Mapping the Cultural Geography of Childhood or, Performing Monstrous Children

Abstract

This past holiday season, I received a card with an illustrated map on front labeled the Geography of Christmas (Hanson). I had recently finished reading Stephen Nissenbaum's Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday, and was struck by how succinctly this one illustration graphically represented Nissenbaum's 381-page book. illustration locates both (the North Pole, Bethlehem, 34th Street, and Vermont) and unreal (Toyland, Bedford Falls, Y's Men, and Where Fruitcakes Come From) within metaphorical space. Juxtaposing cultural references (a dotted line travels from Our House over an icon of a river and through pictured woods to Grandmother's House) with unabashed consumerism (F.A.O. Schwartz and Nieman Marcus are both represented), graphic illustrates American, public construction of holiday. map does not pretend to be a real representation, nor does it even touch upon religious substance of Christmas, although artist does include tongue-in-cheek religious references. card does not present a particular Christmas, nor any one individual's experience. Instead, using rich metaphor of geography, ilustration explores common constructions and understandings of a cultural event. It maps contiguity of Christmas-the juxtapositions and mixtures of images and icons-- arranging seemingly unrelated objects within performative space of holiday. This essay can be understood much in same manner-as an exploration of geography of childhood, with a specific focus-evil, infected, and monstrous children. Stories of bad children, children who steal, rape, sell drugs, or perform multiple murders fill today's news media. Indeed, construct of child occupies a prominent space within performative geography of childhood. Childhood is not universal. Humans, indeed most species, must necessarily experience biological immaturity, but childhood is manner in which a society understands and articulates that physical reality. Viewed in this light, child becomes a metaphor-a pattern of meaning-and childhood can be conceived of as culturally specific sets of ideas and philosophies, attitudes and practices (James and Prout 1). Unlike gender or race, childhood is a temporary and temporal classification; however, it can be understood in much same manner-as sets of power relationships revolving around different axes. Much in way that early feminists separated gender from sex and deconstructed understandings of natural, diverse ways in which American culture shapes and understands child can be unpacked and explored. This essay explores dark side of construction of child: as Goya declared, the sleep of reason produces monsters! (qtd. in Jenks 118). I approach this research from perspective of a performance theorist with a focus in children's theater and educational drama, and with central thesis that childhood exists as a type of performance space-a cultural geography-in which identities are performed on, in, and through child bodies. As Joseph Roach states, The processes of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as culture, may be carried out by a variety of performance events, from stage plays to sacred rites, from carnivals to invisible rituals of everyday life. To perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit (xi). I am concerned here with manifestations of evil children through and in cultural performances. First, I turn my attention to character of Rhoda Penmark in Maxwell Anderson's Bad Seed. Anderson's play and later movie contain a narrative of child as pure evil, highlighting social tendency of parents to view their children as alien intruders (Kincheloe 164). This xenophobic response to childhood can be seen elsewhere, including Children of Corn, Exorcist, and Lord of Flies. …