often than not, the nearest ‘answer’ to the questions raised by the latest versions of childhood monstrosity are a mixture of the old and the new, myth and reality. Burke’s chapter is not necessarily a positive interpretation of the monstrous child and shows how anxiety over the unknown and the future seems to find an easy home within the form of a child. Interestingly here, the BEKs, which follow the recent phenomenon in popular culture of representing people who are possessed or demonic with black glassy eyes, are more of a universalization of the monstrous child, with little specific or individual detail to distinguish the various sightings apart. As such, and as Burke’s piece suggests, it makes an obvious comparison to Jung’s ideas around archetypes and the figure of the child, a shared signifier across cultures and time periods. But the fit with Jung’s interpretations is not an easy one and as Burke observes:
It is hard to know what Jung would have made of the BEK phenomenon, but it is clear that BEKs, whatever else they may represent, do not represent a hopeful or positive future. Their negative and soulless quality suggests they are something else: the shadow opposite of the Child archetype.47
Entanglements with contemporary nodes of anxiety then weave together with Jung’s theory and older embodiments of unwelcome children to create the BEKs, a projection, or vessel, into which twentieth and twenty-first century culture can pour its anxiety, a process Burke describes as an urban legend, as online folklore, which utilizes already existing tropes from vampire/faery/spectral tropes to give form to this psychological projection. The monstrous child in this view begins to give form to a growing feeling of disconnection between the past and the present, where adults fear the black-eyed or ‘soulless’ future that they are heading towards – a situation which is only exacerbated by the increasingly strict demarcations between childhood and adulthood.
‘Indigo Children: Unexpected Consequences of a Process of Pathologization’, by Gerhard Mayer and Anita Brutler, shows a positive solution to the ‘problem’ child that formed the basis for so many monsters in the past. Indigo children, a term which is contemporaneous with ‘BEKs’,
is a commonly used term for children who – according to the adherents of this concept – feature particular characteristics and talents […] ‘a new breed of children’ – who have a mission on earth, that is, to propel a global spiritual process of transformation, and, therefore, to herald a new era.48
Curiously, both BEKs and the Indigos are linked to contemporary folklore, or what we might call urban legend, but whereas the subjects of Burke’s study are interpreted as ‘bad’, those in Mayer and Brutler’s are seen as ‘good’, even to the point where they ‘should make right what went wrong in past’.49 More interestingly, the notion of the Indigo, rather than representing some unspecific generalization, is actually based on specific cases of actual children, and reinterprets what was, almost universally, considered in earlier cases as a problematic or ‘monstrous’ child in a positive light. Here then the child or adolescent who is ordinarily diagnosed as having ADD (attention deficit disorder) or ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is othered, but in a way that sees it as an evolutionary step forward, super-normal if you will, rather than devolutionary or subnormal. That does not mean that this new ‘myth’ does not still appeal to old ones, such as the gifted loner or ‘special’ child; nor does it prevent it from leading on to new ones – already Indigos have evolved into Crystal children.
It does show, however, that it is possible to see the anomalous child in a positive light, and that resistance to easy categorization can be embraced by wider society as a force for change. Something of this can be seen in a recent example of a problematic child/adolescent Greta Thunberg. A singularly focused individual, Greta, who is 16 years old at the time of writing, has consistently refused to act as desired by the adult society around her in pursuit of gaining recognition of the urgent need for action in regard to environmental change. She is simultaneously constructed as a symbol of hope, and the child as a futurity that will heal the world from the damage caused by its elders, and a ‘naughty girl’ with mental health issues, who is simplistic and manipulated by others50 and should sit quietly in a corner.51 In a different age one wonders if she would have been accused of consorting with devils – though in this one she has been accused of being used by big business52 – but here in the twenty-first century she is an anomalous youth with her direct manner and serious demeanour marking her out as different and curiously analogous to the Gothic child, and indeed her Asperger’s, which she describes as a ‘superpower’,53 conforms to the idea of the abhuman body, a subject on a trajectory of change, not to repeat what has gone before but become something different and unexpected. This points to a possible and welcome shift in the interpretation of the anomalous or monstrous child – using the Latin root of ‘monster’, monstrum meaning a warning or harbinger of change – where the difficulties it presents to adult society do not immediately cause anxiety or panic but lead to introspection and greater understanding. Naughty little girls and boys are not blanks within which to project the sins of the fathers but might just embody the future society that the world needs.
Notes
1Steven Bruhm, ‘Nightmare on Sesame Street: Or, the Self-Possessed Child’, Gothic Studies 8.2 (2006): 98.
2William Paul, Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 282.
3See Katie Silver, ‘Adolescence Now Lasts from 10 to 24’, BBC News, 19 January 2018, accessed 10 October 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42732442/; and Sarah Fader, ‘Adolescent Age Range and What It Means’, Better Help, 18 December 2018, accessed 10 October 2019, https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/adolescence/adolescent-age-range-and-what-it-means/.
4James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 8.
5Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 32.
6Richard Stockton, ‘A Modern-Day Myth: The Slender Man’, Allthatisinteresting, 16 May 2015, accessed 13 October 2019, https://allthatsinteresting.com/slender-man.
7Margarita Georgieva, The Gothic Child (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
8Ibid.
9Thomas Rutherforth, Institutes of Natural Law: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures on Grotius De Jure Belli Et Pacis Read in St. John’s College (Clarke: Lawbook Exchange, [1754–56] 2004), 161.
