Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media ed. by Vanessa Joosen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media ed. by Vanessa Joosen Brianna Anderson (bio) Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media, edited by Vanessa Joosen. U of Mississippi P, 2018. Cultural narratives often depict children and old people as occupying similar life stages. Typically, these comparisons are rather unflattering, characterizing both age groups as dependent on the care of others, passive, physically weak, and voiceless. Other representations frame the elderly and the young as natural enemies. For instance, as Vanessa Joosen observes, discourses surrounding Brexit portrayed the elderly as selfish parasites intent on robbing resources from the youth. These troubling representations reflect pervasive ageism in Western culture, which often diminishes the agency of the very young and old. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media examines how popular media complicates, counters, or reinscribes dominant constructions of childhood and old age. Edited by Joosen, the collection originated during a 2015 workshop hosted by the Platform for a Cultural History of Children's Media at the University of Antwerp. The book features an introduction by Joosen and twelve essays that each explore the same central concept: popular culture inextricably links childhood and old age. The authors investigate how this metaphorical resemblance between the two age groups shapes representations of intergenerational conflict and interactions in a rich corpus of Western and Eastern Asian narratives. The examined texts span the mid-nineteenth century to the present day and include advertisements, books, films, and television shows. The interdisciplinary field of age studies guides all the readings, allowing the authors to provide nuanced socio-historical readings of the links between childhood and old age. Joosen's introduction provides a succinct overview of shifting perceptions of childhood and old age throughout history. She traces the origins of the puer senex trope back to late antiquity. This literary motif collapses the elderly and youth into a single archetype, characterizing both age groups with similar features and levels of maturity. Along [End Page 238] with the puer senex, Joosen identifies three patterns that influence how narratives connect childhood and old age: affinity, conflict, and complementarity. Affinity refers to the perceived strengths, weaknesses, and values shared by children and the elderly. Conflict-oriented media centers on intergenerational competition and struggles. Complementary narratives frame the old and young as united by their differences. The collected essays explore how these three patterns and the puer senex manifest in media featuring children, as well as how they shape popular constructions of old age and youth. By focusing on these archetypes, Joosen contends, "these chapters make it clear how age is always enacted and acquires meaning in interdependence with other stages in life" (21). In other words, the authors regard childhood and old age as performative roles that map onto each other in sometimes harmful but often insightful and provocative ways. The collection loosely groups the twelve chapters into three clusters organized by medium: literature, film, and television. The opening cluster comprises five chapters organized by the analyzed texts' publication dates. The first three chapters provide helpful historical context for the rest of the collection by centering pre-twentieth-century children's literature. In "United by God and Nature: Johanna Spyri's Heidi and Her Relationship with the Elderly," Ingrid Tomkowiak examines how God and religion strengthen complementary intergenerational relationships between Heidi and her elderly caretakers. Next, Mayajo Murai's "Happily Ever After for the Old in Japanese Fairy Tales" offers one of the strongest analyses in the collection. Murai juxtaposes representations of the elderly and youth in Japanese and Western fairy tales. She contends that "[w]hereas the elderly are cast in a supporting role to the coming-of-age plot of the Grimm tales, Japanese fairy tales cast the old as protagonists, who go through adventures themselves and attain eternal bliss when their kindness toward the magical child is finally rewarded" (58). Murai speculates that contemporary transcultural influences between the two cultural traditions could help audiences imagine new relationships between the elderly and youth. Rounding out the historical literature section, Elisabeth Wesseling's "Vitalizing Childhood Through Old Age in Hector Malot's Sans famille: An Intersectional Perspective" analyzes how gender politics and naturalism influence intergenerational relationships in...