Sweet Demons—And Us
JAMES R. KINCAID
“Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory….”
Yeah, sure. The romantic child was no sooner constructed than his demon shadow popped up: the Satanic child, the child we can resent, despise, beat on to our heart’s content. This schizophrenic vision reminds one of the way marginalized people are often seen and forced to live, given choices that are no choices at all. Simone de Beauvoir long ago analyzed a similar situation for women: angels or monsters, but never human.
Women have made some headway in achieving humanity. Not so children.
This extraordinary collection of analyses does more than document this miserable situation; it offers a way out. Showing the great range and force of this demonizing, the way it controls our seeing and thinking, this collection suggests through the deep persuasiveness of its arguments that we can think and feel our way into different, kinder constructions.
I want to be both personal and honest and say bluntly and crudely that I enjoyed reading this collection enormously. I recognize that such a statement may sound flabby and self-indulgent, but I mean only to register how assured, sophisticated, and uniformly bold these essays are. You’d think they were addressing a safe, well-worn topic: Tennyson’s metrics perhaps. How things have changed in the last twenty years: back then, works on children and sexuality, mine certainly included, tended to mark their entry into the field with a host of defensive strategies, not least endless qualifiers and circumlocutions. None of this is true of these essays, which go right for the heart of our cultural misappropriation of “the child,” in this case as an object of horror, the monster hiding in the basement, evoked by our nightmares and our deepest needs.
The scholars represented here are well aware that the monster embodies attractions too dangerous to be faced head-on, that our long-standing and cowardly fascination with the child exists behind disguises we convince ourselves are still working. The adorable, passive, receptive child is certainly present in our cinema, as are the plots that deploy him or her for our uses. This empty child waiting for the adult to complete him is as needed now as in the days of Shirley Temple, Brandon DeWilde, Bridget Anderson, or Macaulay Culkin. Take a look at A Perfect World (1993) or the acclaimed Mud (2012), pedophilic dream narratives in the same old style.
The horrorshow child provides a cover for our aggressive needs but is not really different from the traditional cutesy figure, as several of the scholars here note: both are strangely without agency or motivation—all that is hogged up by the adults. The children, from Victor Frankenstein’s little boy onward, are there to be acted upon, their power always really lodged in adult figures, in us.
We in the audience, devoted to looking, exercise our sadism in the dark, protected by a cultural and artistic tradition that never asks to be examined, only repeated. Whether we are reading of the latest school shootings, mobilizing more anti-predator/pornography/pedophile actions, or sitting in a theater, we manage the same maneuvers. The child, the object of our gaze, is given little to do but enact the same old roles for our pleasure: monster or unacknowledged victim.
We can see enactments of this voyeuristic displacement everywhere in our culture, in the mania for yammering on about the very rare school-kid crimes, for instance, most notably Columbine, but also available to us now and then at other random spots across the country. We know these are absurdist, random events—or a part of us does—but we can’t let them alone, and we revel in our self-satisfied yammering. Kids are safer at school than anywhere else, certainly at home; but we so need these dramas-in-the-head that we ignore all that, pretending the dangers are external, not in any way connected to our needs.
This brilliant collection mounts a humane and layered analytical power, allowing us to see, in so many forms, the child we are maneuvering cruelly and selfishly. Essay after essay shows us this figure in monstrous forms, draws us into the mechanisms by which these cinematic images come into being. They are, we cannot help but see, figures drawn by our own needs, projections not from the booth but from our minds and libidos. As a result, this collection may do much more than show us what we’re doing; it may allow us to do differently, do better.
Jim Kincaid has taught at Ohio State, Colorado, Berkeley, the University of Southern California and Pitt, generally in English but with stints in women’s studies, cultural studies and honors colleges. He has published widely in Victorian literature, childhood studies, theory and constructions of sexuality.