Monstrous Child Research Articles

Abjection and Exclusion in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing’s 1988 novella The Fifth Child tells the story of Ben Lovatt, a so-called “monstrous child” in the eyes of his family. In light of Julia Kristeva’s illustration of abjection, it can be seen that Ben’s otherness has unsettled the conventional assumption about children, and his physical and behavioral differences, viewed as a threat to the idealized family life, accounts for his fate of being excluded and rejected. In consideration of the contextualized descriptions in the book and the political background in which the story is set, it is reasonable to assume that what happens to Ben is indicative of what the non-European immigrants went through in the post-war Britian. The exclusive attitude of the Lovatts towards Ben bears much resemblance to the nationwide rejection of the “dark strangers” who brought with them different customs and values. In this sense, the story of Ben, a heterogenetic other who challenges the fixed perception of what British children should look like, can be taken as a mirror which reflects, in the time of social change, how the British society tackled difference in culture.

Monstrous Children, Gruesome Artistry, and Resisting Maturation in the Sinister Films

Monstrous Children, Gruesome Artistry, and Resisting Maturation in the Sinister Films

‘Danger: Children at Play’: Uncanny Play in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

Representations of play abound in Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary and its 1989 and 2019 subsequent film adaptations. However, play in Pet Sematary is not representative of the innocent actions designed to create functioning adults who meaningfully contribute to society. In the 1989 film, for example, “play” for a newly resurrected Gage is a version of hide-and-go-seek resulting in the death of neighbour Jud. Meanwhile, the 2019 adaptation sees a newly resurrected Ellie “playing” in her dirt-stained white funereal dress. These dirt stains become markers of lost innocence and transform her dance into an uncanny performance. Since Gage and Ellie are both somewhat monstrous child figures, their play, like their bodies, is transformed into something unsettling and ventures into the realm of the uncanny. However, play itself is also performed differently between the adaptations because the central child figure also changes. In the 1989 film, it is a male toddler, and in the 2019 film, it is a pre-pubescent female. Both adaptations focus on ideal, socially acceptable forms of play according to the time in which the film was made as well as how children diverge from these behaviours. Play is often rendered dangerous when not performed properly according to the paradigms of age and gender, resulting in what I call ‘uncanny play’. When children engage with ‘uncanny play’, the adults in the narrative are permitted to execute the children for the sake of preserving the memory of them as innocent beings, or what I call the ‘Save the Child’ discourse. Linda Hutcheon argues that ‘when we adapt […] we actualize or concretize ideas’, so that the socially acceptable play put forth in King’s novel becomes more realised and thus more at risk to transgression in each successive filmic adaptation.

Analogical Perspectives on the Comparison between Vǫlundr and Daedalus

Analogical Perspectives on the Comparison between Vǫlundr and Daedalus

Creepy Little Girl

The Creepy Little Girl is a subset of the Gothic Child and as such, she works differently from the evil child or the monstrous child in contemporary Gothic. Unlike the contradictions inherent in representations of the evil child whose presence is disruption and destruction, or the monstrous child who is dangerous, the Creepy Little Girl serves as a function of the Gothic: she is that figure through which the narrative is unsettled and the Gothic intrudes. The Creepy Little Girl is defined by her hypergendered position in the narratives in which she appears: as both ‘little’ and very much as ‘girl’. The little girl's presence in contemporary gothic narratives destabilises the familiar, the domestic, and the cute and that is the basis for the gothic unease that she engenders.

Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin

Reviewed by: Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin Joseph Michael Sommers (bio) Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States. By Sara Austin. Ohio State University Press, 2022. The literary construction of the monstrous child is a thing that, as a reader, frightens me. And while that may be the point, as a horror enthusiast and generally a devotee of that which goes bump in the night or stares at you from the corner of the bed while you sleep, it is somewhat ironic to admit that the concept and depiction of the young as a lurid thing of contempt and/or grisly detest honestly puts me off. I chalk it up to parenthood and the never-ending unknowns that define it. How wonderful then to find such a well-articulated, longitudinal discussion of the concept of the monstrous youth (from the mid-twentieth century until its end) in Sara Austin's Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States. A multi-modal and multi-medial exploration that spends as much time in a history classroom as it does a literature one, Austin's work nimbly moves about a myriad of topics and age ranges as she constructs an argument for such frightful things and why it scared us and why they might scare us differently today. Her project follows in the footsteps of Paula Fass and Michael Grossberg's work in Reinventing Childhood after WWII with her thesis being a simple, elegant extension of their account for the shifting of that cultural moment (5). She writes: I argue that direct marketing of monstrosity to teens as a potential identity began in the 1950s with comic books and drive-in horror films, and continues to evolve within American children's culture. Since teenagers are visibly similar to adults, teens of the 1950s were the first group to use monsters as a point of identification to gain agency. (4) Austin sees the 1950s as an inflection point for an exchange in values of teens and the adults who still possessed a degree of control over the orthodoxies of their youth en route to adulthood. The give and take between the two groups, the acquisition of and limitations upon the agency of either provide for a judiciously-considered explanation of the cause and effect. Chapters are devoted more or less decade to decade (the 1960s and 1970s are rightly collapsed together given what she finds to be a binding thematic of "racial anxiety" in the "racial coding" of picture books) in a manner that shows the causal effect of the response from the decade prior (52, 53). As Austin posits early on, both monsters and children are "floating signifiers" created to give [End Page 418] "physical form" to cultural fears (… but am I describing the monsters or the children?), and she wisely builds off the recent efforts of those such as Ebony Elizabeth Thomas adding further to her work by looking at how the literary monster "narrates difference within children's culture" (2, 4). One of the most generous aspects of Monstrous Youth comes in Austin's straightforward composition and generous explanation surrounding her project. Crafting possibly my favorite new literary term, "enfreakment" (18), to begin her rich discussion of the pulp and horror of EC Comics and their eventual legislative downfall in the 1950s, Austin illuminates a well-trod discussion in the comics community for young adult and children's scholars with a breviloquence that should become the standard in cultural studies discussions. This material is well-traveled in different discourse circles; however, this might be the first time I've read such a well-constructed history of comics such as The Vault of Horror (1950) and Tales from the Crypt (1950) in the context of children's and young adult scholarship, and it is entirely refreshing to see this material not only not elided over but given a replete treatment within the context of children's literary studies. As such, Austin provides one of the most complete treatments of all manner of material in children's and young adult literature from the spinner rack to, in...

Reading A Story about Abjection in The Fifth Child: Monstrous Child and Monstrous Mother

This paper aims to explore how the process of abjection affects an individual’s psychological reality by reading Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child from a Kristevan perspective. At the individual level, Ben, a retarded child born with deformity, is deprived of opportunities to enjoy the experience of semiotic chora, which will help him accept the law of language in the Symbolic. As an abjected monster, he reveals the process of the mother’s abjection operating in both inter-subjective and intra-subjective relationships. At the level of the social unconscious, Harriet, who gave birth to this monstrous child, is an embodiment of the archaic mother, who is essential to but potentially disruptive of the patriarchal order with its uncontrollable generative power. Despite societal suppression she suffer, Harriet shows the ethics of a mature subject based on maternal love by reinstating Ben into their home in spite of family’s disapproval, and by admitting that the monstrous child’s foreign otherness exists not outside but within ourselves.

Little Monsters: Austerity, Anxiety, and the Monstrous Child in Doris Lessing’sThe Fifth Child

AbstractThe popular imagination of the 1970s and 1980s was a fertile breeding ground for monstrous children who proliferated within a political climate where austerity was becoming a central concept in Thatcherite thinking. In this article, I argue that, despite their neoliberal positioning as possessing certain modes of capital, children become “monstrous” in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child through their association with precisely the kinds of excess which austerity politics condemns, constituting a corporeal and economic threat. I read these “little monsters” as articulations of the social anxieties about lack and scarcity upon which austerity is based and which it subsequently generates and, more broadly, as inscriptions of the ambivalent position of the child within Thatcherite policy and rhetoric.

Kamen Rider

Kamen Rider

Real or alleged ghosts and monstrous dead children in the Italian fiction of Carolina Invernizio and Matilde Serao

ABSTRACT My research aims at investigating the function of ghostly entities in the field of Italian popular literature between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by considering the fiction of Carolina Invernizio (1851–1916) and Matilde Serao (1856–1927), two leading authors of the Italian feuilleton, which was directed at petty-bourgeois and proletarian readers. Invernizio wrote some successful novels focused on the “buried alive” woman, whose apparitions are dreadful and uncanny but, at the same time, lead the “living” people to right the wrong, to punish acts of violence, to resolve the faulty lines in society which were provoked by the patriarchal system’s excesses or by human evil. This paper examines Invernizio’s La sepolta viva (“The Woman buried Alive”, 1896), which shows an innovative portrayal of a woman aspiring to a greater role by escaping from gender subjugation. This novel, a bestseller of a prolific writer who published more than 120 novels in forty years, was strongly appreciated in Italy and was repeatedly reprinted and translated into English and Spanish. Matilde Serao, a long-established investigative journalist, was the first woman to edit an Italian journal and to author important works within the Verista movement, including Il ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1884) and Il paese di cuccagna (The Land of Cockayne,1891). Serao highlighted the hermeneutical role of the fantastic, which reveals a hidden and obscure reality, allowing people to grasp the deep, unconscious reasons for their actions. In “Barchetta fantasma”, (Little ghostly Boat”) and “Leggenda di Capodimonte” (“The Legend of Capodimonte”), in the collection Leggende Napoletane (Neapolitan Legends, 1881), ghosts sanction deviant forms of passion. In ““O Munaciello” (“The Little Monk”), also in Leggende napoletane, Serao shows the human side of her literary fantastic by depicting a deformed child, the scapegoat for the community, who returns to the world after death, and embodies both a sad, irrepressible need for love and a willingness to avenge injustice. In “La donna dall’abito nero e dal ramo di corallo rosso” (“The Woman with the Black Dress and the Red Coral Brooch”) (1883), the ghost personifies the “Jungian shadow”, the rejected side of the self. Ghosts in Invernizio and Serao’s works represent a means of defending reasons based on instincts and passions while proposing a more active role for women, giving literary and human dignity to the “difference”.

The metaphorical Value of Postmodern Fairy Tale: Childhood Characters and Ghosts of the Past in Spanish-Contemporary Fantastic Cinema (G. del Toro and J. A. Bayona)

This paper aims to analyse the metaphorical meaning and the underlying narrative structure of contemporary fairy tales and their thematic lines. Focusing on children’s characters, a selection of six contemporary Spanish films of the fantastic by Guillermo del Toro and Juan Antonio Bayona are analysed: firstly, El espinazo del diablo (2001, director), El laberinto del fauno (2006, director) and Mamá (2013, executive producer, directed by A. Muschietti) and secondly, the films of J.A. Bayona El orfanato (2007, director), Un monstruo viene a verme (2016, director), El secreto de Marrowbone (2017, productor ejecutivo, dirigida por Sergio G. Sánchez). These thematic lines will explore the maternal-filial bonds and the connections of monstrous children’s characters with the fantasy and the ghostly beings.

Gavin Higgins and Francesca Simon, The Monstrous Child, London, Royal Opera House, Linbury Theatre, 21 February–3 March 2019

Melting blocks of ice drip from the ceiling. Sounds of wind, rain, and shrieking howls accompanied by rasping trombone pedal tones and wailing clarinet glissandi build to a cacophony of death-noises. ‘Oh, enough local colour’, retorts Hel.

“Emissaries of Death and Destruction”: Reading the Child-as-Killer in We Need to Talk about Kevin and Sharp Objects

ABSTRACTMonstrous children possess “a unique power as horrific figures”, able to generate disturbances that are as disquieting as they are enthralling. Focusing on Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, this paper examines how representations of children-who-kill dislocate mythologies of childhood to reveal anxieties about the threat of monstrous women to patriarchy. As David Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg argue via Kristeva, the monstrous child evokes a fear of the disruptive potential of the archaic mother (116), a reading in line with Karen J. Renner’s discussion of how “monstrous births” disclose a cultural fixation on women as sites of loss and corruption. Moreover, in a complication of perceptions of the child as a symbol of futurity, the child-who-kills resists binaries of innocence and sin to expose cultural scripts which define the “real” as little more than “a hideous social mask”. Exploring the monstrous child “within the intricate matrix of relations” in which it is produced reveals, this paper argues, a series of concerns about the symbolism (and sanctity) of the child and childhood per se, as well as deep-seated fears about the maintenance of normative culture more broadly.

John Banville’s “monstrous child”: freedom and inheritance in Shroud

ABSTRACTJohn Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) – a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death – as his “monstrous child” that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida’s thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity – that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past – into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a “monstrous child”.

The Monstrous Child by Francesca Simon

The Monstrous Child by Francesca Simon

Queen Alice and the Monstrous Child: Alice through the Looking-Glass

Queen Alice and the Monstrous Child:Alice through the Looking-Glass Veronica Schanoes (bio) In chapter 10 of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, the unicorn, who had been battling the lion for the crown of the White King, catches sight of Alice and regards her “with an air of the deepest disgust.” When informed, with great to-do, that she is a child, the unicorn is very excited, exclaiming, “I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” It is even more fascinated upon being informed that “It [Alice] can talk,” and when addressed, Alice good-naturedly says that she had always thought that unicorns were fabulous monsters (175).1 Despite this momentary mutual recognition of monstrosity, it is Alice who is referred to as “the Monster” and addressed as “Monster” by both the unicorn and the lion for the rest of the chapter. In this sequel to Carroll’s wildly successful Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the dream-child has become a monster. Despite pages full of gryphons, mock turtles, and bloodthirsty queens, this is the only use of the word “monster” in either Alice book. But why? On the face of it, the Alice of Looking-Glass is far less monstrous than the Alice of Wonderland, as Nina Auerbach noted nearly forty years ago. Wonderland Alice’s size and shape change at an alarming rate and with an alarming elasticity; Looking-Glass Alice maintains her physical self admirably well. Wonderland Alice threatens the inhabitants of the fantastical realm through which she travels both accidentally, when she speaks repeatedly and longingly of her cat Dinah, who would love to gobble down the creatures Alice encounters, and purposefully, when she warns the White Rabbit not to set fire to his own house in order to rid it of her overlarge presence; Looking-Glass Alice is unfailingly helpful, and even deferential, to those she encounters, biting down on some of her thoughts to avoid “hurting the poor Queen’s feelings” (although she does threaten to pick a few unruly flowers at the very beginning of the story and destroy her banquet at the end) (196). [End Page 1] I would suggest that Alice’s monstrosity in Looking-Glass is key to understanding some of the sharp differences between this book and its predecessor, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll had established the question of Alice’s identity as central to Wonderland, as she wonders if she is curly-haired Ada or possibly the ignorant and deprived Mabel, the rabbit mistakes her for his housemaid and succeeds in interpolating her into that role, and she is told there is no difference between her and a serpent. I have, in a previous article, discussed what it means for there to be no difference between a little girl and a serpent; here I wish to understand what it means for a child to be a monster, to Carroll, to his contemporary readers, and to us. I will demonstrate that Alice’s ascension to queendom, the central quest of Looking-Glass, is intimately tied to the monstrosity of childhood, and that rather than the book being an indictment of Alice’s royal ambition to maturity, becoming a queen is Alice’s path out of monstrosity. What is that monstrosity, then? One path we might follow to discover the answer is an etymological exploration of the phrase “fabulous monster.” “Fabulous” seems clear enough; certainly both the unicorn and the character of Alice are creatures of fable. But then again, for the unicorn, it is not Alice personally or even little girls generally who are fabulous monsters. It is the category of children. In what way, then, are children creatures of fable and monstrous? Turning to the entry for “monster” in the stalwart Oxford English Dictionary, we find definition A.1.a.: “Originally: a mythical creature which is part animal and part human, or combines elements of two or more animal forms, and is frequently of great size and ferocious appearance. Later, more generally: any imaginary creature that is large, ugly, and frightening.” It is interesting that Alice calls the unicorn a fabulous monster, rather than a mythical beast or animal, as...

Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Reviewed by: Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Paul A. Harris Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2015. 366pp. In this landmark book, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen combines and culminates the two strands of his substantial scholarly work: ecology and Medieval and Early Modern studies. Stone is ambitiously synthetic and syncretic, framed not as critical exegesis but “a thought experiment, attempting to discern in the most mundane of substances a liveliness” (6). Rather than developing an ecological theory and applying it to particular texts, or practicing an ecocriticism that reads nature “in” texts, Cohen attempts to stage something like a symbiotic textual petric performance: “To tell a story with stone is intensely to inhabit that preposition with, to move from solitary individuations to ecosystems, environments, shared agencies, and companionate properties” (11-12). This conjoining of human and stone produces a “monstrous child of the meeting of incompatible scales, queer progeny of impossible taxonomic breach” that Cohen calls “geophilia,” defined as “the lithic in the creaturely and the lively in the stone” (20). Cohen marks his project as necessarily “’inhuman’ to encompass both difference (‘in-’ as negative prefix) and intimacy (‘in-‘ as indicator of estranged interiority”) (10). This inhuman ecology notably serves as both ontology and methodology; the mutual implication and intimacy of stone and human must be countered by tapping the distancing, disruptive power of stone’s difference: Lithic-induced perspective shift triggers an ontological and temporal reeling, a rocky movement of affect, cognition, horizon. This book simulates that seismic effect by intermixing the medieval and the modern, the theoretical with the blunt, the linguistic and textual with the ecomaterial. Vertigo is the book’s intent rather than an accident of its rhetorical excess (16). Yet, while Stone might at times propose vertigo-inducing thought-experiments and consistently takes wonderfully inventive turns, it is also an elegantly structured, stylistically-rich study in theory and criticism. Cohen combines clear command of narrative arc with detailed textual exegesis in a manner both canonical and contemporary; he also is a distinctly poetic writer, drawing on complex layered meanings and etymologies to thicken his prose, without becoming indulgent or showy (see, for example, Cohen’s compelling takes on the triple etymologies of ‘geologic’ and ‘tectonic’). The text features four neatly crafted stand-alone chapters dedicated to particular lithic characteristics: “Geophilia” brings stone and humans into contact and interaction; “Time” examines how stone-human intimacy brings humans into a zone of monumental endurance and intermittent catastrophe; “Force” focuses on the provocations and [End Page 183] attractions that emanate from such perduring material; “Soul” uncovers the affective, creaturely, sexual energies that surface through these forces. Between chapters, Cohen inserts “Excursus,” written as mini-travel narratives where he visit sites and reflects on political and existential questions that percolate in the main chapters. These passages exemplify and enrich the book’s interweaving of personal and political, creative and critical rhetorical registers. Stone is also a deeply interdisciplinary book that seamlessly “intermixes” ecotheory and Medieval/Early Modern Studies. Cohen’s command of these fields allows him to intervene directly in different disciplinary debates. On the one hand, Cohen argues that literature of the period may be richly reread in the context of contemporary ecological thought. This is because “medieval writers meditated upon inanimate matter and came to similar insights” as those informing new materialism, object oriented ontology, and speculative realism: “Rock communicates something nonhuman and yet weirdly creaturely, queerly vital” (257). The “ecomaterial envisionings” of medieval writers “proceeded in modes just as vivid and capacious” as current geo-philosophy, “through narratives stressing ecological entanglement as well as powerful solitudes” (21). Medieval writings are particularly suited to disclose stone’s “queer vivacity” and the ways it “aggregates, attracting to itself disparate matter” because of the period’s “varied rhetorical devices and narratives, especially of the compound and dilatory sort: catalogue poems, encyclopedia entries, biographical digression, etymological impulses, lapidaries…, wonder-filled romances” (6). As one not versed in Medieval/Early Modern studies, I cannot make a scholarly assessment of Cohen’s textual readings. I can attest, though, that Cohen offers up engaging analyses of several texts, including...

Individuating ‘sparks’ and ‘flickers’ of ‘a life’ in dance practices with preschoolers: the ‘monstrous child’ of Colebrook's Queer Vitalism

ABSTRACTWhat are the dominant images of the Child in contemporary Western societies? In order to challenge some dominant images of the Child, this essay explores the possibilities of analyzing an experimental dance practice with preschoolers aged 1–2 years with Claire Colebrook's theorizing on ‘the war on norms’. Colebrook suggests a Queer Vitalism to push the limits of how to understand humanness generally, and more specifically, how to understand processes of subjectification. She moves from a post-structuralist understanding toward the Deleuzian notion of practices of individuation and processes of becoming-imperceptible. In this essay, we draw on Queer Vitalism to show how it is possible to understand children's constructions of subjectivity in events of experimental dance practices for preschoolers. The analysis is performed in close interactions with video-films from these workshops transformed to still photography. We aspire to show how these practices can be understood as counter-power strategies in the enactment of an image of a Monstrous Child. Such an image might transform the taken-for-granted image of the Child and preschool practices in subversive ways.

Wes Williams Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty MagicMonsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic. Wes Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+344.

Wes Williams Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty MagicMonsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic. Wes Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv+344.

Tipologie di bambini maschi mostri nell’immaginario medievale

Il contributo rileva l’importanza educativa dei bambini mostruosi in alcuni esempi significativi della letteratura medievale francese ed italiana. L’individuazione di quattro bambini maschi problematici è interpretata alla luce delle relazioni emotive con gli adulti.