Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik Dewar MacLeod Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. By Pamela Robertson Wojcik. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. x + 256 pp. Cloth $90, paper $27.95. Fantasies of Neglect explores the shifting mythologies of childhood through film and literature in the twentieth century. Pamela Wojcik places the urban imaginary alongside the traditional rural "cult of rusticity" that frames much of children's literature. The more modern urban myths similarly evoke images of nostalgia for a more innocent and free time. The images of urban childhood she explores depend upon dual (and often contradictory) fantasies of neglect (usually by the mother) and freedom (especially special mobility) that derives from neglect. Drawing upon a wide range of scholars from history, literature, film studies, and critical theory, Wojcik situates her valuable work in a deep dialogue with critics and advocates for children with the specific goal "to recover a different way of imagining kids in the city" (171). Wojcik examines how the texts serve to negotiate the anxieties of a given era, giving expression to contradictory discourses. During the Great Depression, films starring the Dead End Kids depicted children in the city that was both the dangerous terrain of social problems and a site for freedom, mobility, and community that was not available within the disintegrated family. While the movies often addressed the specific conditions of urban life in the Depression, they also spoke to the larger contradictions of modernity, balancing "social miserabilism" with "a sense of mobility, spatial freedom, and play" (40). One of the strongest sections of the book is the chapter on "Shirley Temple as Streetwalker," where the author depicts the child star's city films as offering a benign urban vision for the powerful and liberated "new girl" who can approach men in the street, go off alone with them, and end up reforming and rehabilitating these men (62–69). While Temple was in many ways an exceptional (and unusual) actress and character, Wojcik considers her "within potentially contradictory discourses about urban girlhood in the period related to sexuality and risk, on the one hand, and girls' mobility and freedom, on the other" (69). Whereas traditional myths of children invoke the city as a danger to their inborn purity, Temple's innocence depends upon her knowingness. From the perspective of the twenty-first century (and even to some critics at the time), Temple's encounters with men in the city cannot but seem disquieting, even creepy. Wojcik demonstrates how they navigate modern crises of both [End Page 464] femininity and masculinity through the agency of a girl. Similarly, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz reinforces the "potent and prevailing fantasy of the urban girl as mobile, free, and powerful, an adventurer rather than a victim" (99). Midcentury films and books shifted the perspective from the social causes of neglect to "individual personality and psychological well-being" (101). Heavily influenced by Erik Erikson's stages of development, the postwar discourse placed the impossible burden on mothers to do neither too much nor too little, lest they damage the child's psyche. The author astutely examines The Champ (comparing the 1931 and 1979 films), Mary Poppins (book and movie), Kramer vs. Kramer, Little Fugitive, and Harriet the Spy, demonstrating how "children's texts are generally double-voiced, speaking both a child's perspective and an adult's at the same time" (137). However, the choice of texts feels forced and not fully coherent, and the chapter is a bit too diffuse, as the city comes in and out of focus. In the chapter on black urban boyhood, the author shows how the fantasy of neglect in this case "locates the problems of the black community within the black community itself, as a self-perpetuating cycle of misery caused by weak family structures and bad parenting" (145). Wojcik offers fascinating analyses of films that complicate and challenge the mainstream discourse. The texts, produced largely within the African American community, present "archives of unhappiness" that articulate anger but offer little hope. The Planet of Junior Brown, however, counters the...