We've Moved!
Visit SDSU’s new digital collections website at https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu
Description
Children's development, as well as the inherent abjectness of childhood itself, often reflects society's fear of change. This dread of knowledge and increasing sophistication manifests in representations of 'evil' children. An exploration of various adult genres, including drama, horror, and science fiction, explores facets of childhood considered abject, such as struggles for power and sexuality, by placing them into a fantastic context in order to diminish actualized fears of prepubescent deviance. Expanding the genre, however, to include subversive texts spanning the better part of a century reveals diverse representations of children reflecting social and political crises over numerous generations. This thesis proposes that depictions of villainous children over the past three-quarters of a century correspond with specific upheavals in Western society. Early corresponding examples include mischievous young Mary's treachery in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934) as a response to rising anti-gay sentiment in the 1930s. During the prosperous 1950s, Rhoda's murderous desire for pretty objects in William March's The Bad Seed (1954) and Anthony's control over an entire town's possessions in Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" (1953) correlates with unprecedented consumerism in the 1950s. Moving into the second half of the twentieth century, literature reveals a mother's conflict over destroying a dangerous Antichrist infant in Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967) as a counter to burgeoning state-legalized abortion in the United States. Then, in the 1970s, reemerging evangelical movements view youth culture as a cause for concern in David Seltzer's The Omen (1976) and Stephen King's "Children of the Corn" (1977). In addition, author Ann Rice presents Claudia's ruthlessness and insatiable lust for blood in Interview with the Vampire (1976) as a metaphor for the onset of modern capitalism while Jerome Bixby illustrates the futility of fighting capitalism and social abjectness in "It's a Good Life (1953). The relevance of gender and sexuality in contemporary horror also finds a voice in more recent social consciousness, as illustrated in the film Orphan (2009). Thematically, these texts identify and contextualize society's concerns about children's desires, beliefs, and influences. So completely do adults distance themselves from childhood that they begin to view the child as foreign and unfathomable. As exemplars of abject childhood set against a background of continual cultural turbulence, patterns in literature and film emerge that suggest a cultural preoccupation with children that masks darker fears. The transient state of childhood becomes a metaphor for the frightening specter of a rapidly changing culture. Not only do children represent an alternate, irrevocable vision of ourselves, but they symbolize a new world, one in which we have lost control and regress into the captivity of childhood once again.
