Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children’s Rights by Susan Honeyman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children’s Rights by Susan Honeyman Anna Mae Duane Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children’s Rights. By Susan Honeyman. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019. vii + 226 pp. Paper $30, cloth $90. Susan Honeyman’s excellent Perils of Protection asks us to consider the fraught dialectic between the urge to protect children and the need to silence them. At a moment when we in the US watch, aghast, as thousands of migrant children are incarcerated under the auspices of government protection, Honeyman’s historically informed analysis of the ways in which protection has overridden children’s rights—to knowledge, to self-determination, and to political agency—offers a much-needed genealogy of our troubled relationship to children’s vulnerability and adult responses to it. This ambitious book sets out to “follow the historic material roots of protectionism” (12) and Honeyman does so by moving deftly between both historical and literary accounts of shipwrecks, orphan rescues, and even cancer narratives. In the process, she pulls off several balancing acts. The first is stylistic: her inviting, even informal prose cannily navigates complex theoretical and historical arguments about the nature of privacy, the origins of rights discourse, and our cultural uncertainty about the distinction between personhood and property in familial relations. In addition to its rhetorical adroitness, Perils of Protection balances historically rigorous, chronologically specific arguments about the ways that past authors have imagined the relationship between protectionism and participation, while at the same time paying nuanced attention to present crises as they are playing out in twenty-first century policy. The chapters trace a genealogy in which children’s (often perilous) freedoms are exchanged for safety as the private family becomes increasingly defined as a [End Page 324] bulwark against the world’s predations. For Honeyman, this is not a voluntary, or entirely benevolent, development. The increased pressure on the privatized family to carefully manage every aspect of a child’s development, coupled with a cultural investment in an ever more sacrificial version of parenthood, results in a stifling hothouse environment that hurts the very children cocooned within it. “How can protection, which sounds so comforting, do harm?” Honeyman asks. “Like the children we imagine are helpless, we simply don’t know better. Our emotions get the better of us, and our stories do little to challenge our misguided consciences” (9). Honeyman’s analysis of those stories begins with nineteenth-century shipwreck narratives that allegedly gave us the sentimental order to put “women and children” first. As Honeyman points out, vulnerable youth usually fared poorly in historical seafaring disasters, and even romanticized versions of shipwreck stories often left small children entirely out of the rescue narrative in favor of appealingly helpless and imperiled young girls. The erotic charge of rescuing dependent women became solidified in the romanticizing of the Titanic as a model in which women and children’s helplessness became showcases for male strength and sacrifice. Moving from historical shipwrecks to literary ones, Honeyman traces the reception and evolution of the shipwrecked orphan in Robinson Crusoe and its descendants, in which the freedom of young men to “find their fortune” became linked with the conquest of vulnerable people pressed into the service of increasingly privatized (and proprietary) colonial “families.” A child’s capacity to move—over land and sea, from property to property owner, from lower class urchin to the cherished pet project of Daddy Warbucks—emerges in Honeyman’s analysis as an imaginative barometer of cultural change. As the stories we tell and read became increasingly unable to imagine a child who can find their own way through the world, dangers and all, then the more elaborate—and constraining—the confines of protection. The book ends with the confinement of a hospital room as Honeyman traces the protective impulses of both fictional and real-world parents to protect their children from the knowledge of their own terminal illnesses. Although often well-intentioned, Honeyman suggests, this desire to keep children from knowing the state of their own bodies rarely spares young people any suffering. Instead, adults’ insistence on cheerful pretense stifles the grief and closure that children needed to experience...