Political Anxiety in Golden Age Children's Classics and Their Contemporary Adaptations

Jasmin Sültemeyer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783110742657
• eBook ISBN: 9783110742831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As striking, counter-intuitive and distasteful as the combination of children and anxiety may seem, some of the most popular children's classics abound in depictions of traumatic relationships, bloody wars and helpless heroes. This book draws on Freudian and Lacanian anxiety models to investigate the psychological and political significance of this curious juxtaposition, as it stands out in Golden Age novels from both sides of the Atlantic and their present-day adaptations. The stories discussed in detail, so the argument goes, identify specific anxieties and forms of anxiety management as integral elements of hegemonial middle-class identity. Apart from its audacious link between psychoanalysis and Marxist, feminist, as well as postcolonial ideology criticism, this study provides a nuanced analysis of the ways in which allegedly trivial texts negotiate questions of individual and (trans)national identities. In doing so, it offers a fresh look at beloved tales like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, contributes to the dynamic field of adaptation studies and highlights the necessity to approach children's entertainment more seriously and more sensitively than it is generally the case.

1 Discord at Home

Decades of scholarship have demonstrated that ‘the’ family and the roles assigned to its individual members are not of biological essence. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) shows how cultural constructs can, and should be, deconstructed. Butler understands ‘gender’ as the rhetorical and visual means by which ‘sex’ is established as “prediscursive”, “prior to culture” and “a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (Butler 2007: 10, 50). That labels like ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ appear to be natural, is a result of institutional practices, performative language and ritualised behaviour (Butler 2007: 25 f., 34, 45. It is this fantasy of a “pre-existing subject” which critics are to expose as an “effect of discursive practices” (Butler 2007: 24, 195). In analogy to Butler’s deconstruction of ‘gendered identity’, several cultural historians and sociologists have shown that the discursive mechanisms used to describe (or prescribe) ‘mothers’, ‘fathers’ and ‘children’ are historically and culturally variable (Ariès 1975; Mintz 1983; Zelizer 1985; Rowbotham 1989; Coontz 199; Wallace 1995; Stearns 2003; Gillis 2008; Glitz 2009; Grenby 2010; Fass 2011; Jenks 2015) and frequently instrumentalised to advocate political change (Samuels 1986; Rowbotham 1989; Davin 1997). Since predominant ideas about ‘maternity’, ‘paternity’ or ‘childhood’ evolve through dynamic processes of negotiation, they are often incoherent and may even contradict each other. To study ‘the’ family and the roles it assigns to its individual members thus means to look at the ways in which different ideologies overlap and contest each other at one particular moment in time (Bederman 1995: 7).

In the course of the eighteenth century, bureaucrats, doctors, lawyers and factory owners acquired new public roles, yet the social advancement of the educated and financially sound did not automatically give rise to a collective identity. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term ‘middle classes’¹⁵ subsumed all those who were neither holders of large amounts of property, inheritors of substantial wealth or part of the working classes (Rowbotham 1989: 203). Only by the end of the century it designated a cultural movement, led by individuals who shared moral ideals, behavioural standards and a political agenda (Hobsbawm 1989: 11). This change in meaning can be attributed to a climate of social turmoil, which increased the demand for class consciousness (Hobsbawm 1989: 174; McClintock 1995: 46; Davin 1997: 131). For those who lived in metropolitan eras, the Industrial Revolution had generated serious problems. Hygiene shortcomings turned cities like London or New York into hotspots of malady (Houghton 1957: 55; Gould 2001: 8). The unbearable living conditions of the working-classes soon sparked fears about social unrest. “Victorian society […] was shot through, from top to bottom, with the dread of some wild outbreak of the masses that would overthrow the established order and confiscate private property”, writes Walter Houghton (1957: 55). In England, the suspicion that revolutionary forces were at work seemed to be confirmed by the Chartist Movement and the Hyde Park Riots. In the US, Jacob Coxley’s “army of the unemployed” gave rise to similar concerns (Houghton 1957: 57; Gould 2001: 3).

As social unrest increased the need to articulate white, middle-class identity Victorians started to pay unprecedented attention to their private lives (Mintz 1983: 14; Mackinnon 2014: 78). “For people haunted by a nightmare vision of breakdown, splintering and atomization the exaltation of harmony of the family seemed a necessary counterbalance to the decisive disintegrating pressures of public life”, Steven Mintz (1983: 14) describes this new interest in domestic bliss. Policymakers and cultural critics began to portray the middle-class family as an antithesis to the public world (Kohlke 2011: 2 f.). Set back from pedestrians behind iron railings and front yards, Victorian townhouses epitomise this new ideal of privacy (Houghton 1957: 343; Ariès 1975: 562; Mintz 1983: 11). Domestic ideology sharply delineated the realm of paid work, commerce and politics, conventionally reserved for men, from the private domain of housework and childrearing, which constituted women’s sphere of influence. A cluster of assumptions prescribed and justified the limited possibilities this separation held in store for women. Writers like Coventry Patmore or John Ruskin depicted them as angelic and self-sacrificing human beings, whose maternal instinct was far more reliable than their intellectual capacities (Patmore 2006; Ruskin 2006). Obviously, the sexual integrity of these simple creatures had to be protected against the contagious promiscuity of working-class women (Houghton 1957: 365; Rowbotham 1989: 41; Glitz 2009: 113 – 115; Mackinnon 2014: 284; Samuels 2014: 384). The practice of sheltering women also gained a foothold in the US, where it became a hallmark of civilizational progress and social status (Howe 2014: 706).

At the same time domestic ideology portrayed ‘the’ home as an antithesis to (foreign) politics, imperial ideology extolled it as a training ground for future Empire builders. As British colonialism changed its forms, childrearing took on a new importance in public debates: “If the British population did not increase fast enough to fill the empty spaces of the empire, others would”, Anna Davin (1997: 88) reports on the fears generated by declining birth rates and alarming health conditions. In the years following the Second Boer War, policymakers and local authorities worked side by side to increase the performance of England’s mothers. St Pancras School, for instance, offered free dinners, cooking classes and courses on domestic hygiene (Rowbotham 1989: 196). Apart from biological reproducers, these efforts show, mothers were regarded as transmitters of cultural values and political ideology. “If England was the Mother Country, the pivot on which the welfare of her offspring colonies depended, then the professional mother, or her substitute, was the pivot on which England herself depended”, Judith Rowbotham (1989: 196) sums up the way in which motherhood came to be regarded as a professional career in its own right.

In their demonstrative renunciation of old hierarchy ranks, middle-class men and women believed that social status was something to be acquired instead of inherited (Mintz 1983: 37; Glitz 2009: 146; Griffin 2009: 173). In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Victorian society was repetitively shocked by reports of men who had abused their spatial and behavioural freedom. By 1850, 50.000 prostitutes were known to the English police (Houghton 1957: 366). Adultery trials and cases of domestic abuse exposed the sexual double standards of so-called gentlemen (De Symons Honey 1977: 207; Griffin 2009: 65 – 110). Richard Burton’s translation of the Kama Sutra (1883), William Thomas Stead’s indictment of child prostitution (1885), the lurid press coverage of Jack the Ripper’s attacks (1888) and the trials of Oscar Wilde (1895) fuelled this climate of moral panic (Kennedy 2005: 218, 243). In reaction to their compatriots’ abusive behaviour, many MPs voted for laws that protected married women against their husbands (Griffin 2009: 7, 37, 164 – 200). The final decades of the nineteenth century therefore witnessed remarkable changes in women’s legal status. “In the space of little more than thirty years legal and political privileges which had underpinned male power for centuries were either swept away or substantially undermined”, Ben Griffin (2009: 5) stresses the radicality of these reforms. From the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) onwards, American middle-class men were confronted with comparable demands (Mountjoy 2008: 42). In addition, Victorian society witnessed a profound shift of attitudes towards children. For members of the working classes, change manifested itself in the implementation of child-labour laws and the establishment of mandatory schooling (Mitch 1992: 175 f.; Marten 2014: 10). For middle-class children, it became palpable with public school reforms and with the explosion of texts designed for their entertainment.¹⁶ Changes like these indicate an unprecedented degree of emotional, as well as political, investment in the future generation. At the same time, however, they increased children’s economic and political marginality among all social levels (Zelizer 1985: 5).

The twentieth century saw the erosion of many legal barriers which have traditionally prevented women’s inclusion in social institutions (Davis et al 2017: 7).¹⁷ Today, both men and women face the tension between financial self-reliance though paid work and staying at home for caretaking purposes (Gerson 2017: 14). The past century also gave rise to increasing divorce rates and new family patterns (Coontz 1992: 3). The nuclear family now co-exists alongside singledom, childless coupledom, single-parent households and patchwork families. Moreover, the medical practice of in vitro fertilisation has created new boundary disputes: “Courts have been asked to decide what happens to fertilized ova if the partners split up and to rule whether sperm donors or surrogate mothers have higher rights” Stephanie Coontz (1992: 3) reports on some extreme cases. In spite of these changes in gender relations and family patterns, the Victorian ideal continues to be at heart of the social and political debates of our time. “Much of what we call ‘family life’ today is spent either in anticipation of these moments or in remembering them”, John Gillis (2008: 324) sums up the general thrust of idealisation. Even though nostalgic myths surrounding ‘the’ traditional family evaporate upon closer examination, they still fuel fantasies about what ‘the’ home can, or should, do. The felt discrepancies between actual realities and expectations often give rise to anxieties about whether or not contemporary families are able to perform their private and social functions. “The twentieth century […] became rather a century of anxiety about the child and about parents’ own adequacy”, Peter Stearns (2003: 1) identifies anxiety as the governing spirit of childrearing today. Paula Fass and Chris Jenks, too, observe a palpable increase of anxieties surrounding middle-class children (Fass 2011: 11, 14; Jenks 2015: 40, 88). All three agree on the point that current debates about compulsory vaccinations or teenage suicide build on a rich Victorian legacy.

Instead of re-thinking some of these normative assumptions, contemporary commentators tend to judge families on the basis of nineteenth-century ideals, whereby the rhetorical condemnation of working-class families continues to serve the purpose of middle-class self-affirmation. In 1993, the British public was shocked by a case of child-by-child murder: the toddler James Bulger had been abducted, tortured and murdered by two ten-year-old children. According to Jenks (2015: 88) the “conceptual confusion” pervading the ensuing debate stemmed from diverging and mutually contradictory attempts to account for the crime. One group of observers called for understanding of, and compassion for, the perpetrators. In their view, the case was merely a symptom of Britain’s dysfunctional families (Jenks 2015: 120 – 129). When a series of school shootings shocked the American public in the 1990s, some commentators held that ‘American society’ was to blame for the eclipse of childhood innocence (Giroux 1999: 21 f.). During the London riots which took place almost two decades later, one of the most fear-inducing observations was the involvement of relatively young children. In their search for potential causes, Kohlke and Gutleben (2011: 39 f.) observe, “British media and politicians outdid one another in polemical diatribes against broken and failing families, irresponsible parents, out of control young people and youth gangs held accountable a priori for the violence, even before any public inquiries into the causes of the unrest […]”. The contemporary public sphere, these examples show, is still suffused with Victorian ideas about what ‘the’ family should accomplish and how its youngest members should behave.

The present study works from the premise that ‘childhood’ is a culturally significant and politically potent construct just as much as it is a biological category. Summarising the above, it can be said that Victorian children’s fiction emerged and proliferated at a time when middle-class models of family government and childrearing practices spread all over the globe and established themselves as a norm for future generations. The forthcoming chapter investigates how Golden Age classics and their contemporary adaptations depict and negotiate anxieties surrounding the nuclear family in general, and its youngest members in particular, and makes a preliminary attempt to carve out the political agenda behind certain concerns.

1.1 Uncanny Homes

The stories analysed in this book depict economic experiences and family constellations which would have allowed, and continue to allow, readers to recognise upper and lower middle-class environments. While the novels portray relatively happy family lives, the adaptations feature impoverished (half) orphans, children who are given up for adoption and couples who have recently lost a baby. Here, the ideal of nuclear family bliss becomes an unattainable, yet ultimately desirable fantasy. Both the novels and the adaptations are initially set in relatively unagitated homes. The protagonists’ lives are meticulously scheduled, spatially confined and organised according to a fixed set of rules. In the course of the frame narratives, however, these dull routines are thwarted by the appearance of unworldly creatures, supernatural powers or unsettling memories. This subchapter draws on Freud’s model of the uncanny to investigate how different individuals react to these intrusions and what their reactions reveal about how the stories imagine the difference between children and adults.

In their attempts to describe and prescribe children and childhood, Victorians could draw, among others, on the intellectual traditions of Romanticism and Puritanism (Grylls 1978: 24; Gubar 2009: 4 f., 9, 25; Eagleton 2010: 2). Around the turn of the century, the latter was spectacularly revived by the inception of psychoanalysis. In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919) Freud analyses a phenomenon “related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror” (“The Uncanny”: 219). Uncanny feelings, he states, are brought about by “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (“The Uncanny: 241). Freud elaborates on two “classes” of experiences which yield such a simultaneity of familiarity and alienation: (1) situations in which (officially) surmounted thinking patters seem to be confirmed and (2) instances in which (actually) repressed traumas are revived. Both classes hark back to impressions of early childhood which should not have returned in the first place.

Among Freud’s examples for the first class is the ‘intellectual uncertainty’ (“The Uncanny”: 226) that overcomes human beings when they look at dolls or machines and wonder whether these lifeless objects mi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Discord at Home
• 2 Troublesome Otherness
• 3 Guilty Pleasures
• Conclusion
• Index