Little Precossi, Stunted Becky: A Comparative Analysis of Child Hunger and National Body Health Discourses in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature in Italian and English

Anna Gasperini

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.393

Abstract

Article: Little Precossi, Stunted Becky: A Comparative Analysis of Child Hunger and National Body Health Discourses in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature in Italian and English

Highlights

The period under analysis was crucial for the development of dynamics that fall under the definition of biopower and biopolitics: as Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859) achieved international circulation, concerns emerged about the potential for human races to evolve or degenerate
Within the scope of this article, I propose to look at the conversation about child malnutrition developed in this period as articulated into two strands: on the one hand, the medical strand, represented by such positions as Dukes’s and Laura’s above, which focuses on the role nutrition played in physical development
Strong, well-nourished, and athletic children sit alongside weak, hungry, and sickly or disabled ones. These latter are represented by red-headed Crossi, with a dead arm hanging from his neck; Nelli, “un povero gobbino gracile e col viso smunto” [a poor little hunchback, stunted and with a pinched look] (De Amicis 15); and Precossi, a child victim of domestic violence who looks like a “malatino” [little sickly one] (De Amicis 14)

Summary

A MEDICAL HISTORY-BASED TRANSNATIONAL COMPARISON

Scholars of food in literature (Shahani; Humble) argue that the presence of food in a text is always powerfully charged with an array of social, cultural, and symbolic meanings; so, necessarily, are its absence and its consequences. In 1907, Sir John Eldon Gorst, English Conservative politician of a Tory democratic orientation published The Children of the Nation, a book that discussed child malnutrition and its pernicious effects on the population In his text he declared that “[to work a hungry and ailing child, either in body or mind] offends against the principles of humanity [...] it is unpatriotic, for it flings away an opportunity of securing that the coming race of Englishmen shall be strong and vigorous” (52). Despite the seventeen-year gap between them, the geographical distance, and the different national and political contexts in which they were produced, Bertani’s and Gorst’s comments on malnutrition are remarkably similar They both represent child hunger as a danger to the health and strength of the Italian and British people, as if they formed, each in their state, a whole unity, the ‘body’ of the nation. In short, that to increase the state’s wealth and ensure its dominance through physical power, nations could not afford weak bodies; so malnutrition, and by association malnourished bodies, became an issue

THE CHILD MALNUTRITION DEBATE

POPULAR MEDICAL LITERATURE, CHILDCARE, AND CHILD HEALTH RESEARCH

STUNTED BODIES AND FERAL HUNGER

STARVING THE CHILD, THREATENING THE NATIONAL BODY

FEEDING THE HUNGRY CHILD

CONCLUSIONS