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Description
Tracing the evolution of the boogieman trope, clearly establishes the fear of punishment within the mind enhanced only by our own imaginations. More precisely, fear forces children to replace unconscious, irrational desires (any action motivated by a pleasurable affect) with finding pleasure in the absence of punishment. Freud centrally defines this system as ego, super ego, and id, by which individuals (for the most part) learn to repress impulse and find pleasure in this repression—but perhaps forgotten from our own childhood experiences, repressing our immediate desires was once painful. Adults are able to use boogiemen to patrol the borders between childhood and adulthood until proper assimilation is learned—yet, the damage, by which fear is the tool of instruction, is already done. This project serves not only to view the causality imposed through children's literature for reproducing the dominant agenda, but also suggest that if we continue to belittle the childhood experience we only promote a future of adults forever scared by their haunting nightmares of boogiemen. The fact that these topics emerge from close readings of boogiemen within children's literature is not only saying that children's literature has yet to be evaluated to its fullest potential, but arrives at a hesitation to go beyond the predominant adult way of doing things. Boogiemen in children's literature demonstrates how behaviors are learned out of fear of doing something wrong, but what resonates is that "People are wild because they are controlled too much, cooped up, even though they appear free to roam wherever they desire. But they do not know their own desires" (Zipes xi). For this reason, the boogieman I analyze address the desire and repression dynamic controlled by fear from stories children hear— their wildness contained until arriving at nonsense literature.
