Challenging Ideas of Childhood as represented in Victorian Novels - Essay Example

Challenging Ideas of Childhood as represented in Victorian Novels Introduction “In all the books I had read childhoods were either idyllic or deprived. Mine had been neither” (Bennett, 2003, 500). Any reader well versed in juvenile Victorian literature would be aware of these two contrasting dominant images, either that of a helpless child victim, or that of a child coming from an idyllic family setting. In fact the Victorian era is seen by many scholars as a period of contrasts. Charles Dickens in his novel The Tale of Two Cities starts by saying, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness” (1948, 1). Gissing also calls this period to be “a time of suffering, of conflict, of expansion, of progress” (1898, 9). Even before the onset of the Victorian era, children have always been a favourite theme, as is seen in the works of Pope, Dryden, and also in many Elizabethan lyrics. However the importance of juvenile literature increased gradually during the eighteenth century, and manifested itself into a separate entity, and a completely different genre of literature, mainly during the nineteenth century. It is for this reason the Victorian period is referred to as the ‘golden era’ for juvenile literature, where we find children becoming pivotal characters in a fictional world. This era is also credited with the ‘reinvention of childhood’, by bringing in mandatory education for all children and stopping child labour, which is reflected in many of the novels of this time. Famous authors on juvenile literature during the Victorian era include Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Anna Sewell, R.L. Stevenson, R.M. Ballantyne, and Anthony Hope, amongst many others. Discussion Victorian novels, in a general sense, were based on certain idealised and romanticised situations, where hardships formed the main background, around which the chief protagonists revolved. In most of the Victorian novels we will find that virtue triumphs over various wrongdoings, while love and endurance seem to be the only way to achieve accomplishment in life, with of course, a little help from lady luck. This theme is also evident in most of the Victorian era juvenile literature series. Prior to the Victorian era, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century novels for children, the tone is completely Puritan, extremely moralistic, and is based on religious ideologies, where parental motivation was predicated on the desire to “break the will of the child” (Pollock, 1983, 14). So till the eighteenth century, we find that novels abound in cruelty and having a nonchalant attitude towards children, in particular. In these novels, children were uniformly seen as evil beings who epitomised the lack of virtue, and so “pious and prudent parents must check their naughty passions in any way [within] their power” (Pinchbeck and Hewitt, 1973, 351). In fact this trend in literary writing continued till the early part of the nineteenth century, when it was not unusual to find children being put to prison, or worse, being executed. However the eighteenth century slowly started seeing a transformation, when childhood was being apperceived with a more optimistic view, and in a positive light. Slowly an outline started forming where innocent and virtuous children were highlighted in the backdrop of poverty and hardships, as we read in Elizabeth Bonhote’s Hortensia or The Distressed Wife (1769). Soon childhood and imagination were amalgamated with the concept of natural consciousness, to form one theme, which is evident in Rousseau’s Emile, written in 1762. In fact it is in Rousseau’s works that “we find the first expression of the view that childhood may be the best time of life” (Cunningham, 1995, 66), while the works of another philosopher J. Locke, “became the guide for innumerable middle-class families” (ibid, 65). The leitmotif of innocence and childhood wisdom crept into juvenile literature with the works of William Blake (Songs of Innocence in 1789), and William Wordsworth in Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood published in 1807. This theme continued into the writing of the Victorian juvenile novels, where we find children and the process of their growing up, becomes synonymous with the metamorphosis of society at a large. Soon children started representing sanguine aspirations, while childhood became a symbol of rebirth, as is seen in Charles Dickens’s The Great Expectations (1861). In fact it is in Dickens that we see the clear transformation from puritanical to the more mellowed romantic notions, which were earlier put forward by Rousseau, Blake and Wordsworth. In Dickens’s novel (Oliver Twist- 1839, David Copperfield-1850) the child was portrayed as the epitome of innocence against the grim backdrop of poverty and squalor in industrial England that was cruel and uncaring. In almost all his novels we find that the child is portrayed as an orphan, who is forced to labour from a very young age. He was one of the many novelists of that era who focussed on the plight of the poor children in order to get the attention of people placed high in the society. In his famous novel Oliver Twist, he had especially used the picture of the child Twist, to let the readers understand and sympathise with the plight of the poor orphans in the workhouse and the abuse they had to endure each day in order to survive, in the industrial era England, especially after the enactment of the Poor Law Bill. Here Wilson comments “Dickens had in common with most of his contemporaries a desire to put the old world of injustice, ignorance and disease behind him. He shared with them, too, however, sentimentality about the past, a sense that industrialization was wrecking the world. This dichotomy ... is to be one of the defining features of nineteenth century socio-political debates” (Wilson, 2003, 21 – 22). This similar theme is notice in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), which again explored the victimisation of a poor, orphan child, made to live in a hostile environment, with cruelty from the guardian or the caretaker being the order of the day. “This literary type can be distinctly characterised by the lack of concern for children, the neglect of their emotional needs, the permanent absence of close relatives in their lives and the complete denial of affectionate feelings... Victorian writers pushed parent figures into the background creating two complementary images at the same time: of a mother as too young, weak and immature a person to run a house, as in Magnum Bonum (1879) by Charlotte Yong or Jessica’s First Prayer (1867) by Hesba Stretton, and of a permanently absent, awe-arousing father as seen in Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899)” (Nowacka, 2007, 46). Thus in this golden age of the English juvenile literature we see an image being created of childhood, that is simple and untarnished by the complexities of the adult life, and that which speaks of an idyllic setting, generally not seen in real life. However a closer look will reveal that behind this rustic portrayal there is a more complex scenario, which tells us that children’s literature are not actually meant for the children, but are written, consciously or unconsciously, keeping in mind the adult reader. So there is a complete disconnection between the object addressed (in this case, children) and the author who is writing the so called ‘children stories’. In fact Jacqueline Rose puts forward the theory that children’s stories are in reality fantasies of the adult writers who create a fictional world, only to appease adult convoluted apprehensions, pertaining to sexuality and identity. So it is Rose as frames it, “Peter Pan offers us the child- forever. It gives us the child, but it does not speak to the child” (1993, 1). In fact it is contended that Peter Pan portrays a far more complex sexual note, very different from what it seemingly portrays. So we find that in the Victorian juvenile literature it is the adult who appears the foremost, while the child (that is claimed to be the main theme) lags far behind. Gubar also speaks in the same tone when she says children in juvenile literature are nothing but “helpless pawns in the hand of all-powerful adults” (2009, 31). Gubar, however being less critical than Rose, brings in a new note where she opines that the theory of adult domination can be replaced by the theory of an active collaboration between the children and the adults. This is seen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland where, “Carroll dramatizes the plight of the child bombarded by other peoples discourse" (2009, 123) and here Gubar notes that Alice is definitely not the idyllic innocent child, untouched by adult complexities. In fact it has already been proven that Alice was a fictional creation arising out of Carroll’s chimerical seduction of a young girl he knew from long. So the myth, that Victorian juvenile literature portrays children as untouched and unspoilt, shatters into a thousand pieces. Gubar contradicts the theory of ‘cult of the child’, and tells us that innocence in juvenile literature actually comes into vogue much later. The Victorian writers very rarely represented children as innocent beings, who remained untouched by social complexities. Rather if we look closer, we will find that their stories speak of children collaborating skilfully with adults, to artfully dodge the mesh of adult dominance and ascendency (as we seen in Oliver Twist by Dickens). Many well known Victorian writers were not sure as to how to represent children in their stories. In fact Lewis Carroll “was both drawn to and dismissive of romantic figurations of childhood innocence” (Gubar, 2009, 95) and this was represented in his parody of Joshua Reynolds’s Age of Innocence published in 1788, where he replaced the child model, and instead drew a friendly hippopotamus that extends what appeared to be its sharp claws. The barely concealed Alice’s Freudian aggression tendencies in Alice in Wonderland, and Carroll’s other representations of small girls in various voyeuristic images, represents, what Gubar terms as “mass perversion of a mass culture” (2009, 103). A completely different picture from what we conjure when we think of a Victorian author writing juvenile novels, based on the themes of innocence and romanticism. Conclusion The image of a romantic and idyllic childhood, resplendent with innocence and simplicity, which we conjure whenever we speak of Victorian era juvenile literature, thus, in reality never existed. It was just a myth, and a misinterpretation on our part, which Gubar very clearly points out, that did not allow us to seek beyond the portrayed image. A closer look at these well known novels will show us that the Victorian theme of childhood is best portrayed by the image of a child skilled in negotiating and collaborating, with the surrounding adult authority. As we see in Ewing and Nesbit’s writings, the children at the end still manage to escape the imprisonment created by the society (comparable to the picture by Pere Borrell del Caso, titled Escapando de la crítica or ‘escaping criticism’- 1874). This shows that children are extremely complying and innovative enough to create an orbit of their own, into which they can easily escape, and it is this picture, heretofore missed by the readers, which inadvertently comes out in the various writings of the Victorian authors. Bibliography Bennett, A., 2003. Writing home. New York: Picador, 500. Cunningham, Hugh. 1995. Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500. 1st edition. London: Longman, 65, 66. Dickens, C. 1948. A Tale of Two Cities. London: The Zodiac Press, 1. Gissing, G. 2001. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. London: Adegi Graphics LLC, 9. Gubar, M. 2009. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Childrens Literature. Oxford University Press. Nowacka, M. 2007. A crisis in a family, a family in a crisis – the forerunners of the third golden age of children’s literature. The Academy of Humanities and Economics of Lodz, Poland. 46. Accessed at http://www.nbuv.gov.ua/portal/Soc_Gum/infil/2007_119_2/articles_2/Magdalena%20Nowacka.pdf Pinchbeck, I., & Hewitt, M., 1973. Children in English Society-Vol. 2. London: Rouledge and Kegan Paul, 351. Pollock, L. 1983. Forgotten children: parent child relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 14. Rose, J. 1993. The case of Peter Pan, or, The impossibility of childrens fiction. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, Wilson, A. N. 2003. The Victorians. London: Arrow Books, 21-22. Read More