Beautiful monsters, strange children and the problem of making distinctions

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

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.