Ideas on what a child is and what it should be differ from period to period. Literary texts reflect these differences as well as reflecting on them. Prospero in The Tempest treats Miranda as both a love object and a figure to be manipulated. He never questions his right to control her, her movements, her emotional life or her knowledge. His language asserts his right to authority.
It is with Blake that we come to one of the writers who has created our modern sense of the child. The Romantics saw childhood as the golden age of life, a point when all our senses are at their most highly developed, an overturning of Prospero's position. The language is barer, though dense.
Writers responded to the Romantics. Children or child figures appear with a regularity markedly different from that of previous centuries. The complex figures in Goblin Market are just two among many.
However, literature directly for children was still traditionally pious, but amongst all the other changes that marked the late Victorian era, was the birth of a 'Children's Literature'. Lear's nonsense poems, Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, Macdonald's Curdie books all show that children were being seen as serious readers, but it is Carroll who gave us our first recognisably modern image, 'Alice'. Naughty, cheeky, clever, confused – and powerful – Alice is profoundly different from Shakespeare's Miranda and marks how differently writers had come to think in the three hundred years since Shakespeare first started writing. Her language world is full of jokes and absurdities.
But under the surface did the old distrust of children continue? James explores the ambivalent attitudes of the period in The Turn of the Screw and through that novella we are back in a world of distrust and back in words of authority and judgement.
Children fascinate us, their minds, their role in society, our own loss of childhood and in this course we will look at these various authors’ depictions of the child.
Learning outcomes
- To formulate ideas on the presentation of children in literature;
- To see relationships between texts;
- To understand the text in relation to its period.
