This is an introductory lecture on childhood ,language ,and the body

1. Childhood: Language,
Emotion and the Body

2. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
• My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name
Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer
or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be
called Pip.
• Philip Aries: NAMES (immediately compared to age – date of birth
(and death, implicitly, in the Dickens))
• Social system – birth date can be more important marker of “civic
personality” than even surname
• Christian name – world of fancy (fancy shades into frightening
provisionality, accidence?)

3. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1960)
 The family as we know it today (a private, domestic circle founded on mutual affection)
is a relatively new concept. Ariès’ study of the child sets out to confirm this hypothesis.
 Childhood, he argues, emerged around the C17
o Decrease in infant mortality
o Changes in European system of education
o Withdrawal of the family from wider society
 Childhood was ‘discovered’, in Ariès’s term, in the C17; “in mediaeval society, the idea of
childhood did not exist” (125) [much debate on this point…]
 Not so much that families didn’t love and protect their children, but that they didn’t see
it as a distinct phase. A popular (and to some extent crude) version of Ariès’ ideas have
led to the idea that children were seen as simply mini adults, waiting to be strong
enough and mature enough to do the things that adults do).

5. Seven ages of ‘man’
All the world’s a stage,/ […] And one man
in his time plays many parts,/ His acts
being seven ages. At first, the infant, /
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms./
And then the whining school-boy, with his
satchel / And shining morning face,
creeping like snail / Unwillingly to
school. / And then the lover, / Sighing
like furnace, with a woeful ballad / […]
Then a soldier,/ Full of strange oaths and
bearded like the pard, / […] The sixth
age shifts into lean and slipper’d
pantaloon, /With spectacles on nose
[…]./ Last scene of all, /That ends this
strange eventful history, / Is second
childishness and mere oblivion,/ Sans
teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything.

6. Willem Koops, ‘Imaging Childhood’
• Children and their behaviours, experiences, relationships are not “easy-
to-identify empirical realities”, as Willem Koops has pointed out, but
“what we adults choose to see and what we have made of them in our
cultural history and society.”
• Children are a product of our imagination.
• We have based our guidelines for upbringing and education on an image
of childhood that is no longer appropriate. (So there’s a need for
normative guidelines.) [‘normative’ not a dirty word here but moral/
ethical underpinning and rationale for how we treat and teach children]
• Normative issues cannot be solved empirically.
• [Need for] a complex interweaving of facts and norms, of givens and
desires, that is the outstanding feature of child studies.

7. Tom Weisner, ‘What is the most important influence
on child development?’

8. Koops on Aries
• Aries in Centuries of Childhood – two main hypotheses:
- Discontinuity hypothesis. Child didn’t exist until after the Middle Ages. In
mediaeval Europe, negligible difference between children and adults. As
soon as child was weaned, it was seen as natural companion to adult. Not
supported by other studies. Or least challenged: children did play more
than adults, had to some extent separate (safe) spaces, were seen as a
defined age group.
- Change hypothesis. From C13 – steady increase in ‘childishness’ of
children in terms of representation, treatment. [And behaviour?]
“Infantilization.” Increasing distance between world of children and
adults. (Koops’ analysis of children in painting support this hypothesis –
they are portrayed in more ‘childish’ ways, even when older, in later
centuries than earlier ones, and increasingly so as time progresses.)

9. Education
• Montaigne (C16) – first to propose ‘natural pedagogy’ – children not just filled
with book wisdom but allowed to develop their own opinions.
• Locke (C17): blank slate (tabula rasa) image – child as blank slate that can be
filled with all the knowledge s/he acquires, from simple sense impressions to
intellectual knowledge, guided by the pedagogue (but not completely created
by them).
• Rousseau (C18 – epitome of Enlightenment thinking) – natural, age-related
development determines how the child acquires knowledge. Pedagogy should be
child-directed and age appropriate.
• Herbart (C19) – pedagogy depends on ethics and psychology. Pedagogue needs
empirical knowledge of people from “unprejudiced observations” – entwined
the normative (ethical, moral, theological) and the empirical (psychology,
medicine, history). Developmental psych as base.

10. The Disappearance of the Child?
• Van der Berg (1977, cited in Koops): from c.1700-1900, child disappeared
from adult sphere; separated from (adult) public life.
• 1900 slowly returned to the adult sphere.
• A) adults became “victims of the process that infantilized the child”
(technology has removed adult responsibility, the idea of Progress has vanished,
the idea of the Establishment is under siege and so distance between adult and
child has been abolished…)
• B) on the other hand, child is more important than ever, venerated,
embodiment of the future, the heir to history, that current adults cannot
presume to legislate for.
Now a “youth sentiment”, a nostalgia for youth and a denigration of adulthood, a
longing for the period of adolescence even in the young, those for whom
adolescences is just finished.
So  classic adolescence, as turbulent term of rebellion, largely disappeared.
Characterised 50s and 60s – rockers, protesters, counter culture, Beat artists.

11. Neil Postman (1992), ‘The Disappearance of
the Child’
• Role of new/digital media: information not learnt in a structured, normative way.
No longer attached to symbols of authority and institutional power (schools, books,
teachers, [priests?]). All information available at once and all the time. (72)
• “[E]lectric media find it impossible to withhold any secrets” and “without secrets,
of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.” (80)
Koops:
• Child disappearing with the advent of this media? Or adult disappearing? (Becoming
‘kidults’?)
• Lack of safety? End of protected sphere?
• Children and teenagers becoming the centre of consumer culture, influencing the
media sphere
• “The television schedule, for instance, has gradually lost its original pedagogic and
cultural depth in favor of fun and entertainment” (Bernardini, 2014)
Cf. Jarett Kobek’s 2016 novel I Hate the Internet. Kobek has said that Twitter is a
“social network that makes everyone sound like a 15 year old.”

12. Developmental psychology (empirical child)
• Jean Piaget – gave Rousseau’s ideas about innate aptitude and ‘natural’
stages of development empirical basis (200 yrs later!)
• Thought that children have ‘psychological shortcomings’ (Koops, 14) –
cognitive limitations, ways of reasoning that are unlike those of adults
(and in some cases illogical or verifiably misguided)
• So classical dev psych – theory of shortages – what children cannot yet
do.
• 1970s – analogy between brain and computer – ‘information processing
approach’ – went against Piaget
• Felt that children had not had enough information – hadn’t experienced
enough instances of phenomena. Hypothesized that they had at their
disposal cognitive operations, symbolic representations, complex motor
patterns – could in principle do things earlier if presented with enough
information.

13. Landmarks in thinking about the child
• 1689 – Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding – child as ‘blank
slate’
• 1762 – Rousseau’s Emile published (the ‘natural’ child)
• 1905 - Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality published -- effect of
infant sexuality on the psychological destiny of the adult (Kimball, 165)
• 1909 – Freud publishes ‘Analysis of a Phobia of a 5-Year-Old Boy’, reading a fear
of horses as an Oedipal antipathy towards the boy’s father.
• 1962 - Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood
• 1964 - Jean Piaget, The Early Growth of Logic in the Child
• 1974 – P. E. Bryant, Perception and Understanding in Young Children
[information processing approach]; R. M. Young (1976) – Seriation by Children
[computational model]

14. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist (1916)
• "The features of infancy," Joyce's earliest portrait of the artist
begins, "are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait,"
and the first version of A Portrait of the Artist (a 1904 essay)
doesn’t show Stephen/Joyce until he is 15 (and praying in a
wood).
• By 1913, however, when the manuscript of A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man was ready to be set in type, the "features of
infancy" had been expanded into a dramatic overture, opening
with the meeting of "baby tuckoo" and "the moocow," and throwing
a symbolic shadow over Joyce’s “entire lifework” (Kenner 137,
142) (see Kimball, 165)

15. Joyce (2)
• The story told to Stephen by his father about the "moocow coming down along the
road" that "met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo" (7) is drawn from a
childhood memory (John Joyce asks his son in old age “do you recollect the old
days… when you were Babie Tuckoo, and I used to tell you about the moocow that
used to come down from the mountain and take little boys across” in his birthday
greeting to his son in 1931 (Letters III, 212).
• Story –- cow carries children to an island where “they are relieved of the petty
restraints and dependencies of childhood and magically schooled as heroes before
they are returned to their astonished/ parents” (Fairhall, 112-113)
• Freudian readings of the cow (and e.g. sweet that also needs sucking)
• Glass and hairy face (of Stephen/Joyce’s father) found together in Freud’s 1909
‘Analysis of a Phobia of a 5-Year-Old Boy’, and his analysis of ‘Little Hans’
• Stephen’s own fear of his father, excessive affection for his mother.
• Church (Law, Father)

16. Joyce: childhood, language and creativity
• Making art out of frightening experience; using the ‘magical’,
rhythmic/ rhyming properties of language for comfort and
distance from experience… (see Fairhall, 115)
• Joyce designed A Portrait so that material relating to other artists
was interwoven with the events of his own life, making it "both a
self-portrait of the author and a portrait of the artist in general”
(Scholes and Kain, xiii)

17. Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)
• ‘Progress’ narrative -- beginning in speechlessness and anger, and ending
in articulateness and hope.
• “The boy who at the age of four set fire to his own house, became a
drunkard at the age of six, and was so frightened of a new school that he
could not write his name on the board, by the final pages has fought and
lied his way out of the racist South” (Janice Thaddeus). [responsibility
given to the boy, not the circumstance]
• Logic of a slave narrative, though not literally enslaved.
Ambivalences:
• Mother as source of threat as well as object of love.
• Ambiguous values given to ‘white’ and ‘black’ (light/dark) – reversal of
usual ones. (Cf. Morrison – ‘whiteness’ as normative)

18. Black Boy II
• Story of violence – power relations, affect, psychological consequences.
Lack of innocence.
• Story of hunger (“bodily and spiritual”)
• Beaten half to death by his own mother early on in BB.
• Mother – provokes hostile feelings in the boy (forces him to perform
humiliating or frightening acts); he feels guilt about her illness as (if) he
subconsciously wished it on her. Later describes feelings towards her
being ‘frozen’ – cuts her off, emotionally.
• (Later in the work – literature as offering an alternative vision of
America (“shaped nearer to the hearts of those who lived in it” (283)),
of life possibilities.
• Quest for ‘dignity’, ‘freedom’, community.
• Work looking continually for meaning in struggle and suffering.

19. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
• Uses images of childhood as challenge to America’s complacent
image of itself (evocative and emotive symbol of race, class and
gender oppressions)
• Child in The Bluest Eye not just the object of the reader’s gaze,
but the primary voice through which the reader hears, and the eye
through which s/he sees.
• Morrison has commented on the “thematics of innocence” (Playin
the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination) that defines
Americanness in literature. Uses the supposed innocence of
children deftly, sometimes directly, sometimes ironically, to
question this.

20. Morrison in Werrlein (2005)
• Henry Giroux – collective US nostalgia for “mythic” pre-Civil Rights era –
“organized forgetting” ((Channel 77; quoted in Werrlein, 54). Representations
of childhood now often troubled youth (espec. Black youth) – but these blame
the victim, silencing child-figures by ignoring the socioeconomic contexts that
produce suffering (Channel 35, 42-44, 86; quoted in Werrlein, 55)
• Children as “signposts” for America’s self-image (cited Werrlein, 54)
• Cf. Morrison – children’s perspectives situated in socio-economic contexts
• Claudia and Pecola in The Bluest Eye – set on cusp of ‘mythical’ post-war period
(1940)
• 1940 – the year that Richard Wright’s Native Son sparked protest movement
against racism.
• Morrison: childhood innocence as a pervasive ideology that simultaneously
perpetuates and mystifies the harsher realities of white nationalist hegemony.
• Charts the domestic tensions (race) simmered in 1940s, boiled over in 1950s.
• “wrenching narrative of childhood without innocence” (Werrlein, 56)

21. Werrlein’s argument
• Tension between Percola’s life and idealised (white) 1940s models and
images of childhood.
• Epitomised in the ‘Dick and Jane’ primers. (Cf. Ladybird books)
• Childhood that doesn’t exist for anyone? Ideology of the family.
• Provide literary ‘masterplot’ in this novel; national masterplot for
America.
• 1930s: they depicted families that lived in social and economic stability,
defying depression-era conditions.
• After WW2 – Cold War -- women’s role in creating domestic safe havens
(war)

22. Works Cited: Secondary references
Aries, Philippe. (1996 [1960]). Centuries of Childhood: A Social
History of Family Life (Pimlico)
Koops, Willem. (2012). ‘Imaging Childhood’, in Beyond the Century
of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology, ed.
Willem Koops and Michael Zuckermann (University of Pennsylvania
Press), pp. 1-18
Postman, Neil. (1992). Technopoly: the surrender of culture to
technology (New York: Knopf)
Bernardini, Jacopo. ‘The Postmodern Infantilization of the Media’,
Fast Capitalism, vol. 11, no. 1 (2014), n. p.

23. Joyce references
• Fairhall, James. (1995) James Joyce and the Question of History.
(Cambridge University Press)
• Kenner, Hugh. (1948). ‘The Portrait in Perspective,’ in Seon Givens, ed.,
James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (New York: Vanguard)
• Kimball, Jean. (1980) ‘Freud, Leonardo, and Joyce: The Dimensions of a
Childhood Memory’, James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 2 (Winter,
1980), 165-182
• Scholes, Robert E. and Richard M. Kain. (1965) The Workshop of
Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (Northwestern University Press)

24. Wright references
• [contemporary piece by African-American novelist Ralph Ellison]
‘Richard Wright’s Blues’, The Antioch Review, vol. 5, no. 2
(Summer, 1945), 198-211
• Thaddeus, Janice.‘The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright's Black
Boy’, American Literature, vol. 57, no. 2 ((May 1985), 199–214
• Hakutani, Yoshinobu.‘Creation of Self in Richard Wright’s Black
Boy’, Black American Literature Forum, vol. 19, no. 2 (Summer,
1985), 70-75

25. Morrison references
• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992)
• Kuentz, Jane. ‘The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and
Black Female Subjectivity’, African American Review, vol. 27, no. 3,
Women's Culture Issue (Autumn, 1993), 421-43
• Werrlein, Debra T. ‘Not so Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining
Childhood and Nation in The Bluest Eye’, MELUS, vol. 30, no. 4
(Winter 2005), 53-72