The Victorian Childhood of Manga: Toward a Queer Theory of the Child in Toboso Yana's Kuroshitsuji

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)He seems to be a very mature little fellow.- Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little LordFauntleroy (1886)1The turn taken was away from a good boy's boo - escape was left on their hands.-Henry James, The Pupil (1891)2I start this essay from premise that we ought to read a contemporary young adult Japanese manga (comics) series about a Faustian contract between a boy and his demon butler, Toboso Yana's Kuroshitsuji (slac Butler),3 as a literary descendant of Henry James's The Pupil, a fin -de-siecle tale of a doomed love relationship between a tutor and his pupil. I suggest, moreover, that we ought to read them both as queer texts that selfconsciously play with sentimental cultural and literary tropes of child - as exemplified in works like Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1886 saccharine bestseller Little Lord Fauntleroy - in order to foster in their readers a perverse resistance to, in Lee Edelman 's words, the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism.4 Edelman has drawn fire for creating an overly rigid binary opposition between, on one hand, future-oriented politics centering on figure of child, which he reads as inescapably heteronormative and fantasy driven, and, on other hand, a queer rejection ofthat fantasy, which he links to death drive. However, I contend not only that his model provides a useful framework for reading a darkly nihilistic text like Kuroshitsuji, but that manga itself offers a rebuttal of sorts to Edelman's utopian critics, like Jose Munoz and Tim Dean (whose rejection of Edelman's rejection of futurism I discuss in more detail presently).5 Indeed, Kuroshitsuji is a sophisticated meditation on figure of child and social order that is maintained through that figurai child's fetishization, sentimentalization, and even eroticization.The manga explores our desires for a paradoxically knowing-innocent child: a being who can, impossibly, embody potentiality of a future, not-yet-realized social order and also give its full consent to that suppositious future, maintaining both childish purity (ignorance) and mature selfhood (knowingness). I argue, moreover, that Kuroshitsuji does so with self-conscious reference to late-nineteenth-century Victorian (18371901) British and Meiji (1868-1912) Japanese cultural encounter, in which child featured prominently in a shared, and vexed, discourse about individual's relation to social order, particularly as figured through social contract. Not only does manga invite a critical reading of this historical trajectory in production of child, but it maintains a self-referential awareness of reading, of power of narrative investments, one might say, in doing work ofthat cultural production.My analysis of Kuroshitsuji starts with a couple of premises that intersect with queer theory, childhood studies, and literary studies. First, following a well-established, if not uncontested, tradition in scholarship over last several decades, it assumes that queer theory has a lot to say about child and, conversely, that child has a lot to say back to queer theory. In other words, I respond to Kenneth Kidd's recent challenge to theorists to unsettle what we claim to know about children's by asking What if we were to think of children's literature not simply as a field of literature but also as a theoretical site in its own right?6 1 argue that Kuroshitsuji does indeed offer a sort of theoretical apparatus for reading its own deployment of knowing-innocent child. Second, following from landmark work of critics like Jacqueline Rose, James Kincaid, and, more recently, Katherine Bond Stockton and Marah Gubar, I assume that in our contemporary fraught relationship to child we are inheritors of nineteenth-century discourses and structures of feeling. Or, as Kincaid puts it in Erotic Innocence (1998), [0]ur culture has enthusiastically sexualized child while denying just as enthusiastically that it was doing any such thing, and in so doing has engaged in a reckless expenditure of [a] dangerous nineteenth-century inheritance. …