Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods In Antebellum US Literature by Laura Soderberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods In Antebellum US Literature by Laura Soderberg Paige Gray Vicious Infants: Dangerous Childhoods in Antebellum US Literature. By Laura Soderberg. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. x + 200 pp. Paper $27.95, cloth $90. at an early point in Vicious Infants, an adept exploration of early American literary childhoods existing outside the idealized narratives perpetuated and normalized by white supremacy, author Laura Soderberg centers on the common practice of youth indenture as depicted in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and William Apess’s A Son of the Forest (1829). Here, she posits that, taken together, these texts help us “reframe how unfree labor connects child bodies to the public sphere and . . . subsequently shapes their relationship to the social [End Page 343] world as adults” (20). Soderberg’s ability to seamlessly incorporate legal and historical texts—as she does in this particular section by examining what indenture contracts suggest regarding the consent and autonomy of children who were Black, brown, or poor—helps make Vicious Infants a significant scholarly contribution to childhood studies, as well as, of course, nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Though there are places where the book’s momentum occasionally gets weighed down by dense language or academic jargon, and while there are other places where the discussion could have been fleshed out (for example, a section on Freud in the second chapter), these are slight criticisms. For in her skillful erosion of any presumed barriers between the literary and the historical via her shrewd close readings throughout the book, Soderberg reinforces the discursive nature of childhood through her impressive, important research. The book’s captivating title is more than just a catchy phrase underscoring the myth of childhood innocence. It is a nineteenth-century criminal designation. “An early alternative for the [legal] category of the minor,” Soderberg explains, “the term infant was generally used to classify subjects under the age of eighteen or twenty-one years old as holding different rights and duties than adult subjects” (24). Thus, “vicious infants,” as a phrase, also encapsulates the ways in which language predetermines the experience of childhood. Derived from the Latin in-fans, or “non-speaking,” “infant” works to “name an imposed silence, a declaration that the speech of a minor could not properly be recognized in court as the sign of intention or testimony” (25). Those young people unrecognized or marginalized because of antebellum legal and literary strictures shape Vicious Infants. The study’s unifying argument “pushes against any singular type of antebellum childhood, to which one is either admitted or refused” and instead advocates for “a broader vocabulary of multiple childhoods that each have their own relationship to civic and social life” (4). Now, to most childhood studies scholars, this notion may not be revelatory—the idea of varying models of childhood across time and space has been part of academic discussion since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1960; 1962 English trans.). Yet each chapter’s specific engagement with the ways in which early American rhetoric of the white middle-and upper-class imagination codified and essentialized childhood rewards readers in its revisionary recasting of nineteenth-century childhood in the United States, which it accomplishes through considering textual gaps and silences—the textual in-fans. Following the strong opening chapter on indenture and social contracts, Soderberg turns to “the incorrigible child” and juvenile delinquency, unpacking the textual implications of domestic child-rearing manuals (from [End Page 344] well-known figures including Amos Bronson Alcott and Lydia Maria Childs) and institutional records from facilities such as the New York House of Refuge. In what may be the most compelling chapter, Soderberg brings to light the nineteenth-century racialized understanding of “prodigy” in antebellum medical discourse—that is, the “white tendency to treat Blackness as unpredictable and . . . as existing outside of genealogy,” which functioned “as a means of denying Black futurity” (83, 86). In her discussion of Susan Paul’s The Memoir of James Jackson, the Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months, which many argue is the first work of African American...