In Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), Pip’s entrance into the world beyond the blacksmith’s shop involves a confrontation with an upper-class bully who challenges him to a fight. What is strange about the encounter is that the bully who headbutts him in the stomach turns out to be none other than the mild-mannered Herbert Pocket who goes on to become Pip’s lifelong friend and confidante. In the fight scene, Pip and Herbert engage in a kind of class warfare as both are in effect attempting to win the favour of Miss Havisham, who has summoned them to her home. Unlike Pip, who recoils from his first encounter with violence, Herbert puts on a strange display of gentlemanly boxing, declaring, “Regular rules … Come to the ground and go through the preliminaries” (83). Ludicrously, he even comes back with a “bottle of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar” (83), which he announces are “Available for both” (83). The other boy’s style is so formal and rehearsed that Pip feels he must be outmatched despite the fact that Herbert is all “elbows, knees, wrists, and heels, considerably in advance of the rest of him as to development” (83). Pip lashes out instinctively to bloody Herbert’s nose but, despite the fact that he has acted entirely out of self-defence, he soon feels enormously guilty for striking a boy who appears to be better than him: “He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the contest I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing, as a species of savage young wolf or other wild beast” (84).
The reason Herbert appears innocent is that his performance of fighting is ridiculously precocious in its replication of gentlemanly codes of conduct; fighting according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules makes him seem adorably quixotic, while Pip’s complete lack of artifice renders him brutish and savage. Later on, Pip concludes that Herbert, in the end, lacks the kind of aggression and ambition that are necessary to succeed in life: “There was something wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the same time whispered to me he would never be very successful or rich” (162). Pip discovers that cruelty is central to identity formation, and that a boy who combines savage instinct with the decorum demanded by polite society becomes a powerful social actor indeed. What this incident tells us, found as it is in the pages of what is perhaps the most important narrative about child development, is that society is often more concerned with who performs the cruelty and how it is performed than with the cruelty itself.
Our collection challenges assumptions about children and cruelty by examining the cultural work that is performed by representations of cruel children. We do not seek to identify whether or not children are naturally cruel, or to provide a solution to child cruelty. Instead, we are interested in understanding why the cruel child looms so large in the cultural imagination, and in identifying the contours and boundaries of that representation. What actions on the part of young people get labelled as cruel? Are they held to a different standard than adults in this regard? And in what ways are constructions of the cruel child about denying, or supporting, child agency? At the heart of this collection, then, is the question of what representations of the cruel child mean, and what role the cruel child trope plays in delineating power structures and rules of behaviour along lines of age, class, race, and gender.
The Evil Child and the Rise of the Child-Centred Society
Recent scholarship has paid close attention to the figure of the evil child. Karen J. Renner’s The “Evil Child” in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2013) and her edited collection, Evil Children in the Popular Imagination (2016), as well as Markus P. J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland’s Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters (2015) all grapple with “the age-old question of the nature of humankind” (Renner, Evil Child , 5) that children seem to offer the means of understanding: that is, whether those who are evil are “inherently so” (2) or “have been made so” (3). The essays in Renner’s collection connect the “evil child” to “predominant ideologies and presumptions” that help explain why different kinds of “‘evil’ children prevailed during different eras and why their particular brand of evil was so compelling” (6). With their focus on the “monstrous child” in film, Bohlmann and Moreland’s collection takes on a similar topic (9), highlighting “the tremendous variety of intersections between monstrosity and childness in films” (11). They assert, “Monsters are monstrous because they always escape human comprehension: they demonstrate what we do not know, and remonstrate against our presumption to know” (18). The figure of the child is useful for understanding concepts of monstrosity, they point out, because “Over the course of modernity, the child has served as both repository and emblem of our aspirations and fears, our dreams and our nightmares” (11). For Renner, Bohlmann, and Moreland, and the essayists in their collections, the figure of the child and its centrality to debates of nature and nurture plays a crucial role in defining the nature of evil.
We add to this discussion on the importance of the malevolent child with a focus on its role in the emergence of the “child-centred” society. In the nineteenth century, the construction of the child as that which is innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection challenged the construction of the child as that which is savage, sinful, and in need of constant correction. British Romantic writers posited that the child is born into the world possessing a kind of natural perfection: “The more adults and adult society seemed bleak, urbanized and alienated, the more childhood came to be seen as properly a garden, enclosing within the safety of its walls a way of life which was in touch with nature …” (Cunningham 3). Society, the Romantics argued, can only corrupt such perfection as it colonizes the innocent child for participation in the adult world. Religious writers of the evangelical tradition, in contrast, tended to view the child as born with original sin and in need of strict discipline in order to be kept on the path to salvation. Whereas the religious tradition often threatened children with damnation and expulsion, the Romantic tradition produced a more child-centred approach to education and development, one in which children are to be nurtured, indulged, and allowed to grow organically.
Clearly, the Romantic tradition of childhood intersects with the emergence of sentimentalism as a moral force in society, one that measures the health of a society by its ability to protect its most vulnerable members, but it also intersects with the emergence of the modern industrial state. These two structures of feeling came together to reimagine modern society as a space that is designed to conserve its citizens—even its most criminal and corrupt—as valuable resources. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution not only saw astonishing new inventions put to use in large-scale factory production, but also the need for enormous amounts of both skilled and unskilled labour. Consequently, it became both morally wrong and economically wasteful to use expulsion as a means of punishment when the offender could be trained and put to use within the workforce. According to Foucault, the old forms of discipline, such as corporal punishment and transportation, gave way to the modern penitentiary idea of incarceration and rehabilitation (114–131). Rather than expelling offenders, society would contain them within institutional spaces and retrain them as useful hands.
discipline was refigured as an affective and intimate process … Once a child identified with an authority figure, he or she could be ruled through the granting and withdrawal of affection, and would eventually come to internalize the authority figures likes and dislikes, accepting the rules both as the condition of love and acceptance and as the right ordering of the world. (46)
Whereas the old punitive society used corporal punishment and expulsion as a means of disciplining children, the new child-centred approach was designed, at its most basic level, to keep even the most wayward of youths inside the social order. Consequently, the health of society became a measure of its ability to conserve its children by nurturing them, educating them, and encouraging them to invest themselves in capitalist society.
Five years ago you drove me away from your father’s kitchen one night when I come to ask for something to eat, and you said I warn’t there for any good; and when I swore I’d get even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for a vagrant. Did you think I’d forget? The Injun blood ain’t in me for nothing. (Twain 67)
When Joe is eventually walled up in the cave where he dies a horrible death having had nothing to eat but candle wax and bats, the narrator warns his readers that they must not be so soft-headed as to have sympathy for him. We are not to see him as an abandoned child who is made into a criminal by an uncaring society, but as a demonic figure who deserves only to be cast into the pit of hell. The novel is aware of an emerging taste for sympathy and redemption on the part of its readership but ultimately does not allow us to extend it to a vengeful “half breed” who would only prey upon the innocent. In “Injun Joe” we find the “savage” as exemplary evil child, a figure who would come to test the limits of sentimentalism and society’s commitment to inclusion.
In the century after Twain’s frontier gothic, the figure of the evil child took up its primary residence in the US horror film. The prototypical evil child in US cinema is, of course, Rhoda Penmark in the film The Bad Seed (1956), adapted from William March’s novel. She presents a sweet and innocent face to the world but in reality she is, as the family soon discovers, a murderous psychopath. The family’s duty to protect the child comes into direct conflict with the absolute need to be rid of the monstrous child. The parents are trapped as passive victims of the child-centred approach that demands they protect and nurture what is theirs even as the child has been visited upon them as a demonic curse from a pre-civilized past. The evil child subsequently went on to become a central figure in horror cinema, one that is continually deployed to frighten a society that, in its innocence and naïveté, is so weak and soft-headed that it would attempt to include that which only seeks to destroy it. The figure of the evil child has become a well-established trope because it is the site where our belief in rehabilitation is tested. The evil child dares us to be tough enough to cast out that which is seemingly deserving of protection, and mocks us when we baulk at doing so. The evil child, in other words, warns the inclusive society that it can be played for a sucker.
The Cruel Child
What is the relationship between the “evil” child and the merely “cruel” one? Is one an aberration, an abomination that must be cast out, while the other is simply a normal, accepted part of life? One major difference between “Injun Joe” and Rhoda Penmark, of course, is that the former is a Native American and the latter is a white girl. It is easy for a racist society to cast the evil “half breed” into the pit of hell but it is not so easy to destroy a little blonde girl who is much closer to the centre of dominant culture. She is, in some ways, much more weird and horrifying because the expulsion of a figure invested with so much sentimental capital is entirely anathema to society. What becomes important, then, in discussions of evil children is the way in which violence and aggression are tolerated in some children but not tolerated in others. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, the term “superpredator” was used within the US criminal justice system to describe a type of juvenile offender so evil that he must be stripped of his juvenile status and cast into the hell of the adult penal system. The term was used, of course, primarily against black youths (Reed 223). Once the term was invented, it became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby any sign of violence or aggression exhibited by a black youth was proof that he would inevitably become irredeemably evil. In contrast, white juvenile offenders were less likely to be denied their status as children, or if they were, far more likely to be labelled as mentally ill so as to distinguish them as individually, rather than culturally, aberrant. And indeed, white privilege—the idea that the young man has his whole life ahead of him—continues to be used in the court system as a mitigating factor when establishing punishment. Without the label of “superpredator” looming over them, the white youth’s violence and cruelty is considered much more tolerable and is much more likely to be rationalized as the folly of youth.
If we look at another example from nineteenth-century literature, we can see how cruelty in fact emerged as an important component of child development. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), the saintly Helen Burns dies prematurely because she can only meet the cruelties of Lowood Institution with prayer and passivity. By contrast, Jane is able to survive because she learns that even as the institution is born out of English society’s duty to take care of unwanted orphans, it will only perform the bare minimum. As Lowood attempts to fit her for the drudgery of domestic service, she learns to hold onto her ambitions and to protect them with an overarching sense of pride. Indeed, Jane develops a latent mean streak—Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic, being, as Gilbert and Gubar argue, her “truest and darkest double” (360)—one that allows her to resist the kinds of brainwashing used by the institution to break the spirits of its poor inmates. Saintliness and patience are not necessarily virtues within the capitalist economy if the child hopes, unlike Helen Burns, to achieve some measure of social mobility. Jane’s story teaches the middle-class child that she will have to be full of pride and even aggression if she is to climb the social ladder. If the institution seeks to construct Jane as cheap labour, then it is her duty to fight back against such mind control and to seek inclusion on her own terms. Cruelty and aggression are tolerated in her because she is a middle-class girl who has unfortunately found herself in the space of the state-run institution, the space that is normally the home of the poor and the marginalized.
While it is perhaps subversive of the novel to grant aggression and pride to a female protagonist, it is not particularly subversive to grant it to a member of the white middle class. The novel teaches us that while society often pays lip service to the idea that all children are innocent or blank slates, poor children are often judged according to the socio-economic conditions into which they are born. Another classic example of this double standard can be found in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). Uriah Heep is described as “other,” with strange red hair, clammy hands, and a look that is older than his actual years, indicating to us that the poor child who cannot resemble the white, educated, middle-class child is somewhat demonic. Heep’s acts of manipulation, which are designed to seize control over Mr. Wickham’s law firm, result in his eventual imprisonment, but it is very clear that his social climbing closely parallels that of the middle-class Davy, who is able to ascend more properly through the ranks of society. Naked ambition is horrifying, while ambition wrapped in middle-class romance and ingenuity is respectable.
More currently, the figure of the bully provides an excellent means of understanding the delicate balance between child innocence and cruelty. Within the context of the education system where bullying is a hot topic, the bully is often thought of as a “bully-victim,” a child who abuses others because he or she has also been abused. Bullies are normally thought of as “maladapted, troubled people, lashing out because they had been abused or harassed themselves or at least had dysfunctional home lives” (Blackwell). But recently, another narrative has developed in which bullies are not victims, but instead children who are more status-seeking and competitive than their more self-conscious peers. A recent study by the criminologist Jennifer Wong, for example, found that “bullies were the least likely to be depressed, had the highest self-esteem and the greatest social status” (Blackwell). According to researchers, such individuals cannot be changed by the education system but instead must be given high-status roles inside the school in order to channel their aggression. Those who look at bullying in the old way have tended to see this approach as too inclusive, as too much of a reward for bad behaviour. If we tend to think of children who display aggressive behaviour at an early age as in need of fixing, then providing them with more power would certainly appear not only to normalize cruelty, but also to expose the school as a barbaric social order based on the survival of the fittest. There is a Catch-22 dilemma here: if society excludes the bully, it shows itself to be cruelly unable to rehabilitate the child, but if it includes the bully, it can only do so by giving into his or her desire for power. The bully is not a monster, but instead represents the site where we can plainly see how children are empowered when innocence and cruelty begin to work together and at the same time. The child who achieves power and agency is able to be aggressive while at the same time maintaining his or her sentimental capital.
…encompasses far more than these rare horrors. Bullying at school and in the workplace, the criticism of celebrities and politicians in the media, and abuse within families can all be viciously cruel, if less spectacularly lethal. These examples are much closer to home; for some they are a painful part of daily life. Few if any of us have never been on the receiving end of some form of social cruelty: the cutting comments or sniggers or sidelong glances which so expertly demolish self-esteem. Few of us, in truth, have avoided being cruel ourselves. (6)
Taylor’s enumeration of what we might identify as the “banal cruelties” of everyday life is arguably just as unsettling as a meditation on the evil and the monstrous, for it holds up a mirror in which most of us can see ourselves: it reminds us that cruelty plays a large role in normative society.
Philosopher Philip P. Hallie identifies a central paradox of cruelty: “that people can victimize each other without explicitly intending to do so . They can victimize each other for other reasons than sadistic pleasure. They can do so for money, for social position, for comfort, etc.” (13; emphasis in original). There is, he points out, sometimes “a curious innocence to some kinds of victimization, a disregard for the effects on the victim” (13). Cruelty, that is, is something we can participate in without recognizing or acknowledging that we are being cruel—it is something that can be entirely coincident with day-to-day life, as opposed to othered from it as “evil” or a “monstrosity.” In part, this is so because cruelty is linked to power relations within human society and culture: “cruelty involves subordination, subjection to a superior power whose will becomes the victim’s law” (34). Cruelty plays a crucial role in determining who has power, and who has not; who is a member of the in group that receives benefits and privileges, and who shall remain outside that circle; and whose needs and wants must be denied in order to serve the desires of others.
We argue that the cruel child is a central trope, therefore, not solely because it allows us to engage in nature vs. nurture debates of human evil, but because it gets at this idea of the “innocence” of cruelty, as well as the role that such cruelty plays in power relations. Because young people are often constructed as ignorant, unthinking, and lacking in understanding, their cruelties can be dismissed, as if the result of pain to the victim is mitigated by the lack of intention on the part of the perpetrator. Such innocent cruelties, however, can serve as a means of assuaging guilt or responsibility for acts of cruelty in which we all at times participate, such as those which gain us social privilege and power. In this sense, child cruelty can be seen as practice for adulthood, as a crucial skill the child learns so as to engage in power relations when they mature into full personhood. It is made clear by many popular texts, as we have indicated, that children must not be too innocent and that cruelty is in fact an important component of child development. However, in those cases where child cruelty is constructed as having gone too far, as veering into the “monstrous” and the “evil,” we argue that this can be seen as a means of disallowing agency—of denying to young people the power to engage in the kinds of social distinctions, othering, and victimization that is allowed to adults in modern, capitalist society. The central dilemma of the developing child is that he or she must find the proper balance between innocence and cruelty. Too much innocence and the child becomes the vulnerable victim of society; too much cruelty and it is society that becomes the vulnerable victim of the child. This collection is born out of the understanding that the granting or denying of cruelty to children is one of the hidden codes by which we communicate to children the extent to which they can expect to be rewarded for participating in capitalist society.
Our collection begins with “Early Exemplars of the Cruel Child.” While child aggression is often castigated in historical texts, the essays in this section argue that philosophers, novelists, and writers of children’s literature have long suggested that children are taught to employ cruelty by a society in which exclusion, competition, and hierarchy are the norm. Heather Ladd’s chapter addresses the commonly held belief that children are naturally violent towards animals, as seen in eighteenth-century texts such as Jane Collier’s mock conduct book An Essay on The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) and Sarah Trimmer’s popular Aesopic work Fabulous Histories (1786). Ladd argues that, rather than capturing the “naturally cruel” child, what these texts instead illuminate is the extent to which child cruelty is always modelled on and paralleled with normative adult cruelty, making the cruel child indicative of the role cruelty plays in society as a whole. Monica Flegel’s chapter similarly focuses on how the innocent cruelty of children in Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales—that is, cruelty that results from their failure to see beyond their own pleasures—is linked to larger social oppression. In tales from A House of Pomegranates (1891), childish absorption in beauty and privilege operates as a symbol for the relationship between the benighted bourgeois class and the suffering that produced their comforts. Christopher Parkes’s essay closes out this section in an analysis of the orphan child in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). Parkes demonstrates that Anne’s deep-seated rage and desire to exact revenge on an anti-female and anti-child society is channelled into a desire for social success. Her alter ego—the demon orphan—is in fact crucial to Anne’s survival, as without the potential for cruelty, she would not be able to resist the oppression of her underclass status.
Our second section, “Bullying and Its Uses,” addresses what is arguably the most dominant narrative for framing and understanding child cruelty and violence. Katharine Kittredge and Carolyn Rennie open the discussion through challenging the idea that the popular Harry Potter series draws upon Victorian narratives of bullying, in which the bully is represented as a sadistic figure. Instead, looking at the parallels between Rowling’s texts and pre -Victorian school stories, Kittredge and Rennie argue that both depict bullying as a useful means by which children learn to negotiate conflict, power structures, and ethical/moral positions in society. Clare Bradford and Lara Hedberg likewise challenge contemporary bullying discourse by attending to representations of the bully in contemporary YA texts. Noting that bullying discourses tend to focus more on the bullied than the bully, their chapter fills the gap by reading contemporary novels in order to uncover dominant and, as they point out, often contradictory explanations for bullying behaviour, revealing the multiple uses the figure of the bully serves in narratives of childhood and parenting. Rebecca Brown’s chapter on Rohan O’Grady’s Let’s Kill Uncle (1963) rounds out this section through her analysis of the novel’s disruptive and manipulative child characters, whose behaviour veers between seemingly innocent mischief and calculated cruelty. Her appraisal of the role black humour plays in the novel compellingly complicates narratives of child cruelty, revealing the attraction of cruelty as a means of negotiating social powerlessness.
Our section on “Child Killers and Child Victims” focuses on those figures who demonstrate that child cruelty is not always containable in normative social structures. The killer child came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century, and the essays of this section trace this figure’s transformations from the Cold War to the early twenty-first century. Kristen Gregory investigates the parallels and connections between the “gifted child” and the atomic bomb in US science fiction, elucidating the cultural ambivalence towards exceptional children in a post-war world grappling with the destruction wrought by scientific innovation. Hans Staats’s reading of Cold War Era comics similarly examines how representations of monstrous boys in comics themselves, and in the moral panic surrounding them, speaks to a paranoid political order that is worried about its future. Karen Renner’s essay takes us into the late twentieth century, reading films featuring child psychopaths from the 1980s and 1990s and addressing the shifting cultural and political explanations for the killer child, including fears over adoption, the moral panic surrounding “superpredators” in the 1990s, and the emergence of medical discourse that increasingly plays a role in recuperating a child “victim” at the heart of the cold-blooded killer. Finally, Sandra Dinter’s chapter addresses the figure of the school shooter. In her analysis of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2010), Dinter parallels the titular character with his little-discussed sister Celia, the innocent, angelic child who represents the perfect victim. Focusing on the mother’s narration, Dinter demonstrates how the novel operates as a subtle challenge to constructivist views of childhood, and exposes the complicated relationship between theories of childhood and the realities of child experience.
We close our collection by asking what role cruelty might play in empowering the child, either through the use of cruelty as a means of gaining social power, or through the child’s resistance to violence. “Cruelty and Child Agency” opens with Carrie Hintz’s chapter on the dystopian YA novel by William Sleator, House of Stairs (1974), in which she addresses how a “scarcity economy” encourages and incites youth-on-youth violence. Her essay examines how behaviourism occupies a complicated role in human society, useful both as a tool of oppression and violence, but also as the means by which children can train, and perhaps be trained, to resist. Victoria Flanagan similarly acknowledges the central role that cruelty and bullying play in YA fiction, but in her focus on queer sexuality and relationships, she shifts her focus to kindness and self-care in the face of cruelty, elucidating how depictions of kindness allow authors to give voice to gay community and personal/communal resilience in an often hostile world. Our collection closes with an essay about the subversive power of child cruelty, as Tison Pugh takes on the most famous cruel child in popular culture: Rhoda Penmark from William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed . Addressing Rhoda’s afterlife as a camp icon, Pugh argues that Rhoda exemplifies the humour and joys of “bitchiness,” but also recognizes how such a reading might limit her female agency even while it revels in her queer potential.
Taken together, these essays challenge the idea of child cruelty as both “natural” to the child, and as an aberration and affront to adult society that must be stamped out. Instead, they reveal the structural nature of cruelty and the role it plays in determining success or failure, inclusion or exclusion in society. While the evil child is a figure who goes too far and who demands to be cast out, the perfectly innocent child can be almost as monstrous and worthy of expulsion. We like childhood innocence until it becomes too perfect and then it must, like the saintly Victorian child on her deathbed, be purged from society. The long and the short of it is that when we want to deny a particular kind of child agency, we render them either perfectly evil or perfectly innocent. But when we want them to struggle for success, yet are unsure of the boundaries of what acts of manipulation and aggression are allowable to obtain that success, we render them cruel.