Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia

Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture

Elisabeth Wesseling, Elisabeth Wesseling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317068464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.

Part I
The cultural dynamics of cross-generational (re-)appropriation

1 Historical roots of consumption-based nostalgia for childhood in the United States

Gary Cross

A fairly recent historical change in the relationships between childhood and memory is manifested in a new form of nostalgia. This takes the form of collecting and memorializing the past through narrow age-linked consumption, especially formed by childhood encounters with short-lived goods and media that later in life re-appear as nostalgia. This leads to loosely formed nostalgic communities built around narrow cohorts of collectors and enthusiasts who focus on those goods and media experiences (toys, dolls, movies, etc.) associated with brief periods of their own personal childhoods. These forms of nostalgia have their roots in subtle but substantial changes in attitudes toward childhood and consumer practices that emerged in the US around 1900 and mostly later in Western Europe, but were accelerated and transformed after 1970.

Emergence of youth-based consumption, ca. 1900–1930

New methods of advertising, packaging, and distributing goods in the generation around 1900 combined with an extraordinary increase in the range and number of innovative products to produce the birth of modern consumer society in the US. The novelty of these goods not only shaped the generation growing up and coming to maturity at that time, but also led producers of these commodities to draw on and exacerbate generational change and even age conflict to promote their goods. King Gillette’s safety razors were marketed to “modern,” clean-shaven young men in the 1890s, and somewhat later advertisements of new lines of women’s cosmetics transformed Victorian prejudices against “painted” women into a positive association with feminine self-definition and especially youthful renewal (Peiss 1996, 1998; Strasser 1989, 339). Status-seeking purchases that many Americans had condemned as ‘envy’ in 1900 became through advertising a largely legitimate expression of aspiration and democratic right to the fruits of affluence (Matt 2003). Nearly yearly changes in product lines in everything from toys, soda drinks, phonographs, and Tin Pan Alley tunes, to amusement park rides, clothes, and cars began the modern marking of time and even seasons with ‘new and improved’ consumer goods. The fact that many goods were truly new confirmed this link between youth and novelty. Home phonographs, roll film cameras, roller coasters, and cars did not exist before the 1890s. Neither did bottled soda drinks, candy bars, and chewing gum. They had to be worked into the habitual world of people, and then, as now, youth were early adopters of new goods and technologies. This connection between young people and new consumer products, specific to their childhoods (and the triggers of commercialized nostalgia later in life), has been repeated in subsequent rising generations of Americans.

At least in the middle classes, those born and coming of age during this period found identity in these new consumer goods, partially replacing old associations with family, work, and neighborhood that were in decline, were dysfunctional, or were simply constraining. Such goods gave especially young immigrants and urbanizing African-Americans from the South tools for coping with a mobile, anonymous, and often alien urban social milieu. Modern consumption helped youth contend with social conflict and ambiguity, evade clear-cut choices, and even hold contradictory desires by allowing them to put on different faces and costumes for different social situations (Heinze 1990; Lears 1995, 4).

Particular venues of youth peer-group consumption were dance halls, ‘nickelodeon’ cinemas, and perhaps most notably amusement parks (all dating mostly from 1890 to 1905). New York’s Coney Island became a setting for free-spending youth with the opening of three parks between 1897 and 1905, each with a dazzling and ever-changing array of thrill rides and spectacles. These sites offered freedom from family and ethnic values in a playful and provocative (if apparently rarely promiscuous) environment. Amusement parks gave teens and young adults an opportunity to experiment with the new and liberating courtship rituals of ‘dating’ (Bailey 1988; Cross and Walton 2005, chapter 2; Peiss 1986, 121, 125, 130–134).

One of the greatest causes of generation-based consumption in the US was the rapid growth of enrollment at public, non-exclusive high schools and in a vast array of public and private colleges in the thirty years after 1900. This not only removed youth from work, and thus integration in (or subordination to) a cross-generational culture, but also led to a unique peer culture based on the extraordinary leisure time allowed in these schools and colleges for football games, parties, fashions, and fads usually in heterosexual settings. These activities absorbed much of the life of college (and to a lesser degree high school) by the 1920s, and encouraged a unique youth-based consumer culture that was imitated far beyond campuses. This peer culture became more independent with the emergence of teen and youth access to a used car market by the late 1920s,¹ due to the sheer quantity and rapid turnover of automobiles in the US (by 1929, there was one car for every five Americans compared to the 1:43 and 1:335 ratios in Britain and Italy, respectively). One very American manifestation of this was the emergence of the “hot rod” and “drag racing,” which began in the mid-1920s in Southern California. More common, of course, was the liberation of teen couples from parental control in their cars (Flink 1993, 131–33; Moorehouse 1991, 27–32, 42–44).

Gifting children and the origins of consumption/media-based generational identity

In addition to peer-group consumption, generational identification with goods had more subtle origins in the American linkage between new consumer goods and new child-rearing and childhood patterns that again emerged shortly after 1900. In this period, “wondrous innocence”—inexperienced delight in and through encounters with the new—became associated with adult spending on children. While an early-nineteenth-century Romantic notion of the innocent wonder of childhood was linked with small children’s delighted fresh encounters with nature and imagination, with the emergence of a novelty-based consumer culture after 1900, that wonder was evoked through middle-class parental gifts of playthings, commercialized entertainment, sweets, trips to amusement parks, and other special experiences. Even Kodak marketed a children’s camera in 1898 (the Brownie, named after a series of popular children’s illustrated stories), merely a decade after the first Kodak snapshot camera (West 2000, 30–31, 49, 63). Commercial crazes were associated with children—Teddy Bears in 1906, Billiken dolls in 1908, and Kewpie dolls in 1912 (Cross 1997, 87–88). Affluence, but more directly a shift away from utilitarian attitudes toward child bearing and rearing, increased confidence that children would survive infancy. With the triumph of the middle-class withdrawal of children from the labor market, youngsters became not only more protected in law and culture but also valued differently as parents saw them less as investments and more as objects of consumer indulgence (Cross 2004; Zelizer 1994). A new, more permissive image of the child (what I have elsewhere termed the “cute”) encouraged parents to pander to rather than restrain children’s wants or imagined wants. Advertisers, but also producers of everything from comic strips and movies to new holiday rituals, made the “wondrous innocence” of the child part of a culture of parental gift-giving that challenged traditional notions of cross-generational reciprocity (replacing it with a system of parents spending on their children who when adults gifted their children rather than supporting their parents in old age).

At the root of this Romantic, but also materialistic, understanding of children was a subtle reaction of parents to rapid change. Parents projected a longing for escape from the rigors, responsibilities, or at least boredom of emerging bureaucratic capitalism onto their children and their “never lands” and “secret gardens” (as witnessed in ‘children’s’ fantasy stories of the era). Children’s toys particularly expressed the contradictory attitudes of adults: toy Noah’s Arks and circus play sets reminded parents in 1900 of their own childhoods and seemed timeless when given to the young, while fads like the Teddy Bear of 1906 offered parents an opportunity to share with their offspring in a romantic (and unthreatening) embrace of change. Thus, toys alternatively (and sometimes simultaneously) represented both the timeless and the timely. Giving gifts to children let adults recover in the (hopefully) delighted child their own lost “wondrous innocence” in identifying with the child’s pleasure as yet unaffected by the boredom and satiation that consumer society inevitably produced in ‘experienced’ consumers: it allowed adults also to enjoy vicariously the playthings (and wondrous innocence) that they may have missed as children (Cross 2004, chapters 3 and 4).

Consequently, both adults’ identification of the next generation with consumption and children’s own identities were shaped by specific consumer goods and expectations. Thus, memory of childhood was increasingly associated with new, often short-lived consumer goods and entertainments. Doubtless, for many Americans, this made childhood a time of favored memory just as those recollections were associated with particular dolls, toys, cartoon characters, and movie heroes.²

Thus, there were two stages of childhood that became especially significant in that generation of 1900: first, late adolescence became a period of increasing consumer freedom, separation from parents, and emotionally charged peer-group experience that contrasted with the slower and more constrained pace of later life. Second, childhood from roughly ages six to ten was marked by adult gifts that both evoked “wondrous innocence” or a naïve delight and provided the materials for an emerging autonomy, thus shaping formative memory in adults. This consumption-based understanding and memory of youth and childhood became more evident with subsequent generations.

Dynamics of consumer generations

The generations following the turn-of-the-twentieth-century cohort were in part defined by changing baskets of goods and media. The speeding up of that change over the course of the twentieth century ultimately led to shorter-spanned consumer cohorts and repeatedly to generational conflicts expressed in and through that consumption. Of course, adults in 1900 expected that giving gifts to children on holidays and at birthdays would promote cross-generational bonding. Advertisements for everything from cars to prepared foods touted how these goods would build family ties. Adults expected their gifts would prepare offspring for the future and makers of electric toy trains and construction toys like the erector set convinced parents that these playthings would give their offspring an advantage in the competitive world of technology and business. Advertisements for dolls and their accessories reassured parents that daughters would accept futures similar to their mothers as care givers and consumers through their doll play (Cross 1997, chapter 3).

However, parental gift-giving often did not lead to generational bonding. Instead, as children grew older and more independent, they distanced themselves from parental fantasies and hopes, and found their own, in part as a result of success of marketers selling directly to children and encouraging their consumer desire (Cook 2000). This rebellion (the “cool”) meant the once dependent child’s abandonment of both the Teddy Bear and the erector set (or baby doll) for commercial children’s and youth culture that had little to do with parents’ memory of their own childhood or attempts to shape their children’s future. Children found their own consumer cultures through the radio, Saturday afternoon kids’ movie serials, and comic books in the 1930s, and through TV and transistor (and car) radios from the 1950s and digital media from the 1970s. The result was a series of moral panics as parents rejected child and youth commercial culture (opposing pinball and comic books in the 1930s and 1940s, violence on TV and sex in rock music from the 1950s on, and video games from the mid-1970s, for example). These widely publicized generational wars were, however, only part of a broader phenomenon—the separation of age groups resulting from repeated rebellions from the “cute” as children sought their own liberated zones in cohort consumption. The additional fact that this rebellion shifted downward from adolescence has, over time, muddied the distinction between the two periods of childhood nostalgia noted above (Cross 2004, chapters 5 and 6).

Again, there were (and are) countervailing forces: merchandisers did not always promote divisions between the parent and the “cool” child and youth. Walt Disney built an entertainment empire around appealing to children without threatening elders—from his 1930s’ cartoon innovations to his television programming (beginning with The Mickey Mouse Club of 1955)—in contrast to contemporary children’s programming on Nickelodeon channel (Banet-Weiser 2007; Bowles 1976, 16–17). Disney’s theme parks remained cross-generational. For example, Main Street USA, a fantasy corridor leading from the entrance of Disneyland at Anaheim (and the Magic Kingdom at Disney’s Orlando Florida complex) to the major attractions of the park, was designed both to appeal to the nostalgia of adults for small-town Main Streets and to children with its whimsy and miniaturization of buildings (Marling 1998, 25, 39).

Accelerated change since 1970

After about 1970, cross-generational fantasy declined with increased and more systematic media/merchandiser efforts to accommodate and even encourage children’s rebellion. Consumer cohorts shortened (leading later to narrower communities nostalgic for childhood goods) due to a faster turnover of children’s consumer goods. Finally, young adults began to hold on to their ‘childish things’ resulting both from reluctance to abandon the cute or cool ‘stages’ of life and from merchandisers’ efforts to extend the market for ‘children’s’ goods and media into adulthood. All of this ultimately resulted in a fully developed and distinct form of nostalgia that was tethered to children’s and youth consumer products and media. This is a complex history that can only be summarized here.

By the end of the 1960s, Disney’s formulaic appeal to both parents and children was breaking down. The generational divisions that were so sharply drawn between emerging adult boomers and their parents over a wide range of social, cultural, and political issues were more subtly expressed between children and parents. Live adults disappeared from children’s TV programming, replaced by the frenetic animal cartoons of Hanna Barbara and then action-adventure cartoons based on the dark fantasy and violence of Marvel comics superheroes. The cross-generational appeal of Westerns (and the play sets and toys that invited boys into adult cowboy fantasy) was partially replaced by youth-oriented cults of monster movies and adult-defying playthings in the late 1960s and 1970s. Even more important was the shift toward direct TV advertising to kids for toys, sugared cereals, soft drinks, and candy that emerged fully in the 1970s. George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy (1977–83) offered children a fantasy that adults recognized, but through the merchandising of Star Wars action figures and play sets, children entered an esoteric world of play from which adults had no memory or role. This separation of generations became even more obvious in highly orchestrated commercial festivals built around TV cartoon shows like He Man, The Transformers, DinoRiders, and Power Rangers that combined crazes for fantasy stories and playthings to re-enact them. A similar divisive trend for girls, beginning with the Barbie doll (introduced to the general horror of mothers in 1959 for her radical break with nurturing...