of the 19th, adolescence of the twentieth’.5 Even as more categories of not-adults came into focus, the more anomalous members of that designation concentrated the anxieties felt by wider society over how to handle these others in their midst, unsurprisingly seeing them become central characters within contemporaneous popular culture, whether it be folklore, urban myth, novels or cinema. In the light of this, it is unsurprising that with the rise of popular fiction in the nineteenth century children have become increasingly important elements of more sensational stories. It should be noted here that this collection will largely consider examples that feature children as central protagonists rather than works or texts that are produced by children or specifically for children, mainly because the anxieties of a given group or society are more clearly seen in cultural productions about the focus/object of those insecurities than in the works/texts produced by or for those that cause said anxieties.
This process then reveals how the stereotypes associated with troublesome or anomalous youth and the cultural anxiety they produce not only find expression through literature and film but in the interpretation and understanding of everyday situations that centre on children and problematic or unexplainable (supernatural) situations that they find themselves associated with. This might sound like a statement more applicable to the sixteenth century than the twenty-first, but the connection between adolescents and online creepypasta phenomena, such as the Slender Man,6 seems not dissimilar to children communing with spirits in Elizabethan England. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, it is the driving impetus of this collection to show how the construction and representation of the monstrous child at the start of the twenty-first century, while being specific to our times and culture, has not been created from an historical vacuum, but is built upon a long history of generational stereotyping. This actually posits the anomalous child as an almost transhistorical manifestation whose core characteristics remain fixed with only the superficial details provided by particular cultural moments suggesting they are different. This is quite clearly revealed by the interdisciplinary nature of this collection where historical and contemporary studies centred on sociology, anthropology, psychology and media studies all demonstrate the intersection of children and horror/monstrosity.
1. The Anomalous Child
In considering anomalous youth, it is worth looking more closely at the idea of the child and why it might have been a category especially open to being viewed as different or monstrous in some way. The nineteenth century in general and the Victorian period in particular are often cited as being the period when childhood became a more clearly defined stage of the human life cycle. Before then, as observed by Margarita Georgieva, ‘child’ could denote many things that were largely separate from physical age, such as ‘persons of unstable perception and understanding’, those ‘lacking of affective maturity […] vulnerable or helpless […] under legal guardianship […] [or] parental will’.7 Equally, a child is one who is innocent, lacking knowledge, has a potential for development and is intellectually pliable.8 One’s sexual maturity and/or ability to work does not always affect this categorization, and Thomas Rutherforth went as far to claim, in 1754, that childhood lasts until someone’s parents are no longer alive.9 The notions of innocence, vulnerability and lack of knowledge – not to be confused with guile or the ability to deceive – grouped those considered as children alongside women, the mentally impaired and outsiders in general, all considered as other to the society of adult white males. Consequently, the child was viewed as a point of potential societal weakness and pollution10 and open to outside influence and moral corruption.
In many ways the Victorian period focused this otherness more tightly, just as it increasingly defined the child and its place under the intellectual and moral stewardship of adults. With increased industrialization the use of children in factories also grew as families moved from the countryside to the cities for work. While the moves to regulate this and protect the young from the unacceptable working conditions is seen as a largely philanthropic endeavour initiated by certain wealthy individuals such as John Fielden and Lord Ashley, the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, it can equally be seen as a way to separate and control a part of society. Thus, while such protection can be viewed in terms of preventing exploitation (psychologically, physically and sexually) by outside forces, it also becomes a way of enforcing controls and conditions upon humans of a certain age group or maturation whether they want them or not. Alongside this, the prioritization of parental control over the agency of the individual child allows for the society of adults to project their hopes, desires and anxieties upon the ideological body of the young. Nostalgia forms much of this projection and is very much seen in the work of the golden age of children’s literature and authors such as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling (and the slightly later J. M. Barrie) highlighting how the category of the child is not one that is defined by those that are actually contained within it, but by those who impose ideals upon them. This, of course, is not just in terms of social position, but also in regard to sexuality and the sexualization of children. As noted in the work of James Kincaid, the child on the cusp of puberty becomes the figure upon which patriarchal society could project all its repressed sexual desires and fantasies. Simultaneously, as Andrew O’Malley observes regarding Victorian society:
If the ideal figure of the age was the productive, moral, self-disciplined, healthy, male adult governed by the faculty of reason, the child came to be viewed in many regards as its opposite.11
Here the child, whether male or female, embodied everything that the adult male was not. In this way, childhood, as previously mentioned, becomes an ambivalent category, supposedly embodying all that is ‘good’ in a society, while also simultaneously becoming a dark mirror, revealing what is purposely kept secret. From this, Kincaid sees the child as an unformed or undecided individual, inevitably becoming radically ambivalent, even dangerous, and whose socialization becomes ever more imperative, not only for its own safety, but for society at large. Simultaneously then, what is represented as a means of protection for a nation’s most valuable asset can also be seen as a way of maintaining a culture’s universal sense of self-innocence and goodness above and beyond an individual’s personal choice (gender/ethnicity/geography). This has further wide-ranging implications for the way in which other categories are increasingly defined and controlled through the ways in which they are allowed to interact with and influence the child. Consequently, the protection of the child can also be a way to influence and regulate certain categories of adults, parents, businesses and even politico-legal systems in the kinds of relationships – emotional, physical and economical – that they are allowed to engage in with children.
Following on from this, the child is simultaneously the repository of all society holds dear about itself and something which is at once unrestrained and monstrous – not totally removed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s nature child12 – not to be loved and cherished but feared and expelled. One could infer a psychoanalytical interpretation to this where the child becomes something of a receptacle of societal repression. Indeed, Jacqueline Rose, in the middle of the twentieth century, leans towards such a reading via Sigmund Freud, but one where the child’s own sexual development points to a questioning of its own origins (‘where did I come from?’) and its identity (rather loosely read as ‘sexual orientation’ as to whether it is male or female).13 However, she sees this process as one of reflection rather than projection, and so the indeterminacy within the state of the child mirrors that of the adult audience considering it as opposed to being a means of eventual reintegration into the social body.14
