In the wake of World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima, depictions of mutated, supernatural, strange, and violent children flooded US fiction. Yes, murderous and haunting children, both real and fictional, had appeared before the twentieth century, but the subgenre of evil children in literature did not really take off until the 1950s. The most well-known of these texts is William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed , which was quickly adapted into a successful Broadway play and a 1956 film. March’s villain, Rhoda Penmark, is a calculating child murderess who is mentally superior to the adults she outwits but also ruled by childish petulance, and the novel encourages us to see Rhoda as emblematic of the violence of the Cold War Era. 1 In Joyce Carol Oates’s 1996 essay, “Killer Kids,” she credits The Bad Seed with germinating “a mass-market harvest of evil, murderous children where none had previously existed” (16). While The Bad Seed undoubtedly helped to inspire a surge in evil child stories, similar children who combine exceptional capabilities with a capacity for cruelty began to populate postwar US science fiction even before March’s quintessential evil child text.
From the 1940s on, publications like Astounding Science Fiction featured stories by Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, Jerome Bixby, and Richard Matheson about ominous but powerful mutant children, super kids and extra-terrestrial youth. While these postwar texts depict completely different evil child figures, all are threatening because they possess two traits: exceptional capabilities and cruel instincts. Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “The Veldt” presents Peter and Wendy Hadley, spoiled children who use their household technology to murder their parents. Jerome Bixby introduces Anthony, a three-year-old child whose dangerous psychic abilities allow him to terrorize and control the adults in his town, in “It’s a Good Life” (1953). Finally, John Gilling’s 1956 film The Gamma People portrays genius children who carry out the villainous commands of the mad scientist who enhanced their minds with a gamma ray. While these stories certainly depict such children as abnormal, each text implies that it is giftedness, not cruelty, which separates these frightening children from so-called normal children. “The Veldt,” “It’s a Good Life,” and The Gamma People suggest that all children naturally harbor ill intents towards adults and possess violent instincts. However, the normal child is both physically and mentally weaker than adults and thus is easily controlled. The true horror of these children is that they are mentally and supernaturally gifted, which allows them to act on their cruel impulses in a way that the average child never could. 2
On one level, the cruel and gifted child capitalizes on the timeless psychological fear of being conquered and surpassed by the next generation, but, on another level, the cruel, gifted child’s conflation of the exceptional with the destructive taps into a potent source of terror specific to mid-century USA: the atom bomb. At the moment of the bomb’s conception, US veneration of the bomb and atomic science was nearly universal. The bomb was a godsend and proof of the USA’s exceptionalism. However, the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki elicited criticism of atomic science as they showed Americans that this gift also carried the potential of unimaginable destruction. This suspicion of exceptionalism and advancement permeates “The Veldt,” “It’s a Good Life,” and The Gamma People , as all three suggest that these cruel children are only dangerous because they are superior to the adults they annihilate. These texts also invite criticism of the scientific and technological conditions that caused these cruel children to develop their unnatural powers. Underneath these tales of powerful and rebellious children lies the pervasive fear that society, and specifically science, has progressed too far, and something that we created to save us from death now threatens to destroy us. In these ways, the exceptional, cruel child plays the perfect host for the anxieties of the Atomic Age.
Ambivalence and Annihilation: Americans and the Atom Bomb
In the murky beginnings of the Cold War, from 1945 to the early 1950s, Americans were caught between two responses to the atom bomb. On the one hand, the bomb promised a better future for the USA, one powered and protected by atomic energy. On the other hand, the bomb made mass annihilation of whole cities possible, as the world witnessed on August 6, 1945. In By the Bomb’s Early Light (1994), Paul Boyer explores how “along with the shockwaves of fear, one also finds exalted prophecies of the bright promise of atomic energy” (109). For example, Boyer notes that on the same day in August 1945, one newspaper published a cartoon with people fleeing in terror from atomic energy raining down on them, while another featured an image of a goddess unlocking a chest filled with treasures, labeled “atomic energy” (109). The responses of those who witnessed the Manhattan Project also echo this ambivalence. While Robert Oppenheimer notoriously remarked, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” after the bomb’s detonation, William Laurence, a New York Times science reporter, described the event as “the first cry of a newborn world” (101). He later commented that witnessing the explosion was “like being present at the moment of creation” (101). The bomb was at once a harbinger of death and a giver of life.
The fear of atomic destruction became especially linked with the nation’s children in the US popular consciousness. Margaret Peacock discusses this phenomenon in Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (2014) those critical of the USA’s nuclear testing presented children as the victims of their own nation, sacrificed on the altar of war (167). The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), with members including Norman Cousins, Arthur Miller, and Ray Bradbury, particularly targeted child safety in their campaigns. They brought in Dr. Spock, genetics professors, and even dentists to attest that nuclear testing was endangering the nation’s children (170–172). Children also picked up on this rhetoric of the bomb’s victimization of the child, as demonstrated in this 1947 poem submitted to the Senior Scholastic : “I am a child of the Atom / And I must make my roots in this age / But I am afraid / And I would go back into my mother’s / womb where it is dark and quiet” (Thom). While the dread of total annihilation permeated all of US society, children were perceived to be the true victims of atomic warfare.
This association of childhood with the bomb suggested not only that the child was in danger but also that the child was a danger. The bomb was couched in rhetorics of childhood from the moment of its conception. Spencer Weart observes in Nuclear Fear (1988) that the creation of the bomb was surrounded by “a vocabulary of birth” (87). He notes that American physicists referred to neutrons as “reproducing,” while others referred to fission as a “marriage” producing “neutrons as the children” (87). The bomb’s codename, “Little Boy,” also invited Americans to think of the bomb as a child. 3 This bomb-as-child image soon transformed into a monstrous creation in the popular imaginary. H. V. Kaltenborn, reporting for NBC on August 6, 1945, lamented, “For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein! We must assume that with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us” (Boyer 5). A New York Times military analyst, Hanson W. Baldwin, echoed this rhetoric, explaining that we had “unleashed a Frankenstein monster” capable “of destroying cities at one breath” (9). Weart also borrows this imagery when he describes the atomic scientists being “as nervous as if they were attending the birth of a Frankenstein’s monster” (87). This metaphor still casts the bomb as a child created by science, but the child is a monster who rebels against his own creator-father, much like the exceptional and cruel children who populated mid-century science fiction.
Exceptional and Destructive: The Gifted Child and the Bomb
The gifted child evokes much of the same ambivalence as the atom bomb. Optimistic visions of the bomb and the gifted child hoped that they would help to bolster our nation’s exceptionalism. The language surrounding the bomb emphasizes its superiority and immense potential, much like the language surrounding the gifted child. Robert Jacobs echoes this rhetoric in The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (2010): “Since their creation, nuclear weapons have been seen as special, as other, as magical. They have seemed exceptional” (120). Additionally, the optimistic hopes placed in the atom bomb mirror the expectations invested in our nation’s gifted children: the bomb will ensure our nation’s progress and future security, just like the gifted child. 4 Florence Brumbaugh’s 1944 article “A School for Gifted Children” voices these expectations for the gifted. She explains that gifted kids are “potential future leaders” who “have much to contribute to the solving of the problems that will face the next generation” (327). Specifically, gifted children were supposed to contribute to the nation’s scientific and military superiority. 5 This conflation of hopes for the atom bomb and hopes for the gifted child is further demonstrated in Admiral Rickover’s 1956 call for better training of the gifted. As Chief of the Naval Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission, Rickover referred to them as “our most valuable national asset” (Currivan 17) and called for better scientific education of the gifted if the USA was going to remain competitive with the Soviet Union. According to military strategists, government officials, and educators, the gifted child, like the atom bomb, was instrumental in our Cold War battle for national superiority and military supremacy.
While the “good” gifted child evokes the bomb’s promise of scientific progress and military victory, the “bad” gifted child recalls the bomb’s power of annihilation and destruction. Just as Norman Cousins observed that the atom bomb brought the ancient fear of irrational death “out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions” (qtd. in Boyer 8), so does the villainous child function as a harbinger of our own mortality. In “Monstrous Children as Harbingers of Mortality” (2013), Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg analyze the psychological horror of the monstrous child according to Terror Management Theory, which proposes that humans are unique in our knowledge of our own imminent death. Thus, we pursue “symbolic immortality” through various coping mechanisms. Children are one of these mechanisms. Sullivan and Greenberg explain that “[c]hildren play an important role in the psychological lives of adults as symbols of immortality: they bear our genes, names, memory, and culture into the future” (51). Children grant us symbolic immortality in their promise of leaving behind a legacy after death, but the “evil child” taps into our fear of mortality by denying us that possibility (46). Violent and destructive children deny their parents any chance of symbolic immortality, instead symbolizing death and annihilation.
The child’s promise to carry the established generation’s values into the future extends far beyond the reach of the family. After all, the “it takes a village” mentality suggests that children do not just belong to their parents but to the whole community. Lee Edelman addresses this reproductive futurism in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Edelman acknowledges that “[t]he child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11). According to Edelman, the child is so significant because “[w]e are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the child” (11). Thus, when children rebel against the agreed-upon values of a society, they deny the culture they represent a chance at symbolic immortality. 6 The exceptional and cruel child threatens our values, denies us assurance of a future legacy, and reminds us of our own mortality; thus, it is the perfect metaphor for the atom bomb and the threat of atomic annihilation.
Enhanced Cruelty: The Threat of the Gifted Child in “The Veldt”
Powerful and cruel children feature prominently in the work of Ray Bradbury. In “Bradbury on Children” (2001), Lahna Diskin discusses Bradbury’s fascination with children as a separate species from adults. Focusing mostly on Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Diskin explores the ways in which “Bradbury’s boys” live outside of and without societal norms. She claims, “In their passage between dimensions, the children in Bradbury’s fiction, not always benignly and often intentionally, overstep society’s norms” (76). They are modern Peter Pan figures as “their most outrageous actions are instinctive ploys against the inevitable doomsday of exile from childhood” (76). In Bradbury’s stories, Diskin argues, children are “agents who can transfigure and sometimes metamorphose persons, things, and events” (79). In contrast, Bradbury’s adults are often dull and outwitted by his bright children, revealing the notion that “the impedimenta of adulthood change one’s outlook and impair his capacity to apprehend the world openly with keen, clear senses” (79). As Diskin’s evaluation shows, Bradbury’s children are exceptional just by virtue of not being adults. Additionally, Bradbury’s stories seem to relish in the inherent evil and violence of children. In fact, in a 1996 interview with Playboy , Bradbury brags, “Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil” (Aggelis 166). Bradbury’s stories repeatedly demonstrate the threat that the superior and cruel child presents to the mundane adult.
Bradbury develops this view of childhood as a time of cruelty and exceptionalism through Peter and Wendy in “The Veldt.” 7 This 1950 short story tells the tale of the Hadleys, an upper-class family who lives in a “Happylife Home.” The house prepares meals, dresses family members, and, most importantly, features a nursery that can project the children’s imaginings onto its walls. 8 The Happylife nursery recalls Barrie’s Neverland in its representation of the children’s imaginations, but unlike Neverland, the nursery walls are accessible to Peter and Wendy’s curious parents. 9 Dr. McClean, the psychologist the parents call into analyze the nursery, tells them, “[O]ne of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind, study at our leisure, and help the child” (273). While Dr. McClean may claim that it was designed to help children, we can see the nursery as a technological answer to adults’ desires to fully know and understand children by gaining access to the workings of their inner minds.
However, the knowledge of what is on the children’s minds does not prove comforting; in fact, the nursery validates the parents’ distrust of their offspring. The nursery reads “telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and create[s] life to fill their every desire,” and what it creates in the Hadley household is heat, death, and “the smell of blood” (268). The children have frozen the nursery on a scene of lions feasting on prey, and the end of the story reveals the prey to be George and Lydia Hadley, about the death of whom the children had long been fantasizing. Furthermore, the end of the story reveals that the children have managed to alter the technological programing to make the lions corporeal. Thus, “The Veldt” suggests that children do in fact harbor violent and destructive thoughts towards their parents and do not feel bound to them by love or loyalty.
While the nursery’s veldt scene may reflect normal child fantasies of parental destruction, it is the child’s exceptionalism that allows these fantasies to become reality. Peter is able to hack into the house’s programing to make the lions manifest corporeally to devour the parents at the close of the story. While Peter and Wendy are equally culpable in their murder—they both call out for their parents from the nursery and then lock them in the room with the now corporeal lions—we are told that Peter is the gifted child capable of tampering with the technology. When the nursery first gets stuck on the lions, Lydia says, “Peter’s set it to remain that way. … [H]e may have got into the machinery and fixed something” (269). When George is skeptical, she answers, “He’s a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his—” (269). Lydia trails off mid-sentence, suggesting that she finds Peter’s IQ disconcerting. This ominous exchange alludes to the power that comes with being gifted and foreshadows Peter’s ultimate triumph over his parents. Thus, “The Veldt” suggests that all children desire their parents’ destruction, but the gifted child can actually make it happen. Intelligence and capability is all that separates the evil child from other children in this story.
While this ominous depiction of children is disconcerting, George and Lydia do shoulder some of the blame. Their Happylife Home has rendered the parents useless and allowed the children to assume a role of authority. When we meet the Hadley family, Lydia and George are contemplating turning the house off because the children have become spoiled, the parents feel useless, and the nursery has become stuck on the disturbing scene of the veldt. Lydia tells George, “The house is wife and mother now” (267). While the house has taken over traditionally maternal duties like laundry, meal preparation, and cleaning, Lydia also extends the feeling of uselessness to George, saying, “You’re beginning to feel unnecessary too” (267). Later, after the children call to say they will be out late and the parents should eat without them, George exclaims, “They’re insufferable—let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring” (271). Thus, “The Veldt” introduces us to a disordered household in which the parents have given up their rightful authority not only over their smart house but also over their children. Dr. McClean reinforces this judgment of the Hadley parents when he tells them they have “spoiled [their] children more than most” (274). The narrative further supports this reading when the parents are only killed after they give into Peter and Wendy’s demands. When George turns off the house to save his family from destruction, Peter and Wendy only have to throw a fit in order to get him to turn the nursery back on. Once he does, the children call their parents to the nursery and carry out their parricidal plot. The parents’ demise in “The Veldt” suggests that adults will be punished for failing to uphold their rightful authority and acquiescing to their children’s petulant demands.
“The Veldt” allows us to read George and Lydia’s demise as a reflection of their poor parenting, but their own ineptitude is not the only possible cause of their downfall. While the story might suggest that only parents who bequeath their power to their children will meet this end, Bradbury also implies that it is impossible for parents of exceptional children to maintain authority, especially in a new technological age. Yes, George and Lydia die because they give into temper tantrums and turn the nursery back on, but we can assume that if Peter can manage to fix the nursery screen on the image of his choice and turn screen projections into three-dimensional, corporeal bodies, then he can probably also turn the house back on without his father’s help. The parents’ decision to give into their children’s demands may have sped their deaths along, but Peter, with his threatening IQ, is certainly capable of orchestrating the children’s plan on his own. Thus, the story also implies a fundamental distrust of exceptional children by showing the impossibility of maintaining parental control when one’s child is advanced beyond one’s own capabilities.
“The Veldt” presents the monstrous child as a product of adult negligence and technological advancement. As a member of SANE, Bradbury knew the significance of the figure of the child in anti-war rhetoric. However, rather than portraying the child as victimized by American technology, the child becomes the victimizer, allied with new technology to wipe out the established generation. In this way, the exceptional and cruel child is here to punish adults for the society they have created. Bradbury’s message is similar to the anti-nuclear weaponry rhetoric of SANE: we have unleashed something we cannot control, something we do not understand. As the SANE advertisements made clear, children suffered from debilitating anxiety and severe health threats because of the bomb; perhaps Peter and Wendy are simply getting their revenge on the negligent adult generation that created an age of violence and atomic anxiety.
Weaponized Petulance: The Revenge of the Powerful Child in “It’s a Good Life”
By far, the most exceptional and strange child included in this essay is Anthony from Jerome Bixby’s 1953 tale “It’s a Good Life.” Bixby published science fiction, horror, western, and fantasy stories throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but his science fiction is not particularly well known. As John Clute and Gary Westfahl note, “all too often excellent ideas fail to generate memorable stories” in his writing (Clute). “It’s a Good Life” is his most well-known and well-received science-fiction story, and it was adapted into two Twilight Zone episodes. The tale tells the story of Anthony, a three-year-old boy who rules his community with his psi powers. The narrator does not reveal a complete description of Anthony, but we know that he “casts an odd shadow” and has a “bright, wet, purple gaze” (525, 524). Anthony’s powers are vague and ominous: he can read the thoughts of others and “snap” at people with his mind to retard their mental faculties; he can also physically manipulate people and things into unidentifiable shapes and think “them into a grave in the cornfield” when he is done with them (529). The residents of Peaksville live in fear of Anthony because he lashes out with the petulance of a normal three-year-old boy, but his powers are much greater than those of the average child.
Even though Anthony appears to be an evil, malicious child, he is only threatening because he has more power than a three-year-old can properly manage, not necessarily because he is unusually malicious. The story opens with Anthony convincing a rat to devour itself until it dies, which seems like a clear act of villainy and a traditional warning sign of childhood evil. However, we later learn that he tortures rats out of his love for his Aunt Amy, who hates rats, which reveals a childish but violent logic at the heart of his horrific actions. Throughout the story, Anthony’s good intentions manifest in cruel actions because he does not understand the complexities of life, death, and human bonds. This level of development is normal for a young child, but his abnormal powers make this normal childish mentality a threat to the whole community. The townspeople fear the ways in which Anthony might try to help them, so they hide their thoughts from him. The narrator explains, “[w]hile Anthony mightn’t actually mean any harm, he couldn’t be expected to have much notion of what was the right thing to do” (524). For instance, when Anthony senses a widow’s grief, he wakes her husband from the dead and raises a zombie. He cannot understand the horrific consequences of his actions or why his help is not met with gratitude. 10 Anthony also fails to understand why the villagers may fear him after a group of adults attempted to murder him and “he’d just thought them all into the cornfield” (529). Anthony’s cruelty is reminiscent of the innocent heartlessness of Barrie’s Peter Pan, who wanders around burying children in Kensington Gardens, unbothered by the fact that some of the children may not be completely dead. Although his actions are cruel, he does not perceive them as such because he lacks maturity.
Anthony’s immense powers enable his subversion of the conventional adult-child power dynamic, since his parents—and all of adult society—live in fear of him. His Aunt Amy used to have some authority over him but now she lives in a foggy state because Anthony “snapped” at her once. The narrator simply remarks, “[T]hat had been the end of Amy Fremont’s bright eyes” (524). His parents mourn this development because he used to obey Amy more than anyone else, which the narrator tells us “was hardly at all,” and now he obeys no one (524). Thus, instead of the child obeying his parents, the parents—and the rest of the adults—must pretend to be pleased with everything Anthony does. Anthony controls the weather, and his parents continually remark how “good” it is, even when it is boiling hot and ruins the crops. Similarly, the whole town must come over to the Fremonts’ house for television night, during which Anthony makes senseless shapes on the screen with his mind as they pretend to be thrilled. The entire village caters to the whims of a three-year-old boy because he carries the potential to destroy them, much like Cold War nations had to cower to other countries that possessed nuclear weapons.
It was wherever it had been since that day three years ago when Anthony had crept from her womb and old Doc Bates—God rest him—had screamed and dropped him and tried to kill him, and Anthony had whined and done the thing. He had taken the village someplace. Or had destroyed the world and left only the village, nobody knew which. (541)
While Peter and Wendy defeat their parents, their threat of total annihilation is mostly symbolic: it is unlikely that they could actually destroy their entire community. However, Anthony carries the threat of both symbolic and actual annihilation.
Anthony’s bomb-like powers and mutant form suggest that he is the by-product of atomic exposure, which places the blame for his monstrosity on the adults he tortures. Echoing the rhetoric of anti-nuclear armament groups like SANE, several science-fiction stories in the early Atomic Age explore the horrific consequences of nuclear testing on unborn children. For example, Judith Merril’s 1948 story “That Only a Mother” tells the tale of a military wife who gives birth to a limbless but precocious child in 1953. The story explicitly credits nuclear testing with an increase in mutant babies in America. Like Bixby’s story, the narrator only makes vague and ominous references to the child’s form, but we know the child has a face “that only a mother could love” (348). Bixby’s story similarly suggests that Anthony is the result of nuclear testing. His power to reduce landscapes to gray nothingness evokes the images that came out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his physical deformities reflect prevalent Atomic Age concerns about radiation exposure. Though Anthony’s form is monstrous and his powers are dangerous, he is a victim. In this way, Anthony’s power of nuclear devastation allows him to exact a sort of poetic justice, getting revenge on adults for allowing nuclear testing and radiation to damage future generations.
Lab-Created Monsters: The Evils of Unrestrained Science in The Gamma People
While the Cold War certainly informs “The Veldt” and “It’s a Good Life,” the wartime context is most explicit in Gilling’s The Gamma People . The British–US film opens with an American journalist Mike Wilson and photographer Howard Meade on a train to Salzburg, Germany, to cover a local music festival. However, they never make it to Salzburg because, unbeknown to Wilson and Meade, uniform-clad children switch the train tracks. The reporters end up in Gudavia, a place they cannot find on any map, but which we can assume is somewhere near Germany, as the children are all blonde with German accents. Wilson and Meade soon discover that something strange is occurring in Gudavia. Some children are cruel geniuses, while others are simple lackeys, and they all obey the orders of one man: Dr. Boronski. The journalists uncover that Boronski is a mad scientist who used to operate under another name before his experiments were shut down for being unethical. Now, he conducts experiments on children using the “gamma ray,” by which he either creates “future leaders of the world” or “mindless goons,” both of which help him keep control of Gudavia.
While the children appear to have been normal, happy children before the experiments, becoming geniuses seems to come with a side effect of cruelty. At one point in the film, we witness them swarm and murder a man who tries to rescue his daughter from Boronski. The scientist makes them adopt an amoral philosophy in which pragmatism overrides any ethical concerns. Hugo, Boronski’s right-hand genius child, is the main voice of this amoral pragmatism. At one point, he advises Meade to cheat in chess, telling him he should take advantage of every opportunity that offers him an advantage regardless of whether or not it is morally right. We also see Hugo berating Hedda, a musical genius who retains some kindness, for being too sentimental in her music. He tells her, “Sentiment has no place in our philosophy.” With their blonde hair, German accents, and cruel creeds, the children recall Hitler’s Youth. The filmmakers emphasize this connection by dressing them all in collared shirts, shorts, and knee socks.
While these violent children are disconcerting, the true threat of The Gamma People is unrestrained science. At the close of World War II, US attitudes towards scientists and the role of science were conflicted. At first, scientists were celebrated as the saviors of the nation. However, as US attitudes towards the bomb shifted from hopeful to fearful, the scientists involved came under fire. After all, we do not blame Frankenstein’s monster for his destructive actions; instead, we blame his scientist creator for unleashing an unnatural force. Both the discovery of the grotesque human experiments carried out by Nazi scientists and the detonation of the atom bomb raised questions about scientific ethics as the public realized that science could go too far. We see this distrust of science and technology in “The Veldt,” but it is most clearly articulated in The Gamma People . The original trailer for the movie emphasizes the fear of the mad scientist by referring to Boronski as “a scientist with a mania to reshape destiny” and the “power to create a breed apart.” The film unambiguously places the blame for these gifted and cruel children, and the bomb they evoke, on the shoulders of scientists.
However, while the film capitalizes on postwar fears of children being influenced by violent philosophies and destructive science, it ultimately argues that childhood innocence can be restored to these mind-controlled youth. Even though Hugo and the rest of the children act sadistically throughout the film, Hugo has a sudden change of heart when Dr. Boronski tries to use the ray on Hugo’s older sister. Hugo then pushes Boronski into his machinery, killing the mad scientist and destroying the gamma ray, the true villains of the story. Boronski’s death and the destruction of the ray seem to free the children, for they all start singing and frolicking in the streets. The journalists remark that even Hugo, who was a terror, seems to be a normal child now. The movie thus concludes on a more reassuring note than Bradbury’s or Bixby’s stories. While Peter, Wendy, and Anthony pose a threat to the broader adult community, these children only need to get their revenge on one man before happily submitting to adult authority. They are stripped of their giftedness and their penchant for cruelty in one fell swoop, and the threat of the monstrous child is neutralized. As Chris Jenks argues in Childhood (2002), if a society hopes to maintain its social order and guarantee that its values will be carried into the future, then “the evil child must be beaten into submission; an external and public act that celebrates and reaffirms the shared values of their historical period” (78). Although the gamma children were not beaten, they were restored to a more submissive state. By contrast, the victorious villainous child, like Peter and Anthony, threatens the eventual annihilation of the adult community.
“The Veldt,” “It’s a Good Life,” and The Gamma People claim that children’s capacity for cruelty is both commonplace and natural but that only certain, rare children—like Peter, Anthony, and Hugo—are exceptional enough to actualize their violent desires. 11 This vision of childhood as synonymous with cruelty also appears in Barrie’s Peter and Wendy , which notoriously describes children as “gay and innocent and heartless” (148), and in another of Bradbury’s short stories, “The Small Assassin,” which explains that children are dangerous because they are “so new, so amoral, so conscience-free” (376). While these ominous stories suggest that all children harbor violent and destructive thoughts against adults, only the gifted pose a real threat to the adults they despise. According to the logic of these stories, normal children resent their parents but are not capable of endangering adults, who are their superiors in intellect and physical strength. The child’s exceptionalism, rather than his or her violent intentions, is what makes them a threat.
This fear of exceptionalism reflects Atomic Age anxieties about the bomb and the science that created it. The general sentiment following the detonation of the atom bomb in Hiroshima was that science had transgressed an unspoken boundary. Bombs have always been destructive, but the exceptional capability of this bomb was simply unnatural. Similarly, these stories do not reflect a fear of the natural cruelty of the child but of the unnatural superiority of these children. Of course, if the children’s giftedness is portrayed as unnatural and therefore not innate, someone or something is to blame for their threatening gifts. In The Gamma People , unethical scientists clearly take the fall for the children’s dangerous enhancements. In “The Veldt,” parental neglect certainly is to blame for their power in the home as well as the technological encroachment of the family space. Bradbury portrays the parents as impotent, as they have passively allowed technology to take over their role and subsequently bestowed all household authority to the children and the technology. “It’s a Good Life” does not clearly place the blame on dangerous science and technology or inept parenting, but we can infer that Anthony’s abilities are a mutation caused by atomic exposure. Hence, these stories largely place the blame for these cruel and dangerous children not on the natural cruelty of childhood but on the unnatural advancements of science and technology and the negligent adult society that has allowed these advancements to occur under its nose.
Conclusion: The Rise of the Dangerous Child in the Atomic Age
Bradbury’s and Bixby’s stories and Gilling’s film only provide a sampling of the exceptional and cruel children that populated Atomic Age science fiction. 12 There are several possible explanations for this rapid growth of the evil child subgenre in mid-century science fiction. Oates attributes the 1950s surge of evil children literature to “a zestful communal repudiation of the taboo against acknowledging disgust, hatred, and even loathing of children” (19). She even goes as far as to ask, “Do we secretly yearn to hate that which we have been obliged to love?” (20) Karen Renner proposes a similar theory—the evil child subgenre is a rebellious response to family-focused conservatism. She suggests, “Perhaps in an era so entirely child- and family-focused, resentment is being secretly harbored about the expectations that children require never-ending devotion and bring complete fulfillment, and perhaps these films are expressing it” (21). Renner is speaking about the contemporary resurgence in fascination with the evil child here, but the 1950s were similarly conservative and family-focused. For Dominic Lennard, the rise of villainous children in film is a direct response to the rise of the youth counterculture in the 1950s. All of these explanations are plausible, and we can certainly identify adult resentment towards—and fear of—children throughout these texts. However, I suggest the sudden rise and pervasive popularity of the cruel, exceptional child speaks to the anxieties of the Atomic Age. Specifically, these gifted and cruel children are a fitting metaphor for the exceptional but dangerous atom bomb, and their threat of destruction to the adult community perfectly encapsulates the dread of total atomic destruction that permeated postwar America
In a 1964 interview with Show , Bradbury explained that science-fiction stories “are a convenient shorthand symbolic way to write of our huge problems” (Aggelis 18). These postwar science-fiction tales about ominous, gifted children were a medium through which Americans could express and alleviate their fears about not only exceptional children but also atomic anxieties. When the technology of the atom first came upon the scene, Americans were hopeful that it could give rise to unfathomable scientific developments and help build a better future for the nation. But, like a mother who has given birth to a monstrous child, the nation soon gaped at the destructive capabilities of the bomb our scientists had created. Gifted children had a similarly ambiguous potential. They could help to build the nation up, or they could work to destroy it. The cruel, gifted child, the child who puts exceptional abilities to work against household, community, and nation, thus became a fitting metaphor for the atom bomb in the wake of World War II. While the horror of the exceptional child as a harbinger of our mortality and a reminder of the fragility of our social order was given special expression in postwar America, that fear of atomic annihilation never truly went away. It proliferated and mutated throughout Cold War America and continues today in various forms, much like the threatening children of these Atomic Age stories.
Notes
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1.
The title of the novel first appears in the text after Christine Penmark overhears a conversation between two men about living in an age of violence. One man comments, “I’d say we live in an age of violence. It looks to me as if violence is in everybody’s mind these days. It looks like we’re just going to keep on until there’s nothing left to ruin” (30). His commentary alludes to the Cold War fear of annihilation. Christine then realizes that violence is like “a bad seed” at the heart of society (30). The novel clearly asks us to draw connections between this age of violence and the bad seed of violence that lies at the root of Rhoda’s actions.
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2.
Of course, this fusion of evil with exceptionalism is not unique to depictions of children. In Discipline and Punish (1977), Michel Foucault identifies a trend in modern literature “in which crime is glorified, because it is one of the fine arts, because it can be the work only of exceptional natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and powerful, because villainy is yet another mode of privilege” (68). This observation is particularly true of child villains, since children are supposed to be weaker and more ignorant than adults. If they can outwit the adults in their life, then they must be exceptional, their villainy yet another mode of giftedness.
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3.
“Little Boy” was the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, while “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki.
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4.
Roblyn Rawlins observes in “Long Rows of Short Graves” (2002) that the “gifted child … invokes optimistic visions of progress and prosperity” (90). Childhood in general is emblematic of hope for the future. As Chris Jenks notes in Childhood , the normal child is “the very index of a civilization” (67), but a child gifted with advanced capabilities is an especially promising index.
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5.
The name of Kennedy’s “Whiz Kids” emphasizes this connection between gifted children and the nation’s military endeavors. Though these military advisors were all young adults, the name of the group highlights the nation’s assumptions about the role of gifted children in the Cold War Era.
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6.
Edelman suggests that queer theory should reject reproductive futurism entirely, since this child-as-future rhetoric is often used to vilify queer individuals and relationships. In this way, the evil child is a queer figure who pushes back against the heteronormative imperative to reproduce and challenges the belief in children as the future.
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7.
The children’s Peter Pan namesakes allude not only to their desire to remain fixed in childhood, but also to Barrie’s image of children as “heartless.”
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8.
This nursery allows Bradbury to return to the theme of the darkness of children’s desires, something that he explored earlier in “The Small Assassin” (1946). In this short story, Alice Leiber senses that her infant wishes her dead, but her doctor assures her that all children hate their parents and these desires are natural.
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9.
In Peter Pan , Neverland symbolizes the landscape of a child’s mind, a landscape that is forbidden to adult voyeurs like Mrs. Darling. “The Veldt” grants the Hadley parents access to what the Darling parents longed for: a peek into the hidden world of their children’s minds.
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10.
We see Anthony’s desire to be a benevolent, if tyrannical, ruler in his treatment of the animals in the grove. When he grows frustrated with the villagers’ ingratitude for his help, he establishes a paradise for small creatures in a grove. God over his domain, he spends “a lot of time making the grove more like what they [small creatures’] wanted it to be” (528). He kills any predators that invade this small paradise because they remind him of the townspeople’s attitudes towards him. However, his violent petulance even extends to the grove. At one point, he moves a bird through the air with his mind and crashes it into a rock by accident. He becomes so angry that his bird is dead that he thinks the rock into the cornfield, which is how he buries his bodies (529). The grove shows us how Anthony would like to rule the whole village: with a combination of good intentions, nonsensical logic, and deadly threats.
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11.
Notably, all of these evil children are white and male, a pattern that dominates throughout the evil child subgenre. While Peter has a counterpart in his sister Wendy and Hugo has Hedda, both Peter and Hugo orchestrate the most villainous acts and demonstrate the most agency in their stories. I theorize that the dominance of white, male children in evil child texts actually results from this conflation of exceptionalism with childhood evil. We view the evil child as exceptional, gifted even, and giftedness is a label historically and problematically attributed to white, male children. Hence, the sparse representation of girls and children of color in the evil child subgenre is related to sexist and racist perceptions of childhood exceptionalism.
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12.
Similar children also appeared in Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” (1948), Henry Kuttner’s “Absalom” (1952), and Wilmar Shiras’s Children of the Atom (1953), and these representations were not only confined to US science fiction. John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and its film adaptation, The Village of the Damned (1960), also feature exceptional but evil children.