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Reluctant Lords and Lame Princes: Engendering the Male Child in Nineteenth-Century Juvenile Fiction

1993; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0307

1543-3374

Alan Richardson,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Reluctant Lords and Lame Princes:Engendering the Male Child in Nineteenth-Century Juvenile Fiction Alan Richardson (bio) Wordsworth's phrase "The Child is Father of the Man," from his self-authorizing epigraph to the "Immortality" ode, could equally well introduce any number of nineteenth-century representations of childhood. What in Wordsworth's time are still relatively new-fangled notions—that childhood is a period of crucial psychic and moral development, and that adult life is largely shaped, if not quite determined, by childhood experience—grow increasingly self-evident as the nineteenth century progresses, eventually to become codified in the work of Freud. This genetic, developmental approach to childhood is as central to texts representing the child to itself as to those representing the child to adults. Nineteenth-century British children's fiction, whether didactic, fantastic, or "realistic" in character, almost invariably portrays childhood as a period of psychological and moral growth; indeed, what most differentiates Victorian literary fairy tales and fantasies from traditional fairy tales is this very insistence on development as opposed to the static, "flat" characterizations of the folktale (Luthi 37-65). It is no accident, then, that works as otherwise disparate as Charles Kingsley's Water Babies (1863) and Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) both place their hero's "schooling" at the center of their narratives and draw authority for their fictional projects by reference to Wordsworth, "that venerable and learned poet," as Hughes writes, who "most truly says, 'the child is father to the man'; a fortiriori, therefore, he must be father to the boy" (33).1 And yet, as Geoffrey Hartman has remarked, if Wordsworth's phrase eventually "becomes an axiom for modern developmental psychology," it nevertheless "remains as scandalous a paradox as ever founded a poetry of experience" (183), disordering as it does the expected temporal, genealogical, and disciplinary relations of [End Page 3] parent and child. Taking Hughes's seemingly vague but in fact critical distinction between "child" and "boy" as a starting point, we can locate yet another scandal within Wordsworth's proposition, which oddly defers assigning gender to the child, who, in the subject, is neuter and who is sex-typed as male retroactively in the predicate. Only from the standpoint of the "man" it will become can the "child" be differentiated as a potential "father." This retrospective or backwards process of gendering also anticipates Freud, for whom the "pregenital erotic stages" of the pre-Oedipal period are "sexually undifferentiated" yet reconfigured in terms of male (or female) development from the later perspective of the Oedipus complex, which "casts its mark back over their whole meaning" (Mitchell 53). It simultaneously imposes an imagined family romance on the young boy's memories or fantasies of an earlier, "bisexual" psychic era. The child who suffers the father's prohibition knows itself in retrospect as man. This disjunction—however temporary or however obscured by "infantile amnesia"—between the "child" and the male child brings out a crucial problem for any developmental portrayal of childhood in juvenile fiction. That boys will be boys we know from Kingsley, Hughes, and many other Victorian writers for children; but how do they become boys? What, to resort again to the suggestive difficulties of Freud's developmental paradigm, facilitates the (male) child's abandonment of the mother's warm, affectionate sphere for the harsh world of the father; what motivates (his) exchange of "polymorphously perverse" bisexuality for an exclusive, prohibited romance with the mother—the mother with whom (he) so recently and intimately identified? From the perspective of Freud's writings, even as reread by a Lacanian feminist like Juliet Mitchell, the answer is fairly direct: the boy assumes his "phallic heritage" because the "male position" is the only place where "anyone really wants to be . . . within the patriarchal order" (51). But other, more frankly revisionist psychoanalytic approaches, such as that of Nancy Chodorow, describe taking the male position as an ambivalent, even somewhat dubious act. Departing explicitly from the traditional Freudian assumption that the boy child "instantly knows that a penis is better," Chodorow emphasizes instead the "conflictual" aspect of assuming a male identity, a process that for her is not less but more problematic...