Posthumanism, Parenting, and Agency: A Review of Naomi Morgenstern's Wild Child

Abstract

Posthumanism, Parenting, and Agency:A Review of Naomi Morgenstern's Wild Child Jen Harrison (bio) Morgenstern, Naomi. Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics. U of Minnesota P, 2018. 280 pp. $25.00 pb. ISBN 9781517903794. Posthumanism and the posthuman have become increasingly popular theoretical lenses in children's literature and culture studies with their growing focus on embodiment, which Maria Nikolajeva identified in 2016. Scholars such as Zoe Jaques, Victoria Flanagan, and Elaine Ostry have all produced convincing arguments for "the child" as a symbol of both human embodiment and humanist values, and as a site for the contestation of that symbolism. Of particular concern to such studies has been the depiction of "the child" in various historical and contemporary works of fiction and the reading of such interpretations as symptomatic of a growing social, critical, and philosophical disillusionment with humanist ideals. Wild Child, therefore, enters a discourse which is already producing rich and provocative material. Morgenstern takes parenting and the parent-child relationship as the focus for her study, arguing that the depiction of "wild" children within extreme parent-child relationships in literature works to contradict humanist ideas about autonomy and agency. Such depictions, Morgenstern argues, help to "precipitate a posthumanist encounter with the ethics of reproductive choice and with the figure of the wild child" (2). The lack of clearly conceptualized definitions, norms, and perspectives for key concepts such as "wild," "child," "extreme parenting," and "parenting ethics" as they relate to posthumanism limits the scope of this fascinating contribution to current discourse. Morgenstern builds specifically on Cary Wolfe's work, which blurs the demarcation between humanism and posthumanism to posit the child as a liminal figure in humanism, hovering between the "animal" state of uncivilization [End Page 168] and the ideal, rational humanist subject. She argues throughout the volume for an understanding of the child as "situated precisely in [the] unstable, or wild, terrain" theorized by Wolfe to lie "between the humanist and the posthumanist" (6) and uses both psychoanalytical and deconstructive theory alongside posthumanist theory to argue that this liminal child figure serves as a locus for textual explorations of posthumanist parenting fears. Interestingly, the collection engages with ideas of the posthuman as well as posthumanist theory, exploring how modern political and technological complications—from the "designer babies" famously described by Francis Fukuyama to changing conceptions of who and what can be a parent, which Morgenstern explains is fundamentally dependent on ideas about agency—contribute to a destabilization of humanist ideologies. The volume begins with a long introduction, laying out the theoretical framework for the application of posthumanism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction to representations of reproduction, parenting, and ethics. Five theoretical chapters then provide close textual analysis of representations of posthuman reproduction and parenting: Emma Donoghue's Room (chapter 1), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (chapter 2), Toni Morrison's A Mercy (chapter 3), Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (chapter 4), and Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners and Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (chapter 5). An afterword works to pull these close analyses back within the theoretical framework and explain the theoretical significance of the "wild child" as a focus for representations of extreme parenting. The fundamental weakness of this volume appears immediately in the introduction. This long, multi-section chapter draws on a range of theoretical frameworks, from feminist writers like Judith Butler and posthumanist feminists Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad to Derridian deconstruction and the psychoanalysis of Laplanche and Winnicott, to support an exploration of parent-child relationships within posthumanist contexts. The introduction attempts to cover the basic tenets of these theories and how they work together in the analysis, while simultaneously exploring their application to the primary texts analyzed in the rest of the volume. With its focus not only on the posthuman and posthumanism, but also on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, and Levinasian ethics, [End Page 169] the theoretical framework informing the analysis of these texts can be difficult to follow—both in the chapters themselves and in the explanatory subsections of the introduction—and at times the argument about posthumanism becomes lost. Even more problematically, there is no clear articulation of the concept of the "wild child...