well as its significance when I was studying to become an Early Childhood Educator and practising the art of storytelling. This storybook and Sendak himself seem to stimulate the phantasies of childhood for adults who remember reading his books when they were little and many of whom now force these classics on their own children. In 2010 and 2011, Sendak, a rarely interviewed recluse, did a number of interviews, presumably to promote his final children’s storybook, Bumble-Ardy. Intrigued by how intensely people responded to these interviews and articles, I began to think about Sendak and how his newfound presence in print and online stirred up energy and conversation about childhood and its construction, although most listeners and readers had not thought of him or read his stories for years.

Sendak’s stories are filled with lost children, inadequate parents and strange creatures, and he revisits these themes throughout his work. His depictions of children can be easily interpreted as having a direct root in his own childhood. Similar ideas of how childhood experiences make us the adult we become are presented throughout Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where childhood stories are used to explain the life of the adult and her or his many mistakes. However, this deterministic reading is far too simple and limits us in understanding the layers of emotion that are wrapped up in the ways we construct and re-tell the narratives of childhood. Perhaps, this simplification emphasizes the challenges we have in making distinctions between critical concepts when we are faced with our own loss.

I was quick to identify Sendak’s most well-known book Where the Wild Things Are as a metaphor for the depths of our imagination and the phantasies of childhood. It pleases me to imagine I was the kind of child who wanted to be wild but who turned out okay because I could find my way back into the secure arms of my mother’s love. A 2011 article in the Guardian newspaper describes how

Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother’s anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his mother for reconciliation and dinner. (Brockes, 2011: para 8)

Our analysis becomes more challenging if we reframe Brockes’ interpretation and consider the monsters as an incarnation of Max’s phantasies of the self. Max does not defeat the monsters but incorporates them and returns to his mother more monstrous than he was before. It is easy for us to understand this world of monsters as an expression of the child’s frustration with the pressures of the adult world. Or, more interestingly, we can read it as a Kleinian tale of a beastly child who attempts to symbolically destroy the mother in order to become a free and separate subject.

My process of writing about difficult ideas buried deep inside our representations of childhood was complicated by Sendak’s passing on 8 May 2012. I witnessed a dramatic outpouring of grief in the news and on social media. Perhaps, this reaction was partly due to the series of interviews that appeared in the few years prior to his death. We had been reminded of Sendak, he was on our minds and this seemed to matter. Yet, I believe there was something deeper, something beyond this superficial expression of loss. The beloved children’s author, controversial character and strange, reclusive man had re-opened a point of access to our lost childhoods and reminded us of alternate ways to think about children and ourselves. His stories contained wild things, images of naked protagonists, mischievous children and he presented childhood as a difficult and potentially terrifying experience. Criticism of him and his work were fuelled by societal anxiety about children needing protection, which can be interpreted as a screen for a defence of homophobia. Sendak was also grumpy, a self-proclaimed atheist and someone who kept secrets from his parents – as both a child and an adult. He was a rebel in the world of children’s literature and his image holds power to remind us of alternate ways to think about children and, in turn, to think about ourselves. For this reason, I discuss Sendak as an example of a child figure. Although not explicitly thought of as a child by the reading public, Sendak becomes a child figure in the mind of his readers once informed by our constructions and phantasies of childhood. The more I think about Sendak, the harder he pushes at my questions of why we would want to force the idea of the child inside and hold it there. Is it to limit growth, decay and change in an attempt to find or recover what we lost so long ago? And why, when through encounters with the aesthetic conflict, does the phantasy of the child take on new forms and further our confusion?

The figure of the child and its strange dislocations

Steedman (1994) provides a method to probe these particular questions of the child. She uses Goethe’s child figure Mignon to explore ideas of childhood and interiority in Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780–1930. She emphasizes that the imagination is concerned with the beliefs, phantasies and desires of the adult and is expressed through the figure of the child. In Goethe’s work, the child figure Mignon is an acrobat, deformed by adult hands to enable her performance. The strange, androgynous, incomplete and little child that Goethe wrote was and is reproduced in countless versions over time. But Steedman is more concerned with the ideas, and conceptualizations that were involved in remembering and reshaping this literary figure long after it was written. The ideas of childhood that Mignon embodied meant something, even to those who had never read Goethe’s work.

In Strange Dislocations, Steedman presents us with a way to think about how we use the image of the child as more than an emotional site for our phantasies. I relate this to what Rose (1984) describes as a desire for the child. The desire Rose speaks of is not an action but an investment in a particular idea. This investment transforms into something we can utilize. The child as a device helps us function with the masked emotions of our childhood, and the personification of the child figure is one way in which we do this. Steedman (1994) describes the difference between metaphor and personification by explaining that metaphor lives in the world of resemblances and symbols. Alternatively, personification creates a disruption between the entity and the meaning it has been given, and something in this space escapes knowing. So, even those who did not know her in her original form put Mignon to use with little regard for her historical development. Steedman explains that Mignon

was used for the purposes of personification, to give a name and a face (and a body: a deformed and damaged body) to abstract ideas and bodies of theories, particularly theories of childhood and development. (p. 19)

This object or figure is incomplete but open to be created. While a place to explore the emotions of the unconscious phantasies of childhood is necessary, we also seem to require a way to translate these things into something we deem as useful in the world. The child as a figure is enigmatic and serves as both an emotional site for phantasies and as a place to turn phantasies into action.

The problem of making distinctions

Steedman (1994) asks us to make distinctions or discriminate between things as different. We often have difficulty making distinctions and instead collapse concepts together as a method of coping with anxiety. When we collapse concepts, they start to lose their meaning, but, at the same time, they create deep reservoirs that hold the pieces of what were once whole ideas. This challenge is seen in our difficulty in knowing the difference between the child as real, historical, literary or imaginary. This challenge is also made evident as dimensions of time become distorted, and we combine the past, present and future. Additionally, when reading and writing about representations of childhood, it is easy to blur the lines between actual experience, narrative and our phantasies. Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg (2015) look at the relationship between uglification and beautification in a paper that explores how children become monsters and monsters become children. In this context, ‘monsters and ugliness can be attractive and intriguing in their difference, novelty and strangeness’ (Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg, 2015: 6), providing an additional layer of complexity to our challenge of making distinctions when thinking about the child. This constitutes a problem, particularly for humans in the state of childhood but also for the adults performing the projection. The means by which children have come to be closely identified with our adult self-hood requires us to consider the role of projection onto identifications with children. And while distinctions matter, there is also something we gain when they become muddied and unclear. The image of the child, which is generated through our collapse of concepts and lack of distinctions, becomes the way in which we understand ourselves. In this confusion, we reassign meaning and affect.

Frankenstein

When I first started thinking about the concept of childhood, its misrecognition and the place for the monstrous child, I was reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My initial curiosities about the book were related to how Shelley constructs childhood and how children are portrayed in the novel. The concept of childhood was exceptionally new when Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published in 1818. While not explicitly defined in her novel, the concept pervades the text, providing a framework that continually strives to explain how characters arrive in their adult predicaments.

The mythology of childhood constructed in Frankenstein focuses on confirming certainties about children and human development. The novel presents children as objects and assumes that the lives of people can be determined based on the absence or presence of childhood essentials. In general, children are characterized in opposition to adults, and Shelley’s novel Frankenstein does exactly this. Depictions of the early years of Captain Walton, Victor, his mother Caroline and Elizabeth serve to construct a mythology of childhood that separates children from adults and suggests universal truths about the child.

Shelley’s childhood

Shelley’s construction of the child requires that we think about the language used to describe childhood, the difference between childhood and adulthood and what children require or need. Shelley’s way of thinking also uncovers new areas to explore including the child/adult dichotomy, parental expression of love and responsibility, the need for child protection and rescue and childhood as a predictor of the future.

In Frankenstein, childhood is placed in opposition to adulthood. This dualism equates childhood with innocence, vulnerability and the need for protection, while adulthood is associated with responsibility, independence and guilt. The description of the ideal child focuses on a combination of beauty and innocence. Even the monster’s perspective of William confirms this ideal when he tells of a ‘beautiful child’ ‘with all the sportiveness of infancy’ (Shelley, 2003: 144). The monster believes that William would be ‘unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity’ (p. 144). The pastimes of children are considered implicitly immature and Victor articulates his own difference when he describes how his childhood passions ‘were turned not towards childish pursuits but to an eager desire to learn’ (Shelley, 2003: 39). Here, he places child’s play in juxtaposition to learning, inferring the importance of the latter.

Shelley also divides children into two types: children of privilege and children who are destitute. Victor recognizes his own privilege, for when he ‘mingled with other families, [he] distinctly discerned how peculiarly fortunate [his] lot was and gratitude assisted the development of filial love’ (Shelley, 2003: 39). It is also assumed that parents feel a natural responsibility towards their creations that is expressed in love. Victor connects his incomparably happy childhood to his parents being ‘possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence’ (Shelley, 2003: 39) concerning him. He believes that his parents’ ‘deep consciousness of what they owed towards the being to which they had given life, added to the active spirit of tenderness that animated both’ (Shelley, 2003: 35). Innocence is lost one way or another, either by growing up or by being destroyed. These stories feed the emotions that inform our image of the child.

Frankenstein tells us that children who meet unfortunate circumstances are in danger of becoming ‘orphans and beggars’ unless they are rescued. In the novel, beauty and charm are the liberators. All characters are assumed to be the product of their histories, with their early years determining what kind of adults they will be. Even with all the love he received, Victor tells of a day that determined his fate and sent him on the path to his great mistake. On this day, he witnessed ‘a most violent and terrible thunderstorm’ (Shelley, 2003: 42) and became acquainted with the laws of electricity. This was the beginning of his path to destruction. According to Shelley, a moment, an experience or an environment from our childhood can govern the future. These stories we tell ourselves about our childhood help us justify a difficult past and reconcile with the events of the present. But these stories are not facts, they are narratives that are constructed to confirm affect and can be justified only based on what we know now. So while Frankenstein seems to promote a determinist view of childhood, where the events and conditions of the child are seen to decide the future of the adult, in fact, the novel shows us that we all construct narratives of our childhood in adulthood. In this way, we can see that childhood is less about determinism and more about experimenting with temporality and dimensions of time.

(Not) a novel childhood

When Frankenstein’s monster becomes literate, it is implied that he makes the shift from childhood to adulthood. At this time, he is finally able to reflect on his own circumstances, but he still requires phantasy in order to narrate his past. He describes the ‘agony that these reflections inflicted’ (Shelley, 2003: 123) and how he wished he could have ‘forever remained in [his] native wood nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst and heat!’ (Shelley, 2003: 123). His early days, devoid of self-reflection and personal knowledge, can be perceived as uncomplicated and simple. Once the monster learns the lessons of the world, he reflects,

But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? (Shelley, 2003: 124)

With the capacity for self-reflection and analysis provided by his education, he recognizes the significance of loving responsible parents, his otherness and that he is somehow defective. He learns he is a monster. As he looks back on his past, it is inevitable that his narrative of childhood is constructed with this grown-up knowledge in mind and he resents the betrayal of his body. This can be understood as what Britzman and Pitt (2004) describe as a mistiming of learning. The monster’s narrative is a type of deferred action as he desires what he believes was childhood innocence. However, this can only be articulated as a reflection of his past – constructed through his task of memory building and filled with the affect of his current desire.

Considering the monster’s narrative in contrast to Shelley’s ideas about childhood exposes the weakness in her depiction of social mythology and offers something else. Frankenstein was the first book I read where I truly realized it was possible to think about the child as something beyond my own beliefs or concepts of childhood. The monster sits on the periphery of Shelley’s theory, defined as neither adult nor child. So what does his construction represent in relation to the myth of the child? What distinctions have collapsed in the wake of his representation? He follows child-like patterns of development, grows into maturity and expresses things that reflect human needs and wants. Conceivably, we can consider him a construction of the ‘Other’ where the author and the reader do not know or understand his identity and experience. More interestingly, once I was able to see the monster as a personification of the child figure, I was able to grasp that there are enigmatic qualities of childhood that mobilize adults in our constructions.

The child: A figure, an enigmatic object and monster

To think of the monster as a representation of the child initially raises questions about our resistance to the otherness of childhood, which is different than thinking of the child as a monster. Frankenstein’s monster is large, cumbersome, destructive, ugly and lonely. This image of the child is not as palatable as Shelley’s or as ours. The monster is without origin and the creation of someone’s obsession. He is made from dead parts. He has no history, no family and no future. The story of the monster shows us how we can look at people as subjects and authors of their childhood histories rather than products of their pasts, providing us a more complex line of thinking than determinism by creating space for the monster in childhood and giving value to the experience of children. Yet, even then, there remains something more puzzling. Eventually, my ideas collided with the text to create a new kind of exploration as I read the work of Carolyn Steedman (1994).

The child of fascination in Steedman’s work is invested with an abundance of adult anxiety, revealing a longing for the characteristics, bodies and phantasies that belong to childhood. Figures like Goethe’s Mignon are a combination of childhood qualities that animate adult protection and reflect desire for the child. At the same time, this figure is infused with something more bewildering. Turning to Freud, Steedman (1994) describes how childhood is

a cluster of desires, happenings, experiences, assaults and traumas [that] is relocated, put into another place – a place that for the moment we only need to label as not the conscious mind, under the sway of a radically different form of time. (p. 88)

The fascination with the inner world of the child acts as an antidote for lost memories and inability to consciously access the emotional experience of the past.

The figure of the child

The move from literature into concepts is a complicated process, where an understanding of the figure of the child becomes necessary. A figurative child is metaphorical, resembles the actual child and includes the act of forming something into a particular shape and representing it through symbolization that holds ideas of the child together in some kind of container. This figurative child, just like a literary child, can be used to revolt against actual experience. The child is employed as a receptacle and a stage, where both resentment and wishes are acted out, stored and explored. Figures of childhood move and transform across time, genres, forms of writing and cultures, where they are altered according to new understandings and begin to stand in for actual children. Possessed with enigmatic qualities and confusing to the observer, these figures are both enchanting and a source of speculation. The child figure represents the adult’s desire for the child, and, as Rose (1984) distinguishes, this desire is not action but investment. This investment is an emotional one. The child as an enigmatic object becomes a place to house the affect of our experience, the arousal of our emotions and the unfulfilled wishes we have constructed about the past. The figure of the child born out of a union of history, real life experience, psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and literature can offer compelling and perplexing images. As we leave the world of literature, we take this figure with us, and in many ways it is a summation of our anxieties, wishes and regrets. This aesthetic transforms into a figure and is driven to exist beyond the page.

Preservation, mortality and stalling development

Steedman (1994) describes how the very transient nature of the child as subject makes the return of the past an unattainable quest and confirms the impossibility of detaining and questioning the child. This is a conversation about time. Natality is fleeting and the moment of birth is instantly overtaken by growth. The wish that the child is knowable moves onto the body of the child and creates a figure. The figure that we presume or want to know is made small, helpless and, in turn, accessible. Steedman discusses how, in general, the child’s development becomes linked to death as it irrefutably moves the child away from natality and towards ageing and ultimately dying. Shelley’s Frankenstein gives us a rendition of the connection between development and death by framing each childhood experience as something that has consequence for the adult they will become. This means that each move the child makes propels them into their future. Mortality is a problem for the adult, and the figure of the child has the ability to represent this. In this configuration, the adults’ wish to identify with the child is obstructed and so highlights why the figurative child, one without a past, becomes important. We can see this in Steedman’s (1994) discussion of Mignon, who ‘at the point of existence – she did not have a history’ (p. 40). The child without beginnings is divorced from a past, a developmental trajectory, and a future. This is a child we can make use of – one that embodies fragility and indestructibility at the same time. This child can remain forever new: if the child can be frozen in time it will not develop or move towards death; she is caught and can be known. This act of preservation, a distortion of time, is an emotional act that is rooted in unconscious loss and its phantasies. It is present not only in the construction of the figure but also through the narrative that accompanies it. Narrative, in both oral tradition and written works, reinforces the mythology of the child and keeps the investment in the figure alive. Once held in time, the figure becomes a container for truths and understandings about the child. Ideas of childhood as narrations of our wishes are then placed onto others. We read ourselves and our ideas of childhood onto the world, and this has the power to restore our relationship to the world, making it safe and securing our place in it (Rose, 1984). However, at the same time, the child who is preserved remains in a state of natality and does not threaten or remind us of our loss. It is easier to stall the child in time if they do not belong to time at all.

Monsters in childhood

In order to tolerate change and the uncertainty of meeting a child we do not know, we need new concepts. This does not simply mean a destruction of the Other or recognition of our past but something else entirely. It is a complete change of narrative and demands elasticity and flexibility in our thinking. Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg (2015) use philosophy to explore childhood contexts and monstrosities within the same conversation and claim that we need monsters. In Cute, creepy and sublime unnamed childhood monstrosities, they discuss how ‘monsters are concerned both with novelty and strangeness, they cannot be completely recognized or be recognizable, and as such they have no name to signify their identity’ (Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg, 2015: 3). This speaks to how enigmatic objects or figures of the child like Sendak, Frankenstein and Mignon make sense and can exist as both child and monster simultaneously.

Sendak, the figure, acts as a placeholder for the phantasies of childhood that belong to many adults who read his books when they were little. As we attach wishes and desires to Sendak, our distinctions are lost between the writer, the story, the image and our past. We find him strangely curious, unlikely and satisfying. The fact that he was rarely seen or heard appears to amplify his capacity to know. The image of the child and our childhood wishes are absorbed into the figure that we use to manage and represent them.

Frankenstein’s monster, or Frankenstein as we often call him, has been used, misnamed and misunderstood by many, including those who have never read Shelley’s book. If we see him as a representation of childhood, he is not merely a challenge to the myth of childhood innocence. Frankenstein’s monster becomes Frankenstein the figure who exists beyond the novel but is disconnected from his context and story. He is brought to life in multiple ways and we are left with contradictory images. He is a monstrous, awkward and incomplete child who makes us uncomfortable, and he is not easy to love. He is sad, destructive and vengeful and then feeds our desire to save, fix and educate the child. He carries the burden of his monstrosity but is also weighed down by our problem of the monstrous other in childhood. The monster transforms from monstrous literary creation to a representation of childhood, then into a figure of childhood who lives outside the novel and is used in our pursuit of knowing the child. Clearly, we become confused about who he is as he inhabits multiple roles at the same time. The monster acts as a container for our stress and anxiety so that we can construct an image of the competent, capable and beautiful child.

Perhaps, Frankenstein’s monster is just as mesmerizing as Goethe’s Mignon because he was never a child. He may be the personification of our fears of creation, our apprehension towards the motherless child, our misunderstanding of a child who does not fit and our wishes for our relationships with children. He is a child we cannot place but also a vessel capable of holding our wishes, anxieties and anti-theories about childhood. Figures like Mignon and the monster are a combination of childhood qualities that animate adult protection and reflect desire and investment in the child. Neither Frankenstein or Mignon was ever a complete story; instead, they are devices. Traces of stories accompany Mignon, and she was wished into a narrative. We attach Victor’s childhood to the monster as if they are one in the same. In this way, the child becomes a container for emotional moments and fragments of history in search of a home. The child may also serve our needs for working through grief and unfulfilled wishes for our childhood but is still not directly reflective of our loss.

A delight in littleness

In the case of Mignon, the child figure is a strange, alluring mystery, a monstrous, misunderstood creature or a variety of phantasies in between. Adults relish in the fascination inspired by a tiny child who attempts to participate in a grown-up world, as Steedman (1994) notes: ‘What is “priceless” in the child’s performance is its attempt to be part of the adult world, and the very uselessness of that attempt’ (p. 144). According to Steedman, the size and shape of children’s bodies, knowledge and capabilities in contrast to that of the adult fuel ideas of sentimentality. The child’s littleness makes the figure accessible, easy to manipulate and understand. Steedman (1994) explains that ‘much of the claim for Mignon’s importance is to do with the attention the figure draws to littleness, to the visceral sense of the smallness of the self that lies inside’ (p. 9). This child who is preserved in time is also preserved in size and knowledge. The relationship between the adult and the child is rooted in not only an obvious physical otherness but also a sameness found in their histories of natality. While Frankenstein is not little, his feelings of confusion and loneliness enable him to embody littleness and inspire our concern. Sendak, too, transports us back to our own feeling of being small and opens a door to our past.

Childhood as performance

There is a sense of intrigue in watching children work, embodying the qualities and movements of both adults and children at the same time. In Strange Dislocations, the child’s work is that of the acrobat, street performer and actor. In other spaces, the child’s work is that of play. The voyeuristic investment in children’s labour transforms it into performance. The child-as-performer provides easy access for surveillance and capture and is also a comfort to the spectator. Steedman (1994) states, ‘The child on display watched by adults encourages the formation of a collection of concepts and understandings about children’s bodies’ (p. 94). Documentation of children’s play becomes an observable collection or survey of their development and learning. We watch children as they gain skill and competence as they play the role of adult while they still embodying littleness, uncertainty and vulnerability.

In Frankenstein, the monster learns to talk and read in an effort to perform as adult, as human and as loveable. At once, the child figure is familiar (providing a place to locate meaning and sameness) and bizarre, as it bears the burden of its oddness through an aestheticized physiology, sexual ambiguity, public embarrassment and positioning as an object of charity and manipulation. The construction of child-as-performer removes certain qualities of childhood and interferes with understandings about children’s bodies and capabilities. Performance, in another sense, is what the child does for our loss and in our phantasies. I read the figure of Sendak as a performance of our own childhood. The figure of Sendak is an attempt to watch ourselves. Our attachment to him, his books and illustrations are bound to our past and encourage us to think that we can recover what was lost. In this instance, the child performs both our grief and our desire.

Steedman (1994) describes the act of watching the child as a method for stalling development and stopping the movement towards a feared yet inevitable death. To watch is another act of preservation in both size and time. The figure becomes suspended in time and fixed in qualities. This pause allows us to not only indulge in our phantasy but also explore the affect without the usual anxiety. This obsession with observing children is partially the adults’ way of dealing with mortality through forming something into a shape to fit particular desires, creating a device that can be put to use.

To make or not to make distinctions

Steedman (1994) recognizes that it is difficult to distinguish between historical, literary and real children and shows that as all these ideas collapse, our images become reality. Yet, she asks us to make this analytic separation so that we can identify the difference between ‘real children and the ideational and figurative force of their existence’ (Steedman, 1994: 5). She describes this process of making distinctions, as we separate the real child from the figure of the child, as a cognitive dislocation and clearly expresses the difficulties of achieving this, as everyone is implicated by their history. Carrying out this separation is the very thing that is almost impossible for us due to our history of being a baby, our loss of childhood omnipotence and our search for a lost object that we can never recover.

We read ourselves and our ideas of childhood onto the world, and yet, despite this, there is something we still cannot know. The struggle between knowing and not knowing is demonstrated by our belief in the possibility of recovering lost knowledge. From the position of looking back, we make claims of authority and understanding, especially in relation to children. Our desire to capture and know the child turns into a form of investment in childhood and a construction of a child that we can believe in.

I phantasize Sendak as a child figure. His crass, honest and fantastical portrayal of childhood gives us a figure of the child that many of us want to believe we were. This figure represents the way we wished adults talked to us and the phantasies we think were ours. Mignon is the ultimate desirable child. She is stalled in time, performing for our pleasure, capable, confident and still easy to manipulate. In this space, we can use her to unconsciously create the self. Frankenstein embodies our fears and anxiety about a monstrous creation, but places them all together to engage our emotions and then make room for a more agreeable construction of the child. The figure of the child acts as a container to hold both what we know and what we don’t know about the phantasies from our own natality and the phantasies we have about natality. The child’s body performs for the pleasure of others and also in order to develop the self.

The child as an enigmatic object

Steedman demands that distinctions be made. Yet, how can we think with Steedman if we cannot do what she asks of us? Perhaps, it is because we cannot make distinctions that we are even able to contemplate her idea. To think of the child as a device and to consider our problem with making distinctions motivates a turn to Lear’s (2006) discussion of both enigmatic objects and nostalgic evasion. In Radical Hope, Lear (2006) delves into a philosophical and ethical inquiry about how we face the possibility of our own cultural devastation. The reasons we attach to figures like Sendak, feel empathy for Frankenstein’s monster and are mesmerized by Mignon as she translates across time is because we collapse concepts and lose distinctions as the result of a devastating cultural loss. Working with Lear’s (2006) ideas, I wonder whether the concepts that we use to make sense of childhood have lost their intelligibility. If the symbols, representations and understandings of childhood are no longer useful as soon as we start to grow up, then what do we do when we can no longer project these forward? What is left? The narratives we currently use to think about childhood can be read as Lear’s (2006) concept of nostalgic evasion (p. 97): an avoidance of recognizing our own history of newness or our wishes for our past and a misrecognition of regrets and wants. Childhood cannot be fixed, revisited or reclaimed. Childhood can never be what it was before. Historical facts are fragile, and as we recapitulate what we thought has already happened, we change its meaning. Considering childhood as a ghost, a monster or a fabrication bonded to our biographies frames it as revolt against the currency of our experience. Our constructions of the child, now distorted into figurations, become useful to us.

Historicity, the self and what is inside

Steedman (1994) frames both childhood and history as ways of knowing and thinking. Both ideas are seen as resistant to growth and so have pushed their very questions inside:

The modern self is imagined as being inside, and it is this spatial sense that the term ‘interiority’ seeks to describe: the self within, created by the laying down and accretion of our own childhood experience, our own history, in a place inside. (Steedman, 1994: 12)

Inside is where history can be separated from time and can avoid crumbling away. Time can essentially be defeated in the timeless space inside the self. Steedman suggests that child figures and ideas of childhood are generally used to express the deep-rooted historicity that is fundamentally linked to individual subjects. The personification of the figure is alive with drama and emotion and opens up the problem of a misplaced past and allows us to see subjectivity at play. Here constructions are built, torn apart and invested with meaning. In order to conceive the problems of development and mortality as belonging to children, children become the problem they were formerly used to express. In the personified child figure, there is ‘something grasped and understood: a shape, moving in the body … something inside: an interiority’ (Steedman, 1994: 20).

The child figure represents history and so makes childhood equivalent to history. It holds the historicity of the subject who constructs it. The trauma of losing natality and the completion of actual childhood are the things that force history and childhood inside. These entities are broken into fragments and preserved as traces of memory and affect deep within the self. This past is made small and is disguised and housed away but continues to exist, preserved and distorted inside the self. The figure of the child, personified and filled with enigmatic qualities, becomes a method for the adult to believe they are connecting to the past. Yet, the cost is that the actual child collapses into the adult’s projection.

To move childhood beyond the child means positioning the child as an enigmatic object, a site for projections, a placeholder for dreams and anxieties and a possible representation of forgetting and loss. The body of the figurative child becomes the site for manipulation as we destruct, redesign and rebuild the child to suit our needs. To conceive the problems of development and mortality as belonging to childhood, children become the problem they were formerly used to express, and the child figure provides us with a method to think about constructing the self.

Even if we can see how our own histories affect our views of childhood, ‘there is no implication that one can glimpse what lies beyond the horizons of one’s historically situated understanding’ (Lear, 2006: 95). If imagination is not related to experience, then perhaps we can relinquish our own subjectivity in both the stories we construct about our childhoods and the fictional stories of childhood informed by the phantasies of our natality. Lear (2006) suggests that in order to go forward - the only way is to ‘give up the subjectivity entangled in that way of life’ (p. 98). That would mean divorcing our experiences from our views. A temporary loss of our subjectivity may allow us the imaginative excellence to create or find something we cannot yet envision. Using the gift of imagination and transforming our constructions into figures, we may find our way into new visions of childhood and human relationships; things that we may not be able to conceive of yet. This way of opening up the field of possibilities is a potential risk, but, according to Lear, we already live with risk every day just by being human.