The Virtual Child, or Six Provocations on Children’s Literature and (Pre-) Digital Culture

Abstract

The Virtual Child, or Six Provocations on Children’s Literature and (Pre-) Digital Culture Derritt Mason (bio) What comes to mind when you hear the word “virtual”? Today, we tend to associate it with digital technology: virtual offices, virtual worlds, virtual reality, the newly virtual dimensions of our lives in the wake of COVID-19. The term, however, has a much longer and often controversial history. Rob Shields opens his book, The Virtual, with the following illustrative example: in 1556 a Calvinist archbishop named Thomas Cranmer asserted a “doctrine of Virtualism” in regards to the Eucharist—Christ does not have a “Real Presence” in bread and wine, the Calvinists argued, but rather a virtual one (5–6). The Eucharist, in other words, is the blood and flesh of Christ in essence but not actually. This claim proved so contentious that Cranmer was executed for heresy. Now: what comes to mind when you think about children and the virtual? This combination could recall any number of contemporary debates, some of which might feel as heated as the fight over the Eucharist probably did in the sixteenth century. How much screen time should children be permitted? How and when are children vulnerable in virtual space? What can digital technology teach children, and when does it risk harming them? Are virtual worlds and spaces ruining the minds (and abilities) of future generations? These anxious questions, among many others, seemingly belong to what Samantha A. Smith and Simon A. Cole call “a new breed of techno-scientific moral panics” that concern themselves with the relationship between young people and emergent technologies (208). Anxieties about children and the virtual might feel unique to the digital age, but as this essay clarifies, a longer, pre-digital history of “the virtual child” demonstrates that the child itself has long been “virtual,” not merely—and only recently—confronted by the perils of virtual space. Such [End Page 1] a history illuminates the peculiarity of our current cultural moment, wherein worries about the digital virtual collide with the child’s enduring construction (by adults) as a virtual being that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, both promising and threatening. As I will explain, we need only reexamine the endless attempts to define the child and delineate its characteristics to see the anxious tensions aroused by the child’s ostensible virtuality. Given the etymology of “virtual,” I argue that we can characterize children’s literature as part of a broader apparatus, one that includes schooling and related sociocultural institutions, that seek influence over the child’s virtuality. Children’s literature often aims to instill virtue, or moral quality, in the child, while mapping and regulating their Virtù, or power, creativity, and possible lack of morality. The child’s virtuality has been the subject of adult concern for centuries, such that worried attempts to manage the child’s virtuality end up producing virtual spaces for this management to take place. Frequently, these virtual spaces take shape inside imperialist narratives of colonial exploitation that assign distinctly gendered tasks to its participants, grooming them for heterosexual adulthood. Such narratives survive today, yielding not only apprehensions about and hopes for the virtual child in a digital era, but also new forms of resistance to these enduring conventions. Instead of a refined and—we could say—fully-grown essay, I offer something “child-like” in the popular sense: six unformed, unfinished, playful provocations, which are occasionally unruly and requiring discipline (perhaps, even, a good spanking). These provocations span genre and form—fairy tales, digital apps, young adult literature, film, and poetry—to consider various iterations of the virtual child over the years, culminating in a brief examination of discourse about young activists; I offer “the activist child” as a noteworthy contemporary version of the virtual child. I begin, however, with a history and etymology of “virtual.” Provocation 1: Historicizing Virtù and the Virtual In The Virtual, Shields provides the dictionary definitions and etymology of his key concept: “The virtual: Anything, ‘that is so in essence or effect, although not formally or actually; admitting of being called by the name so far as the effect or result is concerned’” (OED qtd. in Shields 2). This first definition is...