The Lost Child in Literature and Culture PDF
Preview The Lost Child in Literature and Culture
m a r k f r o u d i n l i t e r a t u r e a n d c u l t u r e The Lost Child in Literature and Culture Mark Froud The Lost Child in Literature and Culture Mark Froud Independent Scholar Corsham, UK ISBN 978-1-137-58494-6 ISBN 978-1-137-58495-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58495-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945814 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ClassicStock/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom I would like to dedicate this book to my family: Mum and Dad—thank you for everything you have done for me, Neil, Connor, Caleb and to Pam, an incredible woman. And always to Liz—I love you so much. This book is for Hazel Tree, so she can be found again and complete her journey. A cknowledgements I would like to thank all my friends and tutors who have encouraged me and made suggestions for sources, including Chris Lewis, Jon Farrow, Steve Harrington, Max Ashworth, Nick Smart, Julie Waldron, Annabel Wynne, Ollie Cane, Simon and Hannah Wharf, Lola Herrero, Gail Jones, Samantha Harvey, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Nicola King, Tessa Hadley and Paul Edwards (who started me on the search for the lost child nearly twenty years ago). Also, a special teacher who inspired me when I was a child, the late Mr. Bowles. Mark Froud vii c ontents 1 Introduction: The Figure of the Child 1 2 The Child in the Story 13 3 The Child Lost in History 45 4 The Child Lost in Our Time 69 5 The Uncanny Child, a Ghostly Return 113 6 The Hole in Language 141 Conclusion 187 The Lost Child Bibliography 189 Index 197 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction: The Figure of the Child The figure appears so frequently in our culture, in films, television drama and documentaries, news media and novels, and yet we bury the trauma of the lost child deep within us. The lost child is everywhere and nowhere. By definition absent, lost children are a constant presence in our culture. Society buries the vast numbers of lost children that it removes from the world but the vast ranks of the forgotten boys and girls haunt us, reappearing in stories and images across time. At the time of writing, the long-awaited Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in Britain is underway, having begun on 27 February 2017. The aims are to expose institutional failings and collu- sion regarding child sexual abuse in the past and present, to enable vic- tims and survivors to give testimony and have their voices heard, and to provide initiatives for the future to prevent subsequent abuse. The loss of a child takes many forms. Even when a child grows into an adult and lives into old age, any damage inflicted upon him or her, emotionally, physically or mentally, can mean that a child is still lost. The scope of the IICSA inquiry indicates the scale of the problem of child sexual abuse, but also how shocking the extent to which such a widespread and horrific issue has been buried from view for so long. For many victims, they too have buried the effects of the abuse deep inside them. This book is not an example of trauma theory, although I will make some reference to psychoanalysis. Much has been written about how the effect of experiencing trauma often results in repression of memories and the inability to articulate what has happened. It would © The Author(s) 2017 1 M. Froud, The Lost Child in Literature and Culture, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58495-3_1 2 M. FROUD appear that our society as a whole has suffered from this repression, denying the abuses within it. However, the psychosis of the collective is not so easily categorised: society, as the IICSA inquiry makes clear, is also the perpetrator of trauma. Established, responsible institutions have been guilty of not only allowing abuse to occur under their auspices, but, in examples such as child migration and the ‘Stolen Generations’ of indigenous children in Australia and Canada, state-run and independent authorities have actively encouraged and facilitated the removal of chil- dren from their families. In this book I will analyse the figure of the lost child as it appears, dis- appears and reappears constantly through our cultural history. It is firstly important to set the scene of how the figure of the child was formed (so we know what we have lost). Two seemingly distinct concepts emerge: the representation of the child into images, and the absorption of the child figure to make him or her a signifier of the interior self. Awareness of the child within has found expression in the projection of that child out onto the world. It is as if the deeper the child figure is as an aspect of our self, the more we need to position it outside of ourselves so we can look at it. The prevalence of the lost child figure would suggest that the internal child is the part of ourselves that we mourn, or that we are afraid of, or that we despise, and because of this we must eject it from our mind and body, like a contagion. The formulation of the concept of memory is asserted by many to have developed in the late eighteenth century, at the same time as that of the concept of childhood. Breithaupt cites several critics who ‘have added to Charles Taylor’s insight that the model for the self and its interiority since the eighteenth century was the figure of the child’ (Breithaupt 2005, 78). Breithaupt’s view is that the development of the idea of childhood was linked to the concepts of selfhood and the psychology of memory and he connects this with the assertion that trauma was ‘invented’ in the late-eighteenth-century period of roman- ticism. During this period, the concept of selfhood ‘becomes a prereq- uisite for the modern man’ (77–78). However, conversely, this notion of the self causes the German Romantics suffering because they perceive themselves as too weak to achieve the creation of a self. To remedy this situation, Breithaupt argues, trauma was invented as a means of pro- ducing strength from weakness, making the absence of a self desirable (77–78). He goes further by asserting that ‘the notion of the psycho- logical as a whole comes about as the recipient of the demand to give a 1 INTRODUCTION: THE FIGURE OF THE CHILD 3 shape, a recognizable form to a process of an individual’s reversal’ (81). This argument makes loss a prerequisite for the definition of selfhood: absence is necessary for presence. Breithaupt argues that there is a connection between this emergence of the self and ‘the promise to turn weakness into strength’ with ‘the sudden emergence of childhood as the model of selfhood in the late eighteenth century; the child’s weakness and absolute reliance on the outside turns out to be the condition of possibility for selfhood’ (78). In this formulation we have the simultaneous concepts of vulnerability to external (traumatic) force and the potential for growth and (self) devel- opment. It is the potential, in other words, for the child to become lost, which is essential to a modern psychological identity. Larry Wolff, referred to by Breithaupt, discusses the relationship between developing concepts of childhood and the emerging beliefs about memory from Hume, Locke and, particularly, Rousseau (Wolff 1998, 378). This period saw the development of the autobiography (following Rousseau’s Confessions) which also involved reaching back through memory to try to recover the childhood self. Rousseau denied that children themselves have memory in the same way that adults do, instead absorbing sensations from objects around them in a particular type of memory which then awaited entry into ‘mature consciousness’ (Wolff 1998, 378). Wolff asserts that, for Rousseau, the child ‘was always the object, never the subject of memory, that children could not con- sciously remember anything of consequence, and yet childhood itself was recognized essentially in remembrance’ (379). It is this reclamation of childhood which becomes the source of literature in the form of auto- biography. In this conceptualisation, children are made into representa- tions on the page as signifiers of an interior self. The centrality of the child to a psychology of the self continued in the following century when Freudian psychoanalysis formalised the concept that ‘the core of an individual’s psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood’ and ‘discovered’ the ‘unconscious’ as a ‘formulation to the idea of the lost child within all of us’ (Steedman 1995, 4). This development of conceptualising the interior self in the figure of a child was intricately entwined with the image of the child. The mental pro- cesses of memory and imagination form around the figure of a child and then project that child into the world through autobiographies, novels, poetry and art.
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