Images of Childhood: A Visual History From Stone to Screen 9781350299931, 9781350299948, 9781350299962, 9781350299924

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
Defining childhood
Conflicting conceptions
Modern childhood
Childhood and adult psychology
Pictures of childhood
Scope and outline
1 Children as Worthy Subjects
Antiquity
Medieval morphology and limited pictorial functions
The sacred and secular of the Renaissance
Seventeenth-century developments
Eighteenth-century sentiment
Nineteenth-century Romanticism
Mass production and photography
Twentieth-century proliferation
Twenty-first-century digital saturation
2 Children as Family Members
Families are not all the same
Families as spiritual union
Families as bonds of ancestry and property
Families as bonds of affection
Happy snaps and power
Digitally networked families
Public families as pedagogy
Dysfunctional families as pedagogy
Controlling the image
3 Children as Gendered
Patriarchy and feminism
Clothes and color
Attributes and activities
Girls fight back
Shifting sands
4 Children as Adults
Historical integration
Exceptional children
Premature sexuality
Dependence reasserted
Separation ensured
5 Children as Schooled
Students as organic wholes
Students as God-fearing
Students as good citizens in the making
Students as consumers
Students realizing their individual potential
Control and agency
6 Children as Aesthetic Objects
Aesthetics and aestheticism
Aesthetically beautiful children
The culture of cuteness
Aesthetics and its opposites
Aestheticism and anxiety
Aestheticism, innocence, and reality
7 Children as Victims
Child sacrifice
Infanticide and filicide
War and famine
Destitution
Beatings and abuse
Child labor
Child pornography
Memorializing children
Counternarratives
Sins and sorrows
8 Children as Threats
Horrid children
The child Jesus as malevolent
The original holy terrors
Real child abusers and murderers
Unruly street children
Child soldiers
Multiple threats
9 Children as Economic Value
Children in slave economies
Productive and consumer capitalism
Servants of productive capitalism
Servants of consumer capitalism
Leveraging children’s sign value
Children as economic entities
10 Children as Propaganda
Selling succession
Children as ethnic and population policy
Recruitment children
The co-option of meaning
Children’s exploitability
11 Children as Innocent
The ideology of innocence
The iconography of innocence
The longevity of innocence
The heyday of innocent childhood
The invitation of innocence
Child abuse
Child nudity
Innocence as incitement
Innocence versus social justice
Childhood and continuity
References
Image Credits
Index

Citation preview

Images of Childhood

ii

Images of Childhood A Visual History From Stone to Screen Paul Duncum

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Paul Duncum, 2023 Paul Duncum has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Elena Durey Cover image: Auguste Renoir, Marguerite Therese (Margot) Berard, 1879 © Metropolitan Museum of Art All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duncum, Paul, author. Title: Images of childhood : a visual history from stone to screen / Paul Duncum. Description: London : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023. | Includes index. | Contents: Worthy subject – Family member – Gendered – Adult – Schooled – Aesthetic – Victim – Threat – Economic entity – Political propaganda – Innocent. Identifiers: LCCN 2022048224 (print) | LCCN 2022048225 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350299931 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350299948 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350299955 (epub) | ISBN 9781350299924 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350299962 Subjects: LCSH: Children in art. | Children–Social conditions–Pictorial works. | Innocence (Psychology) Classification: LCC N7640 .D86 2023 (print) | LCC N7640 (ebook) | DDC 700/.4523–dc23/eng/20230114 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048224 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022048225 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-9993-1 PB: 978-1-3502-9994-8 ePDF: 978-1-3502-9992-4 eBook: 978-1-3502-9995-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Introduction

1

Defining childhood Conflicting conceptions Modern childhood Childhood and adult psychology Pictures of childhood Scope and outline

1

1

Children as Worthy Subjects

9

Antiquity Medieval morphology and limited pictorial functions The sacred and secular of the Renaissance Seventeenth-century developments Eighteenth-century sentiment Nineteenth-century Romanticism Mass production and photography Twentieth-century proliferation Twenty-first-century digital saturation

9

34

Children as Family Members

35

Families are not all the same Families as spiritual union Families as bonds of ancestry and property Families as bonds of affection Happy snaps and power Digitally networked families Public families as pedagogy Dysfunctional families as pedagogy Controlling the image

35

2

1 2 3 4 6

13 19 22 26 27 31 33

36 40 41 49 50 52 53 55

vi Contents

3

4

5

6

7

Children as Gendered

56

Patriarchy and feminism Clothes and color Attributes and activities Girls fight back Shifting sands

56 63

Children as Adults

72

Historical integration Exceptional children Premature sexuality Dependence reasserted Separation ensured

73 85

Children as Schooled

91

Students as organic wholes Students as God-fearing Students as good citizens in the making Students as consumers Students realizing their individual potential Control and agency

92

57 68 71

77 88 89

94 98 107 108 110

Children as Aesthetic Objects

111

Aesthetics and aestheticism Aesthetically beautiful children The culture of cuteness Aesthetics and its opposites Aestheticism and anxiety Aestheticism, innocence, and reality

111 112 121 124 127 128

Children as Victims

129

Child sacrifice Infanticide and filicide

129 132

Contents vii

War and famine Destitution Beatings and abuse Child labor Child pornography Memorializing children Counternarratives Sins and sorrows

8

9

10

139 146 149 150 153 155 157 158

Children as Threats

160

Horrid children The child Jesus as malevolent The original holy terrors Real child abusers and murderers Unruly street children Child soldiers Multiple threats

160 162 164 165 170 175 178

Children as Economic Value

179

Children in slave economies Productive and consumer capitalism Servants of productive capitalism Servants of consumer capitalism Leveraging children’s sign value Children as economic entities

179

196

Children as Propaganda

197

Selling succession Children as ethnic and population policy Recruitment children The co-option of meaning Children’s exploitability

197

181 181 187 191

201 207 209 214

viii Contents

11

Children as Innocent

215

The ideology of innocence The iconography of innocence The longevity of innocence The heyday of innocent childhood The invitation of innocence Child abuse Child nudity Innocence as incitement Innocence versus social justice Childhood and continuity

215

References Image Credits Index

216 217 220 229 230 233 238 242 243 245 258 264

Introduction

“In contemporary society, images of children are part of the populous world of two dimensions that threads through the living world of flesh and blood.” (Holland 2004: 1) It seems likely that, on social media, pictures of children even outnumber cats. But why are we so fond of picturing children? What do the pictures tell us about our ideas, values, and beliefs about children? What does our viewing of them say about ourselves as adults? And what do the pictures show us about modern societies? These questions are at the heart of this book, questions that seem important to address because modern societies are both highly visual and, in many ways, child-centered, and it was not always like this. How did we get to where we are?

Defining childhood In past centuries, even the definition of childhood was different from what we commonly employ today (Heywood 2018). Young people often ceased to be regarded as children past the age of 7 years. The concept of childhood covered only those years we commonly regard as infancy to early childhood. By the time children reached what today’s developmental psychology calls middle childhood, from 8 to around 12 years, they were already regarded as young adults. In some cases, youngsters were regarded as having left childhood behind as soon as they were able to take up arms or begin work. Even today, legal definitions and those of international bodies differ, sometimes asserting that childhood lasts as long as 18 years, 21 years, and even 25 years (Plastow 2015). However, in terms of age, this book uses the commonly employed contemporary touchstone as derived from first-world developmental psychology (Miller 2016). Childhood is defined as limited to children from birth to puberty, from babyhood to around 12 or 13 years.

Conflicting conceptions But considering the age of children is just the beginning. A distinction first needs to be made between actual, real-life children and conceptions of childhood—the latter being an abstract noun defining our mostly adult ideas, beliefs, and values about children. Childhood is a way of perceiving children mostly by adults; it does not refer to children themselves. Children have ideas about childhood too, but they are

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Images of Childhood

rarely in a position to insert them into public discourse; for the most part, children remain recipients of adult understandings. Childhood is almost entirely comprised of adult conceptions. All societies have had concepts of childhood, that is, ways of distinguishing children from adults, but societies differ in their conceptions of childhood, in their particular understandings of what to make of children (Heywood 2018). Is childhood a glorious time to be prolonged as long as possible, preparation only for adulthood, to be celebrated, endured affectionately, or subject to rigorous discipline? Are children primarily human beings or human becomings, or are they both? In modern societies, conceptions of childhood are manifold, and often as contradictory as modern societies are complex and fragmented. And in modern societies marked by visual communication, each conception finds pictorial form. Children appear as both wholesome and abused, as beauties and brats, as blessings and a bother. They appear on greeting cards as sentimental cuties, while in newspapers they feature as both victims and perpetrators of violent crime. Fictional urchins frequent sitcoms and comic strips at the same time that documentaries offer forensic evidence of serious abuse. Pictures of children are used to sell numerous commodities, even where the association between product and childhood is no more than an inference of vitality. Starving children are the public image of the third world, horror movies depict children as both blameless mites and the personification of evil, picture books represent children as heroes, and child pornography coexists with photographs of childhood as a nostalgic dream. And everywhere, parents coax their children to produce snaps of happy, smiling families. Pictures of children inhabit all these fault lines: between extending protection and exploitation, between violence and hope for a better future, between the corporeal reality of real children and a desire for an idealized past.

Modern childhood Today, childhood is a major way of defining the characteristics of modern, first-world societies (Cunningham 2020). But, unlike many societies of the past, and many in the third world today, first-world societies are organized so that children lead lives that are quite different from the lives of adults (Jenks 2005). Children have their own institutions, clothes, pastimes, even culture. They have different rights and responsibilities from adults, and as adults our expectations of their behavior are markedly different from what we expect of ourselves. We have created a special world with children’s rooms, toys, books, sports, television programs, and music. Children have their own welfare agents, doctors, nurses, and so on; and children’s play is segregated from the lives of working adults. This separation of child from adult is basic to our social organization. It is maintained by the institutions of family, nurseries, clinics, and schools, which are regulated by special children’s courts that, in turn, reference international declarations specific to children’s rights. Despite centuries of often fierce debate over the nature of childhood, no consensus exists; childhood continues to be a diffuse and ambiguous concept. Everyone holds common-sense ideas about children, not only because all adults are graduates from childhood, but because many adults deal with children on a routine basis. Children are viewed through the lens of practical yet limited experience which tends to be generalized; indeed, to carry the weight of universal truth. The ever-present need to deal with actual children obscures our views of childhood as historically determined and socially constructed. Teachers, nurses, social workers, let alone parents and

Introduction 3

grandparents, must attend to the ever-present demands children place upon them. The institutions of schools, hospitals, welfare, and the family each have their own socializing practices. Each imposes their own views on children, which act as self-fulfilling prophecies about their nature. Routinized institutional practices produce what Bourdieu (1977) called habitus, the habitual ways of thinking and acting within a specific environment. This is also what Foucault (1978) called discourse, a particular set of ideas and actions inside of which certain ideas and actions make sense and outside of which they do not. For school teachers, for example, children need to be disciplined and taught. The routinized, institutional habits of teaching, or discourses about teaching, impose goals, methods, and practices, while simultaneously excluding others. It is important to keep the socially constructed nature of childhood in mind because otherwise our ideas about childhood can easily appear natural, in the order of things, to be just so much common sense (Cunningham 2020). Cultural theory teaches that there is nothing so burdened by vested interests as ideas and practices that pose as common sense (Storey 2021). And ideas and practices to do with children are especially prone to appear normal and natural. Having been a child, having children, or relating to children on a regular basis, contrives to make children and childhood appear normal and natural. This is not to deny that there are universals to human biology and development, however differently interpreted in different times and places. Parenting, teaching, and nursing, although institutionalized in particular ways in modern society, describe actions that are necessary in all societies. It is not surprising to find that some discourses about childhood are of great longevity.

Childhood and adult psychology Conceptions of childhood are fraught, partly because modern societies are fragmented but also because, as adults, we each carry within us something of the child we once were. Psychology has taken the idea of the child within us all to be an axiomatic metaphor of our psychic structure (van der Kolk 2015). Childhood engages us because the child of yesterday always coexists with the image we have of ourselves as adults; and, moreover, we are frequently prone to draw upon the child we have carried forward into adult life. And according to psychoanalysis, the world of the unconscious is the world of childhood, not actual childhood, but a metaphor for the world of infantile pleasures—moral chaos, violence, and vulnerability—though equally a world of playfulness, spontaneity and imagination (Plastow 2015). Our idea of ourselves as adults necessitates the subjugation of the child within. To be adult means to be a rational and moral being, logical and in control of oneself. On the other hand, childhood represents all that is vulnerable, inept, clumsy, primitive, being at the mercy of emotions, subject to petulance and rage; in general, to be of a lower, inferior state of being that requires repression. Yet suppressing the child within is always a struggle. We try to resist behaving irrationally or being viewed as childish, immature, or infantile, even while knowing it is easy to regress. As children, we learned ways to cope with events and, frequently, when similar events arise in adulthood, we play out the same copying strategies acquired as children. Patterns of behavior learned as children persist into adulthood. Instead of responding with calm and thoughtful consideration, we may respond with a sense of inadequacy, tears, and depression, with all the frustration and misplaced anger of the child within. Anger dominates

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reason as the unfinished madness of childhood is carried forward into our adult lives, making our adult status highly vulnerable. The achievement of adulthood is thus always precarious, always under threat. We are deeply fearful of behaving childishly or of being accused of doing so. Consequently, we have devised measures to defend ourselves, our segregation of children from ourselves being in part a function of the desire to control not only actual children, but the child within. As adults, we are continuously striving to gain control over real-life children, our own childhood memories, and the very idea of childhood (Holland 2004). Many of what we take to be the essential qualities of childhood—especially spontaneity and ­playfulness—we tend to deny ourselves as adults. A sense of wonder, awe, of excitement in the face of something new, of limitless horizons stretching out before us, are each curtailed by the adult self. Such childlike qualities are still present and can be replayed, notably during times of leisure. Yet the pressures of working life, including caring for children, devalue childlike qualities. The driven impetus of a materialistic, rationally organized society depreciates the childlike. Consequently, as adults, we construct ideal childhoods for ourselves, viewing childhood through the lens of a warm nostalgic glow. Where this is impossible, the idea of childhood is constructed as an ideal, often with particular investment because it is constructed from a need for compensation. Childhood becomes an ideal, mythical time when the characteristics we deny ourselves are indulged. As Hillman (1992) wrote, “Our cult of childhood is a sentimental disguise for the true homage to the imaginal” (106). Childhood is associated with nature, the primitive, and emotion, whereas adulthood is associated with their opposites—culture, civilization, and reason. What we deny ourselves as adults appears achievable only in childhood. We feel pressure to preserve childhood for our own children, while for our own sake we strive to preserve a sense of our own early life. Childhood is a rich depository for all the characteristics we desire as adults but believe we cannot indulge in ourselves. We may insist that childhood belongs only to actual children, but childhood is also a construct that fulfills our need to insert our fantasies and desires somewhere into reality. Adult relations to childhood are fraught with paradox. Childhood is an idealized past, a projection of qualities we desire; equally, adult regression to childishness is an ever-present fear. The need to distinguish between childlike and childish is paramount. Idealizing childhood long ago rose to the level of an ideology, of conceptualizing childhood essentially as a state of simple innocence. In the face of much contradictory evidence, it prevails today as the dominating perspective. No matter the reality of many actual children, the ideal childhood is believed to be one of untainted purity and carefree happiness. Other ideas about children either support or supplement the ideology of innocence or make sense only in opposition to it. Even views that threaten the idea of childhood innocence are subject to its influence. Views of children as victims or as threats cannot be understood without an underlying belief in their innocence.

Pictures of childhood Pictures are one of the major sign systems by which we think and communicate ideas, beliefs and values, and childhood is one of the root concepts of modern life. Modern societies are both visual and deeply child-conscious. Pictures of children play their part in fierce battles over the nature of childhood; they are sites of ideological struggle (Storey 2021). As key players in the struggles between competing

Introduction 5

social forces to define childhood, pictures of children are battlegrounds on which wars for people’s hearts and minds are won or lost. Competing social currents censor, modify, contextualize, and interpret images of children to advance social, cultural, economic, and political agendas. Today, such battles are facilitated by the dominant style of photographic realism, a style that Barthes (1977) characterized as possessing the “lustral bath of innocence” (49). They seem evidently true, their meaning apparently transparent, so that images carry great authority in articulating and reproducing ideas about childhood. Where a discrepancy exists between pictures and written or spoken text, people prefer to believe the pictures. Seeing is believing. Literary critics long ago acknowledged the shift with phrases such as “the triumph of the image” and “the humiliation of the word” (Guinness 1994: 94, 95). Of course, we continue to communicate primarily through language, but in the shift to imagery it is no exaggeration to say that today we also live amidst and through pictures. A definition of pictures is now a definition of ourselves as humans active within the world. Images saturate the fabric of everyday experience as a ubiquitous part of the richness and density of everyday life (Elkins and Fiorentini 2021). They structure much of our knowledge of the world beyond personal experience. Beyond contact with other people, pictures are for most people their principal window on reality. As Williams (1977) argued, they are a constitutive part of social practice. By contrast, pictures neither passively express nor reflect social reality. Equally, they are not the effect of social causes. Rather, pictures are an integral part of social knowledge, beliefs, and values. Their contents are derived from society and offered back to society in an ongoing, symbiotic relationship, helping to focus and explain our ideologies to ourselves. With the pressure of modern life, we typically deal with images with a hasty, distracted glance, but in former, more leisurely times, pictures were typically subject to contemplative examination. They were not nearly as commonplace as today, so instead of being fleetingly acknowledged by numerous, fragmented, and interrupted glances, images tended to be subject to prolonged and careful scrutiny. The power of a relatively few images to inform and focus ideology should therefore not be underestimated. Many of the images examined in this book, especially the historical ones, are commonly considered to be fine art, but they are treated here without any honorific regard. They are considered using the same tools employed to examine popular imagery. Pictures are powerful, but not only because there are now so many of them, and not only because the meaning of realistic-style imagery can appear transparent. They are powerful because they are especially sensuous and prone to arousing emotion (Duncum 2021). Pictures pleasure us. They hail us, and sometimes they will not leave us alone. They delight the eyes, and they can also evoke the sense of touch, taste, and even sound and smell, so that it is hard to resist their ability to persuade. Images seduce. This book relies heavily on pictures from long ago. Studying past imagery is important because many contemporary practices of picturing children originate in the past. Past imagery helps to indicate what appears to be perennial and unexceptional in our own time. They equally help show what is characteristic about our own practices by revealing what we have rejected. A historical perspective helps to make the familiar strange by providing analytical distance from our taken-for-granted assumptions. Such distance is especially important in addressing children because, as mentioned above, considering childhood means addressing our own intimate, adult selves. Pictures of children need to be considered as the product of particular historical and social assumptions and preoccupations.

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Pictures help to constitute the discourse of childhood. To study pictures of children as discourse means to study them not only for what they picture, but who pictures them, under what conditions, and for whom. It is to examine pictures as a social practice within the context of other social practices that give them meaning. This is to examine them not only for what they appear to contain but what they do. Discourses are formed through historical processes as a way of exercising influence, and they are maintained in an effort to retain influence. And yet they are always contestable by those who seek to exercise the power of interpretation for themselves. Thus, in what follows, there will be no search for stable truths about children as if they possess an essential and universal essence. Rather, attention will be paid to the dispositions, maneuvers, tactics, and techniques—in a word, the rhetoric—used when picturing children. Pictures cannot inform us about everything. They tend to show rather than tell, and even what they show can be unreliable. What they show is always bound by prevailing visual conventions and sentiments. Changing sentiments about childhood are represented by different conventions, but this does not necessarily mean that the circumstances of actual children have changed. Pictures of children are just that—pictures—and they lead different lives from the lives of actual children. It is always crucial to try to understand how images were viewed in the past, for our own contemporary viewing may be quite different. For most of recorded history, images of naked children were a sign of purity, of innocence. Today, it is difficult not to see many of them through the lens of abuse. The sometimes disjunction between looking then and looking now requires reflection on why pictures from the past make us think and feel the way they do. Such reflection equally applies to viewing contemporary images. Viewing pictures from both the past and the present requires consideration of our gaze as viewers, of turning back from the images themselves to consider ourselves as viewers. It requires reflexive viewing, reflecting on our viewing and reflecting on our reflections. To summarize: In what follows, a variety of theoretical perspectives are drawn upon, the only possible approach to focus on such a complex, ambiguous, nay paradoxical, subject as childhood. As mentioned above, from psychology we learn that childhood is not merely an early stage of biological growth but a state of being human throughout adulthood. From sociology, we learn that our concepts of childhood are subject to social construction. From historical studies, we learn that our concepts of childhood are historically determined. And Cultural Studies teaches us that pictures are sites of competing ideologies about childhood with the power to influence. We learn to ask who exercises influence, how, and why.

Scope and outline One of the central differences between this book and histories of childhood, notable of which are Aries (1960), deMause (1974a), Stearns (2021), Heywood (2018), and Cunningham (2020), is that the focus here is the nexus of childhood and pictures. Frequent reference will be made to these texts, but while they use pictures sparingly to make their arguments, the present book focuses on the wide range of visual strategies used to help construct different conceptions of childhood. Attention is placed on such strategies as framing, angles-of-view, lighting, body language, and facial expression as used to highlight the way childhood is made visible. How are children’s bodies choreographed in space? Do they smile? How are they dressed? With whom, and with what attributes, do they appear? For what reason are they pictured at all?

Introduction 7

Often this means showing how a widespread belief about children is cleverly manifested in pictures, how pictures appear merely to illustrate a prevailing view. In other cases, it means noting that the realities of many children’s lives are not widely represented at all, or the conditions of children’s lives are often denied by unrepresentative images. This is because, as sketched above, pictures of children are not really about children as much as they are about constructions of childhood that gratify adult desires. Each chapter draws upon fictional and non-fictional children because, in the construction of childhood, the distinction between reality and fantasy is often entirely blurred. The representation of real children can be a fiction, while fantasy children are invariably projections of anxieties and desires no less real than actual flesh and blood. Current concerns about childhood are placed in their historical context. Again and again it is shown that, if each of today’s constructions of childhood is not perennial, each is at least centuries old. Some clearly are perennial. Visual media changes, specific sentiments change, but some constructions have remained deeply persistent, echoing the earlier observation that biology imposes certain unvarying universals on thought, feeling, and action. The book does not pretend to be comprehensive; that would be impossible. Picturing children in the West can be traced for around five millennia. During this time, the eleven constructions used here have been employed many times, but with quite diverse intentions and using quite different visual media. And each media’s technicalities afford and limit differently what can be communicated. The selection of pictures is also eclectic. The pictures include some of the big names of fine art and photography, but also many who are either hardly known today or who are anonymous. In some cases, copyright restrictions have meant using similar images to those discussed. Chapter 1 offers a brief historical overview of when, why, and how children were considered worthy of representation. While common in antiquity, their representation declined during the Middle Ages only to reemerge during the Renaissance to become arguably the most common pictures taken today. The chapter provides a scaffold on which each of the subsequent thematic chapters is developed. Chapter 2 develops threads introduced in Chapter 1. It begins the thematic examination of particular kinds of children in pictures, namely children as family members. Different conceptions of the family are manifest in different kinds of imagery: families as both good and bad models of social behavior, children as prefiguring their future adult roles, and the projection of families as happy, the latter perfectly exemplifying the ideology of childhood as a time of unbridled innocence. Chapter 3 considers how boys and girls are pictured differently as constitutive of gender-based views in which the ideology of innocence is applied more to girls than boys. A historical examination of children’s clothes, toys, attributes, body posture, bodily gestures, and facial expressions highlights both continuities and differences with the ever-shifting picturing practices of children in today’s popular media. The ideology of childhood innocence is both challenged and reinforced in Chapter 4 by children dressed as, and expected to behave as, adults. Based on acquaintance with violence, sexuality, and knowledge, the contemporary, normative division between childhood and adulthood is blurred, but it is shown that historically it has long been so. Examples include prodigies, child soldiers, and sexualized beauty pageants. Chapter 5 demonstrates how schools turn children into students. Pictures show the choreographing of student bodies in different spatial configurations to ensure conformity irrespective of diverse

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educational theories, but they are limited in showing how control is imposed through the timetable. Routinized behaviors and different spatial arrangements show evidence of helping to socialize students into the demands of industrial capitalism and, more recently, the demands of consumer capitalism. Aestheticizing children’s bodies is discussed in Chapter 6 as strongly supportive of the ideology of childhood innocence, but it is problematized by its use of control and coercion. A culture of cuteness, born from social anxiety, can breed resentment toward children, even actual abuse. Images include photographs from the 1990s’ baby craze and the DIY aesthetic using computer apps for people’s own children on social media. Chapter 7 focuses on children pictured as victims of war, disease, crime, child labor, and abuse, including child pornography and child torture. Such damaged children challenge the ideology of innocence, and in being horrific to look at, some images require reflexive looking. The chapter concludes by considering the adequacy of different kinds of memorials to children who have died in wars and mass shootings. By contrast, Chapter 8 considers children as threats. These are children who pose physical and/or psychological harm to others, but who also do violence to the ideology of innocence. Examples include the monsters of horror films and real-life child murderers. Since antiquity, pictures of children as innocent have always coexisted with pictures of children as malevolent, suggesting that a belief in the dual nature of childhood has long operated as distinctly oppositional to the ideology of innocence. Chapter 9 considers children as economic entities in both productive capitalism through child labor and as future workers, while consumer capitalism employs images of children to sell products and encourage avid consumption. Both kinds of capitalism simultaneously challenge and employ the ideology of innocence. Chapter 10 examines how, since antiquity, the idea of children’s essential nature as innocent has been employed to provide some political leaders with cover for both their malevolent personalities and their policies. Examples are derived from Ancient Rome and twentieth-century totalitarian leaders. Other examples involve the British Monarchy, past and present. By contrast, children themselves are now employing the ideology of their innocence to advance their own causes. Finally, Chapter 11 directly addresses the myth of innocence by pulling together threads explored in previous chapters. While originating in ancient times, its heyday was the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when childhood acquired a semidivine status, the remnants of which continue today. The socioeconomic conditions of the past two centuries that have led to its dominance are examined, especially in relation to the changed meanings of art, culture, class, and nature. Innocence both affords children protection and infantilizes them, and social justice is advanced as an alternative framework.

Chapter 1 Children as Worthy Subjects

“Who sees a child sees nothing.” (An early sixteenth-century saying) (Schorsch 1979: 34) So common is the picturing of children today that this early sixteenth-century saying appears shocking. But it reminds us that childhood is a cultural construction. It also highlights the variability of these constructions at any one time because, contrary to the above comment, it was in the sixteenth century that children were as widely and as well observed in pictures as they had been since antiquity. Though apparently common in the ancient world, and appearing here and there during the Middle Ages, as subject matter for pictures children became a specific focus only during the Renaissance. This chapter traces the historical struggles which occasioned the appearance of children as subjects worthy of being pictured. Unlike the following chapters, which are thematic, this chapter presents a brief, linear history of the accent of Western thought and feeling in producing pictures of children. It is intended to act as a skeletal, historical frame on which to hang subsequent chapters. Subsequent chapters elaborate on developments sketched below.

Antiquity Children were commonly depicted in antiquity (Neils and Oakley 2003). In some cases, their representation indicates only their integration into the adult community; in others, they are central to purpose. From the remaining fragments of the ancient civilizations of South East Asia, Egypt, Greece, and especially Rome, children appear to have been represented for a variety of reasons: religious devotion, to indicate political succession, to boast of political plunder, to stress the continuity of life, and to memorialize deceased children. There is much we do not know (Cunningham 2020), and it seems likely that there were various and contradictory assumptions behind the representation of children because this is true of later periods. In the Middle East, the earliest images of children date to the fourth millennium BCE as mother goddesses with their offspring as icons of fertility. They are quite abstract. Thus, the earliest extant examples of children in imagery are to ensure fertility and the unbroken endurance of life. They were reinterpreted by the neo-Babylonians in the sixth century BCE with mothers suckling their children, the physical appearance of the children remaining abstract (Parrot 1961). The Assyrians, who were known

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Images of Childhood

Figure 1.1 Anonymous, Isis with Horus the Child, c. 680–640 BCE. Walters Art Museum

even in the ancient world for their aggression, pictured children in triumphal processions that boasted of their plunder. Cartloads of children, pictured as small adults, appear as part of processions of captive adults and livestock. In ancient Egypt, children appear as early as the sixth dynasty (2323 to 2150 BCE). That the Egyptians took care to observe the behavior of children is evident by the hieroglyph with which they are represented, a small figure with a hand in its mouth (Wilkinson 1994). Children appear most commonly as infant gods and as family members of the ruling classes, although childbirth and the suckling of infants are also included in such scenes (Porter and Moss 1929). Many divine families were represented, of which the most common was that of the god Osiris, the goddess Isis, and their infant son Horus. Images of just Isis and Horus are also common for several dynasties (Emery 1994). They appear to be successors of the much earlier mother goddesses with children, and the predecessors of Madonna and the Christ Child imagery. Figure 1.1 is typical of many. While mother and infant at first appear to lack mutual affection—Isis stares imperiously before her and does not even touch the adult-like Horus—she holds her son before her in such a way as to form with her arms the hieroglyph meaning “to embrace” (Porter and Moss 1929).

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But some Egyptian images of children do employ a childlike morphology, and often adults are depicted showing affection to them. A mother attempts to amuse her two children, a father places a protective hand on his son’s shoulder, and a mother suckles her baby (Burn and Grossman 1984). Even among royal family portraits, which were usually formal affairs, there is sometimes a show of affection. Pharaoh Ikhnaton kisses one of his children while his wife, Nefertiti, allows another of their children to stroke her face. In another scene, Ikhnaton offers his eldest daughter an earring while the younger daughters are amused by Nefertiti (Dodson 2020) Among other less exalted families, there are many private tombs where the adult tomb owner holds a staff with his child at his feet, a tiny adult-like figure, grasping the bottom of the staff, separated by death but presumably fondly remembered (Wilkinson 1994). The frequency of this funeral imagery, which spans many centuries, highlights the level of infant mortality and also appears to indicate the extent to which a child’s death was felt. Much later, in the second century CE, the mummified bodies of Egyptian children were accompanied by lifelike painted portraits, and they were apparently used to assist the practice of communicating with the dead (Walker 2020). A much older Egyptian tradition involved stone statuettes that parents, seeking to protect their children, placed in the sanctuary of one of the gods concerned with child-rearing. The tradition was maintained by the ancient Greeks, especially in Cyprus, where children were depicted with special affection (Burn and Grossman 1984) In ancient Greece, children were painted on ceramic jars and on walls, created in mosaics, and chiseled in both low relief and free-standing stone sculpture (Neils and Oakley 2003). Most commonly, these representations helped to illustrate Greek myths involving children (Klein 1932). As Greek art developed an interest in observable nature, so the representation of children’s behavior and children’s morphology developed. A sixth-century BCE mother goddess suckling an infant is of indeterminable physiology (Papaioannou 1989), but during the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE), as indicated by Figure 7.19, children are well observed and frequently posed to suggest affection. The Greeks sought truth in the physical beauty of the human body, and much of their imagery delights in sensuous display. Since for some centuries, pederasty was an approved and commonplace activity, many depictions of children are erotic. Cupid, to whom many of the arguments for pederasty were addressed, was represented during the Hellenistic period as a naked, rather chubby, winged boy (Marconi 2018). Similarly, Dionysus, the noisy and rowdy god who attacked established order, is sometimes represented, perhaps not surprisingly given these attributes, also as a young boy. Children appear in illustrations of scenes from Greek theater as background accompaniments to the main narrative. More significantly, children appeared among many funerary sculptures and commemorative statues where, often with considerable poignancy, they are accompanied by a caring adult. Children are also used to illustrate everyday scenes, as participants in sacrificial ceremonies (Marconi 2018) and playing with balls, hoops, toys, and pet animals (Klein 1932). A child drags his feet while being led by a mother or nurse, an infant is carried away from a sickbed, a boy servant helps a horseman to mount, and a boy-jockey appears astride a horse (Neils and Oakley 2003). The motivation behind representations of childlike qualities may have been from sheer adult delight, or it may have been to show the qualities latent in adulthood and which adults surmount: thus, not to delight in children as such but to observe what traits, such as courage, modesty, and the like, tell about the children as adults to be (Cunningham 2020). Perhaps it was both.

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While closely observed, and numerous, these ancient Greek images of children usually appear to be types rather than portraits. It was the ancient Romans who took an interest in physical appearance to the point of representing individuals, including individual children. Rome was said to have been founded by two mythological twins whose fantastic childhoods captured the popular imagination of the ancient Romans. Abandoned at birth, Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf and grew up amidst a family of twelve children. Whether or not such an origin was influential on the interest ancient Romans took in picturing children, children frequently appear among the extant fragments of their imagery. They appear among both aristocratic and ordinary families, as real children, and, as illustrated by Figure 7.3, as mythological children. However, the most important influence on the picturing of children was a consequence of official policy. The first Emperor of Rome, Augustus, exploited imagery as political propaganda and in so doing set a precedent for his successors. Fearing a declining birth rate among the upper classes, Augustus encouraged the aristocracy to procreate. Family group portraiture consequently demonstrated the desired inclination of women to bear children, the joys of motherhood, and the unbreakable bonds of family life (Zanker 1990). This extended to mythological families, as illustrated in Figure 10.5. Emperors were also fond of associating themselves with divine figures so that, for example, Cupid, who occurs in great numbers, conveyed the message of the youthful fecundity of royal persons. In one example, the presence of Cupid was intended to indicate a conferring on Augustus of divine ancestry from the goddess Venus. His grandchildren, who were his preferred successors, even appear to have their faces on some images of Cupid. The Emperor Caracalla was even pictured as the god Hercules as an infant (Kleiner 1994). In addition to the numerous pictures of Cupid were the closely related putti. These were young, chubby, naked children, sometimes with wings, who, in great profusion, were frequently used as decorative motifs on relief sculpture. However, the most significant example of the use of children’s images as an articulation of official policy is found in the representation of real children. Figure 10.4 illustrates how among imperial family portraits, the inclusion of particular children helped to indicate the preferred succession of power. These children are invariably well observed, and despite their programmatic function, they are rendered with affection. They are shown variously as cradled by their mothers, holding hands with adults, riding on their father’s shoulders, and hugging the sleeves of adults to gain attention (Kleiner 1994; Marconi 2018; Tuck 2015). Almost invariably, children feature in family portraits, whether they be of royal, aristocratic, or ordinary wealthy families. Children always appear in crowd scenes, whether the crowds are of Roman citizens or, as the Romans were wont to represent, people from conquered regions. Roman generals were fond of commemorating the incidents of their lives on their funerary sculpture, and while the majority of sarcophagi illustrate their deeds in battle, some adopt a more inclusive biography and record domestic life, including their life with children. Yet perhaps the most striking examples of children as subjects for representation are the sculptures on the remaining sarcophagi of children that record significant details of their own brief lives as infant, toddler, and child. Children are swaddled, take a bath in the presence of their mother or nurse, ride in a wagon or chariot, take lessons, play with pets, wheel push toys; and even while serving their programmatic function, they are often rendered with affection (Kleiner 1994).

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Figure 1.2 Anonymous, Children Playing Ball Games. c. 2nd century CE. Louvre Museum

Medieval morphology and limited pictorial functions The demise of pagan antiquity and the rise of medieval Christianity saw a narrowing of the functions of pictures generally and a subsequent restriction on children as subject matter. There was also a turn back to abstraction. For medieval Christianity, the prime purpose of pictures was religious, and for a millennium the only child represented with any consistency was the infant Jesus. Rather than images being used for the variety of social functions they performed in ancient times and perform today, images were almost entirely confined to illustrating religious stories and the focus of devotion. Apart from the infant Jesus, the representation of children, once so common, seemed largely to have disappeared. Consequently, the medieval period was once thought to have had little time for children, and even that it lacked a concept of childhood (Aries 1960). Perhaps one reason for overlooking the children that were represented is that it is often difficult to discern during this period what was intended as a child and what was intended to be an adult. Early medieval representations still bear some childlike physical features, but they largely disappeared. Unlike the Greeks who sought truth through physical beauty, or the Romans who were interested in physical reality, medieval Christians sought truth not in the physical realities of everyday life but through spiritual discernment, for which an abstract style was required. Life on earth was believed merely to presage a heavenly life with God, and artists attempted to represent eternal truths rather than observations of external appearance. Like images from millennia before, children’s features became difficult to distinguish from the morphology of adults. Consider Figure 7.4 from the tenth century in which the babies appear like small sumo wrestlers. Perhaps their morphology is due to artists being so unpracticed in representing children that their

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attempts appear, at least to our eyes, so unconvincing. Children frequently appeared as manikins, as adults in everything but size, or as children in nothing but size. But abstraction does not indicate that children were not loved or appreciated for their own particular characteristics. This is a history of childhood as pictured and, no matter how much pictures show, pictures are not copies of reality; pictures and real life are different things. Medical texts of the time indicate that children occupied the minds of doctors, and church records make it equally clear that the problems and moral behavior of children troubled clerical minds (Shahar 1990). Indeed, medieval ideas about the innocence of children and the gentle ways in which they were often instructed stand in marked contrast to some later developments (Cunningham 2020), but a likeness, so valued in Hellenistic and Roman times and so important to Europeans later, was considered unimportant (Burn and Grossman 1984). Pictures were either didactic or devotional; either they illustrated religious narratives or they were icons for worship. Almost all adult figures were religious, and by far the most common images of a child were from nativity scenes or images of Mary and the infant Jesus. The latter typically show Jesus sitting or standing on his mother’s knee or, seemingly, just superimposed upon her. These devotional images were painted on walls, made from mosaic, cut into stone, and carved in wood and gilded with silver and gold (Snyder 1989). Often directly facing the viewer, and like Isis and Horus before them (Emery 1994), mother and child are strictly formal. Until the thirteenth century, they appear without any show of affection or even of a relationship between them (Martindale 1994). Mary sits on a throne that is often elaborately embellished with jewels and flanked by angels and saints who offer homage. Jesus appears as a fully grown mini-man with a serious face, and he frequently offers the sign of benediction as if he was an emperor or king making an official appearance. Since the kings and emperors of medieval Europe assumed Christ’s role as God’s representative on earth, like their Egyptian predecessors, these images supported the fusion of religious and temporal authority. The theological import of these images took precedence over any reference to children. Jesus is not meant to be an infant; he is intended to represent Divine Wisdom, God made flesh, and his mother, a throne for that Wisdom. The people of the Middle Ages would not have expected the son of the Madonna in Majesty to exhibit infant behavior. It may even have been distressing to a medieval viewer to have Him represented as a suckling, helpless infant (Forsyth 1976). Where artists deviated from biblical accounts, church authorities heavily criticized them, although this did not stop monks trying, since there were oral, non-canonical traditions that excited their medieval imaginations (Marindale 1994). These oral traditions found their way into illuminated manuscripts, a principal form of imagery during the earlier Middle Ages. The stories were passed down from mouth to mouth, being based on apocryphal literature that had circulated widely in the Christian communities of the first few centuries CE but were banned by the Church in the fourth century. The stories evidently lived on in popular imagination, filling in details absent from the sparse biblical accounts. Such was the popularity of these extra-biblical stories that, in the twelfth century, the Church eventually relented, and artists then freely drew on them, including those about Jesus as an infant and a child as well as the many tales about the childhoods of other biblical figures (Horton 1975). Jesus as a child is represented as making mischief, playing games with friends, and being beaten by both parents and teachers, though also, as in Figure 8.1, performing miracles. Children also tease the ass that Jesus sits on as he rides into Jerusalem, and children throw stones at him as he carries his cross (Forsyth 1976).

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Figure 1.3 Anonymous, Enthroned Virgin and Child, c. 1150–1200. Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most notable influence of the apocryphal tales on the officially approved pictures of Jesus was with the representation of the nativity. The details they offered quickly became pictorial canons, and they even inform representations today with regard to, for example, the inclusion of the ox and the ass (Martindale 1994). Some of the nativity scenes like Figure 1.4 will certainly be unfamiliar today. In an admission of human weakness, Mary lay exhausted after the birth, and sometimes she even ignores her newborn son. Sometimes she lies on a bed of grain as symbolic of fertility, thus harking back to the earliest extant images of mothers with a child. Jesus frequently appears tightly swaddled in a crib and overlooked by Joseph and animals. And often the infant is bathed by two midwives, and is naked and exceptionally small, both symbols of innocence, vulnerability, and the subject of wonder. Some medieval representations of children were only by analogy. From the fifth century CE, bodies of the dead were represented in a reduced scale, and in French medieval art, the soul was depicted as a little, naked, and usually genderless child (Aries 1960). A child is shown leaving a dead person’s mouth, indicating that the person had died and their soul was leaving their body. Pregnancies are also sometimes indicated by a soul in the form of a naked child flying through the air and entering the mother’s mouth. In Jesus’ case, an angel presents a naked child to the Virgin Mary and, by such means,

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Figure 1.4  Doccio di Buoninsegna, The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, c. 1308–11. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C

offers her Jesus’ soul. The difficulty faced by a modern observer is that these naked children, who represented souls, have some of the characteristic gestures of children but the proportions of adults (Forsyth 1976). During the second half of the twelfth century, the infant Jesus appeared far more frequently than before due to the influence of the Marian cult, in which for the next two centuries Mary threatened to eclipse the status of Jesus as the incarnation of God (Morgan 1991). It is noteworthy that with the very first images of a child noticeably common since antiquity, the adult was frequently perceived to be more important than the child.

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Figure 1.5  Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, Madonna and Child, c. 1230. Metropolitan Museum of Art

However, during the thirteenth century, the infant Jesus took on some childlike poses, stretching his arms out to his mother, sometimes stroking her face, and often looking toward her. Despite having the appearance of an adult, he sometimes even feeds from her breast (Marindale 1994). Mary, in turn, now appears conscious of his presence. She inclines her head toward him and sometimes gently touches his hands with her own. Even so, as with Figure 1.5, her gaze usually remains outwards to engage the viewer, and in her role as mediator, she effectively says: “Behold, the Christchild.” Though more lifelike than before—compare Figures 1.3 and 1.5—this remains a child who is the divine made incarnate. Yet their touching and caressing each other means that these images are no longer only a sign of divine providence but an icon of maternal care; there is now a union of spirituality with human qualities. Consider too the cult of the Christmas crib that emerged during the twelfth century. Christmas mass was often celebrated with a tableau of a crib, live animals, and real hay, and it was not unknown to include inside the crib a real child. In nativity scenes, Mary sometimes gazes blissfully down at her newborn infant and gently pulls back his swaddling bands to look at his childlike face (Morgan 1991). Pictures of the nativity became common, and they were increasingly informed by the apocryphal stories that were more and more accommodated by the Church. Pictures of Jesus being circumcised and the purported events on the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt were especially popular (Horton 1975). From these various images, there developed during the fourteenth century images of other religious families. With the aid of the apocryphal stories, the childhoods of St John and St James, and particularly

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Figure 1.6  van Meckenem, Birth of the Virgin, c. 1490s.

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Mary, became favorites. Mary’s birth, her education, her pastimes, and her dedication to the temple were each duly pictured (Horton 1975). Moses’s childhood, which parallels the then common practice of letting out children to a wet nurse, was also a popular subject (Schorsch 1979). Such scenes continued to be represented for centuries. Increasingly these religious children are shown in affectionate terms as well as with increasing realism. Childlike morphology developed rapidly in sculpture, more gradually and unevenly in painting but at least in southern Europe it was well established by the mid-fourteenth century. These two ­developments—realistic morphology and a show of affection—appear in general to be due to the slow but inexorable emergence of humanism with its emphasis on human rather than divine agency and activity (Marindale 1994). Although pictures of ordinary children remained exceptionally rare, with the emergence of the Renaissance, children became a common subject.

The sacred and secular of the Renaissance From the second half of the fourteenth century through to the sixteenth century, humanist ideas increasingly informed sensibility. Ancient Greek and Roman art and learning were rediscovered along with the assertion that, albeit under the grace of God, human beings controlled their own destiny and were free to pursue knowledge for themselves. In the visual arts, this was manifest in the urge once again to make images that were faithful to the material world. A picture was conceived as a window on the world, a mirror held up to nature, an imitation of nature, and not only of the most elevated aspects of nature but the mundane, the everyday (Gombrich 1995). The purposes for picturing expanded beyond the sacred to include the secular, a trend that is nowhere more apparent than in the representation of children. Children were pictured with ever more realism, and they appear in both religious images and a variety of secular contexts. By the time the Dutch artist Gerard David painted his Madonna and Child early in the sixteenth century, Jesus had developed both a child’s appearance and the behavior of a playful boy. He even has a tiny penis. From the religious iconography of family life, there also emerged images of lay families (Aries 1960). Children were pictured in realistic ways although, with few exceptions, without much affection. Children and parents alike are stiff and formal. Unsmiling, dressed as adults, they seem already burdened with their life to be – as Figure 1.8 indicates. Especially among the upper classes, families were not then altogether bound by ties of affection and personal loyalty, and family portraits reflect a principal function of such families, that of economic inheritance through bloodlines (Hirsch 1999). Children appear as family members on altarpieces, kneeling in order of size, to show reverence to their patron saint, but they neither show affection nor receive it. Figure 3.2 shows seven family members with an identical fixed expression and identically stiff postures. Again, this is not to suggest that these children were not cared for. As evidence of their importance, children appear in mortuary images as silent, solemn witnesses to the death of adults, though not yet on their own mortuary monuments. Many of the images of children served as pictorial allegories. There emerged, for example, illustrations to a genre called the Cycle of Life. Life was seen to ebb and flow yet continue; and with this in

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Figure 1.7  Gerard David, Virgin and Child, c. 1500–23 Metropolitan Museum of Art

mind it became common to represent the stages of life. The stages were variously reckoned to be three, four, seven, or twelve (Cunningham 2020). When the stages were reckoned to be seven, no fewer than four were assigned to prepubescent youth. They were called, and appropriately illustrated as such, the naked age, the swaddled age, the robed age, and the hobby-horse age; or alternatively, the cradle age, the walker age, the hobby-horse age, and the school age (Heywood 2018). A common pictorial interpretation of the stages of life was to arrange figures in a row on the steps of a pyramid that rose from birth to maturity and then went down to old age and death, but as with Figure 1.9, there were other arrangements. Figure 1.9 prefigures the development during the sixteenth century of whole family portraits. Grandparents, parents, and children of different ages were grouped together to symbolize the duration of life that, in turn, had a profound impact on the depiction of family life during the seventeenth century (Aries 1960). Cupid had survived the Middle Ages by becoming a clothed adult. He now shrank in size, was deprived of his clothes, and resumed his former appearance as a nude, winged figure who usually carried bows and arrows. He reappeared along with the associated putti, and together they filled the skies of numerous paintings, sacred and secular. As both heavenly and mischievous, even occasionally

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Figure 1.8  Alonso Sanchez Coello, King Sebastian of Portugal, 1562. Kunsthistorisches Museum

malevolent creatures, Cupid and putti were perfectly suited to variously symbolize spiritual love and human passion (Panofksy 1972). However, the most notable development during the Renaissance was the depiction of ordinary children. In devotional books, paintings, and tapestries, children were shown as an ordinary accompaniment to adult life. Children accompany their fathers picking grapes or supervising the corn harvest, though mostly they appear in busy crowded streets. Life then was not lived so much in the privacy of houses—houses being small and cramped—as in full public view. Commercial and professional activity was conducted in the street, as well as gossip, and as shown in Figure 4.1, entertainment and games. Children are breastfed, unselfconsciously expose themselves, and urinate through open doors. Sometimes they appear being circumcised while adults and older children mill around nearby to watch. Children play in the streets, wait on tables, snowball one another, heckle the preacher in church, are thrown out of church, and cut the purse strings off otherwise occupied housewives (Aries 1960). Children are represented as part of daily life and, in being closely observed, they are represented with the special and often annoying qualities of children. But, apart from Virgin and Child scenes, they are rarely shown with overt affection. The importance of children to their parents appears to have varied

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Figure 1.9  Bartholomeus Anglicus, Stages of Life, 1486.

greatly, powerful bonding on the one hand, but also dismissal, cryptically summarized by the comment introducing this chapter. Yet despite the latter sentiments, by the sixteenth century children had taken their place among the subjects commonly to be pictured. There were even rare individual portraits of very young children, such as Figure 2.3.

Seventeenth-century developments During the seventeenth century, major social changes occasioned a wholly new interest in children and, consequently, in picturing children in their own right. What had been rare became common. Just as in the early sixteenth century, images of lay families emerged from depictions of religious families, so in the seventeenth century individual children parted company from family portraits with parents and other siblings (Aries 1960). This new interest in children for themselves, not as part of a religious narrative or

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Figure 1.10  Peter Paul Rubens, Two Sleeping Children, 1612–13. National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

to capture a specific likeness of an aristocratic child, is evident in Figure 1.10, a painting of two sleeping children. It is not even possible to identify one child, and, as the title indicates, they are not identified; Rubens’ interest seems to have lain solely in their particular qualities as children. Children became one of the most popular subjects, attracting some of the most notable painters of the time that included, apart from Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyke, and Velazquez. This new interest was constitutive of significant new social developments. The working class continued to live life largely in the streets, but the growing middle classes increasingly lived inside houses that, compared to previous centuries, were much increased in size. This separation of public and private spheres encouraged an emphasis on domestic life, including children (Heywood 2018). The physical health of children came under scrutiny, and their education first emerged as an issue of public debate. Children were regarded as possessing souls, and the practice of naming children with the names of one or more deceased siblings was dropped. Naming a child became an important gesture, for it indicated that each child had a distinctive nature (Schorsch 1979). The different genders and ages of children were separated as a way to control sexuality. Puritans, in particular, saw their mission as disciplining children

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so that they would perpetuate God’s will as adults. Children reflected credit on their parents, but also they were a means of ensuring that their parents were not consigned to hell (Illick 1974). Children were “young vipers,” or “seeds of sin,” although in complete contradiction the Puritans also saw children as innocents, as “embryo-angels” (cited in Heywood 2018: 50). Children were either inherently wicked or purity itself. More secular voices argued that children were blank slates, owing little to nature and much to nurture. Children were prone to temper tantrums and all kinds of mischief, but their upbringing determined if they turned out good or evil. Secular and religious voices combined to advocate for a combination of education and punishment to ensure good outcomes. From the seventeenth century onward, children’s behavior, and adult behavior toward children, was subject to an increasingly pervasive regime of surveillance and regulation. For the first time, children were subject to rules which governed cohabitation, sleeping arrangements, and masturbation. The effect on children was twofold: it brought them a wholly new importance with benefits for their health and education, and it restricted their actions as never before (Cunningham 2020). The easygoing attitude toward children, which had previously seen them neglected but also allowed autonomy, was superseded by numerous rules and ever-watchful eyes (Foucault 1978). Pictures of children often seem to have combined the seemingly irreconcilable views of children as both inherently sinful and innocent. Many children are pictured with symbolic attributes of innocence, yet their postures are stiff and their faces unsmiling. They appear holding species of flowers long held to symbolize virtue. They also appear beside tamed animals and with birds on a string or in a cage. The birds symbolized life as a brief passage of time, and the string or cage a lack of freedom. Sometimes children appear with a lamb, or a dead goldfinch, as in Figure 4.4. Both were traditional symbols of the purity and eventual martyrdom of Jesus, the latter being held up to children as a sacrifice for which they should be ever grateful (Schorsch 1979). Life was a serious business, and adults and children alike almost invariably appear solemn. Children appear as harmless innocents, but their expressions suggest the effect of strict regulation intended to keep them that way. The increased interest of children in pictures is perhaps best illustrated by the emergence of portraits of dead children. While children had earlier appeared on their own funerary brasses, they were now represented in a way that implies the memory of deceased children lived on within the family circle. In Figure 1.11, the deceased child of these Puritan parents is partly naked. His mother points to him and so draws our attention to his importance to the family not only as a material unit but as a spiritual reality. The further reference to mortality made through the inclusion of the skulls underlines the brevity of life, while the other multi-generational figures continue the long tradition of employing children to suggest life’s continuity. Such funerary images of children marked a critical moment in the history of picturing feelings. Not since ancient times had parents sought to recall the appearance of a dead child. This cannot be attributed to a lowering of child mortality rates, for they were not to diminish significantly until the eighteenth century (Landers 1993). The appearance in pictures of deceased children seems due to their wholly new symbolic associations as an integral part of the new concept of family, not based on bloodlines but a spiritual communion under God.

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Figure 1.11  William Dobson, Family Portrait of Richard Streatfield, 1645. Yale Center for British Art

The seventeenth-century concern for children’s welfare, at least among the upper and middle classes, ensured that children became a subject worthy of being pictured. Though not yet pictured with any marked, outward show of affection, children were no longer just an accompaniment to a scene of everyday life. They were pictured in their own right. Under the influence of Puritanism and Protestantism more generally, the self-control exercised by adults was thrust upon their children. By breaking the will of children, parents sought to instill in children their own self-control. Children were to doubt their own abilities, repress their urges, and look to divine authority. Self-control and God’s guidance went hand in hand (Spring 2018). Such self-control led to a heightened sense of the individual which, in turn, was to have a profound influence on the picturing of children, commencing early in the eighteenth century and continuing to this day.

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Eighteenth-century sentiment By the close of the seventeenth century, children were to be found in religious images, in images drawn from classical times, in scenes of contemporary everyday life, and in both family portraiture and individual portraiture. Early in the eighteenth century, paintings of siblings were added to this catalog, and the finest artists of the day continued to be attracted to children as subject matter, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Hogarth. However, by far the most significant, indeed striking, development lay in the way children came to be represented. Children are shown with great affection. Ordinary young children of the eighteenth century are pictured with a degree of warmth and sentiment rarely expressed in antiquity, and among upper-class families such is the show of emotion that it is hard to imagine it being surpassed at any time. Compare the difference between 1.11 and 1.12, a period of just one century, for this significant shift in sensibility. These tendencies are constitutive in general of the Enlightenment’s stress on individuality, and specifically the influence of social reformers. Individualism related back to the breakup of the medieval

Figure 1.12  William Hogarth, The Graham Child, 1742–44. The National Gallery, London; Photographer: Sailko

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order and it fueled the Renaissance and the Reformation, but in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, individualism was developed into a new mode of scientific analysis and philosophical inquiry in which the individual was primary. Individuals were thought to have an initial and central existence, and laws and forms of society were conceived to be derived from them (Cunningham 2020). The idea of individual character was extended to children. Children, it was claimed, were as individual in character as adults, and not blank slates for society to write upon. Reformers, most notably the French philosopher Rousseau, preached that children’s so-called “natural” development should above all else be respected (Heywood 2018). For Rousseau, children were by nature good, neither inherently sinful nor empty vessels. They were born innocent and it was only the corrupting influence of society that played havoc with their original state of grace. To fulfill their promise, children needed to be encouraged by familial affection, not subject to rigid rules. In place of rote learning, reformers preached the virtues of children thinking for themselves. Nature should guide development, and social strictures should be minimized. Among the many items of advice offered to this end was the adoption of loose clothing for children and, as an encouragement of the maternal bond, mothers breastfeeding their own children. Both pieces of advice are readily apparent from paintings of upper-class children (Higonnet 1998). Aristocratic mothers make a display of freely suckling their chubby, healthy infants, as in Figure 2.6. Near-naked, heavenly children, putti without wings, clamber to embrace their blissfully joyful mothers who are totally given over to their children’s desires. Occasionally, as with Figure 1.13, real children were even represented as angels. As subjects in their own right, individual children became common, so much so that they became one of the chief topics of painting. Attired in loose-fitting clothes, children were set in outdoor, natural environments, and artists strove to effect what was most charming in their small subjects. The contrast with the lack of affection shown in family portraits a century earlier could not be more marked. However, images of happy children remained sites of a battle over the nature of childhood, especially in North America where the Puritan influence was strong (Schorsch 1979). Trust in children’s own development was opposed by those who continued to believe in strict discipline of both mind and body. Some parents trusted nature; others feared God. But it was the idea of childhood innocence that had the most influence on how children were pictured in both paint and the imagination.

Nineteenth-century Romanticism In the last decades of the eighteenth century, Anglo-European societies began undergoing an immense upheaval which rapidly increased during the nineteenth century and inaugurated what remain as many of the dynamics of contemporary societies throughout the developed world. The importance of the Industrial Revolution to thought and feeling in general, and to our modern fascination with childhood in particular, can hardly be overstated (Williams 1976). Our own contemporary investment in the symbolic meanings of childhood and its representations has its origins in a series of social changes at that time. It is indebted to the changes that separated an agrarian society from an industrial one and, effectively, separated the old world from the modern world.

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Images of Childhood

Figure 1.13 Joshua Reynolds, Heads of Angels—Miss Frances Gordon, 1786–87. Denver Art Museum; Source: Berger Collection

Childhood became a reference point for the divided modern consciousness between a mechanized, industrial, and mass society on the one hand, and human sensibility on the other. Society came to be driven by an evangelical individualism, and it was organized to exploit new technologies irrespective of the harm done to the great body of working people. The new factories of industry were notorious for their hideous work conditions, of which one common practice was to chain children for long hours to their places of work (Heywood 2018). In active opposition, the desire arose for calm, aestheticized spaces where what were now regarded as indisputably human qualities could still be cherished (Williams 1976). The middle class sought in childhood, as it sought in fine art, high culture, and the natural world, those finer feelings it believed it was denied by the driven impetus of a mechanized, industrialized, and mass society. Childhood was intended to express a human dimension that the dominant view of society seemed to exclude. The lack

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of freedom the public felt was denied it in the cities was located in the countryside. Similarly, the freedom which adults believed was denied them in an increasingly structured and legislated society was located in childhood. Just as they looked back with nostalgia to an earlier agrarian way of life, they located in childhood a place of freedom and innocence. Artists were kept busy supplying a seemingly insatiable market for idylls of rustic childhood innocence (Higonnet 1998). Children wander unsupervised along country lanes; they fish, watch ducks, pick flowers, examine bird nests, and fall peacefully asleep under the protection of large trees (Eisenman 2019). They play with one another and with furry animals, and they beguile adults with their charming ways. The cover image by Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir captures this well; a wide-eyed, smiling five-year-old, so white she might be shining. Figure 1.14 is an image of child labor but recast as a picturesque idyll. Bouguereau was not the highest-paid painter of the nineteenth century for nothing (Clay 1978). In contrast, there were also numerous images produced for an almost equally keen market for poor, even destitute, children. Such children were to be found in considerable numbers in all large cities, but they were pictured with the same sentimentality characteristic of the nineteenth-century approach to children. Homeless and bedraggled waifs are pictured in situations and with expressions that were carefully calculated to elicit a furtive tear. Pathetic little mites beg, limp on crutches, shelter from the cold, and huddle together to comfort one another (Eisenman 2019). For such children, the nineteenth-­ century middle class could enjoy the pleasant sensation of sympathy. Furthermore, children like those in Figure 1.15 were evidence of small-scale, can-do capitalism; their poverty did not need to trouble anyone. Some photographers like Jacob Ries and Lewis Hine—see Figures 7.15, 7.17 and 9.2—sought to document poor children as social victims, but they were the exception (Macieski 2015). In a society uneasy about itself—aware of income disparity and in fear of social conflict—it was easier to think of

Figure 1.14 WilliamAdolphe Bouguereau, The Nut Gatherers, 1882. Detroit Institute of Art

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Figure 1.15  Karl Witkowski, Shoe Shine Boys, 1889. Private Collection; Source: WordPress

childhood as a time of uncomplicated, happy innocence. It was as though the middle class held a double consciousness, aware of the disparity between their own lives and those of poor children but preferring to indulge the fantasy that childhood was a realm of sweetness and light. Childhood even acquired a visual style particular unto itself. In the long history of children in pictures, they had always been represented with styles used for other subject matter, but the children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway developed a style that was immediately associated with childhood. It included uniform lines, diluted colors, abbreviated facial features, bodies well hidden under clothes, and inert backdrops; in short, a naïve, simple, in a word—innocent—style (Higonnet 1998). Benefiting from the introduction of mass production printing, the style was quickly adopted for children’s picture books.

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Figure 1.16 Kate Greenaway, Little Miss Moffitt, 1900. Source: April Baby Book of Tunes

Mass production and photography Since childhood had come to be invested with such powerful symbolic meaning, it should not be surprising that images of children proliferated with mass production. Motherhood too was widely venerated as part of a woman’s domestic sphere of influence, and pictures of mothers with their children were widely reproduced. These were both religious, such as Madonna and Child images, and images of ordinary mothers with their children (Higonnet 1998). Equally important in the mushrooming of pictures of children was the introduction of photography. Photography was invented in 1839, and within 20 years photographing children had become an industry; indeed, it was the “bread and butter” of professional photographers (Gear 1987). The baby’s

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visit to the studio was an important part of the ritual of motherhood. Whether framed and displayed on the front parlor mantle, set into family albums and brought out for visitors, or produced as duplicates and sent to relatives, friends, and neighbors, baby photographs were established credentials of motherhood. But professional studio pictures were merely the tip of the iceberg. By the late nineteenth century, three social ingredients had fallen into place for a revolution in the picturing of children. Even today, they

Figure 1.17  Baldwin T. Stith, A.B.C. Guide to Photography, 1900.

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determine the selective nature of snapshots of children: the family as the primary focus of emotional investment, mass production, and consumerism. The revolution came in two successive waves, one quickly following the other. Kodak introduced the first roll film camera in the late 1880s, and in 1900 the first camera—the Brownie Box —that almost all families could afford. It was also very easy to use. For the first time in history, ordinary, visually untrained people could record their children’s visual appearance, and they did so immediately and in large numbers. From the start, Kodak’s advertising and promotion made domestic scenes the point of photography. This perfectly dovetailed with the middle classes, who were coming to regard the family as the linchpin of social life and the main source of moral values (Pasternak 2015). Around the turn of the twentieth century, the family was also undergoing a transformation into the principal unit of consumption. Families were beginning to enjoy the fruits of mass production in the clothes they wore, the vehicles they drove, and the variety of things they read. They had purchasing power as never before. Photography realized this new sense of obtaining happiness through consuming the products of mass production. And using a Brownie Box was as simple as ABC. Although many products attempted to offer happiness, only Kodak could do it in the form of a tangible record of happy times. Kodak used the symbolic investment in the family to sell a product that was designed specifically for the family as a unit of consumption (Rosenblum and Stoll 2019).

Twentieth-century proliferation During the twentieth century, new technologies, from Polaroid cameras to television, greatly assisted the reproduction of children in pictures. And in the 1930s, child stars dominated Hollywood. Printed media, newly enabled to cheaply reproduce photographs, and later in color, drew upon and reinforced an investment in the symbolic value of childhood. Children were represented as both avid consumers and influencers to sell all manner of goods and services At the same time, the social dynamics inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution that first occasioned the contemporary cult of childhood were joined in the second half of the twentieth century by a sense of disorientation that ensured a continuing investment in childhood. Indeed, the sense of dislocation associated with a postmodern society appears to have led to children becoming ever more significantly a repository for adult desires and fantasies (Holland 2004). A symbolic investment in the value of childhood generally, and childhood innocence in particular, appeared stronger than ever (Higonnet 1998). Highly aestheticized children appeared even as children were also portrayed as victims of domestic violence, war, and famine. To invest in childhood as innocence, again, required a double consciousness. The boundaries between childhood and adulthood appeared under threat from images of children’s precocious sexuality, children as the perpetrators of crime, and where time to be free and playful had been seriously eroded by the demands of a highly organized society. Some were even proclaiming the end of childhood, meaning the end of childhood innocence (Postman 1982). The twentieth century closed with images by fine art photographers questioning the long-repressed idea of children as sexual beings in the context of a new awareness of pedophilia (Higonnet 1998).

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Twenty-first-century digital saturation Today, images of children are ubiquitous, and it seems surprising that they have not always been so. With digital cameras, there is no longer any need to carefully calculate how many photographs to take (Larson and Sandbye 2013). Once the internet ceased to be a mere highway and became a highly interactive network, parents were able to share pictures of their children as never before and not only with their close relatives but all their social media friends. All the cost having already been expended on the necessary electronic equipment, parents need now only to snap and share (Rosenblum and Stoll 2019). And to the extent to which we increasingly live in a global world with a globalized consciousness with large numbers of diaspora, generational connectivity has become ever more important. Social media platforms enable grandparents in one continent to follow the intimate, daily activities of their small grandchildren living on another continent in high resolution and in real time. Our ways of life call for connectivity, and technology enables it, and none more so than through pictures of children. At the same time, easy access to the internet has only made the distinction between childhood and adulthood increasingly complicated. Sex and violence are among the most important factors with which the ideology of childhood innocence contends, yet we have an ever more violent (Stearns 2021) and sexualized (Paul 2005) media that is easily accessed by children The fact that for lengthy periods of Western history, children were underrepresented, or represented only as adults, or represented without apparent affection, indicates the extent to which contemporary views of childhood are historically determined and culturally specific. The wide variety of images of children today, and the numerous tensions between them, are the subjects of subsequent chapters.

Figure 1.18 Factory.com, Indian Grandfather Taking Selfie, 2021.

Chapter 2 Children as Family Members

“The child has been the locus of virtually every ideological regime founded on the rhetoric of the family.” (Bohlmann and Moreland 2015: 12) Children as family members are undoubtedly the most common images of children today. As a primary way to record, affirm, and reproduce the institution of the family, they are our principal form of memorabilia. Snapshots are presented in elaborate frames, displayed on mantelpieces, walls, and shelves in a kind of photographic “blitzkrieg” (Halle 1987: 222), a practice that has not diminished with digitalization (Rose 2013). They are downloaded, printed, sent to relatives, systematically placed into albums, or shared with the interested and uninterested alike on phones, tablets, and laptops. Pictures of children are among a family’s most prized possessions, usually the first thing to be rescued from the threat of fire and flood. Many household items can be replaced, but there is no substitute for a visual record of one’s own family life. Family pictures are a focus of profound emotions, of hope and regret, of love and sadness, of all the trials and joys of lives spent together. They are both deeply personal, and in reinforcing the family as the principal unit of the social structure, they are sociopolitical. The family is where children first learn their values and beliefs and acquire a sense of belonging. It is the basic unit of society and a critical agent of acculturation. As such, the concept of family is unproblematic. Problems arise, however, from some of its diverse configurations, and today the family is either constantly being defended or attacked (Cohen 2020). On the one hand, the traditional family, meaning the nuclear family, is defended against its perceived threats: namely, feminism, homosexuality, and commercialism. On the other hand, diverse forms of family, such as same-sex families, are celebrated, and traditional families are attacked for their patriarchy and limits on freedom. Consequently, pictures of children as family members are found in the crosshairs of such diverse views. The pictures play a critical role in determining what it means to constitute a family. Whether in capitalist or socialist societies, families are sanctified as central to the fabric of society, as incubators of individual freedom or, alternatively, the ideal unit of the collective.

Families are not all the same Today, what is generally meant by family is based primarily on emotional attachments, but in the past, families have been based primarily on spiritual connections and political alliances (Hirsch 1981). This is not to suggest that either spiritually or politically orientated families were without affection, only that in the past, the primary functions of families were quite different from those that are typical today.

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The term family was once applied to everyone who lived together under one roof, yet it is now believed that most families in England and Europe existed as nuclear (Heywood 2018). The common definition of the nuclear family consists of a married couple and their dependents who live together in one household, and it remains the definition against which all others are compared (Dobler 2019). These include single-parent, mixed, cross-generational, same-gender, grandparents as parents, and never married (Greydanus and Bashe 2005). And contrary to an earlier definition, and still today’s normative definition, it now includes members living in spatially diverse ways, that is, not necessarily under the same roof (Dobler 2019). Irrespective of how families are constructed, pictures of children as family members are subject to what Hirsch (1999) calls “the familial gaze.” These are “the conventions and ideologies of family through which they see themselves … the complex negotiations, however unspoken and unacknowledged, that constitute family pictures and family life” (xi). Pictures of families involve a struggle for control, of narrative, and of memory. The struggle is both personal and social. And it is now widely acknowledged that families can also be dysfunctional and abusive (Cohen 2020). Pictures of families are also not all the same. Some represent a nuclear family: father, mother, and children. Others are extended with multi-generations and with aunts and uncles. Others show only a single child or siblings, but even where parents or other relatives are absent, the presence of relatives can be felt, for it is usually a family member who has either taken the pictures or had them made. There are also many mother and child pictures or mother and children pictures, and though not as common, pictures of a father with a child or children. Family pictures can also be considered private or public, either created for and/or by family members to represent themselves to themselves, or to present an image to others as a form of public pedagogy. Some act in both the private and public spheres. While family pictures are prescriptive in that they offer a view of family life as an ideal and a model to follow, others can be descriptive in offering a more realistic view. Additionally, they can be proscriptive. Images of dysfunction show what family life should not be about. Prescriptive and proscriptive images are especially agenda-driven, in service to both individual families and the state.

Families as spiritual union During periods when the Church dominated societies, families were based on a spiritual union between members of the family and their Church and God. Hirsch (1981) describes such families “as a spiritual assembly … based on moral values” (15). For the full medieval millennium and beyond, the Catholic Church offered images of the Holy Family as analogous to the ideal relationship between the faithful and their own religious authority. Through God’s representatives on earth—priests, nuns, monks, or higher up the hierarchy—the laity were instructed on what to believe and how to behave. Images of the Holy Family had a crucial pedagogical role as visual signs of this spiritual union, between family members, and between the family as a unit and their Church.

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As noted in the previous chapter, for centuries the focus of the Madonna and Child was on their divine character, but by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had undergone a transformation. In place of the earlier medieval images of an otherworldly Queen of Heaven and a small, adult-like Christ, there emerged an image of the Madonna as a mother with a joyful, playful child. By the sixteenth century, the process of turning the picture of the infant Jesus into a real child was complete. In Figure 1.7 the baby Jesus caresses her, and in other images of the time he is shown seeking his mother’s breast, even playing traditional childhood games. These were mostly devotional images and, though now realistic in style, they were still laden with theological significance. Figure 1.7 shows Jesus with a tiny penis that is meant to show he was a real human being and not, as some proposed at the time, a purely spiritual being. Other Madonna and Child images contain symbols of Christianity crushing paganism and also of Jesus’ eventual fate. Even so, such symbolism was combined with a loving relationship in what appears to be what we would call a single-parent family. On the other hand, nativity scenes—they date from the fourth century—include Joseph and are representative of what today we would call a nuclear family. Most nativity scenes emphasize the adoration of the shepherds and/or the magi, and might be taken to suggest that a nuclear family is sustained only by a community. Some nativities, like Figure 6.2, show Mary and Joseph on their knees adoring their child, demonstrating how to regard Jesus while equally offering the Holy Family as a model to emulate. Like the Madonna and Child images, they are a form of public pedagogy. However, even when Joseph is present, he is usually sidelined, the focus being on the mother and child, and quite often he is absent, and this despite the presence of angels, patrons, and midwives (Sgarbi and McEwen 2014). He stands at the side, merely looking on, sometimes in shadow. Theologically, God, not Joseph, was the real father. Also, such nativity scenes would have allowed the male donor of the painting to imagine himself as the absent male figure. By the sixteenth century, not only was the baby Jesus portrayed like an actual child, nativity scenes were joined by pictures of Jesus’ circumcision and to illustrate a rest on the family’s flight into Egypt. Numerous scenes in the childhoods of other religious figures had also proliferated, including a whole host of saints, although most notably John the Baptist and Mary, as in Figure 1.6. In Michelangelo’s painting, partly named after its patron, the Christ child is lovingly passed from one parent to the other. It is an intimate, domestic scene, one that was appropriate to celebrate the donor’s own marriage and the birth of his first child. Unlike most images of the Holy Family where Joseph is visually sidelined or absent altogether, here he is positioned above his wife, and she sits between his legs, enveloping her as if he is her protector. Instead of a theological statement, it is more a gentle familial moment, and with each of their bodies twisting in response to each other, folding one into the other, the composition reinforces a strong sense of family unity. In family portraits, members invariably overlap one another to create a unified entity, but rarely are family members so intertwined as here. Many nativity pictures show the infant Jesus being bathed, much like Figure 1.6 of the Virgin being bathed. Some pictures also show him at the Virgin’s breast, but there appears to be no image of him having the equivalent of a diaper change. While painters were keen to follow the Church’s theology that he was a real human and not merely a spirit, thus including his genitals and in some cases even drawing attention to them, to show this crucial aspect of bringing up a child was a step too far.

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Figure 2.1  Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Holy Family, known as the “Doni Tondo,” 1506. Uffizi Gallery

For both Catholics and Protestants, families were a microcosm of the social fabric and the linchpin of social stability. Otherwise, Protestants did things differently. Rejecting the authority of the established Church, yet initially unable to supply sufficient pastors to serve their congregations, authority was invested in the head of the household, namely fathers (Cunningham 2020). Family order was viewed as being derived from the divine Christian order, and the son having been obedient to the father, so family members were to be obedient to the father’s interpretation of how to live in accordance with God’s will. The spiritual union between the family and the Catholic Church as God’s representative on earth was replaced by a spiritual union between family members and the head of the household as God’s stand-in on earth. The father was “the epitome of the whole gospel” (cited in Schorsch 1979: 53), and as such, he was in charge of the souls of his family. Protestant fathers could view nativity scenes with either a sidelined or absent Joseph and imagine themselves as the father figure, for they had indeed become God’s avatar. This model of authority and the obedience demanded was most

Children as Family Members 39

explicitly practiced by Evangelical and Puritan families who introduced numerous dictates to keep children on the straight and narrow. Since death frequently snatched children away, parents lived in fear that unless their children were brought up to fear God, they would not later see them in heaven. The effect on children was profound. During the medieval millennium, children’s lives were rather untroubled by rules; they appear largely to have brought up themselves. Now they were subject to innumerable rules. It is not surprising then that family portraits of Evangelical and Puritan families tend to be somber affairs. In Figure 1.11, a portrait of a Puritan family, members are dressed in black, their faces are unsmiling, their gestures restrained, and references to mortality are explicit, but their sobriety echoes family portraits of the time. Figure 2.2 is also a picture of an evangelical family, though from a century earlier. Here, the emphasis is on the father, as God’s representation, in relation to the rest of the family. Although one child holds a toy and is smiling, everyone else whose face can be seen is serious. The father is in command while his wife dutifully pays attention and one child reads along. The role of the father as educator is clear from his separation from the other members as he counts on his fingers, as the accompanying text indicates, on “the whole psalms in four parts.” Believing in a judgmental God

Figure 2.2 Anonymous, An English Puritan Family, 1563.

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who saw every sinful deed and knew of every sinful thought, parental governance was, like God himself, omnipresent and omnipotent. Significant also is that while they are well dressed, apart from the father, their clothes are plain, and their parlor is entirely devoid of adornment.

Families as bonds of ancestry and property In contrast to families as a spiritual assembly, many family portraits represent “the family as a state whose ties are rooted in property” (Hirsch 1981: 15). These are families bound together through ties of ancestry, economic necessity, and social status. The connection is not spiritual; the connection is a matter of bloodlines. Unlike Puritan families, they have never been afraid to show off their wealth and privilege. Indeed, their display of wealth was an offering of proof of their socioeconomic and political legitimacy. The portraits of royal and aristocratic families were an exercise, at least in part, of indicating to anyone who might doubt, the intended line of succession. As discussed in other chapters, Figure 10.4 shows who Emperor Augustus intended as his successor, Figures 10.1 and 10.2 show who was meant to inherit the crown of England, and Figure 3.2 indicates who is to inherit land and other property. These are family portraits in which the body language of family members and their physical placement in relation to one another are both carefully contrived to convey the preferred lineage. The powerful Medici family in Renaissance Italy were among the first to use another strategy, that of having their children painted from an early age. They even commissioned a painting of a baby still wearing swaddling clothes. With an ethos of family loyalty trumping all other social obligations, and always in fierce competition with other powerful families, the Medici were deeply concerned to project an image that justified their legitimacy (Hollingsworth 2020). Figure 2.3 shows young Giovani de Medici as a young boy, though he was also painted much younger, even as an infant. He was also painted with his mother, who shows off her elaborate dress. The wet-nurses who fed the infant and the servants who looked after the child are not shown. During the fifteenth through to the seventeenth century, royal and aristocratic children are shown little affection by their parents. Nor do the children appear to be enjoying themselves. Family portraits were painted with the stiff formality that characterized the marriage contracts of the time, bonds of ancestry, not ones of love. The family often appears on one side of these paintings, allowing the other side to show a building, cultivated gardens, and livestock; in short, what the parents own. They are a demonstration of status. They make a claim of their right to property in which the children are the rightful heirs. In Figure 2.4, is the father pointing to his house, his servant in the midground, or to his wife and children? Each is his property. He stands with his own father, from whom he has inherited. Both are wearing brown clothes, which is balanced on the other side of the picture by the eldest child, who will inherit after his father, and who is also dressed in brown clothes. The mother and small children, who will not inherit, are distinguished from the patriarchal line by wearing white and pale blue. To help ensure that there can be no doubt as to the preferred lineage, in this painting the lineage is color-coded. The grandfather appears to have a slight smile; perhaps he is content in the knowledge that the line of succession appears assured. But no one else is smiling.

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Figure 2.3  Angelo Bronzini, Don Giovanni de Medici, c.1551. Museo Nacional de Prado; Photographer: Sailko

Families as bonds of affection Bonds of ancestry continued to inform upper-class families, but during the eighteenth century major social changes took place which led, eventually, to our modern conception of the family and childhood. The idea emerged of the family as a group of people living together and owing loyalty and affection to one another, neither to ancestry and kin nor to Church and God. Hirsch (1981) refers to this conception as “the family as a bond of feeling which stems from instinct and passion” (15). The family was conceived as a unit concerned with privacy, affection, and personal freedom. From the latter part of the eighteenth century, genuine tenderness is apparent when children are pictured as members of a family. During the nineteenth century, pictures of parents playing with their children, and of children playing by themselves, became common. Each is filled with the warmth of childhood as we commonly think of childhood today.

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Figure 2.4  Arthur Devis, Robert Gwillym of Atherton and His Family, 1745–47. Yale Center for British Art

In Figure 2.5, the father is placed center stage, though he also draws our attention because he is the only figure who is not forward-facing. Instead, he gently rests his hands on his youngest child, a gesture that reflects a then new-found valuing of human sentiment. Feelings were highly prized even among men and here specifically in relation to a child. It is almost as though the father’s features are less important than the assertion of his own tender emotions. But the mother is at least equally important, for she engages us with a mutual gaze and effectively says, “Behold my family.” Fathers dominated the public sphere, but mothers were in charge of the domestic sphere. Finding that their power was limited to household and family matters, mothers turned to their children as their daily, even hourly, preoccupation, as well as their future legacy. The importance placed on mothers only increased during the nineteenth century, when the sanctification of children was matched only by the sanctification of motherhood. Like the conception of childhood as a special state of being, motherhood was set apart as a special spiritual calling (Cunningham 2020). In most family portraits, family members were overlapped to create the appearance of unity. Family members typically face forward, although to create variety some commonly turn to one or other side. Another approach was the “conversational portrait” which involved a tableau in which, though

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Figure 2.5  Nathaniel DanceHolland, The Pybus Family, c. 1769. National Gallery of Victoria)

motionless, family members acted out as if on a stage. In Figure 2.6, a number of actions are taking place simultaneously, although everyone is quietly pleased with themselves. One child is playing cards; another, the piano. Both were signs of the common moral lesson at the time that it was important to keep children busy. But center stage is reserved for the mother. Rather than putting the baby out to a wet nurse as had been previously common, she is following Rousseau’s advice in breastfeeding the baby. What better way to highlight the extent to which families were now conceived as ones of affection as well as the central place taken by mothers to initiate and maintain these attachments (Schorsch 1979)? Note also the number of family portraits included within the picture; it is quite unlike Figure 2.2 in covering the walls with beloved family members. The emerging middle classes were keen to have their likenesses made. However, numerous family portraits, like Figure 2.7, testify that many middle-class families enjoyed enough wherewithal to employ a painter but insufficient wherewithal to employ a good one. Consider how the children’s faces, though all very similar, are blank; how their clothes fail to suggest bodies underneath; and how the postures of the two outer children mirror each other in their awkwardness, in particular how their heads are angled at variance with their bodies.

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Figure 2.6 Anonymous, Gabriel Joseph de Froment and his wife Princess Hermine Aline Dorothée de Rohan with their family, 1825. Private Collection

The invention of photography could not have come at a better time. There was a huge pent-up demand for something both more lifelike and more elegant than most painters could offer. Family photographic portraiture was immediately and overwhelmingly popular (Rosenblum and Stoll 2019). Figure 2.8 is a typical studio photograph where the family is arranged as they had been for a painting, that is, overlapping to form a coherent unit. Many of these studio pictures employ painted backdrops and props with classical references for their cultural status. However humble, families were dressed in their Sunday best. But exposure times were initially lengthy so that no one could maintain a smile for the five to ten minutes an exposure could take. Thus the new technology enhanced lifelikeness, but also, at least, initially, it prevented the signs of liveliness that had come to characterize paintings of genteel families bound by affection. In the colonies, photographs were frequently sent back to the motherland. It was a precursor to today’s global sharing of photographs with relatives (Wills 1988). The family would be posed in front of their house as proof that they were successful, though often the house was not their own, or the background was only a façade behind which their rustic hut stood. The point was to demonstrate that, just as their family was growing, they were prospering.

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Figure 2.7 Anonymous, Five Children of the Budd Family, 1818. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Deceased children The importance of children to families bound by affection was also demonstrated by the extensive industry of photographing deceased children. Since the fifteenth century, deceased children had been portrayed among their surviving siblings with their eyes open as if alive though smaller, paler, often gray, and sometimes loosely robed. Sometimes they are naked to suggest purity, and sometimes they hold a cross or skull to signify mortality. While undoubtedly motivated by a desire to keep beloved family members alive, like Figure 1.11, they also acted as a memento mori, a reminder to the living of their own mortal state and the wages of sin. By contrast, nineteenth-century mortuary photographs of children were more likely to act as reminders of the dead child’s physical appearance and to demonstrate how parents had cared for the child in death as well as in life. With the invention of photography, the middle classes and even some poor families could afford pictures of their children to be taken by professional photographers (Rosenblum and Stoll 2019). Photography was then lauded for its alleged absolute faithfulness to nature, but with postmortem photographs, photographers eschewed realism for an aestheticized approach (Linkman 2011). A soft focus bathed deceased children in a gentle light, and lying on a bed of soft pillows, dressed in

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Figure 2.8  Southworth and Hawes, Unknown Family. c. 19th century.

lacey clothes, they were most commonly posed as having merely fallen asleep. Death-as-sleep was a sweetener “to dress and serve the dish that was death” (21). For the bereaved, death-as-sleep offered comfort. Sleep was familiar; it took place within the safe confines of home and family, and it was associated with a welcome respite from the cares of the world. As with Figure 2.9, most postmortem death-as-sleep photographs showed only the hands and head, with the body lying on one side so that the face was clearly identifiable but posed, as one reviewer wrote in 1858 with “the serene and happy look of childhood” (cited: 24). Bereaved parents could regard their dead children as angels who would watch over them on earth and, later, welcome them to heaven. In Figure 2.9, the pain of family members is invisible. In other photographs where mothers hold their babies in their arms, there is a more explicit expression of grief at loss. In some images, mothers look at their child in their arms; in others, they stare at the camera. Both seem to invite viewers to share in their grief (Summersgill 2015). In still other examples, children lie on a bed, but their eyes have either been propped open or painted on the negative so that they appear to be alive. Unfortunately, the effect is often ghastly. The children are abject in that they appear neither dead nor alive. Initially, postmortem photographs were made by professionals, but with the introduction in 1888 of the first Kodak roll film camera, family members began taking their own. The era of amateur photography began.

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Figure 2.9  Carl Durheim, Postmortem of a Child, c. 19th century. Getty Foundation

Kodak kids The advent of a series of inexpensive and simple-to-use cameras proved as significant as the invention of photography itself (Rosenblum and Stoll 2019). In Australia, for example, in 1895, only two months after the introduction of the Kodak pocket camera, more than 3000 had been sold. This is a staggering number since about the same number of professional photographers had practiced in Australia in all of the previous 50 years (Wills 1988). The initial success of Kodak lay in several factors that, even today, determine the selective nature of snapshot photography, especially of children. What Kodak’s advertising and promotion did was to make domestic scenes the dominant function of amateur image-making. Mass photography began when the middle classes were already regarding the family as the linchpin of social life and the main source of moral values. But around the turn of the century, the family was also undergoing a transformation into the principal unit of consumption of economic goods and services. Families were beginning to enjoy the fruits of mass production: in the clothes they wore, the vehicles they drove, and the variety of things they read. They had purchasing power as never before. As both a consumer item and a technology, photography fitted in well with this new sense of obtaining happiness through consuming the products of mass production in a mechanized society. Kodak realized that the greatest market was not people interested in photography per se, but amateurs who wanted to take photographs without any fuss. Very simple cameras were required, ones that eliminated almost all the choices available to the professional photographer. In the hands of an amateur, these very choices would often mean failure. As a consequence, Kodak cameras were designed to be simple and reliable. Photographs had to turn out with the minimum of photographic skill.

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This was achieved by using a fixed focus, single aperture lens with a wide angle and a considerable depth-of-field, the latter being the area in which subjects are in focus. As one writer proclaimed, “With a depth-of-field of five feet to infinity, the subject will be there somewhere in the frame, and very probably in focus, as long as you stand back a bit” (Slater 1991: 52). What was gained in simplicity and reliability, however, meant that photographic options were severely limited, and the restrictions placed upon snap-shooting roll film photography became the conventions by which it is instantly recognizable. You could photograph only under certain conditions, such as out of doors, in good light, and from at least a meter and a half away. Adding to these restrictions, amateur photographers at the time often chose to position their subjects in the middle distance, capturing their subjects with a loose full frame so that facial features were less than optimal. Figure 2.10 manages to capture its subjects in the foreground, but otherwise, it is typical in that rather than a carefully constructed composition as a painter would have used, it has captured a stranded moment. There is also a lack of the idealization that was normally employed by painters. Where painters would gloss imperfections, the camera was unforgiving. The whole shot is slightly at an angle, the edges are accidental, the eldest child is distracted by something out of frame, and the youngest has been caught with an idiotic expression. From the beginning, Kodak aimed its publicity at the family in its happier moments. Leisure was something new for the middle classes. Family holidays were made possible by cheap rail fares and cheaper hotels. The value of recording such good fortune was highlighted by Kodak advertisements asserting that a holiday without a Kodak was a wasted holiday. An early advertisement read: “The Kodak holiday will last forever … not one moment of your holiday can escape for the Kodak remembers everything you want to remember down to the last detail” (cited in Willis 1988: 128).

Figure 2.10 Anonymous, Photograph of C. E. Proctor and Family, 1940. National Archives and Records Administration

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Kodak was in effect attempting to sell people their own happiness. Happiness had become a commodity to be purchased with a Kodak camera. Many products attempted to offer this, but only Kodak could offer happiness in the form of a tangible record of happy times. This even took the form of a Happy Moment Contest. Judges declared that “the simple little snapshot that is bubbling over with natural merriment is preferred to the photograph that had been carefully posed and arranged,” and prizes were given for “natural, hearty, spontaneous, unrestrained happiness” (128). As Figure 1.17 indicates, women were especially encouraged to participate. While women were not expected to be technically proficient, photography was a way to maintain domestic life as their power base. During World War I, the idea of photographing the family at home was promoted as part of the war effort. Families were encouraged to send pictures of themselves to their fighting men. The YMCA emphasized that such pictures would remind soldiers of their homes, and claimed that family photographs would help keep a man “clean and decent amidst the temptations of camp life” (cited in Wills 1988: 131). Readers were assured that the photographs would “reach his heart more quickly than anything else in the world. It will make him feel what he is fighting for” (131). Thus Kodak employed the ideological associations of the family to sell its product, one that was designed specifically for the family as a unit of consumption. The central role of the family in social life was thus strengthened and perpetuated (Rosenblum and Stoll 2019).

Happy snaps and power From the start, parents frequently coached their children into the right kind of photographic behavior. Eager to capture their child’s first attempt at crawling or walking, parents still do. Typically, they direct their children to produce smiles suitable for the family album, website, or social media. On their side of the camera, children must learn to present themselves not just as an image but as a preferred image. They must learn to reproduce in themselves the qualities that parents and relatives find so charming. They learn to exhibit themselves, knowing that failure to learn, or open refusal to cooperate, invites parental displeasure and their own unhappiness. Consider Figure 3.4. The girl is smiling sweetly, aware of the camera and the photographer’s intention, as well as her own desire to conform; after all, she is a fairy princess. Like all photographs, it has captured just a single moment in time. Only moments before, she may have been far less accommodating, and moments later, she may have thrown a tantrum. Consider that, in looking at pictures of ourselves, we may find that there appears to be a disjunction between the person we remember ourselves to have been and the evidence of the photographs. In a series of articles called “The Child I Never Was,” Kuhn (1991) examined a photograph of herself as a smiling 6-year-old seated in a fireside chair with a bird in her hand. As an adult, she could neither recall the situation nor believe that the photograph was representative of her childhood. Faced with the undeniable evidence of the photograph, however, she was left to speculate on the degree to which she had colluded with her father in contriving the image. Similarly, Watney (1991), as a middle-aged man, looked back at his early photographs and found no evidence there of the ugly or fat child that he had always imagined himself to have been. He had thought of himself as fat and ugly because he had thought of himself as “bad”—bad because, even as a child, he knew himself to be homosexual. Looking at the

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photographs as an adult, he could only wonder at his desire to please his parents by presenting himself to the camera as a so-called normal, healthy, and happy child. He concluded that family snaps should not be trusted. By offering a singular view of their children, parents dominate the image of their children’s childhood. As Rose (2013) notes, it is usually mothers who select what pictures are displayed, and what they select mothers typically regard as revealing their child’s true or real nature. Laying claim to knowledge of their children’s essential self, mothers lay claim to special insight. To assert that a photograph captures their children as they really are, is to assert the subjectivity of mothers over any trace of their children. And while diaper changing and toilet training is an important aspect of parenting, images of these activities are practically non-existent. As in earlier times, the abject aspects of children are censored. When asked to be photographed, children freeze for a moment—we all do—so that what is captured is never part of ordinary, ongoing life. It is always a pose. Such self-imposed immobility by children in front of the camera anticipates the frozen image they will become. But the momentary freeze may not always be to assist the photographer; it can also be to protect children from the photographic gaze. Children, as much as adults, can separate themselves from their semblance, or as Lacan wrote, “that paper tiger … [a child] shows to the other … a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown off skin” (cited in Owens 1992: 212). Children can detach themselves from themselves to become a picture, a façade, by offering themselves up with what they need for being on their guard.

Digitally networked families Most of the characteristics of film and print photography of children described above apply to digital, networked imagery of families, largely because in terms of both subject matter and their purpose, they remain the same (Rose 2013). Family photographs are now housed in digital folders, but also they still proliferate on desks, mantel pieces, and walls. With the provision of home printers, they are as common as ever. And with readily available software, children are now printed out not only for frames and albums but on calendars, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and mouse pads. But digital technologies are also enabling new practices. Paintings of the past took time to be produced. With analog photography, there was also a time lag between taking photographs and having them processed. This meant that the activity of having a portrait painted or taking a roll film photograph was directed toward a future viewership. The pictures confirmed what had been; they embalmed time. By contrast, digital photographs taken with cell phones are viewed immediately. Due to the cost involved in roll film and its processing, people were parsimonious about the number of photographs they would take, whereas with digital photography, all the costs involved are already expended, and people click away with abandon. The immediacy and frequency with which digital photographs are taken means that instead of viewing, the emphasis has shifted to the taking of photographs, a major reversal of all previous practice. This is especially the case with parents who frequently photo blog. Where there is no additional cost involved and no time lag, the blog becomes just a place for the photographs to go (Lister 2013). Now, instead of mementos of time past, photographs are taken in such numbers and shared so frequently that they are better considered moments rather than mementos (Larson and Sandbye 2013).

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They are also shared globally. Via social media, they are shared well beyond relatives and friends to anyone with whom internet algorithms connect to a user. As Figures 2.5 and 2.6 indicate, family portraiture was a way for mothers to demonstrate their power within the domestic sphere by being pictured center stage. Now mothers exercise their power not necessarily by appearing in the photographs but by constantly taking photographs of their children and social networking them. Figure 2.11 captures yet another development, the shift from mothers to a more equitable load in responsibility for the upbringing of children. Figure 2.11 also epitomizes the informal, playful character of selfies (Urban 2020). Selfies are so ubiquitous that, again, there is usually little attention paid to composition other than capturing the primary subjects. Unless using a selfie stick, the wide-angle lens on cell phones ensures that faces are ever so slightly distorted and the near impossibility of arranging an ordered background. The point is to snap a moment and post it. Figure 2.11 could well be titled, “Hello Grandad, Hello Grandma.” It is a far cry from the formality of fathers with their children of Victorian times, let alone with their daughters. Whereas in the past, the only pictures of a father with a child were likely to be with their son as a sign of family inheritance, digitally networked snaps include a good-natured, lighthearted familiarity that few outside the family ever saw before. In other respects, the technology has not changed family snaps; it has only made them easier to take, store, and share (Rose 2013).

Figure 2.11 Anonymous, Father and Daughter, 2021.

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Public families as pedagogy Most of the images above offer an insider’s view of children as family members, where the interest lies in specific children for other family members, but children as family members are also made primarily for public consumption and where the interest is more in children as types than individuals and where the focus is as much if not more on the parents than the children. Celebrity families are a staple of women’s magazines. Royal mothers, movie star mothers, and rock star mothers photographed with their newborns do not show the changing of dirty diapers or toddler temper tantrums—often there are nannies for these baby downsides—but the pictures make them relatable to their viewers. Each presents the family smiling for the camera, or their children happy at play. This is no different from ordinary, in-house snapshots, but here the agenda extends beyond bolstering a positive view for the family’s own consumption or presenting a picture of good parenting to grandparents. Professional photographers are welcomed into the luxury homes of celebrities to capture images of family life that have the effect of humanizing them through their children. In this respect, they function like childhood images of the Medici, who used their paintings of their children not only as records for themselves but as relatable images for a fickle public ready to tear them down. And like the public images of the Holy Family, the photographs act as public pedagogy. An even more influential source of public families has been television’s fictional families. Family situation comedies have been a staple of US television since the 1950s. Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver from this period are discussed in Chapter 10 as presenting an ideal of US family life. Both programs were grounded in patriarchic, nuclear, white, and middle-class families as normative. The children may have been prone to misunderstanding or even to being deliberately mischievous, but every episode ended with the children being instructed about good behavior. The programs were lessons in the family as genteel with the children as conforming. These early programs set the pattern for decades, though over time family sitcoms did address different kinds of families. The iconic TV sitcom The Brady Bunch (1969–74) featured a blended family of three boys and three girls who, in the first season, worked to ensure their parents stayed together by behaving especially well. Episodes dealt with sibling rivalry, puppy love, character building, and learning to take responsivity. The thrust was entirely pro-social. Whatever issues were raised, the overall sweet tone was captured by the opening song lyrics: “This is a story of a lovely lady bringing up three very lovely girls, each had hair of gold like their mother, the youngest in curls.” In the 1980s, sitcoms began addressing working mothers juggling between work and family. Frequently presented in idealistic ways—because they often had nannies to do the hard work—they reassured viewers that the children remained alright. Commonly aired in the first hour of prime time when parents and children would be watching together, the programs continued to offer templates for family organization and behavior. They often retained the heart-to-heart chat between children and parents of earlier family sitcoms in which the children learned a moral lesson. While not every episode concluded so didactically, the issue raised in an episode was invariably resolved by the end (Leppert 2019). Parents learned how to parent, and children learned what was expected of them. Times have changed. In the BBC Outnumbered (2008–16) the beleaguered parents were frequently at the mercy of their three offspring, two children and a teen. The girl had a talent for interrogating, was

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highly critical of most things, and imitated a lot of what she saw on television; the boy was a hyperactive, pathological liar and did disturbing things. The parents were often at their wit’s end and lost battle after battle. In one episode, the father was unable to wrest a power drill from his son and, in the end, was forced to hand over money in exchange. In other episodes, the girl outwitted her parents with endless negotiations over what she would eat. Although Outnumbered was often a study in parental incompetence, it showed parents attempting to raise their children with the least amount of emotional damage. Critically praised for its realistic representation of modern family life, even capturing its dull moments, it managed to be realistic without offering a negative or dysfunctional picture.

Dysfunctional families as pedagogy In contrast to all the prescriptive images of family life that model how families are meant to be, and rare examples such as Outnumbered that attempt to represent family life descriptively, images of dysfunctional families act as models of how families should not be. The seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Steen specialized in families where ideal social norms were turned on their heads. Unlike most portraits of families of the time who wear somber expressions, his family members are smiling, laughing, enjoying the moment. They are also drinking to excess, adults and children alike. In Figure 2.12, the father is singing loudly, the mother immodestly shows cleavage, and an older child offers alcohol to a younger child. The floor is messy with an upturned plate, upturned bottles, broken eggshells, and a frying pan. This is the antithesis of a house-proud family on their best behavior. Moreover, this is an ungodly family. For millennia, mothers had overseen their children’s moral education; their fathers, thereafter. But this is not a mother to instruct on moral behavior, or the father, especially since in Protestant Holland, fathers had taken over the role formerly assigned to priests as God’s representatives on earth. For sober, solemn Protestants, this family was an affront. Just in case anyone missed the point, Steen drove it home. Above the group of children playing instruments, a piece of paper reads, “As the old sing, so pipe the young.” The message was clear: if parents behave badly, so will the children. By contrast, it is doubtful that a moral agenda lies behind either The Simpsons or Family Guy, both long-running TV programs that follow the situation comedy format. Nevertheless, although framed as humor, they offer proscriptive models of family life. If regular sitcoms that feature real actors have tended toward being pro-social, cartoon family sitcoms have stretched wide the envelope of normative behavior to include the dysfunctional. Billed as satires on life in the United States, conservative politicians and religious groups have condemned both programs as celebrating bad behavior, not condemning it. Homer Simpson is a buffoon, devoted to his stomach, quick to anger, lazy, ignorant about most things, and addicted to beer. With his explosive temper, Homer frequently strangles his 10-year-old son Bart. For his part, Bart is a prankster, a troublemaker, a bad influence on his best friend, and like his father, a proud underachiever, especially about his education. He is egotistical, mean-spirited, and angry. His relationship with his father is challenging. Both Homer and Bart have long been accused of being bad role models, and T-shirts bearing their image have been banned from schools (Riess and Klicksten 2018).

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Figure 2.12  Jan Steen, The Merry Family, 1668. Rijksmuseum

Dysfunction is taken further in Family Guy. The father is a bumbling no-hoper, and the mother is a recovering meth addict and kleptomaniac. Though often the voice of reason, she also indulges in sadomasochism, variously suffers from bulimia and obesity, has affairs, and plots to kill her son Stewie. Stewie, a diabolical evil toddler, plots for world domination, invents machines to destroy things he does not like and frequently plots to kill his mother. Framed as a humorous, surreal fantasy, Family Guy opens the dark closet of what family life can be like. Its various forms of abuse, including filicide, are described in later chapters on children as victims and threats. Apart from deliberately representing dysfunction, the rule for representing children as family members is that they are part of a rock-solid unity. Dysfunction is the exception, and each of the examples of dysfunction above is a commentary on family life, not self-presentation. The rule for self-presentation has always been, and remains, images of health, stability, and respectability.

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Controlling the image The majority of images of family life are pro-social; they offer prescriptions of what life with children is supposed to be about. This applies whether the images are primarily private or public, and whether families are based principally on spiritual connections, bloodlines, or affection. Other images are descriptive, and yet others are proscriptive in that they offer models of family life best to avoid. Far from being ideologically neutral, pictures of children as family members emerge as highly ­agenda-driven, as much in the domestic as in the public arena. They support the family as well as the state; or, better said, they support the state through the family. Irrespective of other social categories of class, gender, race, or those specific to families like sibling position, parents ensure that they present themselves and their offspring in an entirely good light. Even for families that in the past were based on ancestral lines or spiritual connections rather than affection, it was important to present a united front set against all other social connections. None of the smiles of the children can be entirely trusted, but neither can somber facial expressions be read as an indication of the lives they led or lead today. In some cases, the technology has biased representation in a particular direction but always social expectations of what a family is meant to be have determined how parents controlled the image of their families. With the representation of children as family members, children’s caretakers are and always have been also their gatekeepers.

Chapter 3 Children as Gendered

“If you give birth to a boy, keep it. If it’s a girl, expose it.” (From a letter of an Ancient Roman father) (Wolf 2007: 388) There were times during the Roman Empire when Roman fathers were legally entitled to direct this order. Although an extreme expression of preference, for most of recorded history, the arrival of baby boys was celebrated over baby girls. The most infamous example was the failure of Anne Boleyn to give birth to a boy which led to her beheading. Henry VIII’s preference for boys over girls is equally clear from the fact that he had several portraits painted of himself with his son by another wife, but none with himself and either of his two daughters (Tucker 1974).

Patriarchy and feminism Girls have always had it harder than boys. In patriarchal societies, how could it be otherwise? From antiquity to recent years, women have been systematically excluded from public power. The Athenian Aristotle claimed that women lacked innate authority and likened them to children, while the Roman Seneca claimed that men were born to rule and women to obey. And the Christian Church agreed. For centuries, it taught that women should sublimate their anger and aggression (Bradley 2013). God had first created Adam, creating Eve only as something of an afterthought for the company of Adam (Genesis 2:2-23), and there were specific biblically endorsed injunctions to limit the power of women (1 Timothy 2:8-15). Women were associated with emotion and temptation, men with reason and reserve, and since men wrote philosophy, led armies, governed empires, and controlled the Church, it was always male attributes that dominated public discourse. For much of recorded history boys grew up and went into business, the armed services, the professions, government, or the Church (Heywood 2018). The prospects for girls have been restricted to the domestic sphere: wife, mother, homemaker, or domestic servant. Girls may have grown up to rule to roost at home, but their power stopped at the front door. Gendering has been normative, so much a part of social life that, until recently, writers on childhood referred to children with the male pronoun; a child was a he. The single most influential text on how to educate children remains Rousseau’s 1762 text Emile, or On Education. It is four-fifths about a boy, one-fifth about a girl, and it reiterates the Genesis story. The girl is to be educated only so that, as a woman, she will be a fit companion for the boy as a man.

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Nevertheless, the mainstreaming of feminism that began during the 1960s and 1970s has ever since gained momentum and, more recently, the democratizing of social media activism (Roberts 2020) has culminated in significant challenges to patriarchy (Delap 2020). This includes how boys and girls are visually represented: in the clothes they wear, the physical poses they adopt, their relationship to each other, and the attributes they are assigned.

Clothes and color Clothes have long been used to clearly differentiate boys and girls but also to blur them. During the medieval period, boys and girls wore near identical clothes. Today, while some practices are intent on keeping the genders clearly separate, other practices acknowledge gender diversity by, once again, wearing very similar clothes. But whereas boys once wore girls’ clothes, today it is more common for girls to wear what has been long considered boys’ clothes.

The feminization of young boys The recent moral panic that has surrounded the acknowledgment of gender-diverse children and the introduction of gender-neutral clothes stands in marked contrast with the long-held practice of making only rudimentary distinctions between boys and girls during the medieval period and among the peasantry for centuries thereafter. Figure 3.1 shows a boy, but it takes a historian of children’s clothing to identify the child as a boy on the basis of the kind of cap he is wearing. The current moral outrage caused by children as gender neutral is cast further into perspective by acknowledging that for centuries upper-class boys were effectively treated as girls until they were 6 or 7 years of age. Beginning in the sixteenth century through to the end of the nineteenth century, upperand middle-class boys and girls were treated in very much the same way. Boy babies were preferred but, once born, they were initially treated like girls. This appears at odds with the practice, described in the next chapter, of wanting to speed up, not prolong, childhood, but it suggests that, until 6 or 7 years of age, there was a recognition that children were incapable of the kind of learning required for adult occupation, which until the late eighteenth century was conceived as the prime purpose of childhood (Heywood 2018). That boys were treated like girls is testament to the lowly status of children in general. Boys and girls alike were no doubt loved, but only on becoming useful did they gain full social value. Children were not esteemed as especially important, and their gender even less so. In fourteenth-­ century Italy, for example, birth records were not kept of children’s gender (Tucker 1974) Until 6 or 7 years of age, boys and girls were alike in being placed in the charge of their mothers. Their mothers were responsible for their weaning, toilet training, hygiene, and initial character development (Ferraro 2013). And with only minor differentiation, boys were dressed as girls. Ewing (1986) writes, “Small boys in ankle length dresses appear in paintings for three centuries, invariably and with not a single exception” (30). The words dress, petticoats, skirts, and frocks were used interchangeably, but no matter what they were called, boys wore the same full-length, bell-shaped clothes as their sisters and their mothers. And to make identification for a modern viewer more difficult, at times both boys and girls wore short hair; at other times, they both wore long hair.

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Figure 3.1  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding (detail), 1566–69. Kunsthistorisches Museum)

Figure 3.2 represents a mother with her four girls and two boys. But who is a boy and who is a girl? The two eldest children are girls. This is apparent because they are wearing farthingales—hooped ­petticoats—which indicates that they are older than 6 or 7 years of age. At this age, girls were allowed to follow their mother’s fashion. All the other children are wearing plain petticoats, and one boy is obvious. Despite his petticoat and shoes being identical to those of his sisters, he alone wears a sword, the mark of a male child. But who is the other boy? The obvious choice would be the baby, except that in many other pictures of the time, it is near impossible for anyone but a historian of children’s clothing to be sure. To the untrained eye, the boy could be one of the younger children. The one identifiable boy is clearly the preferred child. Although dressed similarly to his sisters, the older boy is positioned in the middle of the picture—he is center stage—and while his mother extends one hand to the baby as the most vulnerable, she extends her other hand to the eldest boy. If this were not enough to attract the eye to him, his bright red hat affects our focus. The boy will later become the Earl of Leicester and inherit the family lands and property. Unless the second son and the girls later make good marriages, it will be on him that they will rely financially. In aristocratic families, girls were

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Figure 3.2  Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Barbara Sidney with her Six Children, c. 1596. Private Collection, Penshurst Place

inevitably at a disadvantage when the family descent was traced through the male line, and the eldest male inherited the family wealth and property. The practice of clothing boys as girls continued even into the twentieth century, as Figure 3.3 demonstrates, although the addition of the word real suggests that by then the practice had become defensive. Such gendering would soon die out. But it had persisted for centuries. At 6 or 7 years of age, boys were breeched—that is, they traded in their petticoats for trousers—and henceforth, their education was undertaken by their fathers. Breeching was a major rite of passage, marked visually by a change of clothes. As described in the following chapter, breeching was a sign that boys were now ready to take on some of the responsibilities of adulthood, however inexpertly. Girls did not undergo the equivalent rite of passage (Ewing 1986). Among the Figures that show boys who have been breeched are 1.8, 3.7, and 4.7. As mentioned above, the blurring of genders among young children was due to their lack of social importance. But this changed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Childhood was

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Figure 3.3 Anonymous, A Boyish Dress for a Real Boy, 1912.

idealized as so special a time of life, gender was conceived as less important than childhood itself. The ­nineteenth-century psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing referred to “the child … as of the neuter gender” (cited in Cunningham 2005: 70). From a time when the gender of children was unimportant because c ­ hildren were unimportant, their gender continued to be unimportant because children were considered so especially important. Even so, the romanticizing of childhood innocence, described in Chapter 11, was more likely to be imagined as female than male because girls were associated with passivity and sweetness far more than boys (Cunningham 2005). During this century and a half, childhood itself was feminized. It was the only time girls got the upper hand, but, of course, this was a highly idealized conception of childhood. It did not refer to the treatment of actual girls, and the feminization of childhood did not last.

Curious color-coding Until the twentieth century, children’s clothes were not even color-coded according to gender as they are today. Adult men and women both wore pink and blue, and so did both boys and girls. Additionally, school uniforms for boys and girls were alike in often being not the drab monochromes they frequently are today but bright and multi-colored (Ewing 1986).

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Early in the twentieth century, some degree of color-coding was introduced to distinguish boys from girls, girls from boys. The rationale behind this gendering was identical to long-established gender norms and those that continue today, but, curiously, the color-coding was the reverse of today’s colorcoded norm. As a 1918 trade publication stated, “The generally accepted rule is pink for boys, and blue for girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and daintier, is prettier for the girl” (cited in Maglaty 2011). Perhaps what they had in mind was a dark, dusty pink, a tone of pink, and a pale blue, a tint of blue. But in the 1940s, the color-coding was reversed to become what we take for granted today. This began when manufacturers discovered that wealthy families would buy whole sets of clothes, plus toys and other items, if they were color-coded (Mass 2019). The color-coding was reversed but not the gendering of qualities.

Gender differentiation The gendering of strong versus delicate and dainty continues. Boys are expected to be rough and tough, active, and strong; girls to be neat, refined, and passive. Girls are still sugar and spice and all things nice; boys are still made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. So normative are these assumptions that they are manifest in the form that most children’s clothes still take, and not only in the colors used, but the fabrics from which the clothes are made, and both the pictures and written messages that appear on the clothes. Often even the style of the pictures that appear on the clothes is gendered. Boys wear jeans or short trousers which allows freedom of movement; girls wear skirts, short shorts, and tight pants, each of which limits their ability to move freely without risking damage to the clothes. This gendered difference is reinforced by the fabrics used. Boys’ jeans are made for activity, while the use of tulle, sequins, and glitter for girls suggests the importance of appearance over practicality. Pictures and words that appear on garments are also often stereotypical. T-shirts for boys typically contain phrases like “Keep on Smiling” and words like cool, smart, genius, and free that stress active behavior, while girls’ T-shirts typically contain words like cute, sweet, and adorable that stress, again, a girl’s appearance over her achievements. Pictures on boys’ T-shirts include cars, planes, rockets, and headphones that emphasize the mechanical and action, while pictures on girls’ T-shirts are typically domestic in nature, such as lipsticks and flowers. Animal motifs also help differentiate the genders. On girls’ clothes, animals are mostly harmless pets, while on boys’ clothes, they are typically wild animals like tigers. When wild animals appear on girls’ clothes, they are fashioned as cute and cuddly, as domesticated, while the boys’ wild animals are active such as hunting, flying, and roaring. Even the style of representation is gendered, with the girls’ animals drawn with soft, round curves and cute large eyes, while the boys’ wild animals are drawn realistically so that their ferociousness is explicit (Agustoni 2018). Each of these gendered characteristics of children’s clothing feature in advertising not only for the clothes themselves but for any number of products and services in which children feature. Being ubiquitous, they reinforce the gendered stereotypes as simply in the nature of things.

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Figure 3.4  Natalia Kirichenko, Happy Little Girl in Fairy Costume, 2021.

Gender neutrality However, fueled by decades of feminism and social media activism (Roberts 2020), we are now witnessing the introduction of gender-neutral clothes. This has the benefit of offering both boys and girls more options than their traditional, gendered stereotypes, while also acknowledging gender-diverse children without singling them out. Recent estimates of schoolchildren identifying with the gender opposite to the sex of their bodies is 1.2 percent, and presumably this would be consistent with children in the past (Brouwers 2021). Such identification was never evident from their representation; they simply had to conform to the sex of their bodies. With gender-neutral clothes, they can blur the traditional gender binary without having to falsely mask their gender identity. In developing gender-neutral clothes, manufacturers are using a number of approaches. Some of their non-binary clothes use cross-over boy/girl features. Pictures of dinosaurs and robots are represented in shiny foil normally associated with girls’ clothes, and boys’ clothes include kittens (LaScala 2016). Other clothes attempt girl empowerment. For example, some clothes for girls feature science and ferocious lions, as well as slogans like “Tough like Mommy,” “Be Bold,” and “Forget Princess, Call me President.” Another example says “Girly Girl” but not in pink and without sparkles (Riddle 2021). Even baby clothes are undergoing a process of neutralization. The Perfectly Baked Company

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Figure 3.5  George Rudy, Cute Little Kids in Stylish Jeans Looking at Camera and Smiling, 2021.

produces a black and white line with slogans like “Fresh Out of the Oven.” And Mattel now offers a line of “gender neutral humanoid dolls” with a variety of clothing options and various lengths of hair (Mass 2019). Many non-gender binary clothes tend to use muted colors like beige and gentle grays: others enjoy every color of the rainbow (Riddle 2021). A further trend is toward blue jeans and plain white tops, which for decades have been associated more with boys than girls, which represents a masculinization of girls, the reverse of the earlier practice of feminizing young boys. Figure 3.5 primarily illustrates this trend, though it does more. One of the girls wears pink socks and the another wears pink sandals, thus including traditional gender identification. But also, the older boy wears pink socks and the youngest boy wears sneakers that include a dark pink that crosses over normative gender color-coding.

Attributes and activities Gendered attributes have been long reflected in advice regarding leisure pursuits. Since Rousseau, play out-of-doors has been recommended for both boys and girls, and some activities have been recommended for both, but also there has been clear differentiation on the basis of physical exertion. For boys, Rousseau favored tennis, archery, and football. Girls, he thought, would benefit from the less strenuous activities of gardening and flying kites (Schorsch 1979). The influential nineteenth-century

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Figure 3.6  Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip, 1872. Metropolitan Museum of Art

child advisor Catherine Beecher also thought that girls would profit from planting flowers and fruits in their gardens (Sklar 1976). Consider the contrast between Figures 3.6 and 11.5, both of which are set out-of-doors. In one, the girls are passive, reclining, and reflective. In the other, the boys are pulling and tugging each other back and forth so robustly that the line has been broken. One of the boys has already fallen over. There appear to be no paintings of girls from the nineteenth century of comparative activity. When boys and girls are pictured together enjoying the same activity, it is invariably the boy who is the more active. The same gender stereotypes that apply to the representation of men and women apply to the representation of boys and girls. Unless the girl is clearly older than the boy, it is the boy who leads. Examining the history of Western painting, Berger (1972) found that males are typically represented as active and women as submissive. He wrote, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47). Similarly, in examining Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s, Mulvey (1988) found that women were much more often than men to be constructed as a sight. “In their traditional exhibitionist role woman are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-lookedat-ness” (62). Both Berger and Mulvey found that, in scenes where men and women appear together, it was frequently the case that women watched men undertaking some activity. In Figure 3.7, a portrait of a brother and his sisters, none of the girls are looking at the boy, but the two older girls are intent on what the boy is doing. Following Rousseau’s advice, the boy is playing archery.

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Figure 3.7 William Beechey, The Oddie Children, 1789. North Carolina Museum of Art

One girl follows his line of sight; another girl, holding onto his coat, almost hides behind him, excited by what he is doing; and the youngest girl engages us with a mutual gaze. It is not as though the girls are inactive. The youngest draws attention to herself while the other girls are delightedly engaged in following the boy’s activity, By the time this painting was produced, boys and girls had for centuries appeared together in many portraits, as in Figure 3.2. Boys and girls alike merely stood or sat and peered out at the viewer. But beginning in late eighteenth-century painting, boys and girls were first commonly pictured engaged in some common activity, and it is the active male and passive female relationship used in Figure 3.7 that henceforth became conventional. This visual representation is the equivalent of referring to children with the male pronoun. The boy as the prime mover became so well established that it is no surprise that, when photographers attempt a retro look, as in Figure 6.8, the normative, gendered attributes are reproduced. Consider Figure 9.12, an advertisement for cocaine drops. The use of children to advertise cocaine might be so astonishing to us that we overlook the fact that the boy is engrossed with the building sticks and the girl, holding a stick for him, is merely his assistant.

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Figure 3.8 Alfie-C, Company Advertisement for Meccano, 1920.

In Figure 3.8, the girl is not even assisting. The boy’s head is turned away from us, his activity being more important than his appearance; we do not even need to see his face. The girl whose face we do see, is full of delight and her clasped hands held back against her body further signify her complete enjoyment in the boy’s activity. Like Eve who was created as company for Adam, she exists here to reinforce the worthiness of the boy’s interest. Admittedly, this is an advertisement for a toy designed for boys, but the legacy of the active boy and the looking-on, passive girl lives on even when everything else is gender neutral. So deeply embedded are the conventions of active boy/passive girl that they appear in Shutterstock’s stock pictures. In Figure 3.9, two children are playing with wooden blocks, which is gender neutral, and the children are also wearing matching gender-neutral clothes. Yet the photographer has chosen to capture and select for publication the children with the traditional gender-specific pose. So conventional is this gender relationship that with a boy/girl logo it is the boy who leads, the girl who follows. The boy holds her hand as if to comfort her, as if suggesting that, with his protection, she need not fear. Imagine how unusual it would be if the relationship had been reversed with the girl leading the boy. Only in pictures where the girl is clearly older than the boy is it common for the girl to be the one taking charge.

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Figure 3.9 Standret, Two Children Playing with Colorful Blocks, 2021.

Not surprisingly, screen advertising for children’s toys is, mostly, highly gendered. This applies to both the products advertised, the tone of presentation, and the language used. According to one study, in twenty-five advertisements for vehicles, a girl appeared in only one (Gander 2015). Advertisements for toy guns, vehicles, and construction sets were also aggressively presented, with the language used stressing control, power, and conflict. By contrast, advertising for dolls focused on grooming, glamour, and nurturance. And as one would expect, boys appeared highly active while girls, other than when dancing, were comparatively docile. Boys and girls rarely appeared together. They appeared together regularly only in advertisements for board games, and gentle, interactive games. Major toy manufacturers claim to have ceased marketing based on gender, although their acknowledgment of changing social attitudes appears to have had no discernable impact on toy stores. Perhaps the single most obvious visual expression of child gendering is to be had on walking into a toy store. Whole aisles are devoted to everything pink; others to anything but pink, but typically dark green, blue, and khaki. The color-coding helps children to go immediately to where they can satisfy their absorption of their gender identity. Girls will find representations of themselves modeled mostly in plastic as princesses in need of makeup and hair styling, as well as dolls to dress and nurture. The boys will find projections of their fantasies as pirates, firemen, and highly stylized action figures. On the packaging of their toys, the girls will find photographs of girls like themselves, waving wands, wearing tiaras, and

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Figure 3.10 bc21, Little Boy and Girl Logo Icon, 2021.

surrounded by domestic appliances, while the boys will find photographs of boys assembling mechanical devices—including Meccano—undertaking science experiments, handling dinosaurs, launching rockets, and wearing hard hats. Unlike the boys, who are invariably actively engaged with their toys and thus turned away from interacting with the viewer, many of the girls are shown presenting their toys directly to the viewer, having, once again, been turned into a sight. However, there are also non-gender-specific toys and representations of both boys and girls enjoying them on an equal basis—for example, boys and girls equally engaged in cooking in toy kitchens, and, contrary to Figure 3.5, boys and girls playing with blocks in the same manner. Even so, it is hard to find images of girls showing boys what to do. Some toys traditionally associated with boys, again including Meccano, show girls playing with them but far fewer images of boys playing with traditionally gendered girls’ toys. These representations reflect social norms that surveys indicate a far greater willingness among adults for girls to play boy things than boys to play girl things (Mass 2019). Girls can be boys, but boys cannot be girls.

Girls fight back As important as gender equity is, an even more striking influence of feminism lies in the empowerment of girls through their representation as strong, even “badass” characters. Even Disney princesses, once the epitome of unsullied girliness, have undergone a transformation (Roberts 2020). For decades, Disney was a “titanium-clad brand image—synonymous with a notion of childhood innocence and wholesome entertainment” (Giroux and Pollock 2010: xiii). But stereotyping began to ease in 2012 with 9-year-old Princess Vanellope von Schweetz, who loved racing fast cars, considered herself one

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of the guys, wore a hoodie, and rejected the status quo. Equally important, the male protagonist was her helpful friend, not her hero (Roberts 2020). Mattel has also had to bow to social pressure. Barbie now has realistic proportions and comes in a variety of skin tones. The 2019 Color Reveal series included five Barbies, each packaged in a plastic cylinder. Each Barbie was covered in pink paint, but when water was poured into their plastic packaging, the paint dissolved to reveal each doll wearing swimming costumes of different colors, none of which was pink. Child beauty pageants remain a notable stand-out. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 6, the pageants defy what apologists attack as “woke” culture and continue to present traditional gender stereotypes of the girls as all things nice. They offer sugar and spice constructions that are hyper concerned about visual appearance. But they have their detractors, and in a world of social media, there are always counterimages. Where mainstream media and manufactures have been slow to adapt to changing social norms, social media has proven to be a riot of resistance. Figure 3.11 combines traditional femininity with the kind of explicit aggression traditionally associated with masculinity. The girls wear pretty, colorful clothes and sparkling tiaras, but also boxing gloves and,

Figure 3.11 Duplass, Group of Beauty Pageant Girls Fighting for the Crown Wearing Boxing Gloves, 2021.

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given their facial expressions and body posture, they appear willing to use them. If they are still princesses, they are not to be messed with. Even more of a counter to traditional submissiveness are what Cunningham (2015) calls “violent nymphs” (206). These are vampire and vigilante girls of recent horror films. Since normative representations of girls are marked as passive, the savage butchery of these girls appears far stronger than when the boys of horror do terrible things. In contrast to most of the girls in Hollywood films, who are often frozen, trapped in “hyperbolic performances of helplessness” (213), the girls of horror are anything but submissive. Vampire girls pose a direct challenge to their stereotype; they perform conventional sweet innocence “as a lure, preying on the projection of weakness onto girlness to ensnare adult prey” (213). One such vampire girl lured a man under a bridge with calls for help, drew him close by effecting innocence, and then when he was within range, leapt to his neck, forcing him to the ground and killing him. Fully aware that he would attempt to rescue her, she consciously employed the trope of the little lost girl to attract and capture her prey. Another vampire girl, who appeared with blonde ringlets and bright blue eyes, repeatedly used the helpless trope. She called out “mama” and cried softly to lure her adult victims within range before she slaughtered them. She consciously used the power projected by an innocent body and vulnerable behavior to strike back at the construction of her as the perfect child.

Figure 3.12  Sandy Morelli, Child Zombie Crawling and Growling in Graveyard, 2021.

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Affecting innocence and a complete lack of threat, vampire girls attack not just their fictional victims but the fiction of girl helplessness. But of course, vampire girls are impossible children; they are fiction. Closer to reality, and therefore more of a threat to conventional ideas of girlhood, are the vigilante girls of horror films. Vigilante girls are normal human girls, apart, that is, for their appetite for carnage. Whereas vampire girls have to kill and drain the blood of their victims to stay alive, and sometimes they are remorseful afterward, vigilante girls have no such need and typically have no qualms about their butchery. They kill for the thrill, but also, as with the vampire girls, for revenge upon those who would box them into any kind of passivity. In the film Kiss Ass from 2010, Hit-Girl plays the game “eeny meeny miny moe” to select each of her victims. In the course of the film, she manages to massacre forty-one people. In Hard Candy from 2005, the protagonist selected her victim from the internet. Identifying her target as a pedophile, she entered chat rooms to watch him try to lure girls, and once aware of his particular tastes, she lured him, though not before playing cat and mouse with him. She was the predator, the unconventional hunter hunting the conventional hunter, exacting revenge, and, again, not just against a lone pedophile but the entire construction of girlhood as purity and light. These girls of filmic horror seriously threaten any nostalgic idea of childhood as a time of happy playfulness. More pointedly, they attack any notion of girls as saccharin sweet.

Shifting sands But the legacy of millennia-long patriarchy remains. The introduction of non-binary products represents the erasure of gender, not tolerance for those who would identify as non-binary (Mass 2019), and commercial attempts to address gender equality with products produced for children are mixed. The Color Reveal Barbies sported swimming costumes with just the kind of cute, girly images of animals described above, and some of Disney’s new girl princesses remain problematic (Roberts 2020). Many of the so-called non-binary clothes are also far less radical than their marketing suggests; for example, in one case what is alleged to be pink for boys is actually a fully saturated purple, and in another case a blue for girls is pale, a mere tint of blue, and appears as a pattern on hair ribbons. Such examples represent the inherently messy morphing of corporate capitalism with products for children in societies conflicted over emerging social norms (Zaslow 2017). But changes are afoot to very long-held forms of representation. Keen to keep abreast of changing social norms, manufacturers need to be responsive. Just as gendered colors were initially a marketing device, so today manufacturers are breaking with color-coding to maintain market share. Long-established ways of representing boys and girls remain entrenched but, again, they are being challenged in both subtle and very confrontational ways.

Chapter 4 Children as Adults

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childhood behind me.” Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 13:11) Like Saint Paul two millennia ago, we still like to keep the concepts of childhood and adulthood separate, to have them stand apart from each other, each defined by what the other is not. Principally, these demarcations relate to cognitive and emotional development, sex, violence, death, and paid work, in which children are commonly understood to have limited cognitive abilities and immature emotional control, as well as ignorance of sex, protection from violence and death, and whose work is not laboring but education and play. Where adulthood is burdened by serious issues, childhood is meant to be carefree. As discussed in the introduction, the adult in us seeks to make the distinction clear; we do not want our status as rational, emotionally mature adults threatened, and we also wish to maintain childhood as a place of nostalgic dreams. Viewing pictures of children always involves both the adult viewer and the child we adults remain, but this interaction between pictures and the adult/child viewer is especially marked with pictures of children as adults. Our tendency is to view children who are in some way adult-like with fascination yet also to view them as children. We are driven to assert the distinction and thereby maintain our position as rational and in charge. We put them back where we feel they belong, in a place of vulnerability and dependency, even as we fret that the distinction today is blurred and that the clear distinction we seek to make is no longer possible. Children in developed countries rarely do hard labor, but a reality check shows that they are only a click away from everything else adult: gratuitous violence, explicit sexuality, apocalyptic disasters, and all kinds of fictional and non-fictional horrors. With the breakdown of such once normalized boundaries, childhood is often said to be disappearing and the cause for moral panic (Garlen 2019). Children are said either to be denied childhood or not be children at all. But such views lack historical perspective. The adult/child distinctions are not only blurred today; they have rarely ever been clear-cut. Even demarcating on the basis of age is historically variable, and today it varies considerably among government agencies and international bodies. And what is true regarding ages is all the more complicated when considering the characteristics we fondly apply to childhood. Children never were as innocent as we like to imagine.

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Historical integration A historical perspective demonstrates that, for much of human history, children were far more integrated into adult life than they are today. Until the nineteenth century, there were no schools that kept children separated from adult life for hours each day. There were no special children’s hospitals, doctors, or law courts, and certainly no child psychologists.

Games, clothes, and toys Bruegel’s Renaissance painting Children’s Games illustrates that at the time there were not even special children’s games. And this was not specific to the Renaissance. Since antiquity, the same games had been played by children and adults alike. And among the peasantry, the same clothes were worn by children and adults for millennia. Apart from the toddlers in Figure 4.1, it is difficult with some figures to know if they are intended to be children or adults. This lack of distinction was informed at the time by the theological idea that in the

Figure 4.1  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games (detail), 1560. Kunsthistorisches Museum

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mind of God, we are all children, which was accompanied by the moralizing idea that adults are like children in being preoccupied with foolish games and concerns (Honig 2019). This is the original meaning of the title, Children’s Games. From our perspective, the adults are playing children’s games; from the perspective of the artist and his contemporaries, the children have joined the adults in playing adult games. The primary characteristic of the games is adult, not child, focused. This lack of distinction is also found in the clothes people wore. Not until the fourteenth century did clothes for adults begin to be differentiated from those of children, and then only among the upper classes. Throughout the medieval period, the basic costume for women, men, and children alike consisted of either a cloak or a tunic with little shaping except for holes for arms and head. As can be observed in Figure 4.1, clothes were worn loose or with belts at the waist. And further, men, boys and girls each wore their hair short, making the distinction between different ages and genders even more difficult (Ewing 1986). As further evidence of the difficulty in deciphering between the representation of children and adults, consider Figure 8.1 from the fourteenth century. The two people standing on the building are the same height, although one is an adult and the other a child. Without knowing the story that the picture illustrates, who could say who is the adult and who is the child? (The story is told in Chapter 8.) Just as the same games were played by both children and adults, there were practically no toys made especially for children. With only a few exceptions among the most wealthy, premodern Europe was a “no toy culture” (Brandow-Faller 2018: 5). Dolls, for example, originated in religious and cultic contexts, and for adult amusement. Dolls’ houses were originally designed with a didactic function for household management, and for wealthy women to display their status. Carousels were originally designed for aristocratic men to train for jousting. Even following industrialization in the late eighteenth century, toys and other forms of amusement only slowly began to be made especially for children (Cross 2004).

Exposure to violence and death For most of human history, children were also well acquainted with violence and death. When the fourth-century Christian Saint Jerome [Unknown]1956) wrote of the fate of one girl, he could have been writing for most children at the time: “Slaughter and death are the toys of her childhood. She will know tears before laughter, sorrow before joy. Scarcely arrived on the stage of the world, soon she must exit” (196). Conditions only worsened after Jerome’s time. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, and lacking centralized governance, the Middle Ages were a time of lawlessness. Settled communities were forever unsettled by rampaging gangs. Life was utterly unpredictable. For many it was short and brutal, with children knowing full well the nature of savagery. Periods of peace were little better. Childbirth was dangerous, and death frequently struck mothers and babies alike, either one or the other, or both. Even in the seventeenth century, the poet John Donne referred to a woman’s womb as the “house of death” (cited in Tucker 1974: 234). Almost any child who survived childhood would have known one or more of their own siblings who did not. Death was hard to avoid, and children who survived often attended funerals. Such were family bonds that the attendance of children appeared entirely appropriate.

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Laboring Throughout the Middle Ages and continuing into the twentieth century, children on the land spent much of their time working side-by-side with their parents. Even very young children had light chores, and often, from the age of 7 years, children worked beside their parents. Children and adults were always together, not just at mealtime but throughout the day. It was due to these working arrangements as well as the general integration of social life that helped to mislead Aries (1960), the pioneering historian of childhood, to conclude that the Middle Ages lacked even a concept of childhood. Subsequent research has shown that childhood was recognized as a separate state of life with its own unique characteristics. But on matters of sex, violence, death, and work, childhood and adulthood remained integrated right up until the latter part of the eighteenth century (Heywood 2018).

Sexuality The above outward, physical signs of integration between child and adult, ones that are easily pictured, echo levels of integration regarding sexual acquaintance for which we have no pictures, but we can easily speculate. Until the eighteenth century when middle-class houses were enlarged, privacy was virtually unknown, and even then privacy remained the privilege of the middle class and aristocracy. As Bruegel’s painting makes clear, life was lived in the streets and public squares. Because houses were small, children often slept in the same room as adults, even the same bed, and not necessarily only with their parents. Thus, from an early age, children were fully conversant with sexual activity. Rural children were also exposed to the copulating and birth of animals. During the Middle Ages, few adults concerned themselves with children’s knowledge of sex or even children’s own sexuality. The Catholic Church considered masturbation a sin, though not a serious one, and during the early years of Protestantism it was either not mentioned or actually endorsed (Bailey 2013). And if the earliest years of Louis XIII are a guide, as late as the seventeenth century, watching young boys play with their penises was a source of much unembarrassed, adult merriment (Houston 2006). During the first half of the eighteenth century, it was common among Rococo painters like Boucher to picture children not only among amorous adolescent and adult figures but observing them. While the children do not act sexually themselves, they are most decidedly aware of sexual activity. The pictures show children being educated. This appears to represent childhood as a state of sexual curiosity, when sexuality is dormant, or latent, as Freud would later claim. It was as much a stage of sexual awakening as of childhood (Milam 2002). Only later in the eighteenth century, under the increasingly redemptive nature of childhood innocence described in Chapter 11, did children in such scenes turn away to play with toys and games among themselves, “unaware or indifferent to sex” (47).

Licentious behavior However, apart from children’s familiarity with sex, perhaps no better example of children’s integration into adult life is their participation in the carnivals that arose during the Middle Ages and lasted in attenuated forms until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Carnivals were riotous, bawdy, and violent

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affairs; they represented a deliberate affront to all that was normally considered right and proper by both religious and secular authorities (Stallybrass and White 1986). Renowned for their obscene and scandalous plays, comedies, and farces, as well as lawlessness and drunkenness, the medieval calendar year was punctuated with periods—days, sometimes weeks—when all the normal rules and obligations owed to landlord and church were set aside. Priests would dress as nuns, nuns as priests. Some festivals would elect a Pope or Archbishop to whom everyone danced riotously in honor. Children were not only swept up in the general hubbub, their participation was institutionalized in the form of the Boy Bishop festivals for which a prepubescent boy was elected from the local choristers. Like other medieval festivals, the Boy Bishop festivals were topsy-turvey affairs that involved whole communities upending the norms of the feudal hierarchy. Having been elected, the boy would don child-size bishop’s robes, wear the bishop’s ring, hold the bishop’s mace, and thus attired, he would parade about with everyone bowing down before him, children and adults alike. The Boy Bishop would offer up incense, bless the congregation, conduct prayers, and preach sermons. He would also lead the children in processions with the adult authorities coming up from behind carrying the books, the incense, and the candles, each of which were ordinarily carried by the children. Feasted, and honored with lighted torches and dancing, the Boy Bishop would then ride off all over the local county with singers and servants in tow to request donations and make merry (Shahar 1990). Figure 4.2 from the nineteenth century shows a Boy Bishop leading a procession of children, all of whom have cherub-like faces. It appears to be a cleaned-up reenactment, much like today’s reenacted

Figure 4.2 Anonymous, A Boy Bishop Attended by his Canons, c. 19th century.

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versions of the medieval period (Mackenzie 2011) where adults have imposed middle-class values of respectability on what was originally anything but sedate. In Figure 4.2, the children appear as nothing more threatening than well-behaved altar boys. They are part of the romantic medievalism of the nineteenth century, a movement that sought solace in a fictional view of the past unravaged by contemporary conflicts, more an aesthetic movement than a historical one. The original medieval Boy Bishops and their entourage were anything but well behaved. The children of Figure 4.2 reflect a major shift in thinking about children from medieval times; these children echo the idea of childhood as wholly a state of innocence and the consequent modern arrangement that children are ostensibly protected from adult issues of violence, death, labor, and sex.

Exceptional children There have always been exceptional children. They are born with exceptional positions to fill, unusual abilities, the wisdom of the sages, or the ability to astonish with their courage and pluck. Some of them appear to be either miracles of nature or, more worrisome, freaks of nature. Seemingly well beyond their years, they blur the distinction between childhood and adulthood; and yet they simultaneously hold it firmly in place. They are significant for the lock they have on the adult imagination, and also because they prove the rule about the child/adult relationship; even exceptional children reinforce the separation. Or at least we see them as such today, intent as we are on keeping them separated.

Premature responsibility Beginning in the fourteenth century, the upper classes began to develop what we would call fashion, although the lack of distinction between adult and child was retained (Ewing 1986). Clothes were used to distinguish between the classes but not between children and adults. Figure 1.8 is a case in point, although the boy is also a case of responsibility thrust upon a child well before being ready for it. He was crowned at 3 years of age. As described in the previous chapter, normally he would have been dressed much like a girl until he was 6 or 7 years of age. Here he is pictured at 8 or 9 years and he has been breeched, a rite of passage in which boys were allowed to wear miniature versions of their father’s clothes. However, in the case of children who had ascended to the crown, pictures needed to go further than indicating the boy as a man. They needed to project authority. In Figure 1.8, the boy king stares out at the viewer with a penetrating gaze. Standing upright, dressed in the armor of a warrior king, wearing a sword, and holding a mace, headgear at hand, even a dog pays him homage, a sign that he commands nature itself. He is posed as if he already carries the burden of his position. Playfulness is suppressed; authority asserted. The artist has used a neutral point of view; he has either placed the boy on a pedestal or sat down to paint. If he had stood on the same floor as the boy, the result would have been a high angle that would have emphasized the boy’s statue as a boy. As it is, the suggestion is that the boy’s height is that of a man. The king is represented as every bit the man he will become. But he clearly is not yet a man; he is a child in a man’s costume. For all the attempts to turn him into an adult, he remains a child.

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The miniature regalia he wears and his child’s facial features betray the maturity he waits upon. There is an unfit between his age and position; in almost any other child, this would be a youngster who has dressed up and precociously assumed the role of king as a bit of fun. Breeching was a much-anticipated rite of passage (Ewing 1986). But not surprisingly, there could be complications. In 1610 Louis XIII became King of France just before his ninth birthday. Until Louis was 4 years of age he wore a robe, but at 4 years he was given breeches to wear under his robe. At 5 years his bonnet was replaced by a man’s hat with the pronouncement, “Now that your bonnet has been taken away, you have stopped being a child and become a man” (Batterberry and Batterberry 1979: 178). However, clothes did not do the trick. There appears to have been some difficulty because his mother put the bonnet back on within a week. Biology will not be denied. At 7 years he was wearing a cloak and sword, although for backsliding behavior he was again shamed by having to don the earlier robe. Figure 4.3 shows him at the age he ascended the throne, still with baby checks but wearing a full ruffle. He is also posed in profile, a convention used for adult leaders as old as Roman Emperors on coins. But even with adult clothes and pose designed to cheat biology, the effect is incongruous. Royals who ascended to the throne as children came with the need to project a stable social order. Their portraits were political. They were intended to convey the continuance of the monarchical social order. In reality, when minors ascended to the throne, decisions were made by appointed guardians, and their portraits, while attempting to offer an impression that the child king was in charge, also hint at their actual relation to power. Thus, these portraits simultaneously smudge the child/adult relationship and reinforce it.

Figure 4.3  Guillaume Dupré, Louis XIII, King of France, 1610. Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Among the upper classes, and not just among royalty, there was an attempt to fast forward adulthood even prior to breeching. Contrary to the romantic idea of trying to prolong childhood for as long as possible, the aim was to have children grow up as fast as possible, and in their rush, adults sometimes appear to have misjudged biology. Consider Figure 4.4. It shows the children in miniature adult clothes, and gives no indication of the children’s bodies underneath. This is partly by design; thrusting children into adulthood meant concealing their childness as much as possible. It is equally due to the procedure that artists followed whenever they made portraits of the upper classes with their highly elaborate clothes that took a long time to paint realistically. Clothes indicated the status of their subjects and were in large measure the point of portraiture. The clothes would be set up on racks and only when painted would the subject step into the frame to have their head and hands painted. This was particularly necessary with children whose ability to stay still for long was limited. In the hands of poor painters, this two-part process is sometimes evident, with the subject’s head not quite sitting comfortably on top of their clothes. This does not appear in Figure 4.4, although the alive heads and hands are contrasted to the wholly static nature of the clothes. Note also that the children are both standing and that the youngest is helped by her standing stool. Since this one is on wheels, it is also called a “going cart.” They protected children from fires, a frequent cause of childhood accidents, but also they were intended specifically to keep the children upright. They prevented children from crawling largely due to a preoccupation with uprightness in both a physical and a moral sense. Infants, it was believed,

Figure 4.4  Alonso Sanchez Coello, Portraits of Philip II’s Daughters Isabel Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela, 1568–69. Monastery of Descalzas Reales de Madrid

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“tottered precariously between upright humanity and the beasts of the field” (Brandon Fawler 2018: 6). Crawling was likened to quadrupedal locomotion and beneath the dignity of civilized humans so that even toddlers were encouraged to stand as if adults.

Precocious ability Some children appear with abilities way beyond their years, children who possess abilities usually only acquired on reaching adulthood. There are two types. Puer-senex—Latin for “old child”—a wise child, an old soul, a child who seems to have been born with an old person’s head on their shoulders. They are the opposite of Puer aeternus, an older person whose emotional life has remained at a much younger level. Wunderkinds—German for “wonder children”—are children who possess a remarkable level of skill normally associated with adults. Stories about both kinds of children have been told since antiquity. Often, the stories are constructed in retrospect where the achievement of remarkable adults is claimed to have been foreshadowed as children. Such stories are told of artists, musicians, and religious leaders. Largely apocryphal, they are presented as miraculous, their intent being to astound, and the proof of their success being their widespread use and longevity. They have been so persistently told over so many centuries that they are, as Dickson (2008) says, mythic motifs lying in wait to impregnate history. And pictures have helped make the myths seem real.

Old souls Exemplifying a child as an old soul is the story of the 12-year-old Jesus discovered by his parents, astonishing venerable religious scholars (Luke 2:41-51). The scene was a favorite of painters and patrons for centuries. Many versions emphasize the boy’s small stature compared to the adults and thus the miracle he was even as a child. They cast him as an exception to the rule of the child versus adult. In Figure 4.5, the artist has chosen the opposite approach. Jesus is seated, with his elders at his feet, so that the distinction between man and boy is blurred, the effect being to deny that he was a child at all. In this regard, the painting echoes images like Figure 1.3 of earlier, medieval images of Jesus sitting on his mother’s knee with the proportions and gestures of an adult. The boy Jesus among the doctors of Figure 4.5 is thus turned into Christ the man, with his exceptional childhood ignored. Yet, not quite, because as a Renaissance painting, not a medieval one, his face has been painted realistically. Despite his physical relation to his elders, by which he appears to be one of them, he appears with the face of a boy. The wise old man, the old soul, in the body of a boy remains, at least in part, a boy.

Prodigies However, some children are undoubtedly worthy of their fame as wunderkinds or child prodigies. Their abilities are not the stuff of legend but verifiable fact. Their abilities are, in Hulbert’s (2018) words, “off the charts.” Some skills lend themselves to early development, such as mathematics, composing, and playing music. Figure 4.6 shows a 7-year-old Mozart at the piano. His reputation astounded everyone

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Figure 4.5  Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, Christ Among the Doctors, 1504. National Museum of Warsaw

who saw and heard him play, and it brought him access to all the aristocratic circles of Europe. Figure 4.6 does not exaggerate his diminutive size —he was small for his age—but it does take advantage of his size to juxtapose his actual physical stature with his remarkable achievement. And it is noteworthy that while Mozart retained his fascination among the aristocracy as a child composer until he was in his early teens, and thus larger than when he was at a mere 7 years of age, it is at 7 years of age that the artist chose to portray him. Reports of Mozart’s childlike, even childish, behavior as a child also reassured adults that, apart from his exceptional musical abilities, he was still a child (Swafford 2020). After he had played for the Empress of Austria, he broke strict protocol and ran up to her, kissed her, and when her daughter, Maria Antoinette, a child herself at the time, attempted to intervene, he playfully wrestled with her. This kind of childish behavior is typical of reports of child prodigies (Hulbert 2018). It is also true of child criminals. As discussed in Chapter 8, newspaper reports stress the incongruity of the childlike attitudes and behaviors of children tried in adult courts for murder. These real-life children appear to be both children and adults. If prodigies are miracles of nature, adult fears construct child murderers as horrible freaks of nature, but reports of their childlike qualities go some way toward placing them back where, according to adult desires, they belong.

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Figure 4.6  Louis Carrogis Carmontelle The Mozart Family on Tour: Leopold, Wolfgang, and Nannerl, 1763. Condé Museum

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Fictional fix-it kids Additional to real-life children with remarkable skills, a staple of children’s picture books, illustrated novels, and movies, are children with remarkable adult-like pluck who make things right. These are what Jackson (1986) called “Fix-it Kids” (34). They save the day. Figure 4.7 is an illustration for a children’s story showing a young girl bandaging a wounded Indian warrior, a brave little warrior herself for in no way being intimidated by either his cultural difference or his potential for violence. Notable representations of twentieth-century examples of fix-it kids include illustrations to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories. Without the help of adults, and often despite them, the children managed to track down thieves, uncover Nazi plots, and recover treasure. Little Orphan Annie, an 11-year-old who featured in a nine-decades-long comic strip, similarly fought political corruption, criminal gangs, corrupt businessmen, spies, and saboteurs. With an innate sense of right and wrong, she exuded resolve, generosity, optimism, and the courage to hold her own against all kinds of bullies.

Figure 4.7  Edwin John Prittie, A Puritan Maying, 1873.

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Fix-it kids were a trope of the movies from their inception. The very first US feature film, The Great Train Robbery of 1903, showed a girl reviving her father so that he can summon help. She was just the first in a long line of children with such resolve (Jackson 1986). In Hollywood, the period from 1925 until 1945 was known as the “child star era,” a time when numerous child stars dominated the box office. They were each self-reliant agents of good outcomes. The most renowned of the silent era was Mary Pickford (herself an adult who played a child until she was in her mid-thirties). With her plucky persona that combined both good and mischievous traits, she was forever righting wrongs that ensured the future remained secure. By far the most famous movie fix-it kid was Shirley Temple. She was the most popular star of the 1930s. All of her many films employed the same basic plot: whatever the particular conflict, she invariably solved whatever conflict arose. She helped to keep her father from a life of crime, cleared her father’s name by catching the real thief, pleaded with the US President, taught a lame girl to walk, and in more than one film, she prevented wars. Her real skill, however, was reserved for getting lovers together. Through her unfailing abilities as a matchmaker, peacemaker, and moneymaker, she righted wrongs and ensured a better world. Usually cast as an orphan and thus alone in the world, she made good through her own determination, can-do approach, and wit. She exclaimed, “Oh my goodness,” and set things right. During the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood films underwent what Jackson (1986) called an “adultification” of childhood (160). As the term implies, films reversed roles between children and adults, much like the Bishop Boy festivals. Adults behaved like children and took their advice from children. In language and interests, children were no longer differentiated from adults. Often they were prodigies, already accomplished musicians or computer whizzes. In other films, streetwise kids looked after themselves and created new families among other individuals who played the part of caregivers. In the cult classic Home Alone (1990), and its various iterations, a boy offers sage advice to an older man as well as outsmarting adults. As with some other characterizations of children, fictional fix-it kids have a very old model in the figure of the child Jesus. The above story of Jesus at 12 years of age portrays him as an old soul, but other stories depict him as a fix-it kid. These other stories are found in non-canonical books that, although banned by the early Church, lived on in an oral tradition until the Church relented and they were allowed to be illustrated. In these stories, he appears in two quite different forms. In Chapter 8, he is discussed as a maniacal killer, but he is also presented with a remarkable talent for making things right. Since he is almost the only identifiable individual child represented in either oral or visual form for over a millennium, it is as though, in the imagination of the medieval mind, he had multiple roles to fulfill. In many stories, he raises people from the dead and cures various illnesses. When his carpenter father finds a piece of timber too short, the boy Jesus simply lengthens the timber (Frilingos 2017). Apart from Jesus as a child, who is represented as both evil and benign, with representations of children as precocious the underlying assumption is that the children are both knowing and innocent. The clear-sightedness, moral superiority, and courage on which their success lies, are based on not having been corrupted by experience. They dare where the courage and the moral fiber of adults falter;

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they see clearly where adults either fail to see at all or whose insight is impaired by long habit. This is an evocation of the Romantic child discussed in Chapter 11 in which children are placed on a moral-cumspiritual pedestal, the hope of the future, saviors of humankind. But, they are only able to act like ideal adults because they are actually still children. The distinction between child and adult is, again, both blurred and maintained.

Premature sexuality Of all the panics raised about contemporary childhood, nothing causes more angst than their sexualization. Sexuality is the criteria more than any other by which childhood is defined, and nothing causes more panic than when sex and children are combined. Freud (1989) claimed that children were sexual beings, although after a brief period of sexual exploration, “a wave of repression” ensued to be expressed until adolescence as mere affection (89). His society reacted with horror and condemnation to his proposal that children were in any way, even latently, sexual. Our society celebrates sexuality, but it remains intent on repressing it among children. Unlike Freud’s society, we may acknowledge children’s sexuality, but we are very much intent on keeping it latent. Parents who find their children “playing doctor” or touching themselves are advised to treat it with “serenity rising quickly to panic as normal fades to deviant” (Kincaid 1998: 56). And academic research faults sexualized imagery on the grounds that it is internalized by young girls as social norms (Slater and Tiggeman 2016) that has detrimental effects on socialization, body image, later sexual development, and academic progress (Starr and Zurbriggen 2019). But sex and controversy sell. Newspapers and popular magazines present pictures of sexualized children while simultaneously claiming outrage. Consider babies who have had lipstick applied to their lips and eyeliner to their eyes (Holland 2004); television fashion shows in which adult models in lingerie present as young girls; Paris Vogue portrayals of pre-adolescent girls as sophisticated femmes fatales wearing heavy makeup; and Bratz dolls that feature sexualized clothing such as miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and feather boas. And in response to the internalizing of sexualized imagery by girls, manufacturers create thongs for 7–10-year-olds, some printed with slogans like “wink wink” and “eye candy” (APA 2007). Wherever such blurring occurs, denial is frequently employed to maintain the separation, one arguably used for centuries. Chapter 11 includes a discussion of some of the many painters and photographers from past centuries who represented nude children in what seem, to us, to be sexualized ways. At the time they were considered, even honored, as a sign of innocence (Kincaid 1998). The public discourse on childhood nudity was a celebration of the sensuousness, not the sexuality, of children’s bodies. The legitimacy of this discourse is discussed in Chapter 11. Here it is only necessary to note that whatever was claimed for these images in the past about a lack of sexualization, it is no longer possible to claim sexual ignorance. It appears evident that they are laden with sexuality. Children do not need to be nude to be sexualized. In the 1930s, mainstream Western culture remained firmly in the grip of the cult of middle-class respectability held over from the nineteenth century, of which the repression of sexuality was a major feature (Foucault 1978). For example, the word pregnant could

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not be used in polite society, and the facts of life were conveyed to children only as a coy analogy with birds and bees that left essential details vague at best (Wuthnow 2017). It was in this culture that Shirley Temple was enabled to be much more than a fix-it kid. While presented as the personification of childhood innocence, she was also frequently suggestive of the sexual fantasy of the woman as child or child as woman (Jackson 1986). For example, in the film Bright Eyes from 1934, at a time when she was only 6 years old, a group of male pilots spend a whole afternoon with her simply to please her. They dote on her, constantly hugging and kissing her; enchanted, they hang on her every word as she sings On the Good Ship Lollipop. The song is clearly child-orientated, but she performs it with a mixture of child and adult feminine gestures. Graham Greene, commenting on her movies in general, called them “interestingly decadent” and “dimpled depravity.” He called her “a fancy little piece” and “a complete totsy” with “the mature suggestiveness of a [Marlene] Dietrich” (cited in Kincaid 1998: 144). This was not what the culture at the time was prepared to acknowledge. Greene was sued and found it convenient to move to Mexico. Greene saw what we see. Watching her films today, the sexualization seems undeniable, but for most of her 1930s’ audience she was simply an innocent sweetheart. We see through eyes educated

Figure 4.8 Anonymous, Shirley Temple with James Dunn for “Bright Eyes,” 1934.

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by a knowledge of pedophilia, child pornography, and child abuse. Unlike the middle-class culture of respectability in which sexual matters were hidden, our culture is often characterized as a “striptease” or “raunch” culture (Attwood 2009: xiii, xxi). Images of women, men and children are represented in mainstream media in ways adopted from soft-core pornography, and where fine artists, while proclaiming innocent intentions, have seen their work framed as pornographic. Having migrated from “obscene to on-scene,” porn is now mainstream (xviii). The once distinct separation of children and sexuality is often broken down. Shock and controversy sell. They help sell any number of both fine art and popular products, and nothing shocks or raises controversy more than sexualized images of children. However, while it was apparently still possible to sexualize Hollywood starlets in the 1930s and deny it, this is impossible today. Thus it is difficult to understand how parents who enter their daughters into child beauty pageants are willing to sexualize them in order to win prizes or even to just participate. The girls are often as young as 3 and 4 years of age. Girls have long loved dressing up and performing princess as part of pretend play, but there is a difference between trying on pearls and lipstick and parading in front of a mirror, and dressing up like a sexy showgirl for an audience of judges. Child beauty pageants are a billion-dollar business, and when parents are the primary motivators for participation, the pageants turn children’s play into work (Flowers 2020). For parents, the pageants often appear to be about living vicariously, to be princesses by proxy, in which parents are obsessed with the financial and social rewards on offer. In the United States, the pageants were the subject of several television shows, such as Toddlers and Tiaras (2009–16). As discussed in Chapter 6, the girls were highly aestheticized; they were groomed to an ethereal perfection (Anderson 2009). Yet the grooming often went beyond creating the appearance of mini-adults. The girls often sported bare midriffs and wore off-the-shoulder dresses. One 4-year-old impersonated Dolly Parton with fake breasts. Another was dressed as the leather-jacket-wearing Julia Roberts’ prostitute character in the film Pretty Woman. Many had undergone Botox and other plastic surgery. Dressed and pressed to kill, children barely out of diapers posed seductively with pouting lips, tilted heads, a finger in their mouths, hands on their hips, and gyrating. Although the programs are now canceled, the pageants continue. Challenged to justify the sexualization of their own children, pageant parents strenuously deny its existence. They claim to see no difference between the pageants and children pursuing other hobbies like ballet and horse riding (Flowers 2020). They reference an aesthetic of cute and even child empowerment. But how in today’s sexually alert society, is such denial possible? While there are always multiple ways to interpret pictures, it is the parents who appear to be in denial. The pageant culture is one of many subcultures in the United States in which, due to the influence of the evangelical churches, sexual repression remains strong. Much like nineteenth-century culture, it is a culture obsessed with the repression of sexuality, and thus it finds itself in a defensive position with regard to a sexualized mainstream culture. On a range of issues, of which sexuality is a major one, it is a culture with a strong propensity to bifurcate, one in which sex is very bad but childhood is pure. And as noted above, and discussed at more length in Chapter 11, once the innocence of children is asserted as gospel, as an article of faith, the sexualization of children becomes possible because it goes unrecognized as such, at least

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consciously. Nevertheless, parents of the pageant culture inevitably partake of the larger culture and so draw upon its tropes, including its sexualization, to parade their children. Pageant culture appears to be both of this world and not of it; to exist in two worlds, a culture determined to see children as innocent and a sexualized culture where the former enables the latter to flourish. While participants of pageant culture are determined to keep childhood and adulthood separate with children ignorant of sex, for mainstream culture alert to the dark side of a sexualized society, pageant culture appears to blur the boundaries. Yet, again, it is not quite so simple. Placing children in sexualized clothes and having them pose provocatively also draws attention to how inexpertly they carry it off. On the one hand, a girl who dresses up and performs like an adult woman playing before a mirror demonstrates how the two categories are linked; the girl foreshadows the woman to come. On the other hand, a girl child dressed up and coached how to act with the sexuality of an adult woman demonstrates how very different the child is from the adult (Holland 2004).

Dependence reasserted In the 1980s and 1990s, at the very time a moral panic erupted about the alleged disappearance of childhood, there emerged a minor photographic genre in which young children were dressed in adult clothes (Holland 2004). For example, a boy toddler wore a bowtie and braces; a girl toddler wore an off-the-shoulder evening gown. It might appear that adults were not only acknowledging the blurring of the adult/child distinction but celebrating it, but reflection on the pictures suggests that the effect of the pictures, as throughout this chapter, is to reassert adult control over children. They put children back into their place. Dressed in small but still too large versions of adult clothes, the children appeal to an aesthetics of the disarmingly adorable; in short, to a common version of childhood as separate from adulthood. These characteristics are especially marked when the children are dressed in formal attire and dressed up on their wedding day. Some photographs show them holding hands or kissing. Like children who play at mimicking adult behavior, these photographs underline not adulthood but childhood. Figure 4.9 is patently a studio production, much like many of the aesthetic children examined in Chapter 6 who offer childhood up as a nostalgic memory of childhoods that, ironically, never existed. With full lighting and an anonymous background, the children exist in a dream space completely disconnected from real children. Stories of the Boy Bishops of medieval carnival exemplify the same assertion of childhood as a separate state. Though they and their child entourage were given authority to perform as adults, it was, like carnival itself, only a temporary arrangement, and even then its license was curtailed (Makenzie 2011). Like carnival in general, the Boy Bishop phenomenon acted as a confirmation of the status quo. Turning the norms of the social hierarchy on their head worked to underline what the norms were, and as much as any other aspect of carnival, this applied to the Boy Bishops themselves. Their behavior became so disruptive that they went beyond even what carnival permitted, and they were restrained. Originally the choristers could elect their bishop, but adult authorities, appalled at how some of the Boy Bishops behaved, regained some level of control by insisting that they elect the Boy Bishop. It is

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Figure 4.9 Dmitreva, Little Boy and Girl Wedding, 2021.

also noteworthy that the sermons the boys preached were written by adults, and while they contained carnivalesque threats to behead bad teachers, they also exhorted adults to be like children in their faith and condemned misbehaving children. While ostensibly free to act up, they were actually curtailed even in their license. Far from being allowed to freely misbehave, the Boy Bishops perfectly exemplify the contradictory nature of carnival—both free to invert social norms and an assertion of norms—is perfectly illustrated by the Boy Bishops. Even the pictures of child soldiers discussed in chapters 7 and 8 reinforce the idea that they are children. Although some of them are merciless killers, their weapons seem too large for their small frames, so that, like adult clothes on children that do not fit, their status as adults is undermined. They threaten the ideology of childhood innocence, but not childhood. The same applies to the children of horror movies or hardened street children. These children exist somewhere between our expectations of children and of adults, but dressed as adults, they appear to be more child than adult. They offer comforting reassurance as to the nature of childhood as a period of life dependent upon adults.

Separation ensured Most of the children discussed in this book lack agency, being subject to adult dictates and pictorial strategies. They are largely subject to circumstances beyond their control and are forced to acquiesce. By contrast, some of the children discussed in this chapter could be thought to possess agency; they

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get ahead of themselves by their exceptional position, abilities, or wisdom, but the way they are framed pictorially, and the stories that are often wrapped around the pictures, ensure that, however adult-like they appear, they remain children. The normative child/adult boundaries often appear threatened by precocious abilities and their sexualization, but such is our determination to protect the idea of childhood as separate and dependent that no matter how much pictures of children blur the boundaries, their childness always leaks from the images. Our modern-day separation between child and adult largely began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but it is now entrenched, and with it firmly in place, our adult identity is safe. The idea of childhood disappearing, or children being denied childhood, is a function of the ideology of childhood innocence combined with the archetypal tendency to see the past through nostalgic, rose-tinted lenses in which the present is always found wanting.

Chapter 5 Children as Schooled

“Nine parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education.” John Locke ([1693] 1989: 83) For good or ill, schools turn children into students. School website promotions feature students performing a task behind a Bunsen burner; tending to fish in a tank; planting seeds; or examining a book, a globe, or a computer screen. Others show students dancing, painting, playing musical instruments, or in costume performing on stage. It is no wonder such photographs are used; learning seems to constitute the business of childhood. And photographs of children learning stand in marked contrast to some of the other, more problematic constructions of childhood discussed elsewhere in this book. But learning and schooling are not necessarily synonymous; schooling can lean more toward regimentation than learning. Schooling can be stupefying, though pictures of school children tend toward the celebratory, masking the tedium many students experience. This is partly due to the often politically motivated nature of the pictures, and partly due to the inherent limits of the medium. Pictures can offer only so much information and understanding; written accounts are frequently necessary to supplement what pictures show but do not tell. Yet cracks appear even in the imagery, in large measure because they cannot disguise the spatial stratagems of control by which schools operate. Irrespective of the governing educational philosophies that inform the pictures, the pictures oscillate between representing control and agency, the agency of the students and the control of the institution, whose aim is invariably to control agency by directing it not only toward learning but compliance. Turning children into students means shaping their unruliness into respectful obedience. Achieving compliance is accomplished in three primary ways: managing students’ time through the regularity of a timetable; organizing space; and choreographing their movements within time and space (Jenks 2005). Still photographs can only hint at time-based control stratagems, but they show stratagems of bodily and spatial control. And painters have used metaphors. Figure 4.4 shows the younger child holding a bird on a string. A child holding a bird on a string or in a cage was a common metaphor at the time; the ability to tame and teach a bird signified that children also needed to be tamed and taught (Cunningham 2005). It is fitting that the child whose movements are constrained by the walking chair is the one holding the string. The framing of children as school students is not only a major feature of their lives, it is a critical feature of how developed, contemporary societies organize themselves. Where prior to the industrialization of

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the nineteenth century, children mostly grew up alongside their parents and other adults, ever since children have spent much of their lives at school and thus separated from their families (Cunningham 2020). Schooling has been, and remains, based on a variety of educational philosophies that, in turn, are based on different conceptions of childhood (Habiger Institute 2020). Are children inherently good and, as students, like plants that need only water, rich soil, and sunshine to grow and develop? Or are children essentially lunatics that need to be disciplined in order to learn? Is their natural curiosity to be encouraged, channeled, or curtailed? And what are they learning for? For themselves? For the workforce? Each of these questions, and the tensions they imply, can be found in pictures of children as students, just like school students themselves, as present, lurking about, or whose absence is telling.

Students as organic wholes The idea of students as organic wholes, of being considered an integration of mind, body, and spirit, is the oldest of all constructions of children being schooled, though, as described below, what is old is now new again (Ritter 2001). Prior to written language, all that there was to know and needed to be known was acquired by observation, oral instruction, and storytelling. Children were conceived as an integral part of their community, at one with their tribe and the natural world. This conception still informs the practice of some remote indigenous peoples. Within safe boundaries, children are allowed to self-regulate. Involving minimum intervention—including discipline—care is distributed among tribal members. Childhood is lived in the present with children as agents of their own growth and development. For indigenous tribes, schooling means being taught but not subject to an institution. The principal latter-day advocate of this conception was Rousseau, and he made it famous in his book Emile ([1762] 1921) where he wrote: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (5). According to this construction, children are innately good, but unless they are allowed to develop at their own pace by self-observation and example, society ruins them. Children are intrinsically natural and are to be kept natural for as long as possible, building up skills, knowledge, and self-reliance until they are able to face the world without succumbing to its temptations. Children learn by doing, by experimenting, and seeing the results for themselves rather than being lectured; even reading should be limited to books that encourage self-reliance. Learning relies upon careful nurture but to a large extent upon maturation, on the natural unfolding of children’s innate abilities at their own individual pace. Rousseau’s advocacy of organic learning had many adherents, spawning a variety of school movements, including the Montessori schools that now exist in many parts of the world. Figure 5.1 shows a young girl engaged in a typical Montessori task, that of building with blocks in which learning is hands-on, a matter of self-discovery, a form of play, and enjoyable. Yet its angle of view reproduces the typical position of adult to child, that of a high angle looking down, a position of adult authority and power. Despite the philosophy of regarding children as self-reliant and the obvious agency of the child as evident from her facial expression, in using a high angle the photograph reproduces the normative child/adult power relationship. Yet it is only a slightly high angle, as if the photographer toyed with the idea of a democratic, shared power relationship between the child and the adult viewer. Nevertheless, and however unintended by the photographer, the photograph captures the idea that there are limits to children’s agency, even in Montessori schools.

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Figure 5.1 Adebabsinland, Adebabs Kiddies Tower Building, 2018.

In Montessori schools, children do not sit rooted at desks but are free to move around from one activity to another. Children pursue activities at their own rate. Instead of lessons being broken into short segments as in mainstream schools, they can last for hours. Teachers are trained to observe each child for their particular characteristics, tendencies, innate talents and abilities, and subsequently to provide materials not only relevant to each subject area but also suited to each child. As with indigenous tribes, mixed age levels are the norm, which allows children to both teach and learn from one another. Materials are placed within easy reach and of suitable size. Stress is placed on an environment facilitative of learning with attention paid to the aesthetic pleasure afforded by materials. The entire endeavor is motivated by the idea that children’s minds are innately absorbent; give children developmentally appropriate tasks and children are inherently motivated to learn for themselves (Montessori 1995). Adults can trust education to be child-centered because, with a little encouragement, children will inevitably learn for themselves. On the internet, Montessori schools are advertised mostly with images of children being assisted by an adult. Like Figure 5.2, the most common are full-frame shots of a classroom or partial classroom inhabited by a teacher who is interacting with several children either sitting at small desks or on the floor. Treating children as organic wholes is transferred to a spatial arrangement based on organic shapes, that is, randomness and curves, rather than the more traditional classroom layout consisting of a series of straight rows that end at right angles. The children are keen to learn from the adult who is quietly in

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Figure 5.2 Anonymous, Montessori Class, 2020.

charge. This is probably at the heart of the appeal of most images of children being schooled: children are focused on learning with adults in control. No wonder they are used in advertising.

Students as God-fearing In contrast to the organic construction, in what Ritter (2001) calls “the metaphysical-moral discourse” of childhood, students learn to fear God, or at least to be aware of his presence as the final arbitrator of morality (21). Childhood is understood as a time of waywardness and in need of correction. In the Christian tradition, Catholics long held the view that priests, being God’s representatives on earth, were the arbiters of morality. As described in Chapter 2, Protestants shifted the responsibility for the instruction and maintenance of morality from the clergy to the family, primarily to fathers. Parents in charge of their children stood in for God, so that to disobey a parent was virtually equivalent to disobeying God. At the time, all Christians—Catholics and Protestants alike—believed in the doctrine of original sin wherein everyone was born with a will to do wrong and to disobey God (Heywood 2018). Children’s disobedience was not just a matter of childish immaturity; it was evidence of their essentially sinful nature. Children’s obstinacy in doing wrong was a battle with Satan and required strong measures to resist, admonish, and instruct. The most noted for their strictness were the Puritans of sixteenth-century England, Europe, and the United States. For the Puritans, the Bible was the principal source of moral instruction. They

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believed that everyone should be able to read the Bible; not only was it the word of God, but it would also save sinners from the devil’s temptations. As a 1647 Massachusetts law put it, “The chief project of the old deluder, Satan [was] to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures” (Spring 2018: 19). As quaint as this may appear to most modern readers, the Puritans were also well ahead of their time in believing in universal education, irrespective of poverty or parentage. As one Puritan argued, “many are now holding the plough, which might have been fit to steer the state” (Lawson and Silver 1973: 155). In Figure 5.3, in what looks like an example of homeschooling, a Puritan child is being taught by means of a hornbook, a common device of the time used with young children. A hornbook was a primer for learning the alphabet, though some also included religious messages to be learned by repetition (Tuer 1896). While most were made of wood, they acquired their name by being protected by a thin layer of horn bone. The three further items on the table represent three other aspects of Puritan education. The inkwell signifies that in addition to reading, children should learn to write so as to better themselves and contribute to the community; the book signifies the Bible as the primary reason for learning to read; and the birch rod signifies the felt need for discipline by corporal punishment. The woodcut also shows the child being held close, which metaphorically Puritan children were held for fear of them falling into Satan’s hands.

Figure 5.3 Anonymous, Title Page from Hornbye’s Hornbook, 1622.

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However, the Puritans did not consistently hold a view of children as the incarnation of evil. They had a split view of children’s essential nature in which children were viewed as either devils or angels. The view of children as angels is similar to the organic construction of childhood insofar as it mistrusts society, but the angel view also mistrusts children’s ability to resist its temptations. The perception of children as devils simply mistrusts children (Cunningham 2020). Consequently, children as angels were overly protected, while children as devils were punished until they obeyed. Angels were strengthened; devils broken down. Children learned through instruction, punishment, and reward. Childhood was viewed as a series of moral hurdles managed by earnest endeavor and strict disciplinary codes. Regulated by discipline, including physical punishments and shame, the purpose was to break the will and engender obedience. As with most things Puritan, their contradictory ideas about childhood were derived from the Bible. On the one hand, the Bible refers to the idea that one has to become as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, and Puritans used terms like “to believe as a child,” “teachable as a child,” and even “innocent as a child” (Heitzenrater 2000: 281). On the other hand, the Bible taught a strong retributional view of sin that was translated in the case of disobedient children as a need for strict regulation and punishment. Such views had a profound influence. Susanna Wesley, mother of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote of the necessity to “conquer the will” of naughty children (283). Of her own children she wrote, “when turned a year old (and some before) they were taught to fear the rod and to cry softly by which means they escaped abundance of correction they might otherwise have had” (284). Her famous son’s views were similar. He advised parents to “break their will, that you may save their soul” (279). He admonished parents who did not “bend the twig” at an early age, it being more difficult at a later age. And of Rousseau’s Emile, he wrote, “the most empty, silly, injudicious thing that ever a self-conceited infidel wrote” (288). And Wesley was not an extremist. The influence of these ideas held for centuries. The early elementary schools in England of the 1870s were conceived primarily for religious instruction. As one educator claimed, “The ‘classics’ of the poor in a Protestant county must ever, indeed, be the scriptures; they contain the most useful of all knowledge” (Lawson and Silver 1973: 271). Many made similar claims, the purpose of education being to cultivate religious principles and moral sentiments; as another educator of the time put it, “to awaken the tender mind to a sense of its evil dispositions and habitual failings before it is become callus by its daily intercourse with vice” (283). The solution was an education “wholly drawn from, based in, or illuminated by the words of Holy Writ” (283). The construction of students as God-fearing is also adopted by those Islamic schools that largely consist of memorizing the Koran. Figure 5.4 captures the strict regulation of both time and space. Time is controlled through a pedagogy based on recitation, and space is controlled through repetition. Only the girls themselves indicate any individuality. The moral metaphysical discourse remains influential in Christian fundamentalist schools as well as among Christian fundamentalists who home school in the belief that secular schools are both inadequate incubators of morality and teach scientific knowledge at odds with elements of their faith. An extreme version is to be found with Accelerated Christian Education Schools (ACE) of which there are thought to be around 6,000 in 145 countries (Scaramanga 2017). The schools teach creationism, homosexuality as unnatural, and that women should obey men as all should obey God. Their structure is strictly hierarchical, with obedience the critical lesson to be learned. One comic-style picture in ACE

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Figure 5.4  Motafa Meraji, Shia Muslim Girls Reciting the Koran during Ramadan in Iran, 2014.

curriculum materials shows a young boy with a thought balloon that reads: “It is easy to obey those who rule over me. Just listening to the words in the Bible helps me obey” (Fenton 2016). Obedience is modeled here as consciously internalized. The ACE ethos is based on individual self-salvation in which students must actively accept God’s word with the eventual aim of entering heaven. The stress on individual salvation informs their pedagogy in which students teach themselves by means of prepackaged materials. Students spend half of each school day teaching themselves by reading textbooks in silence and learning facts by rote. Like some Islamic schools, extreme atomization of learning in time is equally manifest spatially. Photographs show students facing a classroom wall in booths that separate them from other students. Students can neither see their fellow students nor are they allowed to interact with them. Only during the second half of the day are they taught in groups. One former student claimed that to interact with teachers, students need to raise flags, one for mundane issues like wanting a toilet break, another to signal a need for help or readiness to be tested, and that they were told off for putting up too many flags (Fenton 2016). This form of highly internalized learning, taking place in near silence and spatial separation, is akin to the internalization of good behavior, as described by Foucault (1977), of medieval monasteries. The attempt to discipline the mind through regimes of strict regimentation is the same. By quiet, undisturbed introspection, rote learning, and physical separation, ACE recreates the conditions of monks in their cells, and with the same intent, to get closer to God and internalize what they regard as God’s will.

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Students as good citizens in the making By contrast, in what Ritter (2001) calls “the good citizen discourse” of childhood, the arbiter of morality is not God but social expectations of civil and civic behavior (18). It is based on the contribution it is hoped children will make to society at large as citizens. But like the above construction, it is not so much interested in children as children, as it is in what kind of adults they will become. Its main early proponent was the English philosopher John Locke ([1689] 1993). Unlike the organic construction that saw children being born essentially good, or the moral metaphysical construction that viewed children in terms of original sin, Locke famously argued that children were blank slates—a tabula rasa. Babies were a “white paper void of all character, without any ideas” (18). Subsequent development depended upon children’s education in the world. As the quote from Locke that prefaces this chapter indicates, it was through instruction and example that children might become either wild or civilized, learned or ignorant, stupid or wise. The good citizen discourse takes a number of forms. They include students as future workers, as obedient to authority, loyal to school and society, and patriotic.

Students as workers in the making According to the good citizen discourse, a primary function of schools is to instill a work ethic of diligence, dedication, and integrity. It has long been so. The ancient Spartans ensured that their children would become warriors, while in Confucian China children were expected to assume the role of government officials. Spartan children spent a lot of time in physical training; Chinese students in studying for written exams (Ritter 2001). In medieval Europe, children from 7 years of age were trained for a variety of vocations. Boys were trained to be knights, tradesmen, and merchants; girls to be wives (Wilkinson 2014). During the nineteenth century, education became a pressing social concern as preparation for industrial capitalism. Eventually, the pressure led to the legislation of mandatory, universal education as we know it today. Initially, however, the need to equip students to serve industry was undertaken by a variety of schools. In this period of transition, education, even for the important goal of providing future workers, was a rather haphazard, hit-and-miss affair. In England, they included schools known as Dame schools and Ragged schools (Lawson and Silver 1973). Dame schools were run mostly by elderly widows in their own home, thus their name. Pictures of Dame schools typically show a homely environment in which a kindly woman is either reading to half a dozen or so children, or listening to a child read. Typically, some of the children will be reading from their own books, some will be distracted, and at least one will be standing in a corner wearing a pointed dunce’s cap. The spatial arrangement is organic, much like a Montessori class, and the general tone is affectionate and productive. With the dramatic increase in the children needing to be trained for major industries, Dame Schools were clearly inadequate. Ragged schools were so named because the vagrant and destitute children for whom they catered often wore rags. The pictures of these schools vary, sometimes stressing corporal punishment though usually stressing busy but productive activity. Compared to other images of Ragged schools, Figure 5.5 represents an unusually large class, but in other respects it is typical. Monitoring is

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Figure 5.5 Anonymous, St Jude’s Ragged School, Whitechapel, c. 19th century. Wellcome Collection

being used throughout the classroom as older children instruct groups of younger children, while the teacher at a lecture stand also instructs a small group. Individual children read or play in a scene seemingly ordered and industrious. But how could it have been? Surely, this picture at best idealizes what must have been chaos. What of the noise? Given the number of children involved, including the competing sound of monitored groups, the noise level must have been distracting if not actually deafening. This is an impossible scene, motivated to promote the benefits of education to children whose parents were uneducated and wary and who wanted their children helping out on their farms or in their stores. And while we can only imagine what the Dame and Ragged schools were like to experience from their pictures, written confirmation is ready to hand. One commissioner reported that “he knew schools in which he could estimate a pupil’s length of stay by the stupidity impressed upon his countenance” (Lawson and Silver 1973: 285). Another claimed that such schools appeared to have been “devised for the express purpose of arresting growth and strangling life” (292). Dame schools were also sometimes taught by men, as one inspector put it, “whose only qualification for employment seems to be their unfitness for every other” (280). And the literacy and numeracy levels of the dames were equally found wanting by inspectors. Irrespective of their effectiveness in training children to be good citizens, this was their intent. They were designed foremost as incubators of both moral behavior and preparation for working life in

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industrial capitalism. The two went hand in hand; citizens who internalized good behavior made the most reliable workforce. As explored at greater length in Chapter 9, students learning on computers are now acquiring habits that equip them for jobs requiring being online either at home or in large, open-plan offices. By using phones and computers to learn, students are being inculcated with a consciousness suitable for the networked, electronic workplace.

Students as obedient Just as much as religiously orientated schools, secular schools have always sought to root out bad behavior and encourage good behavior, meaning compliance with adult expectations. To become good citizens, children must learn to obey rules, either to internalize rules or to follow them from fear of punishment. Schools are incubators of compliance as an essential component of character. When the ad hoc arrangements of Dame and Ragged schools gave way to mandated, universal schooling, a great deal more rationalizing was required of both time and space, and a model was ready to hand. As mentioned earlier, medieval monks learned to internalize their obedience to God through the strict regulation of time and space. Foucault (1977) argued that medieval monasteries were the model for early nineteenth-century prisons, and later, along with factories and the army, prisons were also used as the model for organizing schools. Prisons had been places of physical punishment, but early in the nineteenth century, this shifted to disciplining a prisoner’s mind by means of a regime of strict regulation and constant surveillance. A prisoner’s day became a series of entirely predictable events that varied little from one day to the next. Time was broken up into set periods down to the minute: ablutions, breakfast, prayers, work, rest, and so on, each day, every day. At the same time, prisons were constructed in such a way that prisoners in their cells could be viewed at any time without them knowing it. Since prisoners never knew when they were being observed, they never knew when to be well-behaved, and eventually they learned to behave well at least much of the time. They learned to internalize discipline. By constantly surveying themselves they become self-disciplined, and the hope was that they would continue to be self-disciplined when they left prison. The key to this hoped-for success was the observation of strict routine and the appearance of constant surveillance; in short, routine and surveillance, the control of both time and space. Taking this as their model, schooldays were similarly established as a succession of unchanging events through the introduction of a timetable that formally broke each day into school work, a break, more work, a break, and so on, each for set periods of time and at the same time each day, week after week. Additionally, a series of tests and exams, internal and external to schools, was mandated. Today, in an effort to ensure that students pass, curriculum materials, and even single lessons, are conceived in terms of aims and objectives as well as observable, evaluative criteria. Development over time is made measurable to ensure productivity and predictability (Jenks 2005), a phenomenon that in recent decades has increased exponentially. The introduction of universal education was initially resisted by many parents; moral reformers wanted children off the streets and industrialists wanted future employees, but many parents still wanted their

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Figure 5.6 Anonymous, Victorian Schoolroom, c. late 19th century.

children as unpaid workers in their family businesses. Thus, a picture like Figure 5.6 served to indicate not only the power of the state to mandate, but the safety, order, and future-looking nature of schooling. Figure 5.6 shows an especially common type of spatial organization. With the introduction of mass schooling, classrooms were organized according to the rational order of rows, both across and receding, and boxed by right angles. Straight lines with right angles comprise a spatial layout of order and efficiency in the spirit of the rationalizing order of nineteenth-century industrialization. It was adopted by nineteenth-century city planners and even the designers of cemeteries. Medieval towns had been based on meandering, organic lines, and cemeteries had been higgledy-piggledy affairs. Under the rationalizing impulse of the nineteenth century, towns and cemeteries alike were laid out geometrically. In school classrooms, a geometric layout allows easy movement of teachers and students alike, and since students are expected to sit in their own designated seat, it also pinpoints the location of each student. Each student is assigned a particular physical place of his or her own, making each student easily located by teachers. From a fixed point at the front of the room, or while roaming about while students have their heads down performing a task, students are placed under the constant gaze of the teacher. Even when a teacher’s back is turned, teachers like to suggest that they have eyes in the back of their heads. Today, these management techniques are evident in many pictures of classrooms for ­mid-childhood-aged children all over the world. Irrespective of the conditions of the classroom, a major

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Figure 5.7 Anonymous, Elementary Students Raising their Hands in a Traditional Classroom, 2021.

spatial arrangement consists of neatly ordered rows under the ever-vigilant surveillance of a teacher. If in the late nineteenth century it was possible to advertise the value of schooling even with the rows of unhappy faces shown in Figure 5.6, today it is necessary to show children eager to learn, as in Figure 5.7. Figure 5.7 also shows that the control of time and space in school is equally extended to students’ bodies. Performative rituals are ground in so that they become second nature; sitting up straight, putting up hands to answer a question, lining up before proceeding in an orderly fashion, and so on. By such means, children literally embody what it means to be a school student (Gleason 2018). Figure 5.8 shows another common choreographing of student bodies. Uniformed students perform the daily ritual of being lined up for the school assembly, all with eyes obediently facing the same direction, and each with hands placed behind their backs so as to neutralize action. The squared-off nature of their spatial position is echoed in the backdrop of their school building. The geometric, elemental construction of strict horizontals and verticals made of brick, glass, and aluminum perfectly complements the imposition on the students of regularity. This is a place where order prevails. In the past when internal surveillance failed, there was always corporal punishment. Fear of physical pain was the handmaiden of internal control. In the case of Figure 5.9, punishment is being administered by a birch rod on what is presumably—because it was the usual practice at the time—a bare bottom. When children’s minds were too weak to grasp the need for discipline, discipline was inflicted

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Figure 5.8  S dip T, School Assembly, 2011.

on the body. A practice that was relinquished for adult prisoners early in the nineteenth century was maintained for children well into the twentieth century. Figure 5.9 caricatures corporal punishment by stereotyping the teacher as witch-like, and all the children but the one child being beaten are enjoying the spectacle of wood on flesh, but as the many other pictures of birching attest, it captures what was a regular, normative part of the school day for generations. Corporal punishment is still practiced in the United States. Elsewhere, punishments include time out, detention, shaming, and calling parents, each of which is intended to encourage reflection leading to self-discipline.

Students as loyal Obedience is also engendered by developing a sense of loyalty. As described in Chapter 8 on children as threat, the introduction of universal education was due partly to the belief that without the inculcation of respect for each other, social institutions and authorities, civil order could not be guaranteed. Today, to facilitate socialization, in most parts of the world, school uniforms are mandatory, and school songs champion the unique qualities of a school. Projecting into the future, school songs predict how students will look back on their happy school days together. The point is to submerge individuality in favor of the school community. An emotional connection is made to the school, with the school acting as a microcosm of society at large.

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Figure 5.9  George Cruikshank, February. Cutting Weather—Squally, 1839. British Library

The annual, formal class or school photograph functions in the same way. Classmates are lined up in tiered rows, each facing toward the camera for posterity. The photographs are frequently used to illustrate documentaries of the famous in which the camera zooms in to identify the childish features of the person under review, the interest lying in the possibility of being able to discern the nascent traits of their later character written on their faces. In such cases, the search is for individual personality, but at the time the photographs are taken, the emphasis is on group identity. The intent is to help build solidarity by marking the transition from one year to the next. From year to year, the students in a class change while the conventions of the class photograph are so conventional they suggest unchanging change. Students get older, they come and they go, but schools remain the same. The photographs engender an emotional commitment to the social mores of the group, specifically a sense of loyalty to the school. Like school uniforms and school songs, the photographs help cement a belief in, and a belonging to, school, and beyond to society. Imagine the performance required to arrange the students in Figure 5.10, in what Burke and de Castro (2007) call the “choreography of schooling” (9). The teacher would have demanded that the students tidy their hair, wipe smudges from their faces, and look ahead at the camera. The boys in the back row would have been told to stand up straight and the girls in the front row to clasp their

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Figure 5.10 Anonymous, School Class with their Teacher, 1964.

hands in order to present a uniform image. Or the photographer could have made these demands, knowing full well what the school required. Nevertheless, the children retain a degree of individuality. Not all the boys are standing to attention and some of the children are looking elsewhere. The photograph encapsulates both group identity and the retention of at least some agency among the students.

Students as patriots Turning children into contributing socioeconomic citizens often goes beyond the classroom. It often entails being schooled in the patriotism of parades, sports events, and flag ceremonies. In the United States in the immediate post-revolutionary years of the late eighteenth century, educators linked schooling to the need to generate loyalty to the culture of the United States rather than to that of England (Spring 2018). Moral education was used to turn a multicultural society into a single culture—namely white and Protestant—and to create a sense of national pride and loyalty to the new government. Known as the “Schoolmaster of America,” Noah Webster (of Webster’s dictionary) led the cause of arousing patriotism. He sought to create a deep emotional bond between citizens and country such that average

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citizens would be prepared to die for their country. He wrote of the pains needed “to discipline our youth in early life to sound maxims of moral, political and religious duties” (59). His 1789 reader contained the statement, “Begin with the infant in the cradle; let the first word he lisps be Washington” (62). Such loyalty was to be achieved by reading about national heroes, studying national literature, singing nationalistic songs, honoring the flag, and participating in patriotic exercises like parades and ceremonies for the fallen. And enactments like these remain a central part of education in many parts of the world, including in the United States. Enacted rituals were also a major feature of education in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Both viewed education as primarily a means to achieve compliant citizens. German children were expected to acquire the habits of obedient nationalists, and school children in the Soviet Union were trained to serve the socialist state. The Nazi school curriculum turned traditional educational priorities on their heads. The first priority was healthy and strong bodies; the second, character building; and third, academic knowledge (Schumann 2013). This applied to both genders, although for boys it meant early training for military service and for girls it meant preparing them for motherhood. As Hitler (1942) proclaimed in Mein Kampf, education was “a valuable element for future procreation” (451). The Nazis attempted to weaken the influence of parents, arguing that parents did not have sufficient expertise to educate their children in Nazi ideology and were not sufficiently disciplinarian. The primary role of parents was not to overindulge them with love but to keep children on track. Life was difficult, and only by early habit-training could German children survive. Recalcitrant students were to be placed in a separate room and paid no attention. Praise was used primarily for students’ physical fitness and vitality. Hitler declared, “I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth … The free splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes … That is how I will create the New Order” (17). To inculcate unswerving obedience in the Nazi self-proclaimed “educational state,” traditional schools could not be trusted (Schumann 2013: 454). Extensive systems of out-of-school organizations were developed as well as many festivals where children showed off their prowess to the public, sometimes with Hitler in attendance. The Little Fellows catered for children from 6 to 10 years, and German Young People catered for children from 10 to 13 years. The children hiked, climbed mountains, and practiced running, swimming, soccer, and synchronized and spatially regimented gymnastics. They also watched films featuring German heroes of the past, heroic war stories, and stories of self-sacrifice. Thus was control extended to children’s time and spaces beyond school. As Figure 5.11 indicates, children were never too young to participate in such out-of-school indoctrination events. It shows girls as part of a parade for a major sports event. Nazi education was entirely future orientated. According to a 1940 directive, education was “to develop and harness all physical and mental powers of youth for the service of the people and the state” (cited: 455). One battle cry was “Make way, you Old ones” (cited in Garson 2019:15). The good citizen construction, like the human potential construction, relies upon a view of children as malleable. They are neither inherently good nor bad, but education will help to make them one or the other. Depending on the social system into which children are born, being a good citizen can mean being an obedient religious observer, being morally upright, a good capitalist worker, a sound socialist, or a loyal nationalist. It can also mean being a good consumer.

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Figure 5.11 Anonymous, A Parade of Girls Using the Hitler Salute and Singing the Unofficial Anthem of the Nazi Party, 1936.

Students as consumers Schools still attempt to prepare students for the marketplace, and increasingly so as the arts, even in primary schools, are devalued in favor of mathematics, science, and technology. But equally, schools are increasingly incubators of present and future consumers. This echoes the shift from an earlier phase of capitalism, that of productive capitalism, to a later stage known as consumer capitalism (Piketty 2017). Productive capitalism relied upon thrift and hard work; consumer capitalism relies upon their opposite, the evermore rapacious consumption of goods, services, and leisure experiences. This may not be the explicit rationale for schools; from a capitalist perspective, that remains acquiring the consciousness and skills to be trustworthy and competent workers. But as governments withdraw financial support from  schools, to survive, schools are increasingly turning to commercial sponsorships. Increasingly, they rely on the supply of name-brand foods and drinks as well as commercially produced ­curriculum-teaching material (Hamann 2017). Consider the widespread use of Channel One in the United States. In return for the provision of television and technology, 12-minute broadcasts are aired during a school day which combine special interest programs with commercials. Some teachers claim that Channel One offers the opportunity to introduce critical media skills, but they are in a battle for students’ minds when research shows that students tend mostly to retain information related to the commercials, not the programs. Ostensibly a program designed for acquiring knowledge, either for itself or for the future job market, is replaced

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by learning to associate positive emotions with logos. Education market researchers are also collecting data. When the Toys“R”Us company administered the “Great American Toy Test” to students, the collected data helped them to initiate changes in children’s consumption patterns (Molnar 2013). Many schools in the United States are now allowed to be hired by for-profit enterprises. In return for being associated with widely regarded good causes, corporations pay for school events, classroom activities, and scholarships. In neither the classroom, the playground, or around the athletic field is there any escaping from slogans and logos. For example, computer companies trade financial packages for having their computer logos in evidence and helping to habituate users to their software for life. One elementary school in the United States allows McDonald’s to take up residence on its grounds (Hamann 2017). This mini-McDonald’s rewards student performance with meal points and the opportunity to apply for employment. But perhaps the most blatant penetration of McDonald’s into schools is by means of McTeacher Night, an event in which teachers stand behind a counter at their local McDonald’s franchise and serve hamburgers, fries, and soft drinks to their students. It is advertised with a T-shirt for sale. There is also a poster with a picture of the McDonald’s cardboard holder normally used for fires but instead it is loaded with pencils. Advertising aimed at children asks how excited they will be to see their teachers in McDonald’s uniforms. Television news coverage of such events, available on YouTube, shows elementary students purchasing from their teachers and the teachers enthusiastically endorsing the event. In response, many parents and education associations have argued that McTeacher Night is at odds with wanting children to choose healthy foods; they point to the alarming statistics on childhood obesity. Moltnar (2013) was prompted to argue that schools are being used to promote illness. More generally, critics are concerned with schools being complicit with commercial interests. They charge that the integration of schools with commercialism creates mental scripts that understand the world in terms of commodities to own. The encroachment of commerce into schools exemplifies the penetration of capital into spaces previously free of commercial interest (Piketty 2017). It is the logic of capital to expand and penetrate, and with dwindling government-supported budgets, schools have become low-lying fruit for corporate interests. Increasingly, schools are not only serving capital by producing future workers, but even from an early age, as consumers and, moreover, constructing them as consumers for life. Critics claim that instead of promoting the values of democracy, schools have become enablers of the market (Hamann 2017).

Students realizing their individual potential In what Ritter (2001) calls “the human potential discourse” of childhood, children are regarded as having the potential to learn what is beneficial to them (17). This is contrary to the Rousseauian view of children, though consistent with the good citizen construction. Children have the potential to learn to be either civil or destructive, and instead of relying heavily on nature with only a minimum of nurture, nature and nurture are understood to be complementary. Human potential is a construction of long standing. The fourth-century BCE Confucian scholar Mencius believed that people were born good but that they could deteriorate without teaching (Ritter 2001). Aristotle thought that students were born into knowledge and wisdom, but he also

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stressed that the aim of education was to help develop each child’s potential into what he or she was best suited to become (Palmer 2004) However, in modern times the human potential construction is primarily a product of the Enlightenment, in which history was viewed in terms of inevitable progress realized by the sum total of individual achievements. Locke’s ([1689] 1993) views on education were as influential in the development of this discourse as on the good citizen discourse The stress of the human potential construction is on improvement—improving curriculum, school grounds, classrooms, teacher qualifications—all to enhance children’s chances of realizing their own worth. And parents are urged not to wait until formal schooling. Commercially produced, electronic-­ based programs promise to enhance a child’s chance of doing well at school by preparing them, even as babies. The emphasis is on either realizing or failing to realize a child’s innate abilities. The irony of this construction is that in order to cope with the organization of large numbers of students, degrees of regimentation are required. Even while championing individual potential, it applies the same regimentation of students’ bodies in time and space as other philosophies of education. This contradiction has often led to the accusation that schools strip individuals of their imagination and creative potential (Robinson and Aronica 2016). Critics favor some version of the organic discourse in which children are treated as integrated as knowledge and skills are in the world beyond schools. And today, many elementary schools, especially in the lower grades, are informed by the idea that if students are engaged in their learning, if they enjoy learning, external rewards, punishment, and constant surveillance is unnecessary. In spatial terms, this idea is manifested by organizing classrooms by workstations and tables around which several children sit and where they work on their own or collaboratively but without being constantly subject to the teacher’s gaze. In pictures, they appear indistinguishable from Montessori schools and similar to the small-scale Dame schools in that, spatially, they are organic. Figure 5.2 could well have been taken in many an ordinary elementary school. What is fascinating about this spatial arrangement is that, to function successfully, it requires just the kind of internal discipline necessary to function successfully in a society based on consumer capitalism. An open, organic plan relies upon a high degree of student self-discipline, much more than is required in the more traditional row-upon-row arrangement. Instead of being all-seeing all the time, teachers will often attend to just one group of students at a time with their backs to other groups, confident in the belief that students are busy at an assigned task and thus behaving compliantly. As teaching is typically organized around projects rather than the transmission of facts and figures, the model of the all-knowing teacher is replaced by the teacher as the problem solver and/or facilitator. And so too the structuring of space becomes less rigid. But as external control is loosened, so must the inculcation of self-control be strengthened (Jenks 2005). The key to success is ensuring that learning is pleasurable. This is constitutive of a central feature of consumer capital, of what Feathersone (1991) called “calculated hedonism” (59). While we are encouraged today to consume for our own individual pleasure, in a highly organized society our taking of pleasure can only be achieved through a carefully circumscribed and internally responsive controlled decontrol. It takes internal discipline to walk through a store without touching everything on display, to develop a controlled enthusiasm that observes, buys, but does not steal. In a highly organized society, hedonism can only exist within limits; indulgence must to some degree be internally regulated. To continue to function, a consumer economy demands ongoing

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hedonistic indulgence, and a highly organized society demands discipline. This necessitates a higher degree of internal control than was required by productive capitalism. Productive capitalism insisted on sufficient control only to work hard; consumer capitalism requires discipline even when having pleasure. Pleasure goes hand in hand with a high level of internal control, of controlled decontrol. Thus the logic of consumer capitalism reaches down into the organization of elementary classrooms and into the consciousness of elementary school students. What is frequently conceived and promoted as facilitating the potential of children, to engage them by means of the pleasure inherent in learning tasks, is also equipping them to operate as consumers in an economy whose primary business is consumption.

Control and agency Irrespective of educational philosophy and the conceptions of childhood upon which they rest, schools are institutions for what Spring (2018) called “ideological management” (5), and this extends beyond particular ideas, values, and beliefs to ensure control. Pictures of children as schooled reveal the controlled choreography of their bodies in time and space that is intended to instill a degree of internalized government. Different philosophies of education, each reliant on different conceptions of childhood, have used different levels and kinds of regulation, but the objective has always been the same: how to discipline the unruly bodies of children. Even when pictures celebrate students’ own agency by their varied expressions and gestures, control is critical. Many pictures of schoolchildren conceal the particular construction of childhood and the philosophy of education they are informed by; control takes precedence. Yet schools are agents of both control and agency. Schools act as both an analog of and a training for broader hierarchies of power by insisting on rationality, order, and compliance. But children’s agency does emerge within the controls set.

Chapter 6 Children as Aesthetic Objects

“There’s only goodness around babies … It’s just human purity right there.” (Anne Geddes quoted in Hughes 2017) Anne Geddes is a noted photographer of highly aestheticized babies and very young children. She sees the alleged purity of her subjects through the lens of the common understanding of aesthetics as beauty. This is modernist aesthetics, in which beauty is equated with inherent goodness and absolute truth. Modernist aesthetics sought to exist outside social valuation, a quasi-spiritual realm unto itself, a dream space uncontaminated by ordinary, mundane concerns. More recent theorizing on aesthetic experience is neither so narrowly focused on beauty nor equated with goodness and truth (Duncum 2021), but it is the modernist aesthetic focus on beauty and a particular version of it—cuteness—that is evoked in this chapter. Aestheticized children are embodiments of beauty and fantasy. Cute and seemingly innocent, they delight the eye, causing viewers to perform cute with “eeews” and “arhhhs.” Childhood is offered up as a fantasy of a better time located either in the future or, more commonly, saturated with a nostalgic yearning for happier and more secure times in the past. Either way, childhood is an indulgence in sweet, escapist imaginings. Aestheticized children are often considered innocent, pure spirits, an idea that is often realized by the conventional trope of their being nude. The issues arising from their nudity are addressed in Chapter 11. The focus here is solely on the sensory-cum-emotional pleasure offered by their representations as beautiful and cute. Children’s bodies are treated here as pleasurable to look at, touch, and smell; as sensual but not sexual. The aesthetics of beautiful and cute children are nevertheless double-edged, at once evoking a deep emotional register of nurturance but also often of deep complications made more problematic by their being normalized. Questions arise regarding cuteness versus resentment, and control versus agency.

Aesthetics and aestheticism As a philosophical endeavor, the study of aesthetics originated with Alexander Baumgarten, who in 1750 declared that he sought to study the “deliverances of the senses … [and] the stirrings of the passions” (Gilbert and Kuhn 1953: 290). It is this particular, general understanding of visual aesthetics as the sensory characteristics of images and their emotional effects upon us—sensation-cum-emotion—that is employed here.

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Eighteenth-century aestheticians were concerned with both beauty and the sublime, but babies and young children fall into their category of the beautiful because they are small and charming, not large or overwhelming like the sublime. Thomas Reid wrote for many when he claimed that beauty was agreeableness and perfection and excited love and esteem: The emotion excited by beautiful objects … sweetens and humanizes the temper, it is friendly to every benevolent affection, and tends to allay sullen and angry passions. It enlivens the mind, and disposes it to other agreeable emotions, such as those of love, hope and joy. (cited in Hipple 1957: 54)

Similarly, for Immanuel Kant ([1764] 1965) the beautiful evoked the virtues of love, sympathy, charity, affection, and agreeableness: “The beautiful proclaims itself through shinning cheerfulness in the eyes, through smiling features.” (47). But Kant ([1790] 1952) went further. In virtually laying down the foundations for modernist aesthetics, he claimed that aesthetic experience was entirely unrelated to sociopolitical considerations. Aesthetic experiences were wholly pure unto themselves. We were to delight in aesthetic pleasures entirely for their own sake, or as he put it, “the delight which determines judgements of taste is independent of all intent” (42). While useful things could please as a means to an end, that which “pleases on its own account we call good in itself” (his italics: 46). This is aestheticism, a view of aesthetic experience that is so uplifting, so pure in spirit, it is akin to the divine. It has nothing to do with utility of any kind. It is on the grounds of aestheticism that aesthetics meets children’s untainted, beautiful bodies and cute expressions. Aestheticism raises children to near godlike beings, uncorrupted, sinless, wholly virtuous, wherein lies nothing but goodness and truth. Even when aestheticized children are mischievous, they are made to appear the very heart of goodness and worthy of unconditional love.

Aesthetically beautiful children In bringing an aesthetic lens to children, image makers have employed a range of strategies. These include the use of children’s innate facial features and body proportions that trigger a nurturing response, rich fabrics placed in close proximity to their bodies, the fetishization of their bodies and body parts, bathing them in golden or soft light, making them appear to glow, evoking the sense of touch and smell of their bodies, associating them with uplifting sayings, locating them in otherworldly settings, and casting them as divine beings. Photographers have also used soft focus, muted colors and tones, and nostalgic photographic techniques.

Small divine beings In antiquity, there were numerous children made to appear highly appealing. In Greece, Cupid was often shown sleeping, enacting the sweet dream he signified for viewers; in Rome, putti swarmed over relief sculpture as decorative motifs. From the Renaissance until the end of the nineteenth century, numerous cupids, putti, and angels—they were often indistinguishable—were frequently to be found

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Figure 6.1 Raphael, Cherubs (detail), 1513. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister; Photographer: Bert Kaufmann

placed decoratively in the upper half of paintings, where they were celebrated as signs of purity. Raphael’s remain the most reproduced in print, though also on many consumer items from tea towels to coffee mugs. And during the Renaissance, the baby Jesus was highly aestheticized. To better convey his special divine nature, he was often surrounded by rich fabrics, colorful fruits, and gorgeous flowers (Wood, 1992), and, as if illustrating the theological idea of Jesus as the light of the world, in some images he appears to glow. In Figure 6.2, he radiates beams of light watched over by child angels. The painting was influenced by the vision of the fourteenth-century Saint Bridget of Sweden, who described a vision of the baby Jesus, emitting light like the sun, “naked and glowing” (Stracke 2015). A century and a half later, Peter Paul Ruben’s painting of toddlers was a celebration of flesh. Likened to ripe fruit, they are also highly tactile.

Sentimental and romantic children However, the heyday of aestheticizing children begins in the latter half of the eighteenth century as part of the sentimental turn that saw human feelings, especially the tender feelings of love and compassion, valued above rationality (Higonett 1998). This was manifest in the visual arts by the Rococo style, which was noted for its shimmering surface effects and representation of dreamlike idylls where all was rendered as perfect bliss. The aestheticizing of children then continued well into the nineteenth century as part of the romantic turn that celebrated an outpouring of emotions and was manifested in both Romantic and Academic art. Taking a cue from Rubens, François Boucher, a leading French Rococo artist, was famous for his sensuous nudes. Noted French critic Denis Diderot remarked on Boucher’s ability in “weaving garlands of children” and “painting chubby pink bottoms” (cited in Held and Posner 1971: 310).

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Figure 6.2  Hans Pleydenwurff, Altar of the Magi, c. 1460. St. Lorenz Church, Nürnberg; Photographer: Uoae1

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Figure 6.3  Peter Paul Rubens, Christ and John the Baptist and Two Angels, 1615–20. Kunsthistorisches Museum

Figure 6.4  François Boucher, Putti Composition, 1762. Fondation Bemberg; Photographer: Dodier Descouens

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Equally representative of aestheticism is Joshua Reynold’s 5-year-old child pictured as multiple disembodied angels in Figure 1.13. Note that there is no discernible light source, almost as if, like the baby Jesus, light emanates from the various iterations of the girl’s face. And like so many of the divine child beings of premodern painting, they each float somewhere among clouds, untethered from material reality. Literally disembodied, they are cut off from considerations of class or indeed any kind of conflict. Thus, they perfectly capture the idea of aestheticized children existing in a realm of their own. The painting was extensively copied, with at least 314 full-size reproductions in oil, many others on decorative items, and many other photographic versions with titles like “The Cherub Choir” (Mannings and Postel 2000). For its time, it rivaled the many reproductions of aesthetic children on all manner of consumer items of our own time. Unlike Reynold’s angels, Adolphe Bouguereau’s Cupid of Figure 6.5 stands on solid ground, but he is no less unworldly. Bouguereau was the highest-paid painter of the nineteenth century, largely because he could beautify sitters like few others (Clay 1978). Cupid, a young boy with wings, is bathed in late-afternoon light as golden as the boy’s shock of curly hair. It is as though he almost appears to glow and only lacks a halo to be deemed fully divine. The light indicates that the day is almost done

Figure 6.5  William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Woman with Captive Cupid, 1885. Private Collection; Source: Bartoli, D., & C. Frederick (2010) William Bouguereau: His Life and Works

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and, like childhood from an adult perspective, can only be looked back upon as something that is past. Posed frontally, his naked body is offered up to the viewer, the focus being on the boy’s skin tones, hands, knees, and feet, items for which Bouguereau was much admired. The boy stares to one side, his body twisted against the half-naked woman who holds him affectionately, her torso pressed against his wings, allowing the viewer to imagine the same, pressing oneself against the boy’s body, feeling his soft skin and breathing in the smell of him. With the invention of photography, it did not take long for the adoption of an ethereal approach to children in a style of photography known as Pictorialism. The earliest and best-known representative of this approach to children is Julia Margaret Cameron. Figure 6.6 shows the boy posed as an angel in dreamy repose. In other images, she posed children from Greek mythology, sometimes with a bow and arrow to evoke Cupid. Cameron was famous for her use of soft focus and muted tones, the effect of which was to create an unreal, dreamlike space. She described her practice as “almost the embodiment of a prayer” (Gernsheim 1975: Flyleaf), and contemporary critics compared her photographs favorably to the most famous painters of children among both her contemporaries and the past.

Figure 6.6  Julia Margaret Cameron, Angel at the Nativity, 1867. Source: Ford, C. (2003) Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius

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The 1990s’ baby craze Aestheticized children never disappeared, but during the 1990s they proliferated, especially in the form of babies. The babies took many forms—small animals, putti, fairies, and angels—and they appeared on many materials, including calendars, cards, coffee mugs, and all kinds of paraphernalia. The craze for aestheticized babies was initiated by photographer Anne Geddes, and she quickly had many imitators, of which Figure 6.7 is a latter-day example. Typical of Geddes’ 1990s images of children is a naked, deliriously happy baby rolling about amidst a bed of pink rose petals. Newborns slept in pea pods, and a naked newborn slept atop a huge, orange pumpkin or a giant toadstool. Another newborn slept in a shell amidst strings of pearls. Two chubby babies sat among cabbages and sported a cabbage leaf on their heads; they looked toward each other with expressions that suggested they had just been born and were baffled about each other. Two babies, one Black, the other white, lay asleep, tucked together in a serving bowl accompanied by bright red cherries. In many images, babies peeked above germanium pots or sat in a line dressed as bees or butterflies. In still other images, babies appeared with wings either as butterflies, angels, or putti. The babies were often likened to cherries, pearls, and flowers, and thereby associated with wholesome sayings like “a bowl of cherries,” “pearls of great price,” and “every flower is a soul blooming in nature.” Geddes’ hyper-real style, achieved with studio lighting and a meticulous attention to detail, highlighted the palpability of the children’s flesh and the physicality of their settings. In Figure 6.7, the baby’s beautifully smooth pink skin contrasts with the roughhewn texture of the basket, but in being complemented by the flowers, fur, and the slightly out-of-focus fans and wallpaper, the baby has become a flower to be arranged. The reference here is babies given up by their mothers and left in a basket on a stranger’s doorstep. For the viewer, like the gift of flowers, here is a beautiful present. Other photographers of the 1990s created images of toddlers and small children as angels, fairies, various animals, and putti. At the time, angels were heavily featured in New Age religious literature. Randol-Price (1993), for example, informed readers that angels offered unconditional love to help us through each of life’s trouble spots. “Each angel has a duty to function as a vortex, through which it emits the true nature of all that is good, true and beautiful” (13). And the numerous pictures testified to the idea that child angels were best. Together, they captured the sad longing for childhoods from former times. Like all the small divine beings that had floated among clouds for centuries, childhood was located in fantasy. Still other photographers explored the nostalgia of hand-painted photographs and/or early printed color photographs of children. Like Figure 6.8, they used a very limited color palette. Also like Figure 6.8, many photographs used a limited depth-of-field so that backgrounds appeared blurred, a signifier of cameras like those used by Cameron a century before. The effect was to evoke images that had originated from an indefinable time known only to have passed. Alternatively, backgrounds were deepetched, which evoked daguerreotypes from the earliest years of photography. Either out of focus or sharply in focus, the photographs managed simultaneously to evoke nostalgia for a vaguely bygone era and to disconnect the children from any specific context in time or space.

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Figure 6.7  Creative Angela, A Cute Newborn, 2021.

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Figure 6.8 Anonymous, Cute Child Couple, unknown date.

Additionally, older images of putti were reproduced, Raphael’s two being popular on coffee mugs, posters, postcards, cushions, and rugs. They appeared framed and unframed, and sometimes glued to timber that had been embellished with carvings and stained dark and glossy to evoke the cultural cache of high art. In one poster, real children were substituted for Raphael’s original. And just one of Raphael’s putti appeared on the 1996 US 32-cent stamp juxtaposed with the word LOVE in capital letters (Duncum 1997). However, perhaps the most eulogical expression of children as aesthetic in the above terms were the photographs by Kelsh and accompanying text by Quindlen (2009) in their book Naked Babies, originally published in 1996. We are told that “a naked baby is humanity stripped down to its essence, perhaps to its soul, and Lord it is good. A naked baby is like a field after a snowfall, before anyone has walked across” (10). The photographs employ soft, muted tones, and are mostly extreme close-ups that show only parts of a baby’s body: curling, intertwined fingers and toes, an ear, a thigh of rolling fat, a pair of heavily dimpled buttocks, a thumb buried in a mouth, buttocks pressing down on small feet. They are similar to the fetishization in Figure 6.9. Instead of focusing on the whole body, there is a fixation on details. The text perfectly complements this fetishization. Quindlen writes, “Babies are meant to be naked as surely as they are meant to be nurtured and loved” (10), and “adults in the presence of a naked baby

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Figure 6.9  Sunny Chen, New Born Baby Feet on White Blanket, 2021.

reach out their hands, as though to warm themselves at the fire of perfection” (14). The flyleaf describes babies’ bodies as “the perfection of hands, the swirls of a cowlick, the smoothness of skin on the neck—all are exquisite and invitingly tactile.” Babies have “unscarred skin and hair-like duck down, fine as sunshine” (20). The photographs capture “Adam and Eve before the snake turned up” (20) because “a baby is the essential virgin, that lovely word, freed from its sexual and religious baggage … means merely this: ‘Not altered by human activity, being used for the first time’” (15–16). A baby is a “pure soul, the personality’s living room before it became cluttered with the furniture of parental projection and societal pressures” (24).

The culture of cuteness The fashion for Geddes and her imitators as in Figure 6.7 has waned, though by no means disappeared. Geddes has migrated to the internet for a pay-for-access financial model (Brara 2020), and many photographers now advertise their willingness to photograph babies with Geddes-like aesthetics. More significantly, aestheticized children now flourish as part of a larger culture of cuteness, a culture of the adorable, loveable, sweet, and delicately endearing. For much of the twentieth century, the cute

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Figure 6.10  Budi Creator, Chibi Girls, 2021.

aesthetic was typified by Disney, but since the beginning of the millennium, there has been a worldwide proliferation of a cute aesthetics that originated in Japan (Dale et al. 2017). Its vanguard was Hello Kitty, the perpetual cutie-pie third grader. Drawn with minimal facial features and a pink bow, she appears on numerous consumer items that were originally aimed at preteens though they are now marketed as much to adults as children. Disney cute is commonly associated with the U.S’s own rural past, whereas Japanese cute is commonly associated with infantilization (Brown 2011). In both cases, the cute aesthetic represents a nostalgic longing for an idealized past date, the one national, the other personal. Since the original Japanese cute is grounded in psychological rather than national fantasies, it has had no trouble going global. Yano (2013) calls it “pink globalization.” The Japanese word for this culture of cute is kawaii. Kawaii now embraces all kinds of materials, virtual and real, a major part of which involves the cartoon representation of children called “chibi” (Dale et al. 2017). Chibi are derived from manga comic books and are drawn with huge eyes, a huge head, often with short stubby bodies, absent a nose, and super flat rendering (Brown 2011). They take full advantage of the features of babies and young children, as well as some juvenile animals, that trigger a nurturing response in adults. These features include a small mouth, high forehead, large eyes, full lips, a round face, and a short body in relation to the head. Since the nurturing response appears across cultures, these features appear to be an evolutionary adaptation, and cartoonists have long taken advantage of them. The rendering of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, for example, has undergone a number of iterations, and each time Mickey’s head has increased in relation to his body, and his eyes have got bigger (Gould 1992). With Chibi, Mickey’s development has been taken several steps further.

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DIY aesthetic children By contrast to all the above aestheticized children, who are the creation of professionals, parents are now able to have their own children aestheticized or to aestheticize themselves. They can either turn their children over to a professional company or adopt a DIY approach. Photographic enhancement companies like Photozworld (2021), for example, promise to “transform your photographs with magical touch ups,” not only removing blemishes but color and density correcting to produce perfect skin. Parents can also choose programs like Snow and Snapchat that allow users not only to airbrush skin but to add filters to decorate a face with hearts, flowers, sunglasses, and animal ears and masks. Clio’s mother, who took and decorated Figure 6.11, argues that since it is popular for children to dress up, experiment with makeup, and wear funny hats and masks, it is unsurprising that it is fun to play with the face on-screen. As Clio has grown older, she is said to enjoy using these programs on her own face. The programs are selfie-based and interactive, so when Clio smiles, opens her mouth, or sticks out her tongue, a mask will snap into place, or a puppy tongue will suddenly snap from her mouth (Livingston 2021). This is a rare case of children having agency with their own photographs and also an example of how real-world play has migrated to living on-screen. These apps allow users to go further and employ face shape editing, called liquefying, which allows them to push, pull, rotate, pucker, and bloat any area of the face; for example, slimming the face and enlarging eyes. When applying the liquefying filters to babies, the result can resemble the “chibi” aesthetic of child cute.

Figure 6.11  Susan Livingston, Clio as a Baby, 2019.

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Aesthetics and its opposites Beauty is uplifting, and cute kids draw a nurturing response, but aestheticizing children can have a negative side. Aestheticized images of children can be an attempt to place the unruliness of real children under control. They can also be a response to deep resentments about children. Either way, typically aestheticized children are physically corralled and rendered blank, that is, without the complexity of actual children.

Cute and resentment Aestheticizing children triggers tender emotions, but it can also trigger resentment at being made to feel a little foolish for being overly sentimental. Viewers can feel that they are being manipulated and resent it. Beautification can be interpreted as mere surface show and cuteness as mere pretense. The cute often “cutifies” viewers, causing them to perform cuteness. Adults speak in baby talk to elicit a response, and in attempting to do so, they act out child/like/ish behavior themselves (Ngai 2012). Adults can be embarrassed by their own such behavior. And cuteness as performative is not always confined to verbal approval and caressing gently; it can also include hugging too hard, smothering with kisses, pinching, and even biting. In other words, performing cuteness can be ambiguous, adoration easily folding into aggression. An aesthetic of cuteness is therefore not solely about the evocation of warm fuzzy feelings, of wonder and attachment, but also, potentially, antagonisms. Harris (2001) claims that cuteness “aestheticizes unhappiness” and, in so doing, represents “an unconscious act of sadism” on the part of both its creators and viewers, who together make “an unconscious attempt to maim, hobble, and embarrass the thing” that they idolize (5). Or worse. Antagonism is at least potentially dangerous. When children are something to be aesthetically composed, they become something that few real children can match for any length of time and no child all the time. Images of ideal children with perfectly formed bodies, who are perpetually cute, cuddly and cheerful, and utterly dependent upon adult approval, present an image that real children cannot possibly sustain. Children leak at both ends, and their crying renders parents feeling helpless and deeply frustrated. The question then arises: is child abuse due, at least in part, when an imagined ideal collides with reality (Holland 1992)? Are pictures like those in this chapter in some way partly responsible for pictures like those in the following chapter on children as victims?

Coercion and control For modernist aesthetic theorists like Kant ([1790] 1952), beauty was equated with freedom, and while adults are free to fantasize about childhood as a dream state, aestheticized children are typically straitjacketed. Agency almost always belongs entirely to adult image makers and adult viewers. Image makers take advantage of the nurturing response in children’s faces and bodies by greatly exaggerating them. And as noted throughout this chapter, by a variety of other means, they impose upon children a beautifying aesthetic filter. As Harris (2001) claims, “cuteness … is not something we

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find in children but something we do to them” (5). By definition, to aestheticize is to impose a particular way of creating images and/or viewing them, to manipulate subject matter to conform to conventions of taste. Image makers carefully select and alter subject matter to fit preconceived ideas of what elicits sensory pleasure. And one of the most notable features of aestheticized children is the degree of control exercised by both painters and photographers over the children’s own agency. Image makers dominate their subject matter and invite viewers to share their domination. Of course, most images of children are made by adults with particular purposes in mind and thus exercise control over the children who they picture, but aestheticizing children takes control to a much higher level. Consider Geddes. Her photographs were much concerned with physically constraining children in a way that emphasized their dependence upon adults. Placing babies in geranium pots assigned each baby to a very restricted place. The children peeked above their pots, unable to move about. Equally constrained were the newborns who lay curled up in fruit bowls or tucked up in pea pods. Where babies were lined up in a row, each was assigned a space in a strictly predetermined relation to each other. In the image where a newborn slept atop a huge pumpkin, the infant was unable to move safely without adult intervention, and this applied equally to the many other children that were placed high on pedestals. In each case, the children were subject to regimes of spatial confinement. Geddes’ best-known motif, the geranium pot, appeared as a metaphor simultaneously for a Never Never Land of innocence and societal control. Note how in Figure 6.7, the baby is placed on top of a basket, a basket the baby could not have climbed up onto or be able to climb down from. Consider Cameron. She was equally renowned for her assertion of her own vision over the children she photographed. She was renowned for her dictatorial approach to her models. Like many of her photographs of children, Figure 6.6 shows a child worn out by the length of the photographic session. Cameron’s photoshoots were very lengthy affairs. Artifice takes time, and Cameron was infamous as a tyrant. She may have thought of her practice as alike to a prayer, but this is not how her sitters saw it. One of her child subjects reflected as an adult: “No wonder those old photographs of us, leaning over imaginary ramparts of heaven, look anxious and wistful. This is how we felt, … ‘Stand there,’ she shouted, and we stood for hours” (quoted in Gernsheim 1975: 30). A further imposition on many aestheticized children is that they are posed nude, ostensibly to celebrate their innocence and/or to revel in their sensuousness. Many commentators refer to them as “naked.” But they are not just naked; they are nude. Both naked and nude mean unclothed, but whereas naked simply means wearing no clothes, in the context of many pictures, and most clearly with aestheticized pictures, nude means having been deliberately posed. As Berger (1972) states, “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others … Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguise” (54). Moreover, the distinction Berger goes on to make is critical: “To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude” (54). In real life, Western children are typically clothed. Even babies in hot weather wear diapers, so that to be painted or photographed naked means that they have become nude only by the imposition of an adult desire to impose upon them the symbolic value of purity and/or to delight in their sensory appeal.

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Beauty and blankness In objectifying children, they are stripped of their individuality and made into types. And as indicated earlier by Kelsh and Quindlen (2009), that babies have not yet developed personalities is one of their primary attractions. But it takes only a short while before their personalities do emerge. Aestheticized children, however, are made blank, which is inscribed in the way some of them are represented. Hello Kitty and all the Chibi are notable for their flat rendering. And photographic enhancement programs like Photozworld wash away facial features to produce synthetic-looking skin. Child beauty pageants provide another example of vacancy. As noted in Chapter 4, in the United States, the pageants were the subject of several television shows. Tantrums and Tiaras (2009–13) highlighted the “high glitz” pageants, which are characterized by couture costumes and the use of professional hairstylists, makeup artists, and dance routine choreographers. The girls, some as young as 4 years of age, are commonly spray tanned, and wear fake nails, fake teeth veneers, very high hair extensions, and high-heeled shoes (Anderson 2009). They are groomed to glossy perfection. The result, can be seen in Figure 6.12 of a girl who was a poster child for Tantrums and Tiaras. With frontal lighting that eliminates shadows, and thus little modeling of the face, the effect leaves her eyes, nose, and mouth floating on her face rather than an integrated part of it. It is as if her skin is made of plastic and any distinctive character bleached out. She and all the other girls photographed in this way resemble dolls rather than children. Often described as creepy, they fall into the category of the uncanny valley, where humans can look too real, too perfect to be pleasurable. It is the same effect rendered by photographic enhancement apps. This is an ironic twist since the intention is pleasure; when artifice goes too far, it turns grotesque.

Figure 6.12 Anonymous, Eden Wood at 4 Years of Age, 2009.

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Aestheticism and anxiety As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, aestheticism involves a concentration on sensory-­cumemotional experience at the exclusion of the sociological conditions out of which pictures arise and with which they engage. Aesthetics is considered to be beyond external valuation of any kind: social, economic, political. It serves the valorization of children well, for being in denial about its socioeconomic conditions, it dovetails perfectly with the denial that beautiful, cute children are anything more than projections of adult desires and societal pressures. Aestheticism represents the triumph of fiction over fact. Like the concept of the ideal childhood, aestheticism is a fantasy, a mirage, a view of aesthetics untethered from reality (Eagleton 1990). Aesthetic pleasure offers the viewer heightened, even consummatory experiences, but pictures always serve sociopolitical and economic interests. And highly aesthetic images of children are no exception. They have always been with us, as indicated by images from antiquity and the Renaissance; however, this chapter has highlighted three historical periods in which aestheticized children have been particularly marked: the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of sentimentalized and romantic children; the 1990s baby and young child craze, and the twenty-first-century culture of cuteness. Each period is marked by radical socioeconomic changes in which idealized, aestheticized children were born of anxiety. In each case, the times appeared to be out of kilter, as they always do, but during these particular times one of the focal points of social malaise was that long-held conceptions of childhood appeared to be coming apart. The earlier period witnessed the greatest social change in millennia. As described in more detail in Chapter 11, European society underwent such an immense upheaval that many of the dynamics of the Industrial Revolution remain with us to this day (Eagleton 2018). Childhood became a reference point in a divided modern consciousness between a mechanized, industrial, and mass society on the one hand and human sensibility on the other. Where society was driven by an evangelical individualism and organized to exploit emerging technologies irrespective of the harm done to the great majority of working people, including children, childhood emerged as a dream space in which all that was now considered indisputably human could be celebrated and cherished. In contrast to the driven impetus of a materialistic and utilitarian society that wreaked aesthetic havoc on the landscape and people’s living conditions, childhood was viewed as a beautified state full of promise. Aestheticized children belied the new, industrial cities that were both hideously unattractive and a danger to health. The public sought in an idealized version of childhood a source of finer feelings that was denied by the onslaught of industrialization and materialism. Childhood represented a human dimension that the dominant view of society excluded: it became a realm of a beautifying imagination even as there was an awareness that the conditions of children working in the factories and mines were inhuman. Aestheticized children could appear to offer the dream of a better future (Jenks 2005), although they were equally viewed through a deeply nostalgic lens (Kincaid 1992). Similarly, the 1990s were notable for a sudden increase in awareness that not all was right with childhood. The conceptions of childhood discussed in other chapters, especially the next two chapters in which children are described as victims of psychological and sexual abuse, child soldiering, and child

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pornography, as well as threats to life and liberty (Holland 2004), led commentators to claim that childhood as commonly conceived was disappearing (Postman 1982). It had risen in social esteem but was now in decline (Summerville 1982). To some commentators, the death of childhood, meaning the death of childhood innocence, was self-evident. Such pessimism about childhood was part of what many commenters saw as a much broader social malaise broadcast as the death of history (Fukuyama 1992), even the death of God (Eagleton 2015), meaning, in general, the implosion of former social categories, the demise of older certainties. A pessimistic, end-times version of postmodernism viewed society as fragmented in which traditional ways of life were undermined with little of value to replace them. In this context, childhood appeared to offer comfort in the form of a nostalgic dream. If modernist children could be viewed as harbingers of a better future, postmodern children at least appeared to offer, again, a return to a better past (Jenks 2005) Since the turn of the millennium, social fragmentation has only increased. Neoliberal economics has shifted even further former state responsibilities to the individual creating ever more jarring challenges to daily life. Former expectations of upward mobility, political and social equality, and durable intimacy have frayed, to be replaced by instability and an increase in isolation and loneliness. Pappano describes the new normal as “overstimulated, hyper kinetic, over committed, striving, under-cared-for, therapy dependent, plugged in, logged on, [and] sleep deprived” (cited in Dale et al. 2017: 21). In this context, many people have retreated into domesticity, evading the vicissitudes of the present to seek comfort in the “naptime aesthetic” of cuteness (26) and other aesthetic children.

Aestheticism, innocence, and reality Aesthetic children are ideal children, decidedly divorced from reality. It is no accident that many of Geddes’ babies are like Figure 6.7, namely, sound asleep. When awake, they are either looking about with wonder or appearing to laugh. Aesthetic babies do not cry, puke or poo, and they never misbehave. They are a beautiful dream, and have long served as an escape from an anxious world. By equating beauty with goodness, they strongly support the ideology of childhood as a state of innocence. And who would lightly dismiss the value of an aesthetic sanctuary in a world gone mad? But also, making children the center of such a sanctuary means imposing control over them, stripping them of agency, constructing them as something they are not and never can be. And who would lightly dismiss a further equation: aesthetics with abuse?

Chapter 7 Children as Victims

“The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.” (DeMause 1974b: 1) Awake to the victimization of children in the past we may be, but what of today’s children? Like adults, children are victims of the vicissitudes of life: war, famine, disease, and abuse, yet since children are on the whole more vulnerable, physically, emotionally, and mentally, their victimhood appears the more distressing. They also suffer specifically for being children. The deliberate killing of children has been a widespread practice throughout history, and in many societies children have had their lives sacrificed to appease the gods. Many still are sacrificed to the god of mammon. Examining how children are pictured as victims highlights with particular clarity some of our most contradictory attitudes toward them. Picturing children as victims is usually intended to raise outrage and effect change for the better, either through reform, revolution, or charity. But intent and viewer reception are often quite different. Horrific images of children’s suffering may shock, dismay, and viscerally disgust, but also they may excite nothing but curiosity. They may even evoke rapt fascination. Worse, there can be a sadistic edge to viewing victimized children, as frustration with their behavior is turned against them. Drawing upon the destructive children we remain as adults, we may blame them for our own failures. We may also do our best to avoid seeing children’s pain, yet also be pleased to be horrified because horror is pleasurable. Alternatively, we may avoid their pain by employing pictorial strategies of obfuscation or have recourse to counter interpretations of minimalization or even outright denial.

Child sacrifice The ancient societies of Egypt, Greece, and the Middle East, as well as several South American nations, practiced child sacrifice to either please or appease their gods (Carrasco 2013). The Aztecs included children in their sacrifices to the god Tlaloc for fear that, otherwise, it would not rain and their crops would wither. Believing that the tears of the very young were required to wet the earth, it appears that children as young as 6 years of age were made to cry by having their nails torn off prior to their being sacrificed. The Incas sacrificed children by blows to the head, strangulation, and by leaving them in the extreme cold of high mountains.

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The Hebrew Bible contains many references to child sacrifice as practiced by contemporaries of the Israelites and also by some of the Israelites themselves. The most notable reference involves the patriarch Abraham and his son Isaac (Genesis 22:1-14). Abraham is summoned by his God to take his firstborn to a remote mountain, where he is to offer him as a “burnt offering.” Seeming to think the request uncontroversial, Abraham immediately obeys, taking with him a knife with which to kill Isaac and wood on which to burn him. Reaching their destination, Abraham is about to slit Isaac’s throat when an angel appears and stays his hand. A lamb is then found struggling in bushes nearby, and it is used as an alternative sacrifice. But it was not this anticlimactic ending that proved a favorite of painters for centuries; it was the moment just prior to the intended kill. The Bible does not mention how old Isaac was, and some pictorial interpretations represent him as an adolescent, even as a young man, but many also show him as a child and thereby the more trusting and vulnerable. In some interpretations, Isaac is blindfolded and his body is stretched out and near naked, his bare flesh offered up to the knife. To have allowed his father to place him in so vulnerable a position speaks of an unconditional trust that is utterly unfounded. In other interpretations, Abraham holds Isaac down while the boy thrashes about in terror. Rembrandt’s version heightens the drama

Figure 7.1 Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603. Uffizi Gallery; Photographer: Yair Hakai

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further by representing Abraham forcing Isaac’s head back by holding his hand over the boy’s face, thus fully exposing for the viewer the victim’s naked, stretched neck, a common trope of helplessness. The story has long been viewed by biblical scholars as Abraham’s God rejecting the ritual of child sacrifice even while other gods continued to demand the practice (Dewrell 2017). Yet the story, and the numerous representations of it, combine the last-minute rescue with Abraham’s pitiless betrayal of his son. It is an image of horror that, despite its historical-cum-theological significance, has clearly thrilled viewers for centuries. It is a profoundly contradictory story, as are its many visual interpretations. Believers can rejoice in God’s benevolence while still enjoying a bloodlust thrill. Like all images of horror, depictions of Abraham about to murder his son shock, repulse, but also fascinate (Duncum 2021). Adi Holzer’s modern reworking of the story echoes the artist’s concern for the vulnerability of disabled children, especially those kept in Romanian orphanages prior to the Romanian revolution of 1989. Dubbed “slaughterhouses of souls,” the orphanages went into serious decline when the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, withdrew resources in favor of paying off the national debt (Odobescu 2015).

Figure 7.2  Adi Holzer, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1997.

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Over several decades approximately half a million children were subject to neglect, physical and sexual abuse, as well as drugs to subdue behavior. Some orphanages lacked medicines and washing facilities; in one, the children were tied to their beds or left naked and sitting in their own urine. Some children were beaten every day. Many children died, and many that survived had delayed cognitive development. This did not stop the dictator and his wife posing with a large group of orphans in 1977, each orphan dressed smartly in traditional clothes and smiling for the camera. The children were sacrificed to pay off the national debt, and betrayed further by having the widespread institutionalized atrocity of their conditions covered up with the help of photographs of happy, healthy children (Odobescu 2015). Perhaps such photographic lies work so effectively because of the common desire to believe that all is well. They also work because of the nature of the media; photographs are so easily believed.

Infanticide and filicide Infanticide is the communally sanctioned, deliberate killing of infants. Filicide is the killing by parents of their own children. Today, both are now illegal everywhere, but both have been widely practiced throughout human history (Smithey 2019). Infanticide was frequently used to control the population and not stretch resources. Both infanticide and filicide were related to poverty, congenital deformities, the shame of illegitimacy, parental conflicts, the demands of dividing estates among sons, and the dowering of daughters (Bradley 2013). The ancient Spartans regularly exposed deformed babies, and while the Athenian Aristotle wrote against infanticide for population control, he felt able to declare: “As to the exposure of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live” (cited in Dunn 2006: 77). There were times during the Roman period when fathers had the right to let a baby live or die. The most infamous story of filicide from the ancient, pagan world, and again one that has been visually represented numerous times, involves the goddess Medea (Wolf 2007). In revenge for being abandoned by her husband of 10 years, she kills her two children by him. There are other accounts of the children’s death, including the idea that they died by accident, but it is the deliberate act of murder that has captured the imagination and been repeatedly represented for centuries. Figure 7.3, a Roman wall painting from Pompeii, is an early version. Medea stands upright, readying herself with a knife that she momentarily hides from her unsuspecting children. She appears to be deliberating. The children are naked, a conventional trope for innocence that also emphasizes their vulnerability. They are preoccupied with playing a game with each other, while a man behind them raises his hand to hover over them in a sign that may indicate both a blessing for their charming innocence and or an acknowledgment of their dreadful fate. As here, many other visual interpretations of the story depict the most suspenseful moment, just seconds before the murder. Other images depict the children struggling for their lives, and still others with the children already dead. To underline the apparent attraction to the theme of murdered children, consider another oft-repeated image in Western art, the Massacre of the Innocents. Figure 7.4, from an illuminated manuscript, is a comparatively sedate version. For centuries this scene of mass killing was a great favorite of sculptors, painters, patrons, and public alike; it was reworked in every style. Many versions are highly explicit. The story appears in Mathew’s gospel (2:16). The Magi, popularly known as the three wise men, visit King Herod inquiring as to the birthplace of the foretold Messiah. Fearing for his kingdom, Herod responds

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Figure 7.3 Anonymous, Medea Plans the Murder of her Children who are Playing Knucklebones, c. 1st century CE. Naples National Archaeological Museum

Figure 7.4 Anonymous, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 10th century.

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by ordering all the children in Bethlehem under 2 years of age to be put to death. The story so grabbed the imagination of early Christians that it became an important part of the Catholic Church’s litany at Christmas. It remains so to this day. Furthermore, some orthodox Christian traditions estimated the number of children slaughtered to be 14,000, 64,000, and even 144,000 (Mina 1907). Most scholars believe the story to be fictional, and even if it did occur, the number of deaths in the small Bethlehem town to have been no more than a dozen (France 2007). As with Figure 7.4, representations of the massacre typically opt for the much smaller number. Perhaps the artists wanted to ensure some level of plausibility or, more likely, a dozen or so babies and their mothers affected a strong emotional identification with the victims; it is not so many as to allow an emotional reaction to be lost in the abstraction of vast numbers. The scene was a favorite among the Baroque painters of the seventeenth century who were intent on leveraging as much raw emotion as possible; Rubens, for example, painted the scene twice. It offered many opportunities to contrast naked baby flesh with knives and swords, as well as murderous cruelty with anguished mothers vainly attempting to protect their infants. Painters variously pictured babies being flung into the air, dropped from a height, stabbed, or lying dead on the ground. The prevalence of representations of the massacre raises the question: Why are they apparently so attractive? What is the enticement in inventing the story in the first place, in making it a central part of Catholic and Orthodox liturgy, in so greatly inflating the numbers of children involved, and finally, for centuries, repeatedly representing it visually? Like the numerous images of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, like the many images of Medea killing her children, it is a scene of horror, and like them it begs the question of motivation. Was it that infanticide and filicide weighed so heavily on the heart, both by parents and their community, that the pictures gave expression to their disquiet cum grief? Or could it be that, like so many other stories of children being killed or threatened with death, the attraction lies not only with the arrested fascination of all horror, but that this particular horror is part of the adult condition to actually enjoy, at least in fictional form, retribution for all the difficulties real children pose? Kincaid (1998) argues that for all our love of children, we can also hate them. We hate their unruliness, their leaky bodies, their unwillingness to obey, and is there anything more harrowing than a baby that will not stop crying? Do we simultaneously recoil from horrifying pictures of children’s pain and death while finding pleasure in them? Do these narrative pictures, so many of them and so persistently told, live in fantasy only because we cannot admit to the dark secret that we enjoy the idea of children’s victimhood? Bakan (1971) claims, “Some things are simply too terrible to think about if one believes them. Thus one does not believe them in order to make it possible to think about them” (cited in Holland 1992: 166). The biblical account of the Massacre of the Innocents is motivated by King Herod fearing that his kingdom was in danger from the birth of Jesus (Matthew 2:1-16). In this regard, the story is similar to an older myth of the Greek god Saturn eating his own sons. Having been told that he would be overthrown by his son, Saturn ate them as soon as they were born, as strikingly depicted by Rubens. It is certainly the case that stories involving the murder of children, or attempts thereof, were not only common in the ancient world but were a mainstay of European oral/visual culture thereafter for millennia. In Chapter 9, a story is recounted that was passed down from generation to generation for over a millennium of children being hidden in a large oven only to be turned into piglets. In some variants, the children are roasted and ready for eating. Other stories from the same source tell of children being induced to

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Figure 7.5  Peter Paul Rubens, Saturn Devouring his Son, 1636. Museo Nacional de Prado; Photographer: Luis Fernandez Garcia

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walk across a ravine on a rainbow who then fall to their deaths, and also of children being encouraged to walk on water only to drown (Horton 1975). In the nineteenth century, the Grimm Brothers popularized folk tales that had been a favorite of European oral culture for centuries, and their efforts became favorites of popular mass culture. The evil stepmother (originally the mother) of Snow White goes to great lengths to kill her. The parents of siblings Hansel and Gretel plan to abandon them in a forest, and although the children escape their parents, they fall into the hands of a carnivorous witch who enslaves them. The witch fattens them up, planning to cook them in an oven and eat them. Another equally popular story, again drawn from the long European oral tradition, is that of Little Red Riding Hood, whom the Big Bad Wolf, disguised as her grandmother, plans to eat. Each of these stories has variants in many parts of the world (Thompson 1977). Like Isaac’s last-minute rescue, in each of these fairy stories the children narrowly escape; their horror lies in the dread of the deed being done. In many stories and pictures, villains are more intriguing than the protagonists. And so it is with pictures of Hansel and Gretel. In Figure 7.6, the witch’s crooked back, wrinkled skin, large nose, and gnarled hands are so much more beguiling than the nondescript, baby-faced children. As sweet innocents, they are pictured as easy targets for cruelty.

Figure 7.6  Arthur Rackham, Hansel and Gretel, 1909.

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Although illegal, infanticide is still practiced in parts of India where resources are often scarce. During the nineteenth century when India was a British colony, the British attempted to stamp it out (Bhatnagar, Dube and Dube 2012). No doubt, the pictures of Indian women practicing filicide purchased some of the same thrills as above, but for British viewers, the thrill was combined with the colonial presumption of cultural superiority. Cultural superiority was certainly being exercised by Figure 7.7 of Chinese burying unwanted babies. The Europeans on the right are alarmed and presumably intending to stop the practice, while the Chinese in the middle and on the left simply look on as if burying babies is unremarkable. Figure 7.7 is an illustration of a religious text for missionaries that contrasts stories of the Holy Family with pagan evils. As is well known from studies of colonizing powers, it is so much easier to project one’s own dark secrets onto another (Manjapra 2020). Only a few centuries earlier, filicide, while illegal, was commonly practiced in England. County records indicate illegitimacy was the most common cause. As an example, one case involved a woman who gave birth in secret, after which she cut the baby boy’s throat, weighed him with a stone, and threw him into a nearby stream. It appears, though, that many cases went unreported to the coroner (Tucker 1974). Today, infanticide is nowhere practiced in the West, and filicide is rare. Yet it occurs partly as a product of current living conditions. Poverty and gender inequality in the workplace combine to create conditions such that modern mothering can mean juggling a low-paying job to make ends meet. This leaves insufficient income for homecare, childcare, or healthcare, as well as little time spent with the infant. For some mothers, feeling utterly powerless to change their situation, the struggle is overwhelming. Burdened by an ideal of good mothering, they reason it is best not to be a mother at all than to be a bad one (Smithey 2019).

Figure 7.7 Anonymous, Burying Babies in China, 1865.

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Abortion A related, but much more prominent, contemporary issue is abortion. According to anti-abortionists, terminating a fetus is the equivalent of both filicide on the mother’s part and infanticide on the part of the community. Ultrasound images feature at the center of their claim (Higonnet 2013). Ultrasounds are powerful tools, for they are a kind of magic. They are “like a dollshouse with the fourth wall missing” (279). Ultrasounds are used by medical professionals to chart the development of the fetus and to reassure parents, but what they show is also cast by anti-abortion activists as potential victims. And fetal ultrasounds happen to be structured to help make their case. They are closely cropped on the fetus, eliminating the pregnant woman’s body. They show neither the biological dependence of the fetus on the placenta nor the placenta’s dependence on the rest of the mother’s own body, being itself reliant upon food, water, and shelter. Furthermore, in the United States, where abortion is an especially fraught matter, some states forbid descriptions of this dependence. Medical staff are mandated to describe only the physical features of the fetus, thereby further implying that the fetus is an independent life. With the maternal body vanquished by both photographic frame and verbal description, parents view, as if with X-ray vision, an entirely fetus-focused image. Additionally, the photographic process often changes the size of the fetus so that it can appear the size of a newborn, further adding to the impression that on looking at the fetus, parents are already encountering their child as an independent individual.

Figure 7.8  Wolfgang Moroder, Ultrasound Image of Fetus at 12 Weeks of Pregnancy, 2012.

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Like Figure 7.8, earlier ultrasound images were back and white and very grainy. They were not unlike the barely distinguishable images of the first landing on the moon, which despite their poor quality, were also considered magical at the time. Despite their limitations, early ultrasounds still bore the evidential truth of photography, and their authenticity was reinforced by the authority of medical science. Today, not only are ultrasounds much more detailed but they are often colored so that they appear more natural than black and white images. And by scanning two-dimensional still images, they can be turned into three-dimensional images that can be rotated, thus further adding to the apparent construction of a real, independent person. In the language of anti-abortionists, to terminate a fetus is to kill a child. And with ultrasounds used as photographic truth, they argue their case with all the passion and conviction with which the rest of society abhors infanticide and filicide as more conventionally defined.

War and famine War brings early deaths to children, whether by weapons or war’s twin accomplices, disease and starvation. Massive armies marching through normally peaceful, populated environments can be catastrophic to already compromised economies, spreading disease, and increasing the number of illegitimate children. War causes homelessness, being orphaned, and displaced, not to mention utter bewilderment. And in the aftermath of conflicts, children face difficult reunions with often deeply scared parents (Marten 2013). Figure 7.9 represents children made homeless during the London Blitz. They are waiting outside the wreckage of their own home, which piles up behind them. The chaos of bricks, timber, furniture, and

Figure 7.9 Anonymous, Children Made Homeless During the Blitz, 1940.

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miscellany echo the children’s state of mind, much like an early nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting that used rainbows to echo human tranquility or, more appropriately here, storms to reflect emotional turmoil. The children’s disorientation is plain to see, but we are left to ask if they are orphaned and who will take care of them. Other images of war can barely be spoken of or written about. Language is near defeated. Figure 7.10 at first raises questions regarding its content, but it may also cause reflection on our own looking. At first, we may ask questions like: Did the children belong to the women? Are the women their mothers? How did each of them die? But as arresting as the content of this photograph is, it may also throw attention back onto us as viewers, away from its content, to the manner of our looking and, in turn, to who we are. The two women have evidently been raped, and with their private parts left exposed, they have been left violated even in death. So the question arises: does our looking at the photograph, even now after eight decades, further violate the women and the children? Is our viewing as indecent as the manner in which they have been discarded? Consider Figure 7.10 as representative of all the pictures of emaciated children behind barbed wire destined to die of malnutrition or in the gas chambers of the Holocaust; or the victims of famine in parts of the third world with their pronounced rib cages, wasted arms and legs, and out of proportion

Figure 7.10 Anonymous, The Bodies of Two German Women and Three Children Killed by the Soviets in Metgethen, 1940 or 1945. Library of Congress

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Figure 7.11 myUpchar, Depiction of Children Suffering from Two Types of Malnutrition, 2019.

heads. Let it stand for all the pictures of the other kind of malnutrition in which children have moon faces and extended stomachs. Figure 7.11 schematizes these conditions, thereby making them far more palatable than photographs of actual children. Figure 7.10 does not afford such distance, only the distance of time. Another strategy, epitomized by Figure 7.12, is to aestheticize horror, to make it palatable by making it appear visually attractive. Figure 7.12 is an example of what might be called poverty porn, or even starvation porn, a carefully constructed image that transfixes attention both for its horror and its formal beauty. It is the kind of image that might appear in a coffee table book or magazine, along with advertisements for 1,000-dollar watches and expensive perfume. It helps to anesthetize the heart by aestheticizing the image. Looking at photographs of horror is not the same thing as looking at real-life horror. In real life we might look away, shocked, but also not wanting anyone to see that we are looking (Walsh 2019). But photographs offer sufficient distance to linger, to satisfy curiosity even as we may be haunted by our own voyeurism, embarrassed to be fascinated by the misery of others. The photographer of Figure 7.10 may have merely glanced at the bodies for a second or two. In real life, looking longer would have been intrusive. It would have been indecent. In real life, looking at such horror as Figure 7.10 might well have caused a strong visceral reaction, but reproduced in this book or displayed in a museum, viewers are safeguarded by the assumption, or disguise, of scholarly interest. The photograph may even seem to invite pouring over the details. If so, is the effect essentially that of pornography in that our looking

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Figure 7.12  Lyle Conrad, Starved Girl During the Nigerian/Biafran War, late 1960s. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia

is not motivated by any attempt at understanding but merely rapt fascination (Baudrillard 1987)? After all, looking at this picture of children’s corpses, or of starving children near death, we are inevitably reminded of the arbitrary nature of who lives and who dies. Our own mortality may be made to seem very fragile. We may acknowledge that in life there is death, but are we not also grateful that the death and unspeakable pain represented in pictures like Figure 7.10 are not our own? Are we not relieved to be mere witnesses? We are at least partly inured to the horror of Figure 7.10 because it is now eight and more decades old, assigned to history and about which we can do nothing. But what of more recent horrors? Do they have the power to shock, or does an accumulation of images of horrors mean that current horrors are readily contextualized by their predecessors and their effect thereby muted? Or are we initially shocked, but since an emotional charge cannot last forever, or even for long, do horrifying images of dead or dying children end up anesthetizing the heart? As discussed in Chapter 10, Figure 10.11 initially caused outrage, but does it still? Horror is transfixing; it stops us in our tracks, but as time passes, are we less and less shocked and shamed? Does the power of images to arouse dismay and disgust drain away with familiarity? And what then is the result? Is the effect Medusa-like in having the effect of paralyzing us as viewers, numbing us, and leaving us depressed, as Baudrillard (1987) argues? Do we journey from shock to accommodation to indifference to forgetfulness, as Sontag (1977) claims? With so much imagery today, all of it competing for attention, it is easy to forget, especially when one horror seems always to be replaced by another.

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To avoid turning viewers off, Western news outlets—both print and electronic—typically avoid showing pictures of the corpses of children, and aid agencies, fearing compassion fatigue, also limit the number of images they show of children starving (Walsh 2019). In mainstream media, the publication of images like Figures 10.9 and 10.11 are also rare. They may help to reinforce pre-existing views but rarely do they challenge opposing views. Pictures are not like a hypodermic needle, with a message received as sent. The intentions of image makers may be understood by the public, but they are often reinterpreted according to the public’s diverse socioeconomic and political assumptions; an image intended to move hearts and minds may not only fail to do so but be interpreted in quite different ways. Viewers make up their own minds, seeing what they want to see. Despite this, photographers justify taking horrifying pictures of child victims, and editors in allowing their occasional publication, on the grounds that they may not change hearts and minds but they do help to reinforce pre-existing commitments to change. Photographs of children as victims of war, famine, and disease are at least witnesses to history. Without the photographs, few people would even be aware of the horrors suffered. People would deny their existence. The latter idea motivated General Eisenhower to film the concentration camps immediately following their liberation; with pictorial evidence, denial became so much more difficult. Deniers had to resort to claiming the images were faked. The evidential truth of photography makes denial more difficult than with either illustrations or written accounts, though, as described below, it does not stop those determined to sideline such evidence through various forms of obfuscation.

Child soldiers Child soldiers were once considered patriotic, and pictures of them are a world away from the above horrors. Figure 7.13 is an example of a minor genre of child soldiers as happy adventurers. It appeared on the cover of a children’s book published during the nineteenth century that taught children to think of war as heroic. Inside the book, a poem reads: “To stand unmoved where bullets fly as thick as falling hail … Caring not for wound or hurt, but only to win the fight! Who would not be a soldier-boy?” With war conceived as a daring adventure, this cheerful drummer is an underage innocent abroad. Generations of children raised on such loaded imagery made easy recruits for World War I, where things worked out quite differently. Looking at images like Figure 7.13 today, it is hard not to see the children who absorbed such imagery as victims in the making. Actual child soldiers were once common and just another example of the blurring in the past of the child/adult distinctions we make today (Marten 2013). During much of the nineteenth century, the British Navy allowed working-class boys as young as 10 years of age to serve on warships, working as “powder monkeys” to carry ammunition to gun crews during battles. At the other end of the class system, sons of the aristocracy, in some cases as young as 9 years, entered service as midshipmen to receive their training as officers on the job. During the US Civil War, thousands of boys served as drummer boys, and they were celebrated in numerous popular images. Although, officially, the minimum age was set at 12 years, many drummers were younger, and once a battle commenced, they were officially assigned to assist surgeons. Since many found themselves on the firing line, many died, so many that another genre of drummer boy stories and images emerged, that of dead drummer boys.

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Figure 7.13 Anonymous, Little Soldier Boys, 1899. Library of Congress

The most famous drummer boy was Joseph Bara, who was killed aged 13 during the French Revolution. Figure 7.14 is only one among many images of him. Although killed while apparently trying to protect two horses, his death was eulogized as the sacrifice of a revolutionary hero. In Figure 7.14, he lies prone at an off-balance, uncomfortable angle, making him appear utterly vulnerable. His head lies back, exposing his neck—repeating the trope of helplessness noted earlier—while he still clutches at his drumsticks and hat suggesting he has only just fallen. Another painting has him rearing up definitely as he is about to be stabbed, and with his arms outstretched, his body echoes Christ crucified. The highly partisan artist Jacques-Louis David pictured him nude—a common trope of innocence. Bust sculptures depict him in uniform as a sweet child, his head slightly uplifted in a way that suggests quiet defiance. Such patriotic images echo the claim made at the time that “only the French have 13-year-old heroes” (cited in Warren 1992: 85). Taken together, the images suggest that his death was as much a sacrifice to the truth as anything else. Dead drummer boys were a subgenre not only of drummer boys but of pictures of children as suffering, sacrificial heroes used in commemorating the dead. The conception has since shifted radically. Contemporary child soldiers are discussed in Chapter 9 as threats where they are described as callus killers, but they did not become so without themselves being subject to savagery. Child Soldiers are now seen not as heroes, and when not viewed as killers, they are understood to be victims (Rosen 2015).

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Figure 7.14  Charles Moreau-Vauthier, Death of Joseph Bara, c. 19th century. Municipal Museum, Nerac

Details of their experiences are too horrific for any patriotic narrative. No trace is left for old-time heroism when the general experience of recent, small-scale wars is endless rather than limited in duration; where there are no clear geographic demarcations; when an attack can come from anywhere at any time; and where instead of clearly defined, internationally recognized rules of engagement, savagery is normalized. It is difficult to estimate how many child soldiers there are in the world today, partly because the United Nations Convention on the Right of the Child defines child soldiers as anyone under 18 years of age, and the focus here is on children of 13 and younger, but also because today child soldiers, however defined, tend to be engaged in small scale conflicts that eventually die away while others are always emerging. The figure of 300,000 is a common approximation that includes both children and adolescents (Nicki 2018). Most child soldiers are in their teens, but some children are as young as 4 years of age (Jha 2018). What is known is that child soldiers are active, especially in Africa, Latin America, and South East Asia, where they are employed in insurgencies, terrorist groups, liberation groups, and guerilla movements (Singer 2005). Many of the children are recruited against their will, being effectively kidnapped and forced to participate, though some volunteer out of destitution or revenge for the killing of friends or relatives. Some just want to be able to eat regularly and have friends. Some are orphans who have no one to care for them, while others are birthed into the group, and still others are escapees from refugee camps and forced labor in mines, factories, or crop fields (Jha 2018). Some children are used as cooks, messengers, and informants, but also many are used in battle. They are often adrift, having lost their entire families, sometimes at their own hands, and they know nothing but

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a world of violence (Singer 2005). Consider just two comments, chosen because they are typical of their recorded stories. The children’s ages are 7 and 12 years, respectively. “The rebels told me to join them, but I said no. They then killed my smaller brother. I changed my mind” (3). “When you arrive at the camp, the first thing they do is kill a guy, and if you are a recruit they call you over to pick at him, to chop off his hands and arms” (4). Some children report having to drink the blood of people they had killed. Unsurprisingly, many personal stories from ex-child soldiers indicate that their combat experiences were terrifying and traumatizing (Uraizee 2020). They report being scared throughout their entire ordeal, and as adults, they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. They are unable to report the savagery of insurgent wars in standard, linear narrative forms. Instead, they report their experiences with marked inconsistencies, recounting an incident in precise detail while also having no memory of others. Suffering from dissociative amnesia, they tell their stories with sudden eruptions, irrelevant tangents, and bewildering disconnections. Many photographs of them exist on the internet from the many conflicts in the developing world. Most of the photographs are drawn from newspaper and magazine stories that chronicle trauma stories like those above, efforts by the United Nations and other agencies to intervene, and success stories in having some of them lay down their weapons. Some photographs offer evidence of their trauma though many do not. Individuals brandish large automatic rifles or rocket launchers which seem out of proportion to the children’s small frames. The pictures offer the same incongruity discussed in Chapter 4 on children as adults, small bodies made to appear even smaller by adult accoutrements. Mostly, the children are in uniforms, but also some are near naked, their weapons seeming to be their only possession. Other photographs document groups of children huddled together holding rifles. The children are frequently expressionless though some laugh even as they point their weapons at the camera. Like many children everywhere, they appear to enjoy the sense of power that comes with playing with guns, and perhaps the more so because the guns are real. Other child soldiers have glazed eyes and taut mouths, their expressions already those normally associated with hard-living adults. The latter photographs, rather than the former ones, reflect the horror of their reported experience. Typically, it is the latter images that are used in stories that report on the horror of contemporary child soldering, intended as they are to motivate intervention by international bodies.

Destitution Jacob Riis aimed more locally. He was among the most notable photographers intent on greater charity being extended to immigrants to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Danish immigrant himself, he sought to expose the appalling living conditions of newly arrived European immigrants in New York (Yochelson 2015). Rather than a land of milk and honey, the immigrants found sewerage pouring directly into drinking water, overcrowded tenements, rats, crime, and a lack of law enforcement. The slight wide angle with loose framing of Figure 7.15 manages to capture both the boys and their environment. With a neutral viewpoint on the boys, we see their faces, and the viewer is thereby invited to identify. The boys are also framed so that they are hedged in by the stones and burdened by the city above. Two of the boys huddle together for warmth and comfort. Each is protected by their heavy clothes, but they are also barefoot.

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Figure 7.15 Jacob Riis, Sleeping, Homeless Children, c. 1914.

Riis’s photographs were often found to be too confronting for mainstream newspapers, so he took to lecturing using lantern slides of his photographs as illustrations. He is credited with some success in aiding the introduction of reforming legislation and the establishment of several parks. Like many people at the time, he believed in the power of photography to move hearts because, unlike a painting or a drawing, it showed nothing but the incontestable truth. To the authorities he would present his photographic evidence, and he claimed, “My case was made” (quoted in Ware 1938: 82). But his photographs did not convince everyone. Because he was also a photographic innovator—he pioneered the use of flash—many critics focused on his technical prowess. And some were intent on undermining his efforts, attacking what they alleged was his classism and racism. It was also claimed that migrants did not stay in the tenements he photographed for long, and that he exaggerated their conditions (Sowell 2002). A similar fate befell photographs taken a few decades later during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a unit of the US Government. The photographs depicted the grinding poverty, despair, and economic inequality endured by millions in the midwest of the United States during the 1930s (Stevens and Fogel 2009). Many of the photographs, especially those of Dorothea Lange, have become iconic of the period, in particular her images of mothers with their children set among the tents and shanties that had become their homes. Figure 7.16 include two children and presumably their mother, overlapping and touching to form a close-knit group. A loose full frame and

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Figure 7.16  Dorothea Lange, Poor Mother and Children, Oklahoma, 1936. Library of Congress

deep focus capture the details of their living conditions, and a neutral angle helps encourage identification. The girl stares at the camera with a quizzical look while the other two are distracted by something to their left. Together the figures indicate an awareness of the camera but also a casual moment in time that suggests documentary truthfulness. The intention of the FSA was to demonstrate to the public the extent of the poverty into which many people had fallen. But when exhibited in 1939, the photographs caused a furor of deeply divided opinion. Some people preferred to laud them for their formal elegance while others declared they were not art, both groups thus avoiding consideration of their content. Most were shocked by what they showed, but in strikingly different ways. Seeing the worn faces and tattered clothes, some viewers were aroused to empathy, while others blamed the poor for being victims. While some viewers were willing to see the photographs as evidence of “the progress being made in the country’s romantic experiment in resettlement” (50), others were stricken by the misery of the people depicted and saw the photographs as proof of the failure of capitalism as an economic system. Some saw an indictment on the country,

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not of human wreckage, but the laziness of the people depicted. “Play up the other side,” these critics demanded; “What these people need more than anything else is birth control” (50). Others still were outraged because they saw the photographs as Communist propaganda. The photographs were subversive, undermining the spirit of the United States, not only false but dangerously seditious. These photographs, like those of Riis, did not change US society so much as indicate the marked differences within it. When challenging vested interests, there is always pushback, and using photographs to make a case is no exception. Intent is one thing; viewer reception, another.

Beatings and abuse Beating children has long been commonplace. Fifth-century CE St. Augustine believed that his upbringing was typical of other children of his time and he recalled ceaseless beatings, but he did not object since he thought that corporal punishment was not only normal but sanctioned by scripture (Bradley 2013). Elizabethan England agreed. The biblical proverb, “spare the rod and spoil the child” (Proverbs 13:12) was used as a pretext to create a further adage, “As a sharp spur makes a horse run, so a rod makes a child learn” (cited in Tucker 1974: 246). And among some Puritan Christians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a common catchphrase was “Better Whipt, than damn’d” (Heywood 2018: 128). Being extremists, Puritans always remained small in number, but their influence was enormous. Wesley, as mentioned in Chapter 5, was by no means an extremist, yet he felt able to write, “Children themselves are not innocent before God. They suffer, therefore, they deserve to suffer” (Heitzenrater 2000: 294). And as mentioned in Chapter 4 on schooling, corporal punishment was standard in schools in many Western countries well into the twentieth century. Abuse, however, is not confined to the physical; it can also be sexual, emotional, and a matter of neglect (Arkow 2019). Each can leave its mark on the body, although often the mark is confined to a hardened facial expression. Sometimes, it leaves no physical mark, which makes prosecution difficult. In courts of law, it is usually only physical abuse, and not all forms of it, that offers clear visual evidence of abuse in the form of bruises, burns, and broken bones. In Slaughter of the Innocents, Bakan (1971) writes, Children have been whipped, beaten, starved, drowned, smashed against walls and floors, held in ice water baths, exposed to extremes of outdoor temperatures, burned with hot irons and steam pipes. Children have been tied and kept in upright positions for long periods. They have been systematically exposed to electric shock; forced to swallow pepper, soil, feces, urine, vinegar, alcohol, and other odious materials; buried alive; had scalding water poured over their genitals; had their limbs held in open fire; placed on roadways where automobiles would run over them, placed on roofs and fire escapes in such a manner as to fall off; bitten, knifed and shot; had their eyes gouged out. (4)

Like other forms of picturing children’s victimhood, photographs of physical abuse are problematic (Holland 1992). Medical images of bruised backs, for example, typically do not show the face, only the torso. X-rays of broken bones show no more of the child. Abuse on the face is shown with extreme close-ups that focus solely on the bruise or gash (Laskey and Sirotnak 2019). The child is left unidentified out of respect for their privacy, a laudable intention, yet the tight framing of the photographs strips

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the victim of personhood. We see nothing of the anguish on the child’s face, nothing of the context of their abuse. Personality is erased, entirely replaced by a singular focus on diagnostic evidence. In the following chapter, a number of children who killed and tortured other children are described as horrifying abusers, but they were first subject to horrific abuse themselves (Figure 8.3). Both Robert Thompson and Jon Venables came from fatherless and shambolic households. Jon’s mother was an alcoholic, his home life was violent, and he was repeatedly exposed to suicide attempts and overdosing (Did Bad Parenting 2000). Mary Bell’s mother was a sex worker, and she had once attempted to kill her daughter, making it appear an accident (Figure 8.5). Mary was drugged and repeatedly subject to sexual abuse from 4 years of age (Sereny 1998). As described in Chapter 8, their photographs betray no sign of them as either abused or abusers. With two recent films, the problem of recognizing abuse does not lie with the limits of photography but, once again, with interpretation. The much award-nominated film Lion (2016) was inspired by the true story of a homeless boy in India who narrowly avoids being abducted for the sex trade only to find himself in an orphanage where children are taken out for the night to be used for sex. The film A Son (2019), set in Tunisia in 2011, involves an 11-year-old boy who, having been shot by terrorists, badly needs a liver transplant. His desperate father is persuaded to go outside normal lines of donor supply because the normal lines can be fatally slow, and he is led to believe the liver will come from a child already killed in the nearby Libyan warzone. But it is later revealed that children from an orphanage and very much alive are to be used to harvest the organ. Unlike horrors from the past about which nothing can be done, A Son and Lion expose ongoing contemporary horrors. However, again, the question has to be raised regarding the extent of their impact. In a visually saturated culture with innumerable images, no matter how powerful, it is easy to see these images as presenting so vast a problem, seemingly so much a part of the socioeconomic reality of the impoverished third world, that nothing can be done. Additionally, Wikipedia entries for both films, as well as most of the reviews of the films, do not even directly mention either the sex or the organ trades. Instead, they laud the fine acting, the direction, and the awards the films garnered. As with Riis and Lange, as well as fellow photographer Lewis Hine below, artistry, being the safest, least disruptive option to critique, often wins out.

Child labor In Chapter 9, child labor is discussed in terms of its benefits to children’s welfare. Here the emphasis is on its downsides as well as attempts to overcome its worst aspects. In the West, the horror of child labor is mainly associated with the Industrial Revolution during the nineteenth century, especially in the early starter countries like England, France, Belgium, and Germany. Children played a highly significant role, particularly in the textile trade. In one Scottish mill, children accounted for over 40 percent of the workforce (Heywood 2018). While most appear to have started work at 11 years of age, many were as young as 7 or 8 years of age. Many children worked 13-hour days in jobs that required sustained concentration. In England, both boys and girls worked underground in the mines until 1850 and in Belgium for most of the nineteenth century. Medical reports refer to such children as “pale, enervated, slow in their movements, tranquil in their games” (163). Reports cited the effects on what they called the “factory cripples” of partially formed bodies of twisted limbs and curved spines, as

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well as the weakened eyes of the girls engaged in the close work of lace making and embroidery (164). They equally noted the noxious mix of dust, fumes, humidity, and high temperatures that caused tuberculosis, anemia, eye infections, and, in the matchstick factories, white phosphorous poisoning. There were also numerous, inevitable, industrial accidents. Rapidly moving shafts, drive belts, and flywheels seized hair and loose clothing, and children cleaning machinery had fingers and hands torn away. Although some children had time to play and adequate food, others were subject to capricious overlords who thought nothing of beating their charges on the pretext of too slow or unsatisfactory work. Among the worst off were the 4 to 10-year-olds who worked in the mines and were chained to coal carts. What they hated the most was being kept in the dark; they often had to beg for candle stubs (Baird 2016) Some reformers were primarily concerned about the dangers of moral degeneracy in an adult atmosphere of swearing, licentiousness, and cruelty. Others were concerned that the children were so reduced in body and soul that, if war came, they would be unfit for soldiering. However, the primary motivation for reform was grounded in the ideology of childhood innocence that, as described in Chapter 11, was at its most fervent during the nineteenth century. The conflict between lauding children as sweetness and light and the reality of their filthy factory and mine work led to contradictory visual expressions. Chapter 11 examines pictures that attempted to minimize the realities of child labor and helped to maintain childhood as a blessed state. The focus below is on images that opposed child labor and those who maintained it, employers who saw the exploitation of children for profit as part of normal human existence. Employers argued that the new machinery had eliminated hard physical work and that children’s poor health was due to the poverty of their homes, not their work conditions. And as one industrialist asked, “Why shouldn’t the child work along-side his mother? The child will then be safe” (quoted in Trachtenberg 1977: 13). Early in the twentieth century, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in the United States attempted to counter these views. They hired photographers to document working conditions, the most notable being Lewis Hine (Nemerov 2016). A contemporary of Riis, Hine recorded the children’s fragile personalities strangled by their environment and their seemingly fruitless struggles against industrial capital. Figure 7.17 emphasizes the vulnerability of the boys’ bodies. Bedraggled, with bare feet, and only inches away from a flywheel, they appear dwarfed by the machines, entangled within, and endangered by them. Many of Hine’s photographs captured the crowded, unclean factories in which the children worked, factories noted for their lack of safety codes, long hours, and little pay. Managing to gain access to the sweatshops and factories that employed children, he documented children in gasworks and, as here, in textile mills. When forbidden such access, he photographed children lining up for their day’s work or coming out of the factories, their weary faces smeared with dirt. Like Riis, he transferred his photographs to lantern slides for lectures, though also posters and magazine articles. The belief of the NCLC, and one shared by Hine as well as Riis before him, was that photography documented truth and, in revealing truth, people would be moved to act. Hine wrote, “No anonymous or signed denials can contradict proof given with photographic fidelity. These pictures speak for themselves, and prove that the law is being violated” (cited in Trachtenberg 1977: 19). But he must have known this was not quite true because for each photograph he took he wrote down in a little notebook the age of each child, their working conditions, years of service, and information about their schooling, which he used whenever he lectured.

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Figure 7.17  Lewis Hine, Children Working in a Mill in Macon, Georgia, 1909.

His photographs were slyly composed, even if at times partly from necessity. Since he would sometimes enter a factory ostensibly to photograph only the equipment, he would set up his camera pointed at machinery and then ask a child to step into the frame on the pretext of gaining a sense of proportion. Such deceits were necessary, and they do not undermine the realities he was seeking to document. They are mere quibbles regarding their authenticity, though ones that critics were happy to make to help discredit his cause. What is seriously problematic is the belief that the evident transparency of photography has the power to move people’s minds and hearts. Though there are no doubt exceptions, as there invariably are, as mentioned earlier, the rule is that photographs only move people who are already predisposed to be moved (Taylor 1998). For most of us today in the first world, an understanding of child labor is also no doubt formed by images of child labor in the third world, where the third world is typically understood as a place of chaos and danger to all. Figure 7.18 shows a young child carrying what appears to be a heavy load and grimacing under the weight. Although it is a first-world cliché of third-world technology, there is nevertheless truth to it. Consider it as representative of many kinds of third-world child labor and by no means the most difficult or dangerous. Children continue to be forced to undertake work, both agricultural and industrial, for which their bodies are not fully equipped. Children continue to work in hazardous conditions with dangerous chemicals and machinery, and some children are required to work so many hours their schooling is impeded (Bourdillon and Carothers 2019).

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Figure 7.18  Tom Skrinar, Child Labor in Shamwana Katango, Congo, 2009.

Great strides had been made in reducing these conditions, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, many children in developing countries were forced back into work, including hazardous work (Gfttelman and Suhasini 2020). When schools closed in first-world countries, many students were able to go online, but in countries lacking widespread online connections, children went off to work, not to school. In India, children searched dump sites littered with broken glass in search of recycled plastics; without shoes, their feet bleed. In Indonesia, children as young as 8 years of age were painted silver to work as living statues who begged for money. In Kenya, 10-year-olds were mining sand, and in West Africa, children were chopping weeds on cocoa plantations with machetes.

Child pornography Chapter 11 on children as innocent considers the difficulties in defining images of children in terms of sensuous fine art versus pornography, but the material discussed here leaves no doubt regarding how it should be classified. Child pornography refers to visual representations of sexually explicit conduct

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involving minors (Akdeniz 2016). As such, it is “linked to child prostitution, child sex tourism and the trafficking of children for sexual exploitation” (4). It differs from conventional pornography in that the latter is produced by consent, whereas child pornography is by definition abuse. Adult pornography is often defended on the basis of free speech, but with child pornography there are no liberal positions. In many cases, children who feature in pornography appear to be in great distress so that the abuse is self-­evident, but even where the children appear complacent, this is usually due to them having been groomed over a period of time. Grooming fosters a false sense of trust, its aim being to overcome a child’s normal resistance to abuse, and because grooming betrays trust, it is itself a form of abuse. Statistics are again problematic because most jurisdictions define child pornography as relating to minors under the age of 18 years, but the trend line reveals not only an increase in sadistic and violent child abuse images but an increase in the number of images of very young children, including toddlers and even infants. As the then US Attorney General noted in 2011, “Tragically, the only place we have seen a decrease is in the age of the children” (US Department of Justice 2020). Since then, the trend line has only got worse (Keller and Dance 2019) Some jurisdictions employ the COPINE ten-level typology (Combating Pedophile Information Networks  in Europe) to categorize child abuse images for use in law enforcement. Level 9 includes “sexual assault involving penetration, masturbation or oral sex involving an adult,” and level 10 includes pictures of “a child being tied, bound, beaten, whipped or otherwise subject that implies pain” (Archer 2011). The imagery victimizes children at the time the pictures are taken but also thereafter because the pictures form a permanent record. Once uploaded to the internet and shared, children are victimized in perpetuity. Victims often suffer a lifetime of re-victimization. They are traumatized simply by knowing that their images are out there and continuing to be viewed. Lasting psychological damage includes dysfunctional sexual development, poor self-image, and trouble in developing relationships of trust (Akdeniz 2016). The internet has allowed an explosion of child pornography. It is now available through virtually every internet technology, including social networking websites, file-sharing sites, photo-sharing sites, gaming devices, and mobile applications. Offenders connect on internet forums and networks to sell, share, and trade photographs. They employ encryption techniques on the dark web to hide massive collections of abusive material. Being worldwide, no country is immune. According to technology companies like Facebook and Twitter, in 1998 there were over 3,000 reports of child sexual abuse imagery. By 2009 there were 1 million reports, and in 2019 there were 18.4 million, which included 45 million images and videos (Keller and Dance 2019). There was no mention of how many children were involved. This is historically unprecedented. As one US prosecutor commented, “Historically, you would never have gone to a black-market shop and asked, I want real hard-core with 3-year-olds … But now you can sit seemingly secure on your device searching for this stuff, trading for it” (Keller and Dance 2019). Government agencies, in association with the major technology companies, are fighting to combat child pornography on the internet but, since the internet is global, the fight requires international cooperation, which is not always guaranteed. It also requires the same level of technological sophistication that pornographers employ on the dark net, making the fight against child pornography always a matter of playing catch up (Akdeniz 2016).

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Memorializing children When it is too late to address the suffering of children, we memorialize them. This is undertaken both privately and publicly. The technologies and styles of memorials and their styles have changed, but not the need to mark either their suffering or pain at their passing. From ancient Greece, numerous images, frequently on vases but also carved in stone, appear to testify to a child as a much-loved family member who had died too early. Considering the expense of such memorials at the time, and that such children had not yet reached the age where they could be useful members of society, they suggest that despite the Greek practice of infanticide as population control, some children were loved and their deaths were felt deeply. Some memorials show the child with their mother, who seems to be saying farewell as the child readies him or herself to be taken by the ferryman to the underworld. The vases were commonly placed on the child’s tomb. Like Figure 7.19, other funerary images show a child alone. A young girl stands by herself holding a bird, presumably a dove, a conventional motif that was associated with the goddess Aphrodite and was therefore a sign of love and beauty. Birds were commonly used with deceased children. Perhaps they were thought to be an appropriate companion for the dead because they can fly and thus move between the living and the deceased (Oakley 2002).

Figure 7.19 Anonymous, Dove Stele, Young Girl with Pet Birds, c. 450 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Today, some parents attach an enameled photograph of their child to their tombstone (Muller 2021). Other parents create Facebook pages that include photographs, videos, and comments about their deceased child. Specifically designated memorial websites also exist (Mitchell et al. 2014). Some websites encourage parents to transfer videos of their deceased child to DVDs or to place them in the Cloud. Although often placed online, these are essentially private memorials without a political dimension. And like the Greek memorials, they employ a realistic style. Public memorials that attempt to honor the deaths of numerous children through genocide, shootings, or natural disasters, tend to reject the abstraction used for similar memorials for adults in favor of painful realism. It is as if an abstract design would be to dishonor the reality of the children’s suffering. In Figure 7.20, the children huddle together for comfort and warmth, like the children in Riis’s photograph, but here their bodies are emaciated, their eyes bulge, and a dead child lies at their feet beside an empty bowl. The repetition of their legs and arms suggests that they stand in for many other children, as indeed they do. Among the millions of victims of the Holocaust, many were children. Some of the worst atrocities took place in Zamosc, Poland, though it was just one place in which Hitler’s policy was enacted: “to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish race or language” (quoted in Hodorowicz-Knab 2010). The policy included the return of all German nationals living in Poland, and there exist grainy,

Figure 7.20  Adam Jones, Memorial to Nazi Occupation, Zamos´ć, Poland, 2013.

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blurry images of naked young children crying as they are examined for Aryan features. Children that met the blue-eyed, blond-haired criteria were separated from their parents, sent to Germany, raised as Germans, and since their parents were often sent to labor camps, many never saw their parents again. Less fortunate children were sent to internment camps or transported in dreadful conditions to death camps like Auschwitz. Figure 7.20 is as much a political statement as it is a site for private mourning. Besides being a focus for grief and sorrow, it proclaims: Let no one forget this is how they died and who was responsible. By depicting the children’s emaciated bodies, horrified eyes, and death, it describes what happened, protests against attempts at revision, and begs that it never happen again. But the deaths of children en masse continue. In 2012, in a small US town, a lone gunman shot six staff and twenty children aged 6 and 7 years of age at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Apart from several makeshift temporary memorials, no permanent physical memorial was built. Instead, the school building was demolished and a new one built. Even the home of the perpetrator was demolished and the space left empty. With millions of dollars from donations on hand, the community decided to spend the money on mental health services. Yet a memorial does exist online via a posting by the Guardian newspaper that shows fifteen of the twenty children in color and each gleefully smiling, some fooling around, some showing missing milk teeth (Becket 2017). Under the photographs of each child, their parents and friends have made comments, and many indicate charitable foundations that parents have established to honor their child. The parents of a child who loved dogs established a scholarship for someone to become a veterinarian; the parents of an autistic child donated to a fund that helps parents with autistic children; the parents of a child who loved animals built an animal sanctuary, and so on. The photographs of the children, each so evidently happy, are a startling indication of how much they were once alive. Their cheerful expressions suggest what the children had to look forward to, and how their dreams, and the dreams of those who loved them, would never be realized. There is no hint of the pain their deaths caused; grief is not pictured, only joy, but the juxtaposition of joy and context is heartrending.

Counternarratives Yet another way to absorb children’s victimhood is to develop counternarratives that, while often valid, also tend to befog the issue. There are two kinds: one argues that improvements have been made to children’s circumstances; the other stresses the resilience of children. Improvements are undeniable. And pictures have played their part in drawing attention to their plight. As long ago as 1924, the Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child set out principles aimed at protecting children from harm, and since then a range of protocols have been issued that established procedures for complaints. Nor is war always bad, even for children. Following both world wars, international bodies were established especially to aid children on the understanding that children constituted the most vulnerable population (Marten 2013). Due to full employment during wartime, children are sometimes better fed, and without parental oversight they often have more freedom to play. Aid agencies are also sometimes able to bring relief to malnourished children. War and famine do not always bring suffering to children.

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Additionally, children are far more adaptable to changed situations than adults. They adapt to even appalling tragedies, and early trauma does not always mean being wholly marked by it forever (Marten 2013). All the happy, smiling internet pictures of child soldiers, children living in poverty and in refugee camps, certainly suggest that not all children continually suffer in conditions most of us are appalled by. Child soldiers have been able to recount their experiences, and some have gone on to live lives of service to others (Uraizee 2020). For many children, war comes as just one more tribulation to overcome. Martial play is a typical feature of children’s play, and during war there are immediate, ready-made sides to take. During the US Civil War, children learned how to march, drill and maneuver, and during World War II, German children played “Stuka.” Polish children under occupation mimicked interrogations and acted out executions in town squares (Marten 2013). In Britain, the children of the London Blitz learned to play among the rubble. The children in Figure 7.9 are shattered, but one can imagine that they could soon have been playing among what was left of their home.

Sins and sorrows Yet it is no accident that this chapter is the longest in this book. There seems no end to the sins committed against children and no end to their sorrow. As Bakan (1971) noted, “Child abuse is so common that it may be a characteristic that comes close to being ‘natural’ to the human condition” (cited in Holland 1992: 166). While infanticide is no longer condoned and filicide is rarely practiced, too many children still labor long hours in dangerous conditions. Many are homeless and live on the streets, where they are especially vulnerable to recruitment as soldiers or human bombs, trafficked as sex slaves, or used for their organs. Without the pictures that expose their victimhood, their suffering children would be unknown, and it is axiomatic that abuse occurs as a result of isolation and secrecy. Pictures at least draw attention to their plight. However, victimhood can always be minimized, obfuscated, and subject to counteraccusations as well as outright denial. Picture makers can pull their punches by idealizing or showing only half-truths. And even the most poignant images made and distributed with the best of intentions are always subject to viewer interpretation. The pictures that horrify can cut through competing images, yet they can also be so shocking many viewers prefer to either ignore or quickly forget them. The pictures can be called fake, interpreted in opposite ways from the apparent evidence they offer, praised or criticized for their artistry rather than their content, and abuse can be medicalized. And image makers can be accused of exaggerating, of bias, challenged as subversive, or attacked for alleged personal failings. Furthermore, pictures of children as victims highlight defining characteristics of childhood as dependent and powerless. As Holland argued (1992), “Childhood is seen as weakness itself,” which acts to reinforce the power of adulthood (148). Such power enables the uninhibited arousal and expression of the tender emotions of love and compassion that are experienced as pleasurable. In short, the response to pictures of children’s suffering can amount to no more than sad sentimentality, a wallowing in mawkishness.

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More insidious, and while reluctant to admit it even to ourselves, there can be pleasure in the pain of children, of seeing abuse as retribution for the trouble they cause. “The abuse of children is repugnant, but so also is the abused child” (Bakan 1971: 7), and repugnance can act as a cloak to hide hidden desires. In other words, pictures of children as victims are not confined to the social conditions of war, disease, exploitation, and so on, but also to our own ways of looking. We are capable of victimizing them again through our enjoyment of their victimhood. Thus, children may experience a double victimization, first by their social conditions and secondly by our pleasure in their suffering. They are at least unaware of our own victimizing as viewers, although where we take no action on their behalf as a consequence of our retaliatory pleasure, they suffer.

Chapter 8 Children as Threats

“After a fright-movie, you can’t go home again … because you’re afraid that your child will kill you.” (Bruhm quoted in Bohlmann and Morland 2015: 13) Horror-movie children threaten the ideology of childhood innocence, but they are not the only ones. Fictional spawns of Satan and malevolent child aliens are the very antithesis of sweet purity, yet perhaps even more antithetical are real children who abuse and kill. And the unruly nature of children generally, which has seen them referred to as lunatics and worse (Heywood 2018), was for centuries understood to threaten not only personal safety but civic order. Such was the threat children posed, it required their removal by whatever means were at hand. In the previous chapter, children were framed as victims; they were cast as passive, unwitting actors with little or no control over their fate. In this chapter, whether fictional or real, children are active agents. Their crimes may be grounded in their previous victimhood—they often are—but for these children, what was done to them they do unto others.

Horrid children The term “holy terrors” appears to have entered the English language in the fourteenth century and applied to people of exasperating habits or manners, but midway through the nineteenth century it was applied to unruly children. As Bohlmann and Moreland (2015) note, the juxtaposition of the two words holy and terror perfectly captures twin ideas about the nature of childhood “both repository and emblem of our aspirations and our fears, our dreams and our nightmares” (11). The term encapsulates both the image of the undefiled soul and the base animal, the location of what we most esteem and what most appalls us. And it is significant that the term developed during the nineteenth century when the view of childhood as sinless innocents came to dominate. As described below, it is as though one conception invariably begets the other. Is it also significant that horrid children emerged as a trope of horror films only during the 1950s, during a time of intense focus on children and the family? As expectations rose that children required complete devotion to enable their development, did horror films express the greater resentment that was secretly harbored against them(Renner 2016)? Horror films offer many kinds of monstrous children, a virtual catalog of young fiends (Larson 2015). Chapter 3 mentioned vampire and vigilante girls, but there are many more. They not only behave in

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gross, disgusting ways and dispatch others with glee, they challenge any sense that children are benign, let alone beneficent. Carnivorous newborns feed on blood, and serial-killer children slash and slice on a whim. Preternaturally gifted children dispatch adults for their weaknesses. Ferals grow up outside society, are unsocialized, pleasure-driven, and exceptionally dangerous; the epitome of the dark side of human nature, they resemble wild animals and behave accordingly. Vengeful child ghosts have been abused and now abuse their abusers, their crimes resembling those perpetrated against them. Antichrist children—literally unholy terrors—are possessed, virtual puppets of a demonic entity; they typically lower their voice by several octaves, ventriloquize languages they could not possibly know, change eye color, vomit green goo, and engage in sexual and violent behavior. Changelings resemble human children, but suffer from unexplained diseases, and some of them sport beards and fangs (Renner 2016). Zombie babies play with eyeballs and bloodied bones, suck on pacifiers made from dismembered fingers, and murder ravenously. Some monstrous children proclaim their evil nature by their visual appearance; others have a benign or even beneficent appearance whose malevolence is revealed only by their appalling behavior. Some dispatch their own parents as well as other caregivers like their doctors and nurses. In one movie, a father was strangled and decapitated with an umbilical cord by a batch of zombie fetuses. These monsters go way beyond unruly behavior, being what is usually meant by monstrous: frightful, grotesque, hideous, ghastly, immoral, even evil. As mentioned above, horror films have long been regarded as echoing the preoccupations of a particular time in history. But the causes of monstrosity in children also appear to arise from perennial fears and anxieties evoked by the abject. Consider, for example, the fear pregnant women have  of the stranger growing inside them and their fear of, once born, their child’s ­ever-demanding nature. Both parents fear being inadequate to the task of dealing with small bodies that constantly leak, keep them from sleeping at night and, later, frequently misbehave (Bohlmann and Moreland 2015). Perhaps nowhere else are images of childhood more clearly used as depositories of adult fears and anxieties than in horror movies. Yet the cause of children’s alleged malevolency has always been located elsewhere, not within the adult psyche but either the children themselves or some external, third force. In the past, it was common to blame the devil and his demons. Alternatively, it was common to evoke the idea of original sin by which children came into the world already stained, already with a predilection to do harm. According to religious authorities, children suffered from “a stubbornness and stoutness of mind” (Moran and Vinavskis 1985: 26). Children were “sinful polluted creatures” (Cunningham 2020: 26). And in horror movies, these older, religious locations of malevolency are still employed, but they also use other dodges that draw upon aspects of modern life. The causes of child monstrosity are variously claimed to be drugs: egotistical scientists whose experiments go wrong: pollution or other environmental toxins. Dysfunctional parenting is also blamed, especially intensive mothering which excludes all other relationships and stifles the child (Renner 2016). Many horrid narratives also blame technology: artificial reproductive technologies interfere with natural procreation, such as test-tube babies and laboratory wombs that incubate unnatural fetuses. Many monstrous children have also previously suffered abuse at the hands of adults and sometimes from other children.

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The child Jesus as malevolent Given the perennial nature of the above anxieties, it is unsurprising that malevolent, fictional children are not just a recent invention of horror movies but of great longstanding. There were once many popular tall tales told about the child Jesus as a homicidal maniac (Frilingos 2017). The tales were often illustrated with pictures. Medieval monks sketched pictures in the margins of otherwise canonical texts and carved the walls of out-of-the-way churches. The tales are based on many of the books that date from the second century but that were banned during the fourth century and hidden away until their discovery in 1948. Despite official disapproval, the stories were evidently kept alive by an oral tradition throughout the medieval period. Owing much to Arabian Nights with their flying carpets, these so-called Infant Gospels of Jesus are highly fanciful, a point well illustrated by the account of the newly born baby Jesus carrying on a theological discourse from his crib. Evidently written to fill in the many gaps in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ early life, they served, perhaps, as the equivalent of tabloid newspapers. Perhaps they were merely meant to entertain. What is certain is that, although expunged from official Christianity for centuries, they so fired the medieval imagination they were passed down from generation to generation (Horton 1975). This is not hard to understand. They are a heady combination of miracles and menace, of magic and murder, among the popular pleasures of any era. The boy Jesus does do some good deeds. He raises some children from the dead and also reanimates one of his teachers whom he had previously killed. But he is also highly capricious, and just as likely to do very bad deeds as good. Like some children of horror films (Renner 2016), he is gifted but lacks moral restraint. He is a dangerous mixture, possessing superhero powers with the undeveloped morality of a child. Easily offended, he turns other children into animals, or, more commonly, he kills them. In The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, we read that when a certain boy destroyed a pool that Jesus had made, he became angry and said, “O you evil, ungodly, stupid boy, what did this pool and the water do to hurt you? Now you will wither up like a tree!” The boy immediately died, and Jesus went quietly home. The boy’s parents came and complained to Joseph. “What kind of boy you have!” After that Jesus went through the village and a boy pushed him on the shoulder. Jesus became angry and said “You will not go on your way.” This boy died, too, and his parents were very bitter towards Joseph … Jesus struck with blindness all those who complained about him. (quoted in Benko 1980: 179–80)

The young Jesus also dispatches two of his teachers. Having killed one teacher, Joseph decided to try again and send Jesus to another school. Jesus asked the teacher, “Tell me the power of the Alpha, and I will tell you the power of the Omega.” The teacher struck Jesus on the head, but Jesus cursed him and the teacher fell to the ground. Joseph was very sorry and told Mary, “Let not this boy go out of the house because everybody dies who provokes him.” (quoted: 180)

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One story has Jesus creating a rainbow across a ravine, inducing children to cross it, and thinking nothing of the fact that they then plunge to their deaths. In another story, he walks on water, induces children to follow him, and is entirely indifferent when they all drown. These two stories were illustrated in the margins of manuscripts (Horton 1975). Another story relates how Jesus walked to a neighboring village, and the villagers who knew of his reputation gathered all the children of the village and hid them in the village oven. When Jesus arrived, being omnipotent he knew where they were hidden, but he asked as if unaware of their whereabouts. On being told they had all gone to another village, he asked what was in the oven, and on being told only piglets, Jesus replied, “Well, let them be piglets.” On this command, the children were turned into piglets. Such was the popularity of these and similar stories, and apparently so widely circulated, the Church relented early in the twelfth century by officially recognizing them. Collections of these tales then poured from the scriptoria of the monasteries. They continued to have official blessing until the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century, when all non-canonical books were once again banned in an attempt to defend the faith, and Protestants banned them as devilish Popish fables with no biblical authority (Horton 1975). Given the variable official status of these tales—on, off, on, and off again—their persistence appears remarkable. This is the very time, from the fourth to the twelfth century, a period of 800 years, when almost the only specific child represented in Western art with any consistency was the Christ Child, a divine, holy, entirely perfect, sinless child. Typically, the infant Jesus sits on Mary’s lap, Mary and her infant a signifier of maternal love and devotion. Often Jesus shows the sign of benediction, as he does in Figures 1.3 and 1.5, thus foregrounding his role as the world’s savior. Yet at the same time an oral tradition existed, kept alive in part by imagery, of this same child as an amoral, highly capricious counterpart. What better illustration could there be of projecting the binary characteristics of good and evil onto childhood? One is so perfect it appears to beg for its opposite. One being so unworldly, so unlike a real child, it seems necessary to create one that is at least recognizable, one that is relatable, a child that is both good and bad. This malevolent Jesus is a terror to his parents and his community. He is capable of doing good, but it is never clear when he will suddenly revert to being a little devil. This child is not entirely evil, not a complete counterpart to the sinless, divine Jesus. He is more a normal child whose good and evil deeds are on steroids, but being exceptionally bad, he nevertheless acts as a counter to official representations of pure beneficence. Some pictorial representations highlight his powers for doing good, and the story Figure 8.1 illustrates has it both ways. Jesus is unfairly blamed for pushing a child called Zenon off a roof and, since the child is killed in the fall, Jesus raises him from the dead so that Zenon can exonerate him. That Jesus is blamed at all indicates that he is known for previous misdeeds, and his motivation for raising the child is only to be exonerated. It also illustrates that Jesus knows good from bad but that he does not care either way. Thus, this child Jesus is like some of the vampires of contemporary horror films, as well as the vigilante girls discussed in Chapter 3. He possesses both good and very bad character traits within the one person. In this way, he poses a serious threat, both bodily and psychically, to both his fictional victims and the construction of childhood as trailing clouds of glory.

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Figure 8.1 Anonymous, During Play, Child Zenon Falls off the Roof of a House. Two Jews Accuse Jesus of Having Pushed him, c. 1340. Schaffhausen City Library

The original holy terrors This fictional Jesus would be the original holy terror if it were not for the fact that ancient Greek stories about their gods as children also include at least two maniacal tots. Golden (2003) suggests that among ancient Greek attitudes, children were seen as “hot of temperature and temper, prone to brawl, bleat and bellow like storms and beasts” (14), a view that was clearly projected onto both the divine heroes Hercules and Hermes. As a child, Hercules played with snakes while still in his crib; other stories have him strangling them with his bare hands, and the stories stayed in the popular imagination for millennia. As a boy, Hercules also killed his music teacher named Linus. In words that suggest that the stories of Jesus killing his teachers are merely a reworking of much older stories, the ancient historian Aelianus ([c.225 CE] 1665) wrote: “Linus taught Hercules (yet a boy) to play on the lute, who touching the instrument unmusically, Linus struck him; whereupon Hercules struck Linus with the lute and killed him” (3.32). Hermes as a child was no better. Within hours of being born, he sought out adventure, and finding himself in the pasture of the gods, he impulsively stole fifty cows from the god Apollo. He then disguised his tracks. While driving the cattle off, he met an old man and bought his silence, but doubting if he could trust the old man, he disguised himself and returned to offer a reward for information about the stolen

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Figure 8.2  Moderno (Galeazzo Mondella), The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpent, c. late 15th—early 16th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

cows. When the old man sold him out, he turned him to stone. Stopping to sacrifice two of the cows, he burned off both their hoofs and head so as to leave no trace of his thievery, all before slipping back into his swaddling clothes and playing innocent (Menzies 2020). Again, like the child Jesus, neither Hercules nor Hermes was entirely bad. On being found out, Hermes promised never to lie again, and while later he was often loose with the truth, he never again explicitly lied. He also became helpful to travelers. Thus, these two holy terrors mixed magic with murder and good deeds with bad deeds, while nevertheless echoing in fictional form adult ambiguities about the nature of childhood.

Real child abusers and murderers The threat children pose for the ideology of innocence is far greater when the children are real, not merely fictions projected from fear. Children who seriously abuse and murder feature powerfully in public discourse, questioning normative ideas about family life, modern life generally, and in an especially marked way, the normative construction of childhood. So-called kid killers cause moral panics. The collision between the normally separate discourses of childhood and criminality, of innocence and guilt before the law, is so great the tendency is to question whether child murderers are really children at all (Jenks 2005).

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In a study of US cases from 1989 to 1996, most newspaper and magazine stories of child murderers were found not to be illustrated with pictures of the perpetrators, but there were exceptions (Wilson 1996). In the case of Cameron Robert Kocher, a 9-year-old who shot and killed a 7-year-old playmate in 1989, the magistrate ruled that he did not have the authority to control the media, but while the boy’s attorney shielded the boy from reporters and TV crews, using a telephoto lens, one photographer managed to capture the boy staring out from a closed window. The image was subsequently published in a local newspaper. In the words of one journalist, the photograph was “a haunting picture … of a very young boy who looks simultaneously bored and bewildered by the events” (Grossman 1990: 1). In other cases where publication was possible, some newspapers published; others did not, claiming that to do so was an invasion of privacy. Two 1998 cases from the United States further highlight inconsistencies. Andrew Golden and Mitchel Johnson, 11 and 13 years old respectively, amassed firearms, rang their school fire bell and, concealed behind bushes, shot indiscriminately as children and teachers fled from the school building. Five children and their teacher were killed, and ten other children were wounded. Pictures of both boys soon appeared in newspapers and on television. Both appeared as smiling, cheerful innocents. The younger of the two, Golden, was also shown on television in home videos practicing with a gun. An image from this footage was used in newspaper reports which showed Golden taking aim. In some reports, a photograph of a smiling Johnson was juxtaposed with the one of Golden taking aim. Quality newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, whose previous policy had been not to publish photographs, decided, after a delay of several days, to publish. The editor justified publication on the ground that, in this case, everyone else was doing it (Langford 1998), though the editorial team had their qualms “because once you cross the line, it might be easier next time” (7). The editor chronicled a series of cases where the Tribune had not published either names or photographs. He went on to quote alleged authorities to the effect that, in this case, the crime affected many people, and it was possible to believe that by naming and picturing the children, one was better drawn into “the morality play.” “Somehow attaching a name to the word ‘suspect’ and then by extension being free to use the suspect’s photo, might help halt an escalation of hatefulness” (7). Another case during the same year saw the taboos reestablished. In August, two unnamed 7- and 8-year-old boys were charged with sexually molesting, battering, and suffocating to death an 11-yearold girl and then stuffing her mouth with leaves. The story ran in newspapers with a picture of the victim—a smiling, happy child—but without pictures of the perpetrators. On television, the story was illustrated with an artist’s impression of the initial court hearing that showed two very small boys drawn without faces. The murder of the toddler James Bulger is the most widely known child killer case in England. This is partly because, unlike many other such cases, the identities of the child murderers and their photographs were made public. In 1993 two 10-year-olds visited a shopping center with the intention of abducting a child. Having tried and failed with one young child, they abducted 2-year-old James. While his mother was momentarily distracted, they took James by the hand and led him away to a deserted area near a railway track and tortured him. They dropped him on his head, kicked him, threw stones and bricks at him, put batteries in his mouth, and dropped a heavy iron bar on him that caused ten skull

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fractures. Altogether, James suffered forty-two injuries, so many that the court pathologist testified that it was impossible to say which one had been fatal. Finally, the boys laid his body on a nearby railway track. When his body was found two days later, their intention had been realized; his body had been cleaved in two. Apart from CCTV footage, the police had little to go on, and because the footage was very grainy, they thought the suspects were teenagers. The case was solved when the police, getting nowhere, released the CCTV footage, and one of the boys was recognized. The police initially had difficulty believing the boys were their suspects. The lead detective later stated, “It was very difficult to get our minds around that potential situation that we could be dealing with two young boys” (Austin 2017). But the DNA and other evidence proved overwhelming, including James’s blood on their boots. On the day of the arrests, crowds gathered screaming for the perpetrators’ deaths. Predictably, the newspapers documented every detail, as well as inventing some of their own, but also, they speculated on how it could have happened. What did the case say about children? What might be happening to children and modern British society at large? The boys had been watching video nasties; was there a causal link? Were the boys gross anomalies, born bad, the consequence of bad parenting, or was society falling apart? Were the boys like canaries in a coal mine, harbingers of things to come? Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, spoke for many: “We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions … These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name” (quoted in Davenport-Hines 2004). Fearing vigilante vengeance, the parents of both boys went into hiding. Considered capable of knowing right from wrong, the boys were tried in an adult court, as adults, although sitting in the dock, removed from their parents, they needed to sit on raised chairs so they could see the proceedings. Found guilty, the judge declared their crimes of “unparalleled evil and barbarity” (Austin 2017). They spent their teen years in custody, though even there they were instructed never to confess to their identities for fear of reprisals. Since being released, and despite many attempts by the press to identify them, officials have consistently kept their identities and locations secret. The only publicly available pictures of them as children are the low-resolution CCTV footage, their three-quarter view mug shots, and two pictures taken the day of their arrest. In the mug shots, they appear concerned. Their photographs seem to invite examination in the way that nineteenth-century theories of physiognomy assumed criminality could be read on the face, as if the cast of eyebrows or mouth might betray mental operations (Taylor 1998). But do the photographs show any sign of murderous inclinations? Instead of revealing any sign of a malevolent nature, they appear only to conceal it. Without context, no one would ever suggest that these are the faces of premeditating brutal killers. Perhaps the concern on their faces might even elicit sympathy. Rather than revealing freakishness, the photographs preserve the mystery of their inexplicable crime. The disjunction between their appearance and their behavior, which was and continues to be repeatedly exploited in the press and on television, could imply that behind the benign appearance of every child lurks what tabloids and scholars alike have labeled evil (Eagleton 2011). The photographs of the perpetrators show no more wicked intent than does the photograph of the victim. But what happens when the photograph of 2-year-old James’s beautiful, smiling face is

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Figure 8.3 Anonymous, Mug Shots of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, 1993.

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Figure 8.4 Anonymous, James Bulger, 1993.

juxtaposed with those of his murderers? James’s vulnerability, as well as his utterly undeserved fate, seems to shine through. Does the photograph of James help make the crime against him seem even worse than it might otherwise, and do the photographs of the perpetrators seem even more inexplicable? Casting the child perpetrators as evil means to utterly other them. This is not surprising since othering is a common strategy with news reports of adult murderers (Taylor 1998). Although murders frequently take place—much more often than is found newsworthy—and they are a staple of popular fictional dramas, most lives are relatively peaceful. The insertion of a horrendous event comes as a shock, and so real horror is easily cast as belonging to another universe. Framing the perpetrators as having given no prior warning of their crimes, as fitting into the community before destroying it, highlights the disruption they cause. And casting the victims as innocent is an age-old murder plot, at least as old as the revenge plays of the seventeenth century. Each of these features is common to newsworthy murder stories (Taylor 1998), but they are highlighted when both perpetrators and victims are children. Moreover, there appears to be a collective amnesia about child-on-child murder and abuse. The James Bulger case caused a moral panic, but it was reported and discussed in the English press as an isolated incident, without any reference to a previous English case that at the time was arguably as horrific and also as widely publicized. In 1968 the day before Mary Bell turned 11 years, she strangled 4-year-old boy Martin Brown in an abandoned, derelict house. Two months later, she and her 13-yearold friend Norma Bell (no relation) strangled 3-year-old Brian Howe. After killing Brian, they left, but then returned. Mary carved an N into his stomach with a razor blade that Norma then turned into an M. Mary also used a pair of scissors to cut off parts of his hair and mutilate his penis (Davis 2014). They were tried for manslaughter, being deemed adults by virtue of their crimes, not their age, even though this contravened international law. Again, the publicly available photographs of the two perpetrators show no sign of malevolence. Mary looks a little concerned, a typical expression of a serious child, but like Thompson and Venables

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Figure 8.5 Anonymous, Mary Bell at 11 years old, 1993.

Figure 8.6 Anonymous, Norma Bell at 13 years old, 1993.

above, more likely to elicit adult sympathy than reprimand. Again, investigating officers had trouble accepting that the two girls were responsible, initially dismissing as a prank a note they left claiming responsibility. The reporting strategies described above, both written and visual, are stereotypical for murder generally. Written accounts include graphic details, while the photographs are benign (Taylor 1998). We do not see corpses let alone mutilated corpses, but ordinary photographs of both perpetrators and victims, usually, as above, looking equally benign, even innocent. This is partly a matter of access by photographers to the crime scene, but primarily it is in deference to public taste, what Taylor (1998) calls “mismeeting” (144), the practice of keeping our eyes averted from others so that we can remain detached and thereby avoid taking responsibility. Mismeeting has the effect of allowing viewers to follow the unfolding story of murders at a safe distance. Murder is rendered as not too ghastly, while also further othering the murderers as abnormal, as monsters, or as the ultimate form of othering—as evil. These cases are now years old, but similar crimes continue. In England, there are a handful of childon-child murders every year, but England is not unique (Hughes 2018). And there are other forms of horrendous child-on-child abuse. Parsons (2020) cites the 2020 case of a 5-year-old boy gang-raped by boys of 12 years and younger on a remote beach in Australia, and there are many other such horrendous cases. Presumably, there always have been (Jenks 2005). Given the power of the ideology of childhood innocence, it seems possible that images of perpetrators, either looking serious or smiling, can be read in several ways as, indeed, can the absence of such images. Pictures of the perpetrators as happy innocents could be read in such a way as to undermine the reality of their crime. They might be read as reinforcing the aberrant nature of the crime even within these children’s lives. In this case, the images reinforce one of the themes of the stories; namely, the childlike qualities of the perpetrators. News stories consistently contrast their crime with details of their benign childlike demeanor. One news report read: “The children doodled and ate lollies as the Chicago

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judge ruled that they would be charged with the juvenile equivalent of first-degree murder” (Killer Boys 1998: 8). In the dock during their trial, they were described as “the kind of normal little boys that you’d want to hug if you saw them … who cried for their mothers” (Mills and Kemper 1998: 1). One accused murderer is said to have “enjoyed computer games, collected trading cards, and model aeroplanes” (16). Another child is reported to have immediately gone home after he had killed and watched cartoons on television (Boys of 7, 8 1998: 10). On the other hand, Wilson (1996) argues that the lack of images of child criminals in the media is also attributable to the pressure to preserve childhood as a state of innocence. Perhaps two alternative understandings are possible. By not offering a child’s face to the stories, the crimes may appear insufficiently founded. In a visually orientated society, a story without a visual representation has less credibility, certainly less interest, than if it was grounded with an image (Hayne 2018). On the other hand, not showing the faces may help to further other these children as exceptions to the rule of childhood as innocence. Again, in a society that has taken a visual turn and is now habituated to visual evidence, the absence of visual images may assist readers to dismiss the perpetrators as not real children. In either case—whether dismissing the stories altogether or refusing to acknowledge the perpetrators as ­children—the absence of imagery may reinforce the ideology of innocence. As deconstructivists have long argued, what is not shown is as powerful as what is shown (Derrida 2016). Whether pictured or not, the alleged innocence of children generally provides the interpretive framework.

Unruly street children In modern societies, children who present serious physical danger, as above, are taken into custody, but most children who would otherwise pose a problem by unruly behavior are simply located within school grounds and schooled in civility. As described in Chapter 5, modern schooling developed in the nineteenth century in part as a reaction to the threats posed by widespread juvenile disorder and criminality. The threats were of long standing, and prior to modern schooling the solutions proposed were drastic. In 1524 the humanist Juan Luis Vives recommended removing to foundling homes children in whom their parents’ idle habits were being villainously reproduced. In 1640 a London alderman left a bequest to be used expressly for “poore boyes and girles to be taken up out of the streets of London as Vagrants and for Cloathing and Transporting of them to Virginia, New England or any other of the Western regions” (quoted in Schorsch 1979: 161). In 1703 an English magistrate, with help from other interested parties— bankers, merchants, and shopkeepers—formed a society with the express purpose of fitting out and setting out to sea boys from the age of 10 years. They eventually rid themselves of 10,000 children in this way. Girls willing to be reformed were sent to reformatories, called “Female Orphan Asylums.” Trained to spin, knit stockings, and make artificial flowers, they helped pay their way. Thus, the threat posed by idle, poor children was removed by physical relocation. Some idea of what so concerned authorities about vagrant and destitute children is perhaps illustrated by William Hogarth’s lithograph, The First Stage of Cruelty from 1751, which shows boys torturing

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Figure 8.7  William Hogarth, The First Stage of Cruelty, 1751. Yale Center of British Art

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animals: gleefully stringing up kittens by their tails, cauterizing the eye of a bird with a hot needle, cock fighting, tying a bone to a dog’s tail, and sticking an arrow into the anus of a terrified dog. The following is appended to the print; While various Scenes of sportive woe. The infant Race employ. And tortur’d Victims bleed shew The Tyrant in the boy.

The print is part of a series, the second of which shows what Hogarth believed happened without social intervention; adults beating animals. If society did not step in as a corrective to children’s wanton natures, society could only get worse. During the nineteenth century, the threat posed to public order by gangs of youth, inclusive of children, greatly increased. The population as a whole grew exponentially, especially in the cities. In England, Europe, and the United States, cities grew up as if overnight without welfare infrastructures and either loophole labor laws or none at all. Many parents found themselves unable to provide, or offered such abusive relationships that children were prepared to risk life on the streets rather than endure life at home. In every major city, street children existed in their many thousands. In 1850 a conservative estimate put New York’s homeless children at 10,000 to 30,000 thousand, and in London, with a population of 4 million, it is estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 were street children (Gilfoyle 2013: 401). The newly developed cities were viewed as breeding grounds of moral dissipation in which little children, both boys and girls, were seen to smoke, drink, gamble, and commit crimes. Gangs of rampaging youth and child prostitutes posed a threat to civic order as well as to the middle-class preoccupation with respectability (Schorsch 1979). These children of the poor were widely viewed by those who were not poor as idle, illiterate, and often obscene. In middle-class minds, poverty equated to idleness, idleness to bad behavior, and bad behavior to threat. In the United States, street children were regarded as vermin, being called “rats,” “gutter snipes,” a “dangerous class,” and “the ulcers of society” (Gilfoyle 2013: 400). Many of these children actually worked at legitimate jobs: selling newspapers, blacking shoes, running errands, carrying bundles, and selling flowers, although for many of them, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate means of survival was fluid. Lacking adult guidance on questions of morality, and needing to survive, many children saw no difference between legal and illegal activity (Gilfoyle 2013). Many survived as pickpockets. Most pickpockets worked as individual entrepreneurs or in small gangs loosely led by an older child. In Figure 8.8, a crowd of the well-to-do are unaware of the nefarious activities of two boys stealing food and of another picking the pocket of a top-hatted, elegantly dressed man about town. Some operations were organized by adults who ran pickpocket schools. A former child pickpocket declared that the operation run by Fagin in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist was “true to life” (cited in Gilfoyle 2013: 406). Figure 8.9 captures the roguish Dodger introducing the innocent Oliver to the two-faced, villainous Fagin and, thus, to small-time organized crime. The other children are already deep in criminality, as indicated by their heavy smoking in an adult fashion. Pickpockets were so numerous pedestrians complained of being confronted by “small infantries of children” eager to sell newspapers and black shoes but who were also likely to pickpocket (404).

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Figure 8.8 Anonymous, A Crowd Gathered to Watch a Procession and a Young Boy Stealing, 1821. Wellcome Museum

Figure 8.9  George Cruikshank, The Artful Dodger Introduces Oliver to Fagin, 1838. Source: Wipple, E. (1894), The Writings of Charles Dickens

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A newspaper boy would wave a newspaper in the face of a potential customer while simultaneously reaching into the customer’s pockets. Children were better suited to pickpocketing than teenagers or adults. They could sidle up to an adult without suspicion being aroused. An invisible crime, pickpocketing was hard to prove in court, and many children carried on for years without being caught. The combination of legitimate and illegitimate work, or using legitimate work as a rouse for illegitimate work, is hardly to be wondered at. These children worked, ate and slept in the streets, and even those who were sympathetic to their plight feared them. Charles Brace, a Protestant minister and social reformer, viewed them with mixed feelings of pity and fear. He wrote admiringly of their “sharp, ready, light hearted, quick to understand and quick to act, generous and impulsive” nature (cited: 400). He admired their energy, entrepreneurial spirit, and pragmatic wits, but simultaneously saw them as a threat to public health and to civic order. As outcasts from society, they developed their own social forms of organization and even their own languages. In New York, the streets and parks where they operated were called “beats”; the “touch” was performed by a “tool,” “bugger,” or “wire,” while the victim was distracted by a “stall.” The novelist Herman Melville called this underworld vocabulary “the foulest of all human lingoes” and a “dialect of sin and death” (quoted: 408). However, contrary to these fear-based sentiments, pickpockets were typically pictured with some affection. Cruikshank’s approach notwithstanding, pickpocketing by children was primarily illustrated as a lark. The newly affluent middle classes were wont to display their wealth in the form of diamond-­ studded stickpins and gold pocket watches, and they conspicuously advertised cash as further visual evidence. As in Figure 8.8, the adult victims of pickpockets were frequently depicted as well-to-do dandies and therefore deserving of losing a little. The threat the child pickpockets posed to civic order was downplayed by picturing them not as gangs, but as a few mischievous kids playing at being naughty, their acting tough being more comical than threatening. Of the sharply contradictory views expressed by Brace and some others, it was the benign, even sympathetic attitude adopted by artists and illustrators. The tendency to idealize street children is well illustrated by the Polish American artist Karl Witkowski. In several paintings, boys focus on playing marbles; in several others, one boy plays harmonica while another looks on appreciatively. One painting shows boys fighting, yet their facial expressions are hardly intense and they seem to be in suspended animation; the artifice seems to undercut anything serious, and the title confirms a lighthearted intention. Each of these children is bedraggled, their clothes full of holes and patches, but they all have clean hands, scrubbed faces, and cheerful or intent expressions. In Figure 1.15, boys participate, however marginally, in the market economy by shining shoes. Figure 8.10 goes further in showing a lad savoring his earnings. Witkowski’s children are poor but enterprising. Boys shine shoes, sell newspapers, and girls sell flowers. Like Figure 9.3, they are typically smiling; happy with their lot. They epitomize the capitalist spirit of can-do. For actual, rather than idealized, children, “Get them off the streets” became the rallying cry. One approach, employed in earlier centuries, was to relocate. In the United States, relocation was called “pacing out” (Gilfoyle 2013: 411). Urban children were removed to small-town communities in the mid-west. But what then to do with such children when they arrived?

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Figure 8.10  Karl Witkowski, Newsboy, 1899.

As throughout the rest of the world, over time, the policy of mandatory, universal, full-time schooling proved successful. The solution was to create an educational system, not just for a few children or for a few hours each week, as in previous centuries, but for every child, even into early adolescence. As described in Chapter 5, the intent was to train them to both behave and to become skilled sufficient to contribute economically in the workplace as adults. Whatever problems the current schooling system has, most children at least get to stay with their parents (Heywood 2018).

Child soldiers In Chapter 7, child soldiers were described as victims, but it has to be said that they are often also callous killers capable of the most horrific acts. As mentioned in the previous chapter, photographs of child soldiers are to be readily found on the internet, brandishing guns with huge magazines, some of them pointing at the camera. Small arms are now made from plastic, making them light to carry, and they have become so simplified they can be stripped, reassembled, and fired by children of 10 years of age and younger. The Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 weighs only just over 10 pounds and takes only 30 minutes for children to learn how to use, making them not just “man portable” but “child portable” (Singer 2005: 46). A

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Figure 8.11 nafterphoto, Asian Child Soldier, 2021.

modern assault rifle can release a burst of thirty bullets that are lethal more than 400 meters away, and a rocket-­propelled grenade can tear down a building. Thus, a handful of children now have the equivalent firepower of an entire regiment of Napoleon’s infantry. With only a few hours of training, a child can be taught all he or she needs to know about how to kill hundreds of people in a few minutes. Of course, technological developments are only a partial explanation for today’s child soldiers. While many are forcefully recruited, one survey of African child soldiers found that 15 percent volunteered because they were fascinated by the prestige and excitement of having a gun (Jah 2018). One former child soldier explained that he admired soldiers, their guns and crisp, neat uniforms and that he just wanted to fight the way they did in the movies. Children make ideal soldiers. With profit being one motive for war, war in the developing world has become criminalized and privatized, and since the children are rarely paid, they provide cheap labor (Singer 2005). Non-state armed groups prefer children over adults because it is said that they have more stamina, are better at surviving in remote areas, follow orders more readily, and do not complain. They are also determined fighters, being more willing to take risks in battle than adults, especially when under the influence of drugs and/or when motivated by revenge for past atrocities to their families (Jha 2018). Children are also especially good as suicide bombers. In Pakistan, they have been recruited as young as 6 years (News.com.au 2012). Internet pictures of children, some very young, show them with bombs strapped to their bodies. One child raises his arms to show off the several metal canisters hanging about his waist. Another photograph shows a young child surrounded by four hooded adults dressed entirely in white, two of whom have bombs around their waists. The picture is designed to illustrate a story from a satirical online publication in which a 15-year-old Palestinian laments that he is too

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old to fight for Hamas. “I doubt they’d accept me. There are just too many younger guys out there—I am basically over the hill.” Arising from the visceral fear that comes of living in a war zone, where actual child bombers are used, satirical humor is used here as a strategy of diversion. By contrast, Figure 8.12 is used to heighten fear and anxiety. What appears to be a baby girl, barely able to stand, and looking perplexed, is dressed in a jumpsuit decorated with tiny flowers. She also wears bombs around her waist that are held in position with straps decorated with bullets. The Israeli Defense Force claimed to have found the photograph in the house of a Palestinian terrorist suspect. Since the child seems still to be wearing diapers and is barely able to stand, let alone walk, whoever dressed and photographed the child as a bomber was presumably not considering the child to act as an actual bomber. But as prefiguring the child’s future? Demonstrating their own commitment to terrorism? As a joke? Or is the photograph a fake, fabricated by the Israelis, a lie to arouse fear and loathing in equal measure? In the minefield not only of South East Asian conflicts but terrorist and counterterrorist conflicts everywhere, it is impossible to know. What is clear is that, placed on the Israeli Defense Forces Facebook page and on their blog, and then reused by US right-wing bloggers in support of Israel, the photograph raises the threat level. If parents are raising their children from babyhood to be bombers, no one is safe. Like child soldiers, “child bombs,” as they are called, have particular advantages over adult suicide bombers. They are less likely to arouse suspicion in built-up areas; with people standing near a target thinking them innocent, they can remain unnoticed for long periods of time (Jha 2018). Additionally, child suicide bombers have more shock value and receive more news coverage than adult suicide bombers. Children are typically less fearful and do not overanalyze what they are doing, and girls make better suicide bombers than boys because they are even less likely to be considered a deadly threat. They can often get closer to their target because they are less likely to be searched and more likely to avoid military checkpoints. Girls who have been victims of rape, physical abuse, and torture are readily recruited to take their revenge.

Figure 8.12  Israel Defense Forces, Picture of a Child Suicide Bomber Found in Hebron, 2002.

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Multiple threats Both fictional and real children pose multiple threats, and we appear to have developed a number of quite different approaches to address them. One approach, originally derived from a religious perspective, is to split the nature of children into two separate parts, perfectly angelic and perfectly evil, in which evil children are virtually cast as not really children but some other species. It is as if in projecting onto children adult desires for childhood as a pure, innocent state, it is also necessary to project the exact opposite onto children who fail the purity test. This has the effect of maintaining the dominant view of childhood innocence as the norm. Children gone bad may be evil, but childhood remains Persil-clean. At both ends of this moral spectrum—evil versus saintly—it is children’s essential nature that is thought to determine their behavior. Yet not all very bad children are all bad. Instead of splitting children into two distinctly separate moral universes, children are also viewed as possessing both good and deeply worrisome characteristics. Children who perpetrate terrible crimes are cast as the victims of horrid, abusive parenting, the media, or mental illness, not acting from their innate nature but from environmental factors or personal deficiencies over which they have no control. In fictional forms, such children are alternatively cast as inherently evil or subject to a variety of social evils. Children who are merely unruly highlight the dual nature of childhood where good and bad behaviors lie side by side, ever ready to manifest in unpredictable ways. Though typically without the same filters as adults, they are at least like adults: good one day, terrible the next. Sometimes such behavior has been viewed as a serious threat that should be eradicated—removed or subject to the disciplines of schooling—but sometimes it has been viewed with affection and treated as high jinks. The fact that we have these different approaches to the troublesome side of children highlights in a particularly unsettling fashion that, as a society, we remain confused about the nature of childhood.

Chapter 9 Children as Economic Value

“Kids love advertising. It’s a gift. It’s something they want. There is something to be said for branding children and owning them.” (Paul Kurrit quoted in Barbaro 2009) As advertising executive Kurrit indicates, in today’s consumer economy, children are sought after for their economic value as consumers. They have always been important for their economic value as workers and future workers. For millennia children were invaluable to family incomes on farms, later in cottage industries, and later still in the factories and mines of the Industrial Revolution. They remain so in the developing world as child labor, while in advanced economies today children help keep the economy running as avid, hedonistic consumers. When not spending their own allowances, they enjoy enormous nagging power. Children are also used to help sell products and services to adults through their associations of vitality and vulnerability. In each case—as workers, and future workers, as consumers, and spruikers—their significance as individuals is outweighed by their economic value. Economic value can take three different forms: exchange value, use value, and sign value (Southerton 2011). As used here, exchange value refers to the selling price of a commodity or service, and in slave economies children were treated as a commodity with a specific price, as they continue to be today to people smugglers. Use value refers to the value of a commodity or service to satisfy a need or want, and children have always been valued as workers and/or potential workers. Sign value refers to the social significance of a commodity or service, and children have long been leveraged for social prestige as well as their childlike qualities.

Children in slave economies In slave economies, the vitality of which relied on the free labor of slaves, children of slave parents were bought and sold much like any other commodity. Sometimes the children were sold along with their parents as a job lot, although often they were separated from their parents and sold separately. Their specific exchange value was determined by their use value, by what work they could undertake. It could also be determined by their sign value, by what social significance they might have for their owners. The more slaves, or for better quality slaves, the more prestige an owner acquired. And for quality they were prepared to pay more. Many nineteenth-century paintings depicted the slave trade somewhere in South East Asia, what the West regarded as the Orient, a place of exotic as well as damnable customs, including the sale of child

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slaves. The paintings typically show traders haggling over the price. They were an assertion of European moral superiority, although Europe’s own use of slavery to bolster its economy was then of only recent memory. The paintings were a projection onto another part of the world of a trade that European powers had practiced for centuries, but by making it appear exotic, and for some also erotic—some of the children are naked—they would have been viewed as confirmation of both their own material and moral progress. Today, people smugglers treat children much the same way in what is effectively modern-day slavery. Parents who are the victims of poverty and/or violence are prepared to pay their life savings to transport themselves and their children to what they believe will be a better life. They pay to be transported in airless trucks or unseaworthy boats, often with dreadful outcomes. Too many children end up drowned, as in Figure 10.11. And children, no less than adults, are trafficked for sex, labor, and their organs (Purkayastha and Yousaf 2018). Chapter 7 describes two movies that address these horrors. In each case, criminals perpetuate modern-day slave economies by exploiting children who live in the subsistence economies of third-world streets. What makes these practices so horrific for viewers is the contrast between these economies and the life that is able to be lived in the thriving capitalist economies of the first world. Figure 9.1 is a different kind of picture. It is a propaganda image used by abolitionists in the United States at a time when slavery in that country was still practiced and about which a civil war was being fought. The girl was much photographed. The actual child was used in public meetings to melt hearts. Pictured here, she is rescued not only from slavery but from sin. Not only is she acceptable because of her piety, but she could easily pass as white and therefore poses no threat. The image was strategic.

Figure 9.1  R. S. De Lamater, Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence, A Redeemed Slave Child, 5 Years of Age, 1863.

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The abolitionists’ cause was advanced not just by a young child but one that white sympathizers could imagine as their own (Morgan-Owens 2020). The economic arguments for a slave economy are challenged in favor of what good can be done once slavery is abolished.

Productive and consumer capitalism Since the start of the Industrial Revolution approximately 250 years ago, capitalism has never stopped evolving, and in the process it has undergone major transformations (Piketty 2017) which have significantly impacted children. The most significant transformation is the eclipse of early or productive capitalism by consumer capitalism. Early capitalism was characterized by the production of goods, and children played their part on the land, in the factories, the mines, and in small family-run retail businesses. Capitalism could not have developed as rapidly as it did without child labor (Heywood 2018). Under productive capitalism, people were encouraged to think of themselves as workers, to pride themselves on their work ethic, and to value thrift. Today, first-world countries with advanced economies have substantially outsourced the production of goods to developing countries, and instead they rely on ever expanding the consumption of goods, services, and experiences (Miles 2021). Consumer capitalism relies upon the activation of desire for such goods, services, and experiences. To survive, capitalism must continually expand. A major way of expanding is to speed up the capitalist circuit of production, distribution and consumption, and to achieve this, advertising and marketing are used to trigger desire. Consumer capitalism is also called fast capitalism due to the unprecedented speed with which the capitalist circuit is now set in motion. Consumer capitalism is also called designer capitalism because of the extent to which it is designed to invoke desire. Goods and services are now promoted not only for what they can achieve, their use value, but as pleasurable experiences (Miles 2021). Under consumer capitalism, advertising and marketing encourage people to think of themselves as consumers, as people who purchase. Instead of a worker consciousness, consumer capitalism relies upon a hedonistic desire for evermore purchased products. Instead of valuing thrift and prolonged gratification, the good life is understood as a goods life in which frugality has given way to instant gratification. A further way of expanding capitalism is to sell to people whose previous purchases were relatively modest. It is better still if the products are also more ephemeral than before. In each of these regards, children represent a godsend to consumer capitalism. Children’s toys and clothes used to be relatively inexpensive but no longer. And children never stop growing up and growing out of their clothes, toys, and taste. Much more than adults, what is valued as a must-have is soon thought childish, as a musthave is replaced by ever new must-haves (Esmaeilpour and Nashtaee 2020).

Servants of productive capitalism Meanwhile, in the developing economies of the third world, child labor remains an everyday reality as it did in today’s advanced economies a century and more ago. The International Labor Organization (IL0) defines child labor as any unpaid work by children under 12 years, more than 14 hours of work for youth of 12–14 years per week, and a minimum of 28 hours of household chores from 7–15 years of age per week (Bourdillon and Carothers 2019). Thus defined, the ILO estimated in 2017 that there were

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150 million child laborers in the world, the majority being unpaid contributors to family businesses and of these mostly in agricultural work. While this included youth as old as 15, many were children of 12 years and younger.

Children as workers In the West, until the beginning of the twentieth century, children’s contribution to household budgets was critical in maintaining economic viability. Where small-scale agriculture was the norm, children were essential in offering seasonal support whenever adult labor was either unaffordable or unavailable. And it was by participating in work that such children were introduced into the social life of their family as well as their wider community (Heywood 2018). For centuries prior to the onset of industrialization, children were employed in cottage industries, for example, basket weaving and lace making, because their small and nimble fingers were better suited to fine work than adult fingers. Whole families would work together to knit, plait straw, and spin wool and cotton. In tasks where strength and skill were not required, by the time children were around 7 years of age they were expected to participate. Perhaps our contemporary first-world understanding of child labor most commonly comes from the long hours and often dreadful conditions in which children worked in the factories and coal mines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And those images were largely produced by Lewis Hine, who was noted in chapter 7 on children as victims, for depicting the physical dangers involved. In the factories, children were especially useful for manufacturing goods that required deft fingers, just as they had been in the cottage industries. But as described in chapter 7, children were also employed because they were cheap, replaceable, and largely conforming. Figure 9.2 captures another kind of vulnerability. Contrary to the happy-go-lucky newsboy of Figure 8.10, this newsboy is over his head. He is placed in the midground with very open framing and a completely out-of-focus background that is compounded by his blank expression. He might well be saying, “Here I am; what else can I do?” Hines recorded that the boy was so young and uneducated that he could not make change. In other images, Hines located children in the midground with both the foreground and background out of focus so that the children appeared lost in space, a spatial metaphor for their social state By contrast, painters who served a middle-class clientele that benefited either directly or indirectly from poor children hideously exploited in the new factories, avoided such realities by representing child labor as an individual, entrepreneurial activity. Girls selling flowers was the most common such subject, though many other paintings show children picking fruit, selling fruit, or cheerfully selling newspapers. Figure 1.14 by Bouguereau represents agricultural labor as a pastoral idyll. Figure 9.3 is typical of this genre of so-called minor entrepreneurs in which the girl engages the viewer as she might in real life with a potential customer. Her facial expression is plaintive and just a shade weary. Her hand rests down on her tray as if she has held it up all day to too many potential customers who, perhaps like the well-to-do couple in the midground, may have simply walked by. Such children offered the reassuring message to the middle class that, despite their poverty, the working class had bought into the capitalist economic system. It would have been a particularly comforting idea at a time of an intense class struggle that frequently appeared to threaten rebellion. Deep and disturbing social realities were laid to rest by the plaintive expression of such a lovely, prepubescent girl.

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Figure 9.2  Lewis Hine, 7-Year-Old Newsie, 1910. Library of Congress

Figure 9.3  Edwin Mulready, A Street Flower Seller, 1882.

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Figure 9.4  Charles Victor Thirion, Young Shepherdess, 1878.

Equally idealized were the many pictures of shepherd girls, such as Figure 9.4. Actual shepherd children were primarily boys, but for centuries, children of the aristocracy had been painted in the guise of idealized shepherds and shepherdesses. A country lifestyle, including the hard work it entailed, had also long been idealized, and was increasingly so with the development of industrialization. Work in the country was viewed as healthy and good for children (Heywood 2018). Figure 9.4 reflects this view, though it stands in marked contrast to the actual life of a child shepherd. Such children endured long, lonely hours both day and night. Preparing fodder in winter could mean wet clothes and swollen and cracked hands. Our first-world ideas of child labor are also no doubt formed by images of child labor in the third world, where the third world is typically represented as chaotic and dangerous, not least for children. Figure 7.18 is used to illustrate the continuing hardships of hard labor in the developing world, but not all child labor should be construed as victimization (Bourdillon and Carothers 2019). Figure 9.5 contradicts the victim narrative. It shows two children from the small West African country of Benin. For a first-world viewer, the children may also appear exploited, not because their load is too heavy for these children, but simply because they are working at all. Whoever filed this image on Wikicommons images thought so; it was filed under the heading “Against Child Labor.” But that filing was presumptuous. The image is drawn from an annual photographic contest that celebrates African achievements. And a moment of examination shows that the children’s expressions seem to suggest they are more intent on selling than suffering.

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Figure 9.5  Degan Gabin, Africa on the Move or Transport, 2020.

To view these children as victims is a function of the separation we in the first world make between childhood and adulthood, childhood being quite separate from rather than continuous with the rest of human life (Bourdillon and Carothers 2019). As a consequence of first-world social arrangements, we may overlook the upside to child labor not only to the family income but to the children themselves. So long as the work children undertake is harmless to their health, and so long as it does not take them out of school to the point where it interferes with their formal education, work can be beneficial. Since children learn through observation and participation, work can be educational. Particularly in agricultural societies, children learn a wide range of skills and knowledge by combining farming, domestic life, and schooling. Children instinctively imitate, first playfully and, as they grow in competence, by helping in family activities. Work and family life are thus closely intertwined. It is by participating in work that such children are introduced into the social life of their family as well as their wider community. In many contexts, children’s contribution is critical in maintaining the viability of family incomes, especially those based on family-run enterprises, and on small farms children are needed to offer seasonal support where adult labor is either too expensive or not available.

Children as future workers During the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, the usefulness of children to the economy gradually shifted from their making an immediate financial contribution through their

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labor to their future prospects as adult income earners. Taken out of the factories and coal mines and placed into schools, the stress was placed on their potential as future workers. As described in chapter 5 on schooling, the introduction of universal, full-time education was primarily justified in terms of economic use value. It was not only about getting unemployed troublesome children off the streets, as described in the previous chapter. Children taken out of the workplace meant that their economic value was delayed, but this was offset by the prospect of later higher economic returns. Childhood as a time of learning was conceived as equipping them to be good adult workers as much as obedient and loyal citizens. Schools were initially segregated by social class, with schools for the working class intended to train children for working-class jobs and middle-class schools to train children for middle-class positions. Within a school class, students were divided by knowledge and skill, often with the “best” students able to sit up the front. Until the 1960s, it was common in Australian schools to rearrange seating on the basis of regular tests. Since there was usually little movement, this spatial positioning reinforced the assumptions, at least among the boys, as to who was likely to become a tradesman and who a professional. The not-so-hidden curriculum of demarcating social class was spelled out in the spatial arrangements of school classes. Today, another kind of hidden curriculum operates well beyond the classroom; it operates wherever children are operating as they are in Figure 9.6. The children are absorbed by their own individual

Figure 9.6 suriyahan, Two Children on their Phones, 2021.

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media. They are together but devouring media content, individually. While no formal policy of social engineering is being illustrated here, the children are in training for working in small, individual cubicles in large, open-plan offices, or individual offices with glass walls, that is, individually but in public, and all the time in front of a screen. They are also learning to perform when in the future they may work online from home. Children who spend extensive periods of time alone on their cell phones or computers are also subject to constant commercial inducements to material gratification for a sense of well-being. They are learning to function in a work environment characterized by media power and money as primary forms of social connection (Ritter 2001). They are learning not only adaptive skills to twenty-first-century work environments but to serve the economy as consumers.

Servants of consumer capitalism Today, the primary economic use value of children is as consumers, influences on adult consumption, and by appearing on products as motivators of consumption. Advanced economies no longer rely on children as part of an immediate labor force. Their immediate use is as consumers.

Children as consumers The process of turning children’s economic use value from labor to consumption did not happen overnight; it took centuries. During the eighteenth century, upper-class children first became part of a commercial culture of mass-produced toys through the social aspirations of their parents. This greatly increased during the nineteenth century with the massively increased expansion of mass production (Cook 2013). There was a proliferation of wooden blocks, cards, yo-yos, drums, dolls, rocking horses, and miniatures of all kinds, from trains made of tin to soldiers made from cast iron (Henderson 2019). But this was a time dominated by thrift and delayed gratification. To counter parents who worried that their children were only interested in play and possession and that possessing toys might only lead to a desire for ever more toys, toys were marketed as educational. And to counter parental anxiety that mass-produced toys would harm children’s creativity, books appeared with such titles as “When Mother Lets Us Make Toys.” Figure 9.7 is from the same series. It contains instructions on how to make useful toys and practical objects with suggestions on how to grade for artistic skill. Gift giving at Christmas became an acceptable way to alleviate the tension between the marketplace and the domestic ideal of restraint. Figure 9.8 epitomizes the tension. The two small children are investigating wrapped presents around a Christmas tree, as if the presents are forbidden fruit. The children charm because their expectant curiosity is so delightfully familiar. But the contents of the book are unlikely to charm today’s children; “recitations, dialogues, exercise, drills … and facts.” (Wikipedia Images) Only in the 1920s and 1930s did advertisers begin to directly appeal to children rather than to their caregivers. An oft-used figure was a boy consumer who knew about and recommended products for adults to buy for children. Stressing the desirability of the goods, he softened the distinction between an ethos of consumption and an ethos of economy (Cook 2013). Due to then-recent

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Figure 9.7  Helen Mortimer Adams, When Mother Lets Us Model, 1916. Library of Congress

Figure 9.8  Joseph Charles Sindelar, The Best Christmas Book, 1885. Library of Congress

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developments in child psychology that emphasized that play was purposeful and not an unproductive waste of time, advertising stressed the benefits of a playroom full of toys that built character. Childhood functioned as a merchandising category, while children themselves were transformed into consumers for life. By the late twentieth century, the transformation from productive to consumer capitalism was well-­ established as advanced economies outsourced the production of goods to developing economies and focused on services like finance, entertainment, and tourism. The economies of world countries are now based increasingly on the consumption of pleasurable experiences—movies, music, theme parks, travel, clothes, electronics, and so on. Each is largely ephemeral and thus in need of ongoing turnover (Miles 2021). Never before have parents had so much disposable income. By 2008, the direct buying power of children was estimated at 40 billion dollars in the United States alone, while adult spending that children could influence was estimated at 700 billion, approximately the combined economies of the 115 poorest countries in the world (Barbaro 2008). Based on the evidence of advertisements aimed at children, they were able to influence what car parents bought, what computer and cell phone they purchased, and where their family took holidays. With so much at stake, selling to children is now fiercely competitive. There are so many clothes, drinks, cereals, and toys all competing for children’s attention. To succeed, advertisers rely upon market researchers to understand how to represent children in a way that will be persuasive to other children. Various research techniques are commonly employed. Focus groups of children are employed where children are given toys to play with and advertisements to watch. They are then monitored from another room in which their bodily movements and facial expressions are studied in relation to what they say. Market researchers go into supermarkets and film the way children move around and pick up products. They film children at school, in their home, eating breakfast, and going into their closets and deciding what to wear, even in the bathroom to see how children shampoo their hair and use soap. They watch children talking to their friends, and organize friendship circles to see how children interact with new products. Children are even placed into MRIs to see how their brains light up in response to marketing stimuli. They are also shown advertisements to see how often they blink. When stimuli elicit a lot of blinks, advertisements are modified to make them even more mesmerizing. Another approach is to employ online platforms like Webkinz, on which children play branded games and chat with one another. The platforms micro-target children in the way Facebook micro-targets us all. Using Big Data analytics, Facebook and other social networking sites gather and aggregate information on age, gender, and product preferences among children aged 8–12 as children chat and interact with one another. The point of all this data is that when aggregated, it is fed back into how children are represented in advertisements and marketing material. From a marketing perspective, the aim is to brand children and own them as consumers for life, and to be successful, marketers need to know what motivates children. In this regard, marketers have been likened to pedophiles in that both need to know what children want (Barbaro 2008). While in the past, children’s culture was a cheap culture, now it is an expensive one. Once, it was fashioned from wood, tin, or cloth; now, it is electronic with ever new series and add-ons. Once, it was

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a soft toy like a teddy bear or a doll; now, it is a bear and a doll that require constant updating with the latest fashions and accessories. Children’s expensive culture is not only branded but designer-branded. Parents today remain anxious about the influence of commercial culture on their children but frequently give into their children’s insistent pleas. Many parents today worry that they are too busy to spend extended time with their children and, like the aristocracy of previous centuries, relegate the care of their children to others. Managing children is a matter of arranging life so that they are as little trouble as possible. Holding down two jobs between two parents, or as single parents holding down a full-time job, for example, means that caregiving is outsourced to daycare, afterschool programs, television, and social media. Some advertising explicitly takes advantage by showing children misbehaving until they get what they want. In one advertisement, a child lies on the floor of a supermarket screaming until their agitated parent finally relents. Such a scene acts as pedagogy for children and parents alike. Screen culture teaches children to become consumers as a way of understanding who they are and how to obtain gratification. In this context, children are ripe pickings for advertisers. It is not as though children appear to respond to advertising from status-seeking or falling victim to false claims; rather, they long to join conversations with school friends and other peers. They are like community journalists in knowing what other children are gifted (Pugh 2009). And advertisers want to understand how to leverage children’s need for familiarity, comfort, to belong, and independence (Poupeau 2016). Acknowledging their children’s longing to belong, parents are willing to buy goods and experiences that act as passports of membership in their children’s social worlds. Even in families under financial constraints, parents today prioritize their children’s desire to be thought normal by their peers. At the heart of the commodification of childhood is the desire to belong, and marketers take full advantage.

Children as spruikers In television advertisements, children act as spruikers declaring, “Kids, this is a toy you’ve got to have,” although more commonly, children play with toys and eat cereal. The advertising is often highly gendered (Barbaro 2009). Boys play with plastic he-men, enacting conflicts with verbal threats and combat action, and girls play with dolls and play at hosting dinner parties. The pacing of screen advertisements is usually frenetic, with quick cuts and close-ups of hyperactive children. In a highly aroused state, they laugh together, run about, clamber for the desired object, and devour it, something of which is captured in Figure 9.9. Advertising used to merely exaggerate the characteristics of toys; for example, a boy riding a toy horse as though it was a real horse. Now, reflecting an economy of consumption, children are represented in terms of what they have and how much of what they have. And more specifically, reflecting an economy of experiences, advertising is more symbolic, offered not on the basis of what a product can do but its social sign value. The benefit of a breakfast cereal or a drink is not its taste but because it is cool (Pugh 2009). Children typically want to be older than they are, so it is not surprising that they show up in advertisements as rappers acting tough, and 5-year-old girls celebrate birthdays with makeup parties. The term tweens, which ostensibly describes children that are between childhood and adolescence, is stretched to include 5-year-olds that are sexualized, enacting adolescent and adult seduction scenarios.

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Figure 9.9  Anurak Pongpatimet, Girl Eating Hamburger, 2021.

Leveraging children’s sign value Children are also used to sell products to adults. In one television advertisement for a car, a child drives his bike into a car showroom and dismounts and takes off his bike helmet. A salesman approaches and asks if the boy needs help much as he would for an adult customer. The boy climbs into the driver’s seat of a car that is clearly too large for him, and he checks out the instrument panel. Getting out of the car, he asks the salesman for a business card, takes it, puts on his bike helmet, and as he leaves, he says, “See you in about 20 years.” While epitomizing the idea of learning to be a future consumer, a consumer cadet, the associations of childhood are being leveraged to sell adult products to adults. This is not a new phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, children appeared on all manner of consumer items as an aid to having them purchased. This is ironic because childhood had come to mean the very antithesis of marketplace values (Cook 2013). However, images of childhood gained commercial value precisely because children had acquired the symbolic value of untrammeled purity In the nineteenth century, it was common for seed manufacturers in the United States to associate their products with good-looking, healthy, happy young children. Presumably, such children evoked the idea that, when planted or potted, the seeds would grow as strong, attractive, and healthy as the children. The children were seemingly analogous to the inevitable future of the vegetation on sale. In Figure 9.10, two delighted children grab attention by their mutual gazes. The younger girl affectionately and cutely clings to the older girl, whose left arm stretches out to both further welcome the viewer

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Figure 9.10 Anonymous, L. L. May & Co. Seed and Nursery Catalogue Cover, 1893.

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and to pick an already ripened fruit. The children are surrounded by flowering plants, to their left and right, behind and in front of them, and with the older girl’s dress covered in flowers and her large hat festooned with yet more flowers, an equation is made between the girls and the flowers. Even the name of the company employs the plant-influenced style of Art Nouveau that was fashionable at the time with its little curlicues. The girls, like flowers, the flowers like the girls, are beautiful and delicate. At the time, of which Figure 9.3 is an example, there were numerous paintings of poor girls selling flowers on street corners. Here though, the girls are not working to eke out a living; they are emblematic of freshness and, though entirely sexless under their loose-fitting dresses, they also promise fertility. During the nineteenth century, young children were also commonly used to sell soap. Children blowing bubbles had long been a subject of Western art, no less so in the nineteenth century, so that the association of soap with children was already established. Presumably, the further intended association here is that if a particular brand was suitable for the soft skin of young children, it would do no harm to the skin of adults. Presumably, this is also the intended connection in the Gillette razor advertisement that showed a baby shaving. Some other child-leveraging advertisements are harder to understand. Were they merely intended as hyperbolic claims as claims commonly are in advertising? Rainer Beer advertised its product with a picture of an old man toasting with a small girl toasting, beer in hand. The slogan read, “Beneficial to Young and Old, Cultivate the Rainer Beer Habit.” Tobacco companies also featured children with slogans like “The Most Delicately Flavored and Highest Cost Leaf Grown.” But perhaps the

Figure 9.11 Anonymous, Advertisement for Pears Soap, c. 19th century.

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Figure 9.12 Anonymous, Cocaine Toothache Drops, 1885. National Library of Medicine

most surprising advertisement for modern observers would be Figure 9.10, which uses two small children playing to promote a cocaine-laced painkiller. One of the most common uses of children today is their appearance in advertisements for aid organizations such as Oxfam, UNICEF, and World Vision. Their photographs are usually taken by first-world professionals (Alum 2007). Figure 9.13 is typical of the kind of images that appear on aid agency advertising material. Two children hug and smile in the standard expression of happy, innocent childhood. The idea that the third world is a place of turmoil and threat is banished by such images of seemingly universal appeal. Figure 9.13 even has an early morning sun behind the children. The backlighting creates a halo effect around the children’s heads as well as associations with warmth and new beginnings. The children appear well fed, presumably the beneficiaries of aid. Pictures like this promise what is possible with the money of a donor. They reassure because they place the viewer in the position of a benefactor whose donation can really make a difference. Pictures of starving children close to death always evoke the question: can aid really be of assistance? The point of aid agency advertising is to elicit action; they do not want to imply that the plight of the children is hopeless. Television advertisements overcome the limitations of print media by first showing starving or damaged children and then showing healthy children, thus demonstrating what a financial commitment can achieve. Much of the success of aid agencies lies in their programs to assist individual children in a way that casts donors as foster parents. A personal relationship is encouraged by the donor receiving a picture of the child they sponsor, his or her name, and personal details. Limited correspondence is encouraged,

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Figure 9.13  Monkey Business Images, African School Boy and Girl Hugging Outdoors, 2021.

and the donor receives an annual report card which further helps to cement the relationship. Once contributing each month to the program, withdrawal is made emotionally difficult because the donor is supporting a very specific child in the role of a surrogate parent. The role of donor as parent is emphasized by never picturing the foster child with their family. The snapshot of one’s foster child like Figure 9.14 is presented alone as if the child is an orphan. The donor is informed that their child’s real parents exist, but by never showing them, the donor can imagine that their relationship is special to the child. No visual image is allowed to confuse this imagining. It is with such photographs that the connections between the economies of the third world and the economies of the first world are personalized and made clear. The relationship is one of dependence. This is a microcosm of the relationship between the two worlds, the two economies. One is subservient; the other dominates. Just as a child is always dependent upon an adult, so the third world is dependent upon the first world. Through the image of a third-world child, the dependent status of the third world upon the first world is crystallized, just as clear as the first world’s domination of the third world. The third world receives aid, and first-world donors experience the pleasure of being the adult in control. The appeal of donorship is made entirely through the idea of supporting an individual child, but the donor’s money is not spent entirely on the child. Donors are informed that part of their donation is spent on the general well-being of their child’s community. This could be building a new school, a dam, a well, or providing much-needed medicines. In fact, the percentage of money spent directly on the child is never made clear. Reading between the lines, it appears that the money could be spent largely on the general community projects from which one’s foster child receives indirect aid.

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Figure 9.14  Lucian Coman, Young Girl from a Village Near the Kalahari Desert, 2021.

To note this is not to suggest these practices are untoward; it is only to highlight the fact that while much, perhaps most, of a donor’s money goes toward community projects, the appeal for donorship is made through a picture of a child. Such images are used as a way to secure and maintain donorship. As Alam (2007) writes, the “developing business” is inextricably linked to the “image business” (61).

Children as economic entities For as long as recorded history—long before capitalism, long before feudalism—children were valued for their economic value. Only in the twentieth century did some children of the working and middle classes cease to work for long hours each week. By contrast, in developing countries, child labor remains common. Child labor has a seriously checkered history, but it is not one thing—much is either benign or beneficial for children—and the economy of many countries could not do without it. In today’s consumer economies, children act as consumers, as influences on adult spending, and they appear on products for adults to leverage purchases. Children appear in advertisements with the intention of convincing other children that, cradle to grave, life is about getting and getting more. With cell phones in hand, children are consumer cadets, consumers in training for future consuming. And because their wants change rapidly, children are a godsend for consumer economies in constant need of turnover. Whether as workers, consumers, or influencers, children are indispensable to both developed and developing economies.

Chapter 10 Children as Propaganda

“I am beginning with the young … With them I can make a new world.” (Adolf Hitler quoted in Rempel 1990: 1) All images of children are political in the sense that they are constitutive of struggles to define childhood and, through childhood, to prescribe and proscribe ideas about human nature and human societies. The pictures of children in this chapter, however, are different in that they have been weaponized specifically to promote political causes. These are either the top-down policies of the politically powerful, or policies pursued from the ground up by the powerless seeking to claim power. What these quite different forces have in common is that children are employed on the basis of their presumed innocence. Pictures of children have been used to motivate commitment to wars, to resist wars, to express outrage at inhumanity, and, since ancient times, they have helped legitimize power. The assumption of children’s innocence, of their essential naivety and vulnerability, has frequently been a go-to propaganda ploy to secure consent. As political, pictures of children are exercises in soft power, the power to grab eyeballs and co-opt rather than coerce, to shape preferences by appeal and attraction, although also they have been frequently used in conjunction with the harder forms of power: legislation, compulsion, and intimidation.

Selling succession One function of children in pictures is to establish in the public mind a ruling elite’s preferred line of succession. Some families have great power, and their use of their children’s charm is among the stratagems employed to maintain their privileged position. The 2019 televised Christmas message from the late Queen Elizabeth II, a nearly 8-minute video, was an exercise in succession. In the opening shot, the Queen talked to the camera while sitting beside framed photographs that included one of her father, King George VI, who she had succeeded in 1953. The other family members included her son, the then Prince Charles, her grandson, Prince William, and her great-grandson, Prince George, who was then aged 7. Each was in direct line to the British Crown. This shot of the Queen was interspersed with historical footage and the adult royal heirs performing their public duties during the previous year. The final scene of the video showed the Queen and each of her successors enjoying making a Christmas pudding. This included Prince Charles helping his grandson, the young Prince George, stir the pudding. Throughout this scene, the focus remained on the youngest heir.

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Figure 10.1 Author, 2019 Christmas Message from Queen Elizabeth II, 2020.

The Queen’s address began with a photograph of George VI and ended with an image of a beautiful boy enthusiastically engaged in an activity he was not quite the master of, a sight to warm any heart. In this final family scene of pudding making, only those in the line of succession were included, the artifice further indicated by each royal personage wearing neatly pressed, formal clothes while baking. From a once King George to a future King George, from the Queen’s father to her great-grandson, the monarchy was offered as a symbol of continuity in the midst of upheaval. In a highly publicized move, Prince Harry and his wife Megan Markle had recently left the royal family, which had caused much public angst in Britain about the status of the monarchy. In this context, it appeared that the photographs on the table and the pudding segment were felt to be needed to reassure the public on the line of succession. Despite the recent departure of two, then very popular, royals, the future of the monarchy was presented as if assured. Support for the monarchy was not only shored up but, as a symbol of continuity, social stability was guaranteed. This was by no means the first time that pictures indicating a line of succession had been used as a propaganda ploy. Indeed, the above example is only the most recent of British royal families to indicate who comes next. The Tudor royals were especially obsessed with succession, understandably since their family’s claim to the throne was, at best, disputable. Figure 10.2 shows that Henry VIII had himself painted sitting firmly on his throne, his young son Edward standing close by, while his grown daughters Mary and Elizabeth stand at some distance as if kept as alternates. In time, each would inherit the crown, but Henry’s preference was clear: his heir was to be his child son, not his adult daughters. This was not a contemporary scene painted from life, but a fictional construction. Jane Seymour, the mother of Edward, who appears to Henry’s right, had long since died. By the time the painting was executed, Henry had already remarried

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Figure 10.2 Anonymous, The Family of Henry VIII, c. 1545. Royal Collection; Source: Campbell, T. P. (2007) Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty

three times and was on his sixth and last wife. But Jane’s presence reinforces the message that it was her son Edward who was to inherit the crown, Henry’s two adult daughters relegated to reserves. In another family portrait, painted 27 years later during Elizabeth I’s reign, the Tudor lineage is represented in reverse: Elizabeth appears as the current Queen, who had by then succeeded Queen Mary, who had earlier succeeded King Edward VI, and the father of each of them, Henry VIII, who had preceded each of them years before. In case anyone was unable to read this visual memo, it is reinforced by a written statement. An inscription below the painting praises the virtues of Elizabeth’s immediate Tudor predecessors, including Edward—“a rare and virtuous soon [sic]”—and concludes with the assertion that the reigning monarch embodies the virtues of each of her Tudor predecessors: “the last of all a vyrgin, Queen to England’s joy we see successively to hold the right and vertues of the three [sic]” (Family of Henry VIII 2021). Continuity is thus equated with both legitimacy and stability; the exact same visual strategy as used above by the second Queen Elizabeth. Moreover, in this painting of the much earlier Elizabeth, Edward holds the sword of justice while Elizabeth holds hands with a figure symbolizing peace, who in turn stands on a sword of discord. Together, she and her child predecessor have brought peace and justice to England and, thus, by association, are legitimate heads of state. The Roman Emperor Augustus did not enjoy the same tradition of family inheritance. However, he had his grandsons, even as young boys, pictured in such a way as to indicate his preferred successors

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Figure 10.3  Lucas de Heere, Family of Henry VIII, An Allegory of the Tudor Succession, c. 1572. Yale Center for British Art

Figure 10.4  Miguel Hermosa Cuesta, Gaius Caesar on the Ara Pacis Augustae, 2014.

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and, through them, to secure the stability of Roman governance. In busts and in relief sculpture, Gaius and Lucius were represented with winning, charming manners, even emphasizing their charm by having them pictured as younger than they were at the time (Zanker 1990). Notably, the boys appear on the Ara Pacis Augustae from 9 BCE, an altar to peace. Although in stone relief, a very different media from photographs, video, and painting, it uses the same visual shorthand as the images of the Windsor and Tudor dynasties for stability, continuity, and legitimacy, that of inclusion and close juxtaposition. The altar is decorated with an extensive frieze illustrating military accomplishments and, through careful placement, the relative importance of dozens of people to both one another and, most importantly, to Augustus. Little Gaius clings to the toga of his father, while Lucius looks up plaintively to an (unidentified) adult. Both boys wear short tunics and have long hair rather than the longer toga and short hair worn by the adults. The short tunics show off the boys’ chubby legs but also mark out the boys from both the adults and the other children included on the frieze. And unlike everyone else, who, befitting the occasion, wear solemn expressions, Gaius and Lucius have lively, childlike expressions. Though small children, their presence is highlighted by means of their dress, facial expressions, gestures, and physical placement. The message would have been clear to his contemporaries: it is through these children that the peace Augustus has brought will continue. From just prior to the first century BCE to the twenty-first century, the simple charm of beautiful young children doing childlike things has been employed to persuade citizens of the continuity of legitimate succession and, with it, the assurance of social stability.

Children as ethnic and population policy Since antiquity, children have been used as part of policies to control the population, either to decrease the population or to promote its expansion. They have also been used to promote the right kind of children.

Augustus’s other children Augustus’s use of children did not stop with his preferred lineage. He lived at a time when what had been thought of as traditional Roman moral standards had broken down (Zanker 1990). Among the elite of Roman society, many children were being born of adulterous relationships, many couples were not bothering to marry, and among those who did marry, many were producing only a few children. Just as troubling to Augustus, children were being born of Roman and non-Roman parentage. An elite of legitimate Roman citizens was critical to the running of the Empire, yet the combined effect of the above developments was that numerically the elite was in decline. For Augustus, it was a matter of either populate or perish. Having secured the peace after years of civil war, would it all be for nothing if traditional Roman culture dissipated? Augustus’s response was to legislate a moral code that included inducements for Romans to marry and for married Roman couples to procreate. There were also disincentives to produce illegitimate children, not to marry, and for couples comprised of a Roman and a non-Roman to have children. The tax system was also reworked to socially engineer a larger elite population. The unmarried were taxed higher, and those married with children were taxed lower. A period of time was established before

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couples could divorce, and inheritance laws were upended, each to ensure that going forward, an elite class would continue to exist that owed its loyalty to Roman institutions, customs, beliefs, and ideals. Two visual strategies were employed to illustrate and promote this legislation. As with the representation noted above of Gaius and Lucius, children of Roman citizens, though especially among the elite, were to appear in all crowd scenes (Uzzi 2005). The children were typically represented wearing Roman costumes standing among their families in an orderly, peaceful way, and holding the togas of their parents or other family members. They were exhortations to the kind of family life Augustus preferred, namely Roman couples with their Roman children. Representing family groups in close proximity to representations of Augustus further underlined the message: for the sake of imperial patronage, legitimately marry and procreate. A second, less direct, visual strategy involved images that symbolized fertility. Many images of various animals with their offspring were represented, but also goddesses with their children. Many traditional goddesses were readily available for this purpose, but a group of newly minted goddesses were also added to serve this particular service. Their images appeared everywhere, their symbolism being well understood by ordinary Romans. The message was clear and endlessly repeated: if the gods have children, so should you. Figure 10.5 shows the best known of these allusions to fertility. It appears on the Ara Pacis Augustus mentioned above. Although the exact identity of the earth goddess is unclear, she is usually identified as Tellus, one of the new, purpose-created earth goddesses. While not associated with a narrative

Figure 10.5  Chris Nas, Tellus Mater, the Roman Earth-Goddess, 2007.

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myth of fertility like older earth goddesses, she is pictured with attributes that were readily understood by contemporary viewers. At the center of the scene, a matronly earth goddess sits in a dignified pose holding her two infants, one of whom reaches for her breast while the other appears to offer a fruit taken from the various fruits that sit on her lap, both her breast and the fruit being signs of abundance. She gently holds both infants while looking upon them with quiet affection. She is surrounded by a lush landscape connoting her power to produce. Under her feet lie an ox and a sheep grazing, signs of an increase in herds and the blessings of country life. The overly large plants, shooting up before her eyes, again signify copious life. Corn, poppies, and more fruit are growing behind her. Taken as a whole, the image is an icon to both worship and emulate. Augustus’s population policy failed; there was no significant increase in the elite class of Roman children (Zanker 1990). But the representation of Roman children alongside the representation of non-Roman children played another, equally important, role. The representations of these two classes of children are remarkably different. While Roman children were depicted as an integral part of their family, non-Roman children were represented as part of military conquests, typically appearing in scenes of submission to Roman triumph. In one case, a child is shown being dragged through the streets by a Roman soldier, a helpless victim of violence (Uzzi 2005). What both kinds of children have in common is that they were intended to symbolize not only then-current relationships between Rome and non-Roman regions but their future relationships. Roman children were to grow up to be culturally Roman, while non-Roman children represented the future of their particular province, whatever that might be, though always and everywhere they would need to be submissive to Rome. Roman imagery of children thereby helped to define what Romanness meant, an important concern to the Roman elite when so many people from the provinces lived in Rome and what Romanness meant was being questioned. One thing Roman children plainly meant was that Romanness meant cultural superiority to the cultures of its conquered peoples. If Augustus was the first to use images of children to promote state-based, ethnic, and population policy, he was not to be the last. Totalitarian leaders of the last century typically had themselves pictured with children. The pictures implied that a leader who delights in the presence of children cannot be all bad. It humanized them. The particular ideological bent of the regime, as well as the political necessities of the time, simply determined what specific kinds of children would be pictured with the leader. The pictures also perpetrated massive lies about the fate of numerous actual children.

Hitler’s children In service to the Nazi policy of ethnic cleansing, Hitler was frequently photographed with children, boys and girls alike, who were clearly of the preferred Aryan type: Aryan facial features, and preferably with blue eyes and blond hair (Rempel 1990). Often the children also wore traditional folk dress to signpost the Nazis’ nostalgic celebration of Germany’s past. Since Hitler had no children of his own—the propaganda line was that he was married to the state—he appears in what Kelly (2005) calls the “ruler with-non-related-small children icon” (203). This is a genre without precedent since past rulers signaled their preferences and policies based on bloodlines. The children are not Hitler’s, they are Germany’s, and they were intended to represent Germany’s future. As Hitler declared in 1933, “[W]e older ones

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Figure 10.6 Anonymous, Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler with Children at the Berghof, his Alpine Home, c. 1940.

are used up. We are rotten to the marrow … we have in our blood the full recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! … What material!” (Rempel 1990: 1). It was through Germany’s children that he saw himself conquering the future. In photographs of Hitler with children, he invariably appears genuinely enchanted, and the children greet him with obvious adoration. Unlike Augustus’s policy, Hitler was intent not merely to subdue ethnic minorities but to rid Germany of children that did not meet his preferred type, whether they be Jews, Gypsies, or the physically and mentally diverse. He is therefore invariably pictured with only one basic ethnicity. This was the Nazis’ soft power with reference to children. The harsh reality of the children of those cast as degenerate was that they were worked to death and incinerated in the gas chambers. In just one transit camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, Terezin, 15,000 children were processed before being sent by train, mostly to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of these children, only 100 survived (Volavkova 1994). Chapter 7, on children as victims, also recounts the impact of Nazi policies on the children of Poland, who were damned as undesirable.

Stalin’s children In the Soviet Union under Premier Joseph Stalin and in China under Chairman Mao Zedong, different policies were pursued, and different kinds of pictures were produced, but there were also marked similarities. In the Soviet Union, a personality cult was promoted based on Stalin as the Great Leader, in

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which children played a critical role. There was both a cult of the leader and a cult of children, in which the former fully exploited the latter. The Soviet Union consistently advanced the view that it had a uniquely caring relationship with children. The welfare of children was promoted as a major proof of its political legitimacy (Peacock 2014). Unlike Hitler, Stalin had a legitimate child, but it is not she who appears in the many photographs of Stalin with children; they too were non-related, small children, intimate with the ruler but not exclusively. The Great Leader cult developed during the 1930s, in which the good fortune of the state was attributed to Stalin’s unerringly wise rule, and everyone, child and adult alike, was encouraged to regard him as a paternal figure. The children were representations of the nation, a nation as adoring as the children’s facial expressions and gestures. The pictures allowed Stalin to project an image of a kindly, accessible leader, so unlike traditional, remote-appearing leaders of past regimes. Among the numerous images of Stalin with children, the most iconic was one of the first, a photograph with a small girl from the Buryat Mongol Republic. Her name was Gelya Markizova. She was typical of the preferred type at the time, being female, prepubescent, and a member of a non-Russian subordinate nationality. This made her an ideal representative of a state consisting of many minorities. Her gender was also significant since, at the time, Soviet propaganda was cultivating a feminized image of the “Motherland” by contrast to the previous Tsarist regime’s evocation of the “Fatherland.” Additionally, the girl’s oriental features flattered Stalin since it made him appear more European, meaning more

Figure 10.7  Mikhail Mikhailovich Kalashnikov, Stalin with Gelia Markizova, 1936.

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sophisticated, than he actually was. Kelly (2005) suggests that the photograph also distantly references religious paintings that represent a spiritual marriage between adult and child. In this way, the nation’s relationship to its ruler went beyond material succor to embrace a non-definable, mystical connection. In many other images, Stalin is shown surrounded by adoring children drawn from various regions of the Soviet Union that again celebrate the multicultural diversity of the state. They are visual embodiments of the slogan that was endlessly repeated at the time, “Thank You, Dear Comrade Stalin, for a Happy Childhood!” The slogan appeared over the doorways of nurseries, orphanages, and schools, on walls, on book and magazine covers, and it was chanted by children at festivals (Kelly 2008: 207). In the Soviet Union, the cult of childhood made its first major appearance at the very time of the worst of Stalin’s purges during the mid-1930s. Millions died, including children, and many children were orphaned (Kelly 2008). Gelya Markizova is a case in point (Yegorov 2018). Her full name was Gelya Engelsina Markizova. Her father was such a devoted communist he named her Engelsina after the communist theoretician Friedrich Engels. But 18 months after the iconic photograph was taken, her father was falsely accused of spying for Japan, and despite his daughter’s letters to Stalin begging for mercy, he was executed. Her mother was also arrested. Exiled to a remote region, she died a year later under mysterious circumstances; she was presumably murdered. The authorities decided to keep Gelya alive, but since her photograph with Stalin was reproduced everywhere, and it was impossible to present the leader posing with the daughter of one of the people’s enemies, Gelya was renamed and given a new identity. No longer a girl from the provinces, she became an allegedly famous member of the Young Pioneers, the state-based organization for children. And no longer Gelya Markizova. In 1937, faced with at least several hundred thousand orphaned children who, like Gelya, had lost their parents as enemies of the people, the Soviets created orphanages. Although there were no official rules discriminating against these children, there was a common belief that social criminality was inherited, and consequently, the children were often beaten and underfed by orphanage staff. Misbehavior was interpreted as the product of a counter-revolutionary upbringing, and consequently it was punished severely.

Mao’s children When Mao came to power in 1949, China was faced with an exploding population, and wanting to cut back on the number of its children, the Chinese government introduced the one-child policy. During the time the policy was in operation, numerous posters represented the ideal family of three, a father, a mother, and one child. Family members often held hands to indicate an emotionally tight-knit unit, and they also each smiled as if to indicate their ready alignment with the one-child policy. The pictures were the happy, upbeat side to the hard power of harsh penalties for non-compliance. Like the Soviet Union, Communist China was also confronted with the problem of encompassing many regions with diverse ethnicities. In an attempt to unify the country, similar to Stalin before him, Mao was often pictured during the 1950s and 1960s surrounded by children drawn from different regions and ethnicities. Typically, Mao smiled benevolently, his arms outstretched to embrace the children, who in turn enthusiastically embraced him with adoring smiles and gestures. The pictures—carefully constructed photographs, paintings, and posters—were part of Mao’s personality cult in which he was cast as an

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infallible hero. Like Hitler and Stalin, he was practically worshiped as a god. Again, the message of the pictures was clear: Mao was the father of the nation; he loved all of China equally, just as all of China loved Mao. If this godlike figure is enthusiastic about children, so should adults be disposed to Mao. The dark deception perpetrated here was that due to Mao’s utter incompetence in agricultural policy during the 1950s and his battle for survival during the 1960s, up to 45 million people perished, many of them children (Karl 2010). Thus, in totalitarian regimes, pictures of happy, smiling children have more than once been used to play a deeply deceptive role. Pictures of a few, highly selective, types of children have repeatedly served to mask the fate of millions of other children. (Chapter 7 on children as victims provides yet another example of life for children in Romania under the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and how children were pictured). Lest it be thought that the use of children in totalitarian regimes to soften the image of the leader is a thing of the past, President Vladimir Putin appears on the internet not only with his two daughters but with other children, visiting children’s centers, and happily taking selfies with children. President Xi Jinping of China appears on the internet in photographs surrounded by cheering and flag-waving children. He also appears in paintings that represent him surrounded by selections of China’s ethnic minorities which use compositional devices, facial expressions and bodily gestures of goodwill identical to those of paintings of Mao with ethnic minorities. This is even as the parents and children of the Uyghur minority are savagely repressed.

Recruitment children In 1915 a widely circulated British recruitment poster for World War I worked on the power of children to shame their elders. A father reclines in a comfortable lounge chair. His son plays with toy soldiers at his feet while his daughter, sitting on his lap, asks, “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” The father engages the presumed male viewer with a thoughtful, mutual gaze. The clear implication is that it would be shameful not to be able to reply that you, the viewer, did not actively participate at a time when it was rumored (falsely) that the enemy, just across the channel, was bayonetting Belgian babies. Nearly six decades later, in 1972, a naked 9-year-old Vietnamese girl was photographed running for her life down a road, screaming, her body burning from napalm. Her name was Kim Phuc Phan. For those opposed to the war, it quickly became iconic of the war’s atrocities and the need to stop the war, especially when the full, uncropped photograph was published that shows a photographer to her right reloading his camera. That the photographer was pursuing his professional task rather than helping the girl was cited as an example of how dehumanizing the war had become (Taylor 1998). Such images were also used by the North Vietnamese, who portrayed themselves as liberators of the South Vietnamese. At first, they used photographs such as Figure 10.9 as an incentive to fight, though later photographs of atrocities inflicted on children were used to illustrate the resolve of the North Vietnamese people to fight on (Peacock 2014). They were not only atrocities to outrage; they were evidence of what can be endured. As with the story of Germans bayonetting Belgium children, children had more emotional impact than adults being killed because children were assumed to be innocent victims of violence, neither able to defend themselves nor potential perpetrators of violence

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Figure 10.8  Parliamentary Recruitment Committee, Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?, 1915.

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Figure 10.9  Oakley Originals, Vietnam Tragedy, 67th Evacuation Hospital, 1967–68.

The co-option of meaning The above multiple interpretations of the same images illustrate their co-option by different forces over time. But the meaning of images is rarely stable, especially when the stakes are high. Whenever pictures are the pointy end of an existing controversy, their meaning is already as unsteady as the issue is fraught. What appears so obvious to some can appear the opposite to others.

Refugee children Pictures of refugee children on the UNICEF website show smiling, happy children, like most children fully prepared to clown about in front of a camera. They appear like those referenced in the previous chapter for aid agencies and seem to say, “With your financial assistance, you can put a smile on the face of a refugee child.” They deliberately avoid the conditions many refugee children endure. In reality, the camps are often used as sites from which to recruit child soldiers (Camarena 2017) and, at best, are overcrowded and inadequately resourced. On the other hand, mass media representations of refugees follow other, distinctly different lines, as either a threat to be stopped or explicit representations of their

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plight. Terms like a swarm or flood of refugees equate refugees with plague and overwhelming disaster to first-world countries’ ways of life and economy. These media accounts are often accompanied by wide shots of vast tent cities or overcrowded boats. Other media stories focus on the living conditions of refugees and illicit sympathy. Still others have it both ways by portraying adult male refugees as terrorists but their children as “generations of innocents” whose childhood is being sacrificed to the political minefields of immigration policy and terrorism (cited in Barr 2020). Figure 10.10 captures the latter view by focusing on the boy’s facial expression. It uses the same visual strategy employed by Hine in photographs like 9.2. By blurring the background, the child is isolated from his surroundings so that, like life in the camps, he is presented as living in a no-person zone. He is also presented not only as this very specific child, with this specific, deeply troubled expression, but as an abstraction, a representation of numerous other children that are no better off. Numerous pictures of this kind appear in the media, and usually their impact is dulled by the unresolved tension between the public’s sympathy and its desire to protect national borders. And they are also easily forgotten in the daily news cycle that is forever moving on. One exception was the 2015 photograph of a 3-year-old Syrian, Alan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a Turkish beach. His family had been fleeing the war in Syria in a small boat with the intention of sailing to Canada, but the boat had capsized shortly after taking to the sea. Widely reproduced in newspapers, the photograph went viral on social media. Unlike other pictures taken at the scene, Alan is shown foreshortened—that is, in this photograph, we travel up from his shoes to his head or vice versa. In Renaissance painting, foreshortening was a technique to create the illusion of depth where the aim was to maintain an accurate representation

Figure 10.10 Magsi, Orphan Boy in Refugee Camp, 2021.

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Figure 10.11  Nilufer Demir, Alan Kurdi’s Lifeless Body, 2015.

with body parts appearing smaller the further they were away from the viewer. It was a form of perspective. But here the photographer has used a telephoto lens which has concertinaed space so that the boy’s head appears larger in proportion to his body. This is reverse perspective. This makes the boy appear especially young because it gives him the body proportions of a baby. By contrast, other pictures of him taken from the side stress his stretched-out torso and tend to suggest he could be older than his 3 years. Other photographs were also taken of someone coming upon him and others of someone carrying him away, but it was Figure 10.11 that went viral, and not surprisingly, for far more than any of the other photographs taken, this is the one whose construction has the most emotional impact. Three other children died during this incident, but they were barely mentioned in reports, if at all. It was the photograph that made the difference. Many people were outraged as Alan’s innate vulnerability fused with the unfulfilled promise of all deceased children. Nevertheless, reactions varied widely. The meaning of the photograph was quickly co-opted by the already existing divergent views on refugees. Some heads of state expressed dismay, suggesting that it should act as a reminder that the refugee crisis was a human catastrophe. Finland struck a coin in Alan Khudi’s honor; a German rescue organization renamed itself Alan Khudi. Singers, artists, and poets from many parts of the world paid tributes in their respective media. The BBC announced that it was one of those moments when the whole world seems to care. A New Zealand broadcaster commented that the picture symbolized the wider refugee tragedy and asked whether there could be a more moving image than the photograph of Alan’s tiny, lifeless body. On the other hand, it was alleged that the terrorist group ISIS used the photograph in their propaganda to claim that God would punish anyone who dared to emigrate from areas under ISIS influence (Death of Alan Kurdi 2021). Some anti-immigration politicians claimed the photograph had been faked. Others denigrated the boy’s father by claiming he was profiteering from the tragedy (Anonymous 2015). And some newspapers refused to run the photograph, claiming that it was like a “snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers” (O’Neill 2015).

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The photograph took on multiple meanings as it was co-opted by different interests. Politicians sought to appear empathic, social media users expressed outrage, pro-immigration commentators used it to argue for a change in immigration policy, and anti-immigration activists sought to delegitimize the image. It also focused a long and ever simmering debate over when to publish images that exploit the vulnerable no matter the importance and urgency of the cause. (Both multiple, contrasting views and the ethics of publishing horror are described further in Chapter 7 on children as victims).

Protesting children The children discussed so far in this chapter were largely devoid of agency; they were puppets in political games well beyond their control or even awareness. By contrast, children who protest in the streets possess agency; they demonstrate a willingness to make a political statement for themselves. Or do they? In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic collided with the Black Lives Matter protests across the United States. In response to police shootings of unarmed Black men, a 15-second video went viral of a 7-yearold African American girl, Wyta-Amor Rogers. The video showed her marching, forcefully punching the air with her right fist, chanting “No justice, no peace” (Harris 2020). She kept her eye on the camera, and since her surgical mask had slipped to her throat, her face was revealed as full of determination. Her mother and others are only partly seen, but they can be heard chanting in unison. In Figure 10.12, a still taken from the video, the whites of her eyes act as the focal point for her determined face, contrasted as they are against her dark skin and even darker eyes and hair. Her defiant, adult-like gesture and facial expression also contrast with the light tints of yellow and pink of her clothes, as well the pale blue of her slipped mask, the colors of a child. The raised arm overlaps with her head so that she might be thought to be knocking her fist against her temple, a gesture that says, “This protest is against the obvious,” or “Aren’t you stupid not to understand?” On social media, the video received 23 million views in the first five days of its posting. People on Twitter and in the blogosphere claimed and counterclaimed that the video, as well as many other images of children at marches and demonstrations, raised questions of developmental appropriateness. Were young children at political protests an act of civic education or indoctrination? Were adults justified in exploiting the innocence of their own children for political purposes, or did their actions amount to abuse? Were the children acting from their own agency, or were they puppets performing for the approval of their parents’ desires? In response to criticism, Wyta-Amor’s mother tweeted that her daughter wanted to be heard. Believing that it was important for children to be shown “the right way,” she had begun with her daughter. Many agreed, claiming that children are like adults in needing an outlet to express their own views. Some saw the video as inspirational and described Wyta-Amor as “a social justice warrior.” Some claimed that protesting helped to develop a sense of courage, pride, and agency. In liberal democracies, the right to protest was a fundamental right, and allowing children to protest was a straightforward matter of socialization.

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Figure 10.12 Author, Wyta-Amor Rogers Marching and Chanting, 2020.

Others disagreed. The video symbolized a loss of innocence; children should be at home playing with toys. Some worried about long-term effects. They asked about children’s emotional well-being and the physical vulnerability of young bodies in demonstrations that, while initially peaceful, had the potential to turn violent. Taking children to a protest seemed like putting them on the front lines of a battle they were not fully equipped to fight. As one mother wrote, “The clock is counting down on their innocence and their understanding of their place in an often-unjust world” (Pope 2020). She did not want her own daughter to face anger and indignity while protesting before she was old enough. Instead, she wanted her to “be so anchored in her beautiful Blackness that she’d be ready to fight that battle armed to win.” Others were more forceful. It was child abuse. One person asked, what kind of parent allows a child to make a gesture with connotations of intransigence if not outright violence, and to employ “fathomless sentimentality—the reverse coin of brutality” to make a sociopolitical point? (Dalrymple 2020). Teaching a child to resent was profoundly irresponsible. Resentment might offer “sour satisfactions,” but it was not only among the least constructive and most incompatible with happiness, it could last a lifetime. An African American woman countered that the video epitomized a lack of innocence that all Black children experience at a very young age. Another added that people of color know that children of color have never been granted the luxury of childhood innocence, and that the issue of Black lives mattering was as deeply felt by Black children as Black adults.

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Opinions on Twitter and blogs went back and forth. Some championed human rights; others, the human rights specifically of children, including the right of children to their innocence. Others claimed that for some children, their innocence, tragically, was already lost.

Children’s exploitability Images of children have long been employed for sociopolitical purposes, and those described above are mere examples. They have been used to legitimate blood lineages and political regimes, to assist in social engineering, to help cultivate a leader’s personality cult, to pursue causes, and to shut causes down. When used by governments, pictures of children almost invariably rely on the charm, naivety, and assumed innocence of the children who act as stand-ins for the hope of a secure, happy future. Used to pursue particular social causes, they are often co-opted by a range of competing, sometimes opposing, interests. These would be impossible burdens for actual children to carry. But they rarely do. It is the use of the concept of childhood innocence that carries the prime responsibility, and it is testimony to its enduring and pervasive power that it has been so frequently exploited. Since ancient times, the soft power of childhood innocence has been repeatedly utilized by the most brutal of regimes against actual children. It is profoundly ironic that innocence has been repeatedly used to mask atrocity. Paraphrasing Foucault (1970), whenever we see power picturing children as innocent, we are looking at a strategy to dominate the sociopolitical discourse. This applies not only to top-down power, but to bottom-up power as well. And because childhood’s natural state continues to be assumed as innocence, pictures of children are powerful in making whatever case is being proposed.

Chapter 11 Children as Innocent

“Innocence is a very tricky subject: its appeal is not always quite as clean as a whistle.” (Grahame Greene, quoted in Kincaid 1998: 115) Since antiquity, there has been no period that did not hold childhood to be a state of innocence, however differently conceived, however strongly contested. From the late eighteenth century until today, it has been the dominant ideology of childhood, its dominance persisting despite its many challenges examined in previous chapters. Every other conception either compliments innocence as the essential nature of childhood or stands in opposition to it. But as Greene indicates, the idea of innocence is problematic. Although childhood innocence has empowered advocates on children’s behalf and served to protect children from many kinds of harm, it has the potential to beget its opposite. Purity can act as a mere tease that makes innocence ripe for defilement. Seeking to protect children’s innocence, their own agency is downplayed, which has helped to make them vulnerable and rid them of rights that are commonly available to adults.

The ideology of innocence For much of human history, innocence was equated with children’s moral neutrality; children were neither essentially good nor bad, but in the late eighteenth century, innocence was reimagined as entirely virtuous. Childhood was elevated to a semidivine status, an enchanted world entirely unto itself, and something of this is retained even today. As such, childhood innocence is mythical, powerfully motivated by adult desire and only sustained by ignoring the lives of many actual children, as much now as in the past. Even today, some are prepared to claim that children have unique powers, such as hearing the inaudible, feeling more sensitively than adults, and being in receipt of intuitive knowledge unavailable to adults (Vroman and Taylor 2018). New Age seer Atwater (2012) informs us that due to changed brain chemistry in children, the “coming new world will be tailored specifically for the new kids who will lead the way in the Great Shift from the old world to the new” (back cover). And echoing ideas from antiquity, Taylor (1990) conceptualizes children as spiritual guides for adults. Such unique beings find visual expression in aestheticized children such as Anne Geddes and others like Figure 6.7. Holland (2004) argued decades ago that such aestheticizing, as described in Chapter 6, represents such an exaggerated sentimentality, mere kitsch, that it is marginal. However, the influence of

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such imagery remains, cohabitating with other conceptions because, as a society, we prove perfectly capable of holding a double consciousness, aware on the one hand of children’s limitations while also holding to the myth that it is their very lack that makes children wholly wonderful. We view innocence as a lack of knowledge of and interest in sex; ignorance of adult-world problems, especially of violence; emotional immaturity; physical vulnerability; and cognitive naivete. Born of adult desire, what children lack is sanctified as virtuous. The qualities children do not possess are transformed from deficit into benefit, from absence into abundance. On the other hand, a pervasive tendency is to juxtapose childhood innocence with domestic child abuse (Finn 2021), as well as witnesses, for example, to war (Yalom 2021), media violence and sex (Wertham 2021), each products of an adult world. If adult life is defined as defiled, childhood is defined by its opposite; as the psychiatrist Eric Erickson (1958) wrote, “Some law of opposites … seems to govern the development of extreme positions” (122). In the introduction to this book, childhood was conceived as a country that adults have left behind. We are all expatriate children, and like expatriates who have left their country of origin but recall it nostalgically, childhood is commonly viewed through rose-tinted glasses. But like expatriates who return to their country of origin for a visit and are disappointed because they find it never was of fond memory, examining childhood innocence involves a reality check. Childhood never was what it was. And it has not been for millennia.

The iconography of innocence The longevity of childhood as innocence is apparent from how many of its visual tropes have impressively long pedigrees. Perhaps the earliest trope is nakedness. Because we come into this world naked, nakedness has long signified our natural state, including in Egypt (Harrington 2018), Greece (Neils and Oakley 2003) and Rome (Marconi 2018). In the ancient world, real children were usually represented as clothed, as in Figures 1.2 and 10.4, but not pictures of putti, winged infants, or images of Cupid, the god of erotic love. Putti and cupids were often mischievous but they were reimagined by Christianity, with putti as winged toddler angels, and cupids as embodiments of heavenly love (Wood 2008). Christianity also contributed its own baby angels called cherubs, as in Figure 6.1. During the Renaissance, this pantheon of naked, chubby bubs frequently merged to become cherub/cupid/putti hybrids (Panofsky 1972) which, as indicated by Figures 6.3 to 6.6, were used for centuries thereafter. Casting children as embodiments of the natural world makes for a powerful alignment. To equate something with the natural is to place it beyond argument, to claim for it a self-evident status (Williams 1976). In the age-old binary between raw nature and sophisticated culture, innocent children have been long claimed for nature. And as Figure 6.9 indicates, nakedness is still being used in twenty-first-century photography of babies to signify natural virtue (Kelsh and Quindlen 2009). In the Middle Ages, gardens were appreciated for being places of rest as well as filled with flowers, and they were added to the iconography of innocence. During the nineteenth century, in response to the Industrial Revolution, a love of gardens was extended to the countryside (Higonnet 1998). The placing of innocent children into natural, rural settings brought together two elements that were deemed indisputably natural and good.

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A very much older association of childhood innocence is with the representations of birds. These are present in ancient Egypt, and although their symbolism is uncertain, as indicated by Figure 7.19, the practice was adopted by the ancient Greeks as a sign of pure intentions (Neils and Oakley 2003). The Greeks associated doves with peace and harmony, and doves survived as a feature of a Christian festival that celebrated spring, youth, fruitfulness, and innocence (Schorsch 1979). Christianity viewed doves as the soul longing to regain a sense of purity, and the association of doves with children symbolized a longing to regain the purity of children (Williamson 2004). Christianity also added goldfinches as representations of devotion and love; according to legend, one flew down to peck out the thorns in Jesus’ crown of thorns (Schorsch 1979). From the Renaissance on, small children were often portrayed either sitting beside a caged goldfinch or, as in Figure 4.4, holding one on a string. Lambs as signs of innocence date from ancient Greece, and they too were reenvisaged by Christianity. Since Jesus was understood as “the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29), children, accompanied by lambs, could be viewed as not only sinless but offering something of the redemption promised by belief in Jesus. Innocence has been conceived as both age- and gender-related; the younger the child, the more innocent, with babies being the most innocent, especially if they are asleep. For early eighteenth-century painters, shut or averted eyes were signs of innocence because, in not seeing, their owners remained ignorant (Milam 2002). While all children were innocent, girls were more so than boys because, typically, they were understood as less trouble than boys (Cunningham 2020). It is no accident that almost all the pictures of children in this chapter are of girls. Since antiquity, beauty has been equated with goodness and truth; thus, a beautiful child, absent a knowing expression, has been long associated with innocence. As described in Chapter 6 on children as aesthetic, beauty in children is determined in part by innate facial features and body proportions that trigger a nurturing response. The equation of beauty with innocence is also facilitated by the placement of children near rich fabrics, bathing them in golden or soft lighting, as well as using the neutral white and otherworldly settings. Each of these icons of innocence is exemplified below.

The longevity of innocence The heyday of childhood innocence is undoubtedly the latter part of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century (Higonnet 1998). During this time, it became such a fantasy that children were considered to be superior to adults, even the means to save adults from themselves. A remnant of this idea persists in the figure of fix-it kids mentioned in Chapter 4. But the idea of childhood innocence has been held for much longer, not always as pure souls but at least as lacking the intention to do harm

Innocence in antiquity In antiquity, children were believed to be in need of particular care given their special physical vulnerability, lack of sound reasoning, and absent sense of morality (Fossheim 2017). Aristotle, for example, effectively regarded children as neither good nor bad but simply lacking a moral compass. Children were equally capable of harm or harmony, but unable yet to comprehend the consequences of their

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behavior on others; they were neither essentially virtuous nor wicked. This is manifest in Greek and Roman images of putti who, though often mischievous, were also pure beings sent from another world to guide and protect the living. A putto was assigned to each newborn for life, being reassigned to another newborn once their human charge died. Putti were much like human children, though being without gender, they were asexual (Schorsch 1979).

Medieval original righteousness In medieval Christian theology, the doctrine of original sin, which emphasized the fallen state of humans and thus the human propensity to do terrible things, was balanced, at least theoretically, by the doctrine of original righteousness that stressed a state of grace in which humans strove to live in harmony with God (Cross 1978). The doctrine was derived from the biblical first couple, Adam and Eve, who were originally without sin. It was argued that babies and very young children were similarly sinless, troublesome to be sure, but without guile. This did not mean that they were virtuous, only, as in Aristotle’s view, that they lacked sufficient knowledge to be deliberately bad. Medieval church authorities differed widely on whether human nature lay in a balance between good and evil or was dominated by one or the other, and they were equally divided over the nature, specifically, of children. If many saw children as essentially wicked, others took as their authority the seemingly unequivocal statement by Jesus: Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like a child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me. (Matthew 18:3-5)

Thus, for example, the twelfth-century theologian Gilbert of Nogent wrote, “How great is the joy in the ignorance of little children being protected by absence of lust, it enjoys the security of angels” (quoted in Shahar 1990: 19). And the thirteenth-century poet Dante, who was fully cognizant of evil, wrote, “For faith and innocence are in the heart Of Children only” (20).

Children’s innocence was evoked in both official practice and folk beliefs. A statue of a child often led medieval processions. It effectively declared that only by becoming sinless like a child was salvation assured. Unlike adult funerals, children’s funerals were all white affairs, including the casket and everyone’s clothes. And from the sublime to the ridiculous, popular folklore claimed that, unlike immoral adults, lions were said not to attack innocents, which included children (Tucker 1974). The epitome of childhood innocence was Jesus himself. Whether carved in wood or stone, created in mosaics, painted, or manifest in tableaux of the nativity, Jesus as both baby and child exemplified sinlessness. As noted in Chapter 1, the young Jesus was the single most commonly pictured child for the full medieval millennium, and he remained the personification of innocence long after secular ­children joined the canon of childhood subjects. Also, in Chapter 1, mention is made of the massacre of the innocents. It is a story made so much more emotionally stirring precisely because the victims are blameless children, and even more so when

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Figure 11.1  Peter Paul Rubens, The Virgin and Child Surrounded by the Holy Innocents, c. 1618. Louvre Museum; Photographer: Jean-Pol Grandmont

they are represented as babies, as in Figure 7.4. Many other images portray these children as no longer the victims of violence but reimagined as souls raised to heaven. According to Catholic theology, this was their reward for being the first Christian martyrs (Heyward 1994). In death, they were sanctified as the Holy Innocents. In Figure 11.1, Mary holds the baby Jesus while surrounded by the souls of the Innocents, represented as alive, naked babies. Many statues of Mary in Catholic churches show her either cradling the baby Jesus, as here, or by herself while a host of the Innocents at her feet hold her aloft. Always the Innocents are represented as naked babies, that is, not according to the biblical account that included children up to the age of 2 years. Two-year-olds were innocent, but babies more so. The representation of the Holy Innocents as babies influenced the representation of the Children’s Crusade of the early thirteenth century. According to legend, two young boys separately received visions of Jesus directing them to lead children on a crusade to Jerusalem. Both boys were led to believe that previous adult crusades had failed due to their moral corruption and use of violence. By contrast, the Children’s Crusade would not slaughter Muslims but use peaceful means to convert them to Christianity. Things did not go to plan. The sea, for example, did not open up to allow them to walk directly to Jerusalem as promised, and many of the children ended up being sold as slaves. None of them reached their destination. But were they really children? More likely they were poor young adults (Dickson 2008). But however young they may have been, they could not possibly have been babies, as depicted in Figure 11.2. Like the story of the Holy Innocents, their story is tragic, and portraying them as babies highlighted their tragedy by underscoring their innocence.

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Figure 11.2 Anonymous, Children’s Crusade, c 1550–80. Metropolitan Museum of Art

The heyday of innocent childhood However, while there are many precedents of childhood as innocent, the heyday of innocent childhood was undoubtedly the late eighteenth century through to the end of the nineteenth century. Rousseau got the ball rolling in 1762 with the publication of Emile. He declared that children could be trusted to do the right thing because they were by nature essentially good. They were not merely morally neutral, not just blameless, but kept out of harm’s way, they were actually virtuous. Poets were soon eulogizing children as wonderous creatures, and painters were soon depicting them as happy mites at play amidst rural scenery. Poets and painters alike fetishized children as purity itself, as virtually a separate species of being, even divinely endowed. These are what are widely called “romantic children” (Higonnet 2013: 301)

Romantic redeemers Poets went so far as to believe that children existed to redeem society. In 1807 William Wordsworth (1998) wrote the highly influential Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, in which he proclaimed: But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! (71)

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Figure 11.3  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Innocence, or Girl with a Lamb, c.1790. The Wallace Collection

For Wordsworth, the child was a “Mighty prophet! Seer blest.” (72). He and his followers created a dream child, a new morning perpetually rising, never reaching midday, and never having to face reality, innocent yet wise, both natural and supernatural, and both child and parent, a being capable of leading adults out of the chaos wrought by social conflict. As one writer opined, children were “still fresh with the dew of heaven … beating in harmony with the highest laws” (quoted in Cunningham 2005: 71). Painters and poets took seriously the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s vision, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid … and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). Among the first artists to eulogize children in this way was Jean-Baptiste Greuze, whose numerous, brightly lit young girls were so distinctive and so numerous they were known as “the Greuze girl” (Barker 2009: 426). The title of Figure 11.3 is sometimes listed as Innocence, sometimes as Girl with a Lamb. Like so many of Greuze’s girls, she gently caresses a furry animal, in this case a lamb, thus referencing the idea of Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Her gentle touch, the material that swirls about her, and the perfection of her luminous, white skin make for a highly tactile image. But who is she? And, where is she? It appears as though she is just a girl, no one famous, chosen not because of a commission to paint the child of an aristocrat but simply to supply a market now hungry for images of pretty, charming children. She is without reference either to class or context other than a normative middle class and set somewhere vaguely out-of-doors. As examined later, however, if this is a picture of innocence, it is a troubled innocence.

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Figure 11.4  Charles Turner, An Etching after Joshua Reynolds 1785 The Age of Innocence, 1836. Yale Center for British Art

Less problematic is Joshua Reynolds’ much more famous painting, The Age of Innocence, from five years earlier. The title has been taken to characterize the perception of children for this entire period (Higonnet 1998). The painting was so admired that it was subject to 323 full-scale painted copies and several printed editions (Jones 1999). Indicating the longevity of its popularity, Figure 11.4 was etched over 50 years after the original. Like Greuze’s girl, Reynolds’ girl is both classless and without a specific context, but she is less stagey and, with her small, bare feet on the ground, she is more a child of nature. She is framed tightly with a neutral angle so that she looms large, her white face and dress are contrasted against the dark background, and her body and dress create a triangle. The effect is to suggest she is monumental, a figure of significant value, even though her face, body, and hands are those of the 3-year-old she most likely was. She is both large and appealingly small. Gently clasping her hands in protection, and with her slightly demure facial expression, she appears the epitome of vulnerability and sweet docility. Reynolds took charm further in Figure 1.13, in which he metamorphosed a friend’s 5-year-old girl into disembodied, divine angels. She has golden hair, dark eyes, and small butterfly lips, and the whole painting is lit by rays of light as if from heaven. Her expressions range from thoughtful, diverted by something out of sight, wonderous, and as she looks out of the picture, she is perhaps staring at some distant vision only she can see. The painting is unusual for the time only in transforming a real child into a divine one. Mostly, real and fictional children were distinguished as such. Fictional children like cherubs were set in unnatural,

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dreamlike settings, while real children appeared mostly in outdoor, rural environments (Rosenblum 1988). Real children were often portrayed playing together; catching butterflies; picnicking: gathering sticks for a fire; holding flowers; and playing with near newborn animals, especially lambs, bunnies, kittens, and puppies, all of them soft or fluffy. Like children, baby animals were viewed as being unaware of danger and in need of protection (Burn and Grossman 1984). Whereas previously children appeared to be acting on a stage and in costume, now they were represented as squirming against the confines of adult control; they fidgeted, they looked curious, they were engrossed in activities like playing cards or appeared bored with their studies (Rosenblum 1988). They had become more real, though only to be the more idealized, as in the cover image by Renoir of a luminous child with blazing hair. Although Figure 11.5 is ostensibly naturalistic, it is loaded with signifiers. The season is spring but so, metaphorically, are the children, with all the seasons of life ahead of them. The younger girl looks wistfully, gently holding in her hand a tiny dead bird, a traditional symbol of both life and death. For adult viewers, the girl would have been a nostalgic sign of the impermanence of childhood, her thoughtful, sad expression, an embodiment of an adult nostalgic longing for lost childhoods. The older girl lies on the ground in union with the earth. Her hat has been abandoned, and pondering a daisy that she holds in her hand, she is a carefree child of nature. Neither of the girls is cuddling a lamb in their arms, but

Figure 11.5  William McTaggart, Spring, 1864. National Gallery of Scotland

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reference to lambs is made nevertheless. They linger in the background. Like Reynolds’ girls and so many other paintings of the time, the girls epitomize sweetness and light, their fluid contours and melting, demure expressions working to accommodate the respectable, restrained tastes of middle-class domesticity (Rosenblum 1988). While most children charmed, some others appeared as vessels of primitive energies. Bathed in golden sunlight, they possessed magical properties. They were embodiments of vitalism, a then popular idea that claimed all of life to be animated by an internal spark. This is best illustrated by the paintings of Philipp Otto Runge. Figure 11.6 shows three children of the artist’s friend. Although of the children, the painting shows them as if through their own eyes. Like Reynolds’ Age of Innocence, the angle of view is once more the children’s own, a neutral angle rather than the normative high, adult angle. Additionally, the fence, the cottages, and the garden path have each been scaled down to suggest the

Figure 11.6  Philipp Otto Runge, The Hulsenbeck Children, 1805–06. Hamburger Kunsthalle; Photographer: anagoria

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children are larger than they would otherwise appear. Their faces also appear balloon-like, almost as if about to burst, and with vividly luminous light infusing the whole scene, this is an image of nature in all its profusion. Along with the poets and the painters, illustrators played their part. Indeed, the illustrators were more widely distributed and thus, arguably, more influential. The fairytale children of Greenaway’s illustrations like Figure 1.17 led to a proliferation of imaginary children by other illustrators, including water babies and any number of fairy children. John Ruskin, the most famous art critic of the time, wrote of these illustrators, “You have the radiance and innocence of reinstated divinity showered again among the flowers of English meadows” (quoted in Cunningham 2005: 71), although in faraway Australia May Gibbs’ gumnut babies Snugglepot and Cuddlepie were equally at home perched in gumtrees (McVitty 1989).

Figure 11.7  Mary Gibbs, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, 1918.

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Other, older images were also reinterpreted as secular celebrations of childhood. Raphael’s two cherubs (Figure 6.1) were originally thoughtful onlookers to the Madonna appearing to contemplate her child’s ultimate fate, but they were detached as a detail to become a double portrait of two angelic divines. As such, they were drained of theological significance so that there remained no content to their thoughtful expressions. Madonna and Child images were similarly bled of their original devotional intent and replaced with the universal reciprocity of love between mother and child. The holiness of the Madonna was transferred to all mothers because just as childhood was sanctified, so motherhood became a blessed state, a sacred calling (Higonnet 1998). The cult of ideal childhood was complemented and reinforced by the cult of true motherhood, in which religiosity, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity were championed.

Paradise past and paradise future All romantic children, both newly created and repurposed, looked back to a paradise lost while also looking forward to a paradise sure to be realized in the future. Wordsworth’s ([1807] 1998) famous poem, quoted above, is profoundly nostalgic. Childhood is mourned: it “fades into the light of common day.” It is “something that is gone,” that gives rise to “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (72). As with Figure 11.5, childhood was associated with profoundly sad longing for what never actually was and never could be (Plotz 2001). Like the medieval theologians who viewed childhood as akin to the biblical idea of Eden, childhood was understood to be a garden where, for at least a time, the earliest humans lived in perfect harmony with God and nature. The word Eden means delight or pleasure, and the biblical Eden was a paradise, a place of innocent delight and contentment, and where no harm came to anyone. It is similar to the concept of a Golden Age. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans developed their own. The Golden Age was the summit of their power, glory, and reputation, a time when all seemed possible. Set in the past, it was a period when life was cast as if in balance and perfect, and from which present conditions represented a fall. Closely related to the idea of Eden and a Golden Age was the idea of an organic society in which people were said to have lived harmoniously. For nineteenth-century champions of the innocent child, the organic society was identified with the eighteenth century, although for observers writing in the eighteenth century, it had already passed (Williams 1973). The organic society was an industrial, urban nostalgia for a rural, pre-industrial past. Critics contrasted their mass, atomized, technological society with small, organic, rural communities where inherited work skills, continuity between work and leisure, and a participatory folk culture were thought to coexist in perfect harmony. And childhood belonged there; the organic society was their natural home. Paradoxically, innocent children were equally harbingers of a better, brighter future. Although children have always promised the continuity of our species, a new generation following the last, now childhood was cast not only as representing continuity but progress. Innocent children were Enlightenment children; they represented progress toward happiness, the sovereignty of reason, and the ideals of toleration, equality, and fraternity. Each would be realized by children, if not in the next generation, or even the one after, but eventually. This conception is most fully realized in Figure 11.8. Runge’s painting is part of a series called Times of the Day in which childhood, as the title indicates, is associated with morning.

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Figure 11.8  Philipp Otto Runge, The Small Morning, 1808. Hamburger Kunsthalle; Source: Holle, G., & B. du Ry van (1994) Kunstgeschichte

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The painting is heavily loaded with symbolism. The baby, flooded by golden light and lying gently on a flowered meadow, awakes at drawn to be drawn up through the maternal figure to the tri-being divinity echoing the Christian Trinity. Yet however influenced by Christianity, this is a poem to nature. The miracle of birth has been taken out of Christianity and placed into the natural world. Like a flower opening, or like the baby Jesus in nativity scenes, the baby spreads its arms to the future. The painting, being reminiscent of an altarpiece, is a worshipful homage to childhood as no less than divine. It was through the divine child of nature that the potential salvation of humankind lay (Lubbock 2011). Innocent childhood looked back to a happier, more secure time while also looking forward to happy, secure times in the future. Childhood was a dream, in which a little child would lead. Like some world religions that have long located a better time both in the past and the present, for example, either Eden before the Fall, or Heaven ahead of us remade on earth, childhood simultaneously took us back to the womb of comfort and security while taking us forward into the light. Both the past and the future have always acted as alternative localities for all that the present lacked (Robinson 1963). That childhood represented both a better past and a better future is paradoxical but entirely reconcilable since both conceptions are equally mythical. Neither relates to actual children.

Challenging times The promotion of childhood to semidivine status did not occur in a vacuum. The myth of childhood innocence as social redemption was both a response and a contribution to major changes in thought and feeling that characterize even our own times. England and Europe in the decades prior to, and throughout, the nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented social, political, and economic change. The age-old cyclic certainties of rural life with its cottage industries were replaced by city life, industrialization, mechanization, and class conflict. The landscape that welcomed the majority of people every morning was no longer that of small village life surrounded by rolling hills, blessed with fresh air, and where everyone knew each other and their place. Now they looked out on overcrowded, polluted city life where most people were strangers in constant uproar over working and living conditions as well as their lack of political representation. The creative destruction of capitalism was eradicating whole ways of life that had stood for centuries (Williams 1976). Long-established authorities were being overturned, with some European countries experiencing a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions. Although England remained relatively stable, Queen Victoria survived no fewer than eight assassination attempts (Baird 2016). Elsewhere in Europe, the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century is rightly known as the “Age of Revolution” (Innes and Philp 2015). The new realities of social dislocation created major psychic dislocations. And just at the time that European societies found themselves in violent upheaval, childhood as innocence went into overdrive. Childhood had previously meant a particular age range and behavior attributes that were often troublesome. Now childhood embodied nothing less than a blessed state promising social redemption. It went from describing something of little social value to describing one of the principal foci of social life. Such elevation was part of other significantly changed social meanings that saw the elevation of art, culture, aesthetics, and nature to something akin to spiritual enlightenment. Art had previously meant

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skill; now, it meant the particular skills of imaginative and creative endeavor born of individual sensibility. Artists had been mere tradespeople; now, they were conduits to the divine (Kant [1790] 1953). Culture had meant mere change; now, it described the transformation of ordinary thoughts and feelings into elevated thoughts and feelings and the works of literature and fine art that sustained such elevation (Williams 1976). Aesthetics had once described mere sensations; now, it was used to describe elevated sensations of the sublime and the beautiful in both nature and art. The countryside had previously been the ordinary backdrop to people’s lives, and in paintings, never more than the setting of scenes that included people. Now rural life was eulogized as everything city life was not (Williams 1973). The countryside was seen through a nostalgic lens of all that had been lost, and landscape painting became a genre in its own right. In each case, what had been mundane was now christened as the best of human sensibility. Each represented an escape and a contribution to the driven impetus of a materialistic society hell-bent on industrialization at all costs. Each was intended to offer both new ways to live well and new ways to order society. Each was a court of human appeal set over the processes of practical, economic, and political considerations, each a defense in the face of a new, modern society. In this context, childhood took its place among a number of “palliatives to modern life” (Casteras 2002: 129). In opposition to all the new dominant forms of social life, childhood became part of a new aestheticized sanctuary, a realm located apart from the driven impetus of society. Childhood was elevated above class conflict, alternatively located in nature or heaven, like the modernist conception of art and the aesthetic discussed in Chapter 6, a thing unto itself, a thing of self-evident value. Moreover, like art, culture, aesthetics, and nature, childhood promised redemption. Childhood was not only a refuge from present difficulties but a way out of them. As divinely endowed, childhood was a specific focus for new ways of conceiving human sensibility in a world of exceptionally rapid and fundamental change. It was part of a divided modern consciousness between the evangelical materialism and individualism of capitalism on the one hand, and on the other, the celebration of what came to be considered indisputably human qualities through the cherishing of fine art, high culture, the aesthetics of beauty, and a wholly new appreciation of the natural world (Williams 1976).

The invitation of innocence Few people today would grant childhood such power and promise. Today, innocence is usually conceived in terms of lack: physical, cognitive, and emotional. Even so, we continue to tend to interpret such lack in positive terms. Unfortunately, children’s lack involves an often unrecognized negative, even dark, side. Among innocents’ many qualities is vacuity, which, as described in Chapter 6, is graphically highlighted by the flat rendering of beauty pageant file photographs and chibi. Yet even when children are rendered fully dimensional, when intelligence and desire are drained away, nothing is left but a blank canvas begging to be painted on. Purity is a vacuum, and a vacuum is an invitation to be filled. Higonnet (1998) writes, “the innocent child … is like a soap bubble: all beautiful surface, shimmering and empty” (62) which in itself is benign, but as Plotz (2001) adds, the innocent child “stands in the blank place of desire” (85), and as Kincaid (1992) warns, “vacuums get filled up, and depravity will do as much as anything else” (78).

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Child abuse As discussed in Chapter 7 on children as victims, there are many kinds of child abuse: physical, emotional, sexual, medical, and neglect. And as discussed in Chapter 6 on children treated as aesthetic objects, the idealization of children can incite its opposite. And at the root of the attraction to abuse is children’s physical, mental, and emotional vulnerability. Adults who feel that their lives are out of control sometimes turn to children to regain a sense of power and control. Some will direct their anger onto children; stressed, for example, from losing their jobs or undergoing divorce, they take out their frustration. Some perpetrators try to convince themselves that age does not matter, or they mistake children’s affection for sexual interest so that abuse has nothing to do with innocence. But equally, just as any form of perfection can invite desecration, so the innocence of children can be viewed as an enticement to corrupt. Virtue and vice, decency and debauchery, can be two sides of the same coin where the former is a mere provocation for the latter. Innocence may invite defilement, innocence being the actual lure for depravity (Kincaid 1992). Eden was a paradise, but it was in Eden that the devil tempted Eve, who in turn tempted Adam, and so began the Fall of humankind. It is certainly the case that the innocent child of the late eighteen and nineteenth centuries went hand in hand with systemic child abuse. The middle classes appear to have adopted a double consciousness no less marked than our own in which a deep emotional investment in the innocence of children lay alongside an awareness of child labor conditions, abject poverty, and child prostitution. At the time, the menaced and mistreated child was even a sentimental trope of literature, with children’s brutalization holding a prurient fascination for the public (Wolff 2004). And so with pictures, although mistreatment need not even be explicitly pictured; pictures may simply evoke a fantasy in the mind of viewers. Consider the famous French art critic Denis Diderot’s confession regarding Figure 11.9 as an indication of just how close to the surface of innocence can lie defilement. Diderot speculated that the bird represented her lost innocence from a corrupt man, like himself, who has already violated her. He stood in front of the painting and exclaimed, “Delicious! Delicious!” and wrote, “I wouldn’t be too displeased to have been the cause of her pain” (quoted in Wolff 2012: 86). This appears to be a rare instance of what today we would regard as the depraved private bursting into public discourse and in doing so bursting the innocence bubble, exposing it as a sham. How would Diderot have responded to the evidently more provocative Figure 11.3 by Greuze? The so-called “Greuze girl” was renowned for fusing childish innocence with sexual allure (Barker 2009). The girl in Figure 11.3 engages the viewer not so much with a mutual gaze, but one ever so slightly to the side and glazed over as if she is worn down, a child who has already experienced much. She has not yet grown breasts, but her dress falls so low there is just the hint of a nipple. And she appears to be wearing makeup. Just how old is she? And how might the lamb she caresses be interpreted? Would it have been read as a stand-in for the sinlessness of Jesus, or, since Jesus is the Lamb of God, could she be understood as a welcomed sacrifice? Could Diderot have viewed her as being a sacrificial lamb in service to his pleasurable fantasy? Would her bare flesh have signified purity or availability? Could her glazed, tired expression have suggested resigned acceptance of his desires? What would Diderot have made of John Everett Millais’s painting of a century later, Cherry Ripe? Figure 11.10 was another highly popular image that was also extensively copied. The girl has the same demure, slightly upcast gaze and passive expression as the Greuze girl, but here there are further

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Figure 11.9  Jean-Baptiste Greuze, A Girl with a Dead Canary, 1765. National Gallery of Scotland

Figure 11.10  John Everett Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879. Private Collection; Source: Coral Professional Photos

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Figure 11.11  Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddle as a Beggar Girl, 1858. New York Public Library

elements to titillate. The title could be read as equating the girl with something sweet, or it could be read—a cherry being a euphuism for virginity—that the girl is ripe for the picking. And as if this reading was not enough, what of both the positioning and posing of her hands that create a vagina-like opening placed between her legs? And do the black armbands also reference adult pubic hair? The painting was reproduced many times, being an insert into a popular magazine that sold 50,000 copies, and it was used for years as a poster to sell Pears Soap (Bradley 1991). How did these references avoid being seen? Equally intriguing is Figure 11.11, a photograph by Lewis Carroll of Alice Liddle at 6 years old, the girl who most likely inspired his famous story, Alice in Wonderland. The tattered rags she wears leaves her right shoulder bare, and with the sleeves on her left falling down and the neckline plunging, again, a nipple is exposed. With her bold expression and penetrating gaze, she is acutely aware of being photographed. Responding to Carroll’s direction, she references the pitiful street urchins painted in previous centuries as well as the adult prostitutes of what was then called the Orient that were commonly pictured waiting for customers. In this regard, the photograph is not simply a portrait but a narrative painting that inevitably conjures a before and after. Also consider Figure 11.12 to indicate further that, under the guise of innocence, erotic-laden imagery can hide in plain sight. This prepubescent girl engages the viewer with a demure gaze, yet she has one sock off and the other is coming off. At the time, one sock on and one sock off was a

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Figure 11.12  William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Before the Bath, 1900. Private Collection

sign of children being mischievous (Schorsch 1979). By dint of her taking off her sock, the picture, again, is not only a portrait but a narrative painting capable of conjuring a sequence of events. Soon she will be undressing, and in the mind of some viewers of the time, perhaps being more than merely mischievous.

Child nudity The potential for an erotic reading of innocent children is raised especially by naked children because, as described in Chapter 6, when pictured, nakedness is almost invariably turned into nudity. Nudity is nakedness fashioned so that it appears appealing, and while nudity can be viewed in a purely sensory way, without any erotic interest, it can also be viewed with an erotic gaze. Of the nude children of the nineteenth century, there appear to be no fewer than four approaches with which to understand them. From our perspective, it is to conceive them as pornographic. However, from the perspective of history longer than the past few decades, the public discourse on nude children was that they were sensual, to be sure, but innocent of either their own sexuality or any attempt to arouse a sexual response in viewers. A third view is to accept the official discourse but to consider it as latently pedophilic. From our perspective, these two later positions raise the question, were all previous generations lying pedophiles, blindly stupid, or something else? And a fourth option, one that is very much a

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minority, is to accept that children are sexual beings and see nothing wrong with children’s sexuality. At first, this would seem to undercut the ideology of innocence, but in fact, proponents tend to reconceptualize innocence as incorporating sexuality.

As child pornography Considering nude children to be at least potentially pornographic, it is instructive to examine the justifications for nude women in premodern painting. Boucher, Rubens, and Bouguereau, whose nude children were discussed in Chapter 6, were each famous for their numerous nude women. Many mythological female figures were commonly represented as allegories of idealized, romantic love or such abstractions as fate, peace, or harmony. Venus, goddess of love, was a favorite subject. In numerous paintings, either nude or semi-nude, she rose from the sea, lay asleep watched over by Cupid, kissed Cupid, bathed, undressed, or just lay on a couch. For centuries, artists found ever new ways to offer up her body for viewing as an object of sensory pleasure. Figure 11.13, for example, is a riot of soft, inviting flesh, and while Venus’s face is directed toward Cupid, her body is directed toward the viewer, as is Cupid’s. And while her genitalia are discreetly screened, not so his. Paintings like this were long justified on the grounds of classical learning and moral injunctions to a virtuous life. The high cultural cache of ancient Greek and Roman sources, as well as the moral authority of the Bible, were evoked as legitimization. This has been called “the classical alibi” (Zewadski 2011: 130), alibi because, to modern eyes, the high-minded evocation of classical learning does not ring true.

Figure 11.13  François Boucher, Venus Consoling Cupid, 1751. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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According to the classic alibi, nude figures offered only the pretense of innocence, nothing but a socially acceptable way to indulge in erotic fantasy. The rouse is said to be disclosed by comparing premodern fine art nudes with soft photographic pornography (Berger 1972). The same gazes and poses are used, as well as the same attempt to establish an intimate relationship between picture and viewer. In both pornography and premodern painting, women display their bodies for the viewer’s gaze, while also engaging the viewer with a mutually desiring gaze. Whether they appear haughty, friendly, forbidding or inviting, women’s bodies are displayed as invitations to view them erotically. Whatever highminded intentions the artists might once have championed for nudes, by the late nineteenth century the classical alibi had worn threadbare thin. Popular academic art at this time has been characterized “as a butcher’s stall, the body as merchandise, and the Salon as a brothel” (Clay 1978: 7). This strongly condemnatory view of premodern painting as the pornography of its day raises an obvious question: Are premodern paintings of nude children the child pornography of its day? Are the  numerous nude putti, cupids, cherubs, and angels, a public mask, at least for some, of a pedophilic gaze?

As innocence These questions arise, of course, only because we view these images with contemporary eyes. What if we attempted to accept at face value what people in the past claimed to be viewing—that is, child nudity as nothing but a sign of innocence? This may be impossible, conscious as we are to the sexualization of children. The phrase “the past is a foreign country” can be no more applicable than in past public declarations of how to interpret nudity among children. Yet, as Kincaid (1992) is wont to do, we should at least attempt to give credence to what they claimed. For all previous periods, the public, official discourse was that children’s bodies were pleasurable to touch, smell, and gaze upon; they were sensual but not sexual. Naked children were a sign of purity, just as the naked baby Jesus had always been, and Greek and Roman children before him. Perhaps the contrast between the past and the present is most pointedly illustrated by the several nude photographs taken by Lewis Carroll. Most of his images are without any erotic interest, but it is a wonder to us today how a few of them could ever have been regarded as innocent. Most striking is the photograph of a nude 8-year-old girl in a prone position, engaging the viewer with, arguably, the come-hither look of adult female seduction. However, far from a nefarious enterprise, the taking and sharing of these photographs was an open, public affair. They aroused no controversy at the time (Waggoner 2020). Carroll had the permission of the children’s parents, the apparent willing collaboration of the children, the collaboration of a colleague in hand-coloring the photographs, and he proudly showed the photographs to his friends. And while Carroll had an unusual interest in young children, no evidence exists of him ever having a sexual interest in them. There is nothing to contradict his stated motivation: “It is very healthy and helpful of one’s own spiritual life, and humbling too, to come into contact with souls so much purer and nearer to God than one feels oneself to be” (quoted in Cohen 1979: 6). Like his famous story, the photographs were taken to be an investigation into the rich nature of childhood, their essential nature as innocent unquestioned (Waggoner 2020).

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Figure 11.14  Lewis Carroll, Evelyn Hatch, 1879. Source: Cohen, M. (1988) Lewis Carroll, Photographer: Four Nude Studies

As latently sexual A third position takes the nineteenth-century official discourse at face value, but believes that the sexually repressed Anglo Europeans of the nineteenth century were, if not consciously pedophiliac, at least latently so (Kincaid 1992). Just as they held a double consciousness about innocent childhood while actual children were hideously exploited at work, they held a double consciousness about children’s sexuality, one that consciously recognized children as objects of sensory pleasure while firmly repressing any conscious recognition of them as objects of sexual desire. Images and attitudes often teetered on sensuality morphing into sexuality, but a sexuality held in check by the nineteenth-century preoccupation with respectability. This was a society that determinedly repressed all conscious expressions of sexuality from public discourse. According to Kincaid, even Freud pulled his punches on children’s sexuality. Against strong condemnation, and bravely, Freud acknowledged childhood’s sexuality, but for Kincaid he failed to fully acknowledge it by calling childhood a stage of latent sexuality. If today sexuality among older teens and adults is overexposed, the idea of sexuality among children is still profoundly repressed, as profoundly as pedophilia is aberrant. Childhood and sexuality are understood as utterly incompatible, and taken off the table for consideration.

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As sexual But not by everyone. A minority view is that sexuality is a feature of childhood, albeit one that is rarely acknowledged. This is illustrated by the furor that erupted in the early 1990s over a number of fine art photographers’ images of nude children. Most notable was the response to Sally Mann’s 1992 book Immediate Family of her own three children, some of them posed in the nude and in some engaging the viewer provocatively. Some critics claimed the images were pornographic, while other critics defended the images as representations of what they assumed to be the natural child, a Rousseauian child that was not subject to repressive adult rules. Mann herself claimed that “childhood and sexuality was an oxymoron” (Stewart 2000). The children were nude because in the summer heat these children often went without clothes; nudity was their natural state. Her outraged defenders claimed that if there was depravity present, it was not that of the children or their mother photographer, only of those who claimed to see depravity. Get the dirt out of your own eyes, they said. On the other hand, some commentators were quick to acknowledge that some of the imagery represented the children as sexual beings and moreover saw nothing amiss. Sexuality was an aspect, even a central one, of the natural child (Kincaid 1992). Mann’s nude children were not prematurely damaged. Sexuality was merely an aspect of children being themselves, one that was usually suppressed or ignored. “If the children were sexual beings, theirs was the sexuality of Adam and Eve and the beasts in the Garden, their seductive poses and expressions the innocent play of a Rousseauian wild child,” and some talked of “innocent sexuality” (Levine 2015). In evoking the natural child, what these critics did was effectively reinterpret childhood sexuality as an aspect of innocence. So powerful was the ideology of innocence that it was able, at least for these critics, to incorporate childhood sexuality.

As complex and contextual These opposing views were merely the tip of the controversy, and many critics were ambiguous. In the above quote, the word if renders the claim uncertain, and the term “innocent sexuality” is similarly ambiguous. There was a great deal of parsing of categories (Levine 2015). Were children actually sexual or just provocative? Were the children merely imitating what they saw adults do without understanding sexuality? Where did the sexuality lie? With the children or with the mother photographer’s careful constructions? And so on. The debate over Mann and other fine art photography of child nudes highlighted not only a range of diverse views over childhood nudity and sexuality, not only strongly opposed views but much ambiguity and confusion. That such views remain three and more decades later can hardly be doubted; they remain disturbing for many viewers (Cohen 2018). They point to the fact that historical periods can be categorized, such as the nineteenth century and our own, but such categories are always a generalization. Always there are diverse and counter ideas, values, and beliefs. The three positions— pornographic, innocent, or latently pornographic—used to categorize the nineteenth century and our own time are presented as absolutes in that they are applied to all representations of nude children and all viewers. But each belies the fact that not all images of nude children are of the same kind and not all viewers are the same, neither in the past nor today.

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Not all nude children are coquettish or even appear to reference sexuality in any way. For example, several of Carroll’s other pictures of nude children are simply posed and without any attempt to engage the viewer. Most of the small nude divinities of the past were preoccupied with their own activities and, again, not interested in engaging viewers. Additionally, while some people in the past undoubtedly had a sexual interest in prepubescent children, it would seem ridiculous to claim that most did. Today we know that some do—as evident by the amount of internet child pornography—but the general public abhors child pornography. Today the alarm nude children cause is due to the fact that most people believe they could be read erotically by other people, not themselves. This is identical to the belief that violence on television affects other people but not oneself. If we acknowledge that this position has merit, then perhaps we are sometimes too quick to envisage a pedophilic gaze where it does not exist. Even today, as aware as we are of pedophilia, for many people, nude children do not appear to beget depravity. They see only the innocence of the so-called natural child, the child of Eden before the Fall, the innocent child. This would seem to suggest that previous generations were neither lying pedophiliacs nor blind to our own superior insight. The answer seems to lie somewhere else, being that both in intent and reception, innocence versus pedophilia is complicated by both the nature of the imagery and who is looking. However, notwithstanding these qualifications, for some, however a minority, innocence and depravity do coexist in both reality and the imagination.

Innocence as incitement What can be said with certainty is that the ideology of childhood innocence has had both positive and negative consequences. It has motivated the movement for children’s rights, but it has also had the opposite effect of undermining their rights. And further, it has been the cause of exerting harmful control, exercising exclusion, and inciting a reaction. The ideology of innocence has had very mixed consequences.

Innocence as benefactor The great benefit of the ideology of childhood innocence to real children has been, and continues to be, its use in inciting improvements to their conditions. Understanding children to be innocent has meant attempting to protect their innocence and, at times, also attempting to prolong their innocence as long as possible. This has been achieved through the rhetoric of risk and protection (Garlen 2019). Seeing children at risk from abuse and exploitation in their many forms, effort after effort has been marshaled to protect children. Risk and protection motivated all the “child-saving” efforts that began in the nineteenth century, originally to save children’s souls but then redirected to improve their working conditions, to lower their working hours, and eventually to rid them of hard and dangerous work (Cunningham 2020). Protections increased exponentially during the twentieth century with a variety of international agreements on children’s welfare. They were signed by most countries. The League of Nations addressed children victimized by war with its 1924 “Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” which asserted that children must be the first to receive relief in times of crisis. The League established the Child Welfare

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Committee in the 1920s, and the founding of the United Nations in 1946 led almost immediately to the establishment of its International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). It is still the flagship organization working on behalf of child victims of war around the world (Marten 2013). The United Nation’s own “Declaration of the Rights of the Child” was proclaimed in 1959, and in 1973 the International Labor Organization declared its intention to abolish all forms of child labor (Cunningham 2020). Informing and informed by such declarations, long-normalized practices like regular beatings and sexual relations between adults and prepubescent girls have been reconceived as abuse, and preventive legislation has been introduced in most jurisdictions throughout the world (Stearns 2021). Central to all these activities has been the principle that human rights were children’s rights, including the right to be listened to, especially on matters that directly concern themselves. While some agreements on labor, as discussed in Chapter 9, reflect inappropriate first-world assumptions, as a whole these agreements have provided pathways for improved conditions. In advanced economies today, considerable sums are spent on child welfare, especially on attempts to ameliorate abuse and neglect. With a host of child specialists, including psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, doctors, nurses, and police, children are understood to be vulnerable and in need of protection.

Innocence as control, exclusion, and reaction However, while childhood innocence can appear to have an unimpeachable moral status, as Garlen (2019) writes, “childhood innocence is not universal. Nor is it inherently good, an ideal to which society should automatically subscribe” (64). Bernstein (2017) adds, “the idea of childhood innocence is not innocent” (para 30). It has, and continues to have, many undesirable consequences, all of which are the flip side of the rhetoric of risk and protection. In seeking to protect children from perceived threats, the ideology of innocence has made life much harder for many children. One of its early direct consequences was the far greater control it extended over children’s bodies. The desire to keep children pure spurred an attempt to prevent masturbation which previously had not been considered a problem. To keep children pure, parents were encouraged to use painful precautions, intrusive contraptions, and punishments (Wolff 2004). Equally pernicious, but of far more consequence, is that from the outset, the romantic notion of the innocent child was exclusionary of children who were not first-world, middle-class, and white (Garlen 2020). During the nineteenth century, children of the poor, who invariably failed to measure up to the ideal, were dismissed as not real children. The innocent child was a middle-class child because innocence required all the privileges of financial security as well as the constant surveillance of their mothers to censor or ban unwanted influences. Consider how the pictures of each of the girls in this chapter, despite either sitting or lying on the ground, are perfectly clean. Their skin is unmarked and their dresses are spotless. Their mothers may not be pictured, but their influence can be felt. Keeping children innocent required the constant observation and supervision of ever vigilant mothers and/or nannies. In turn, child-preoccupied women served patriarchy well, delaying the vote for women, preventing equality of pay, and locking women into marriage contracts for life. If born into poverty, abuse, or discrimination, children were automatically denied the conditions necessary for innocence. Plotz (2001) says of the romantic poets that in order for them to wax lyrical about an ideal childhood,

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they pulled childhood out of history even as they left real children there. The painters and illustrators did the same. Only privileged children enjoyed the wherewithal to be innocent. The ideology of innocence also both assumed and helped perpetuate a belief in racial superiority. Consider Figure 4.7 which was earlier used to illustrate the idea of fix-it kids. The child is white; the man she helps is Black. Such a normatively raced understanding of innocence is equally, and far more famously, highlighted by the figure of Little Eva in the highly popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Originally a novel from 1852—the highest selling in the nineteenth century—it was also translated to the stage as well as a 1936 film starring Shirley Temple. In Figure 11.15, a poster for the stage play, Little Eva, the good little girl, reads the Bible to Uncle Tom, and in the process she teaches him Christian values of toleration and mercy. Although she is a small child and he a grown man, it is the white girl who teaches the Black man a sense of morality. But worse than patronizing non-white races, the ideology of innocence, coupled with the rhetoric of risk and protection, motivated the forced removal of non-white children from Australia, Canada, and the United States. Believing children to be at risk from indigenous parenting, the state stepped in to protect the children. Failing to have eradicated indigenous populations through forced removal and genocide, the objective was to integrate indigenous children into the normative values of mainstream white society. In reality, the programs created heartbreak for parents and life-long trauma for the children taken away. The children are alternatively known as the lost or the stolen generations.

Figure 11.15  Courier Company, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1899. Library of Congress

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For decades now, fueled by media outrage, childhood itself—Black and white, poor and middle class—has been viewed as under dire threat from the influence of mass media and, more recently, social media. Anxieties are provoked about children’s vulnerabilities and the ongoing need to prolong childhood as a state of unawareness. Children are understood to be at risk from global corporations that exploit children as consumers while also offering them images of violence, sex, and immorality (Wertham 2021). Understanding their innocence to be imperiled, the solution offered is to restrict access to such harmful influences. However, this is to equate innocence with ignorance, and the consequence is to limit or censor the very kinds of information and knowledge that would help many of them better address the challenges they actually face. Although international agreements stress the need to listen to children’s concerns, often their voices go unheeded because children are not supposed to know (Faulkner 2011). When innocence and ignorance are equated, children are constructed as merely passive recipients of knowledge, not as agents able to articulate their fears and desires, and question their conditions. Thus unarmed, they remain vulnerable to abuse in all its varied forms (Wolff 2004). The rhetoric of risk and protection presents itself in school curricula by watering down or avoiding altogether difficult issues of race and class in which platitudes replace the complexity of history (Garlen 2019). It underlies parents’ tip-toeing around issues of sex, race, and drugs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, parents were often trepidatious in talking frankly with their children about the challenges with which they were faced (Garlen 2020). Many parents found it difficult to confront their children’s sadness, grief, sadness, and disappointment. For decades the ideology of innocence has motivated antiabortionists who extend innocence to the unborn. Some antiabortionists have proven so passionately committed to what they consider innocence that they have been prepared to vandalize and bomb abortion clinics. They have stalked, assaulted, kidnaped, and even murdered doctors and nurses who performed abortions. In the United States and Canada, the more extreme antiabortionists are considered domestic terrorists (Cohen and Connon 2015). Child innocence has also been used by the media to scare parents into thinking their children are encouraged to become gay and, more recently, to be exposed to transgender children (Blunt and Pascoe 2021). The panic assumes that heterosexual children represent an innocent norm and that their innocence will be defiled by knowledge of, let alone contact with, children whose gender identity and/or sexuality is different. In earlier times, it was only color and class that caused children to be dismissed as not real children; today, gender identity and sexual orientation have been added to the list of exclusions. Whether it is by color, class, sex, or gender, the ideology of innocence invariably damns some children. It casts them out as if they were an infectious disease. According to a moral-panic-driven press, some children are innocent, many are less so, and some have no business being considered children. As if to prove beyond doubt that the ideology of innocence is far from innocent, the binary of childhood innocence versus adult depravity is today exploited by the right-wing conspiracy theory constellation QAnon. QAnon dangles assertions of pedophilic conspiracies at the highest levels of government and Church. Spreading lies and sowing social chaos are used as bait to monetarize media traffic (Roose 2020). Nothing works better to recruit new members than to pit the assumed self-evident innocence of children against sexual predators.

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Innocence versus social justice Garlen (2019) argues that the solution to the downside of childhood innocence is not to expand it to include children currently excluded from its possibilities but to reframe children’s welfare in terms of social justice. Similarly, instead of asking how we may protect children from risk, Bernstein (2017) suggests we should be asking: “Are they hungry? Do they have adequate health care? Are they free from police brutality? Are they threatened by a poisoned and volatile environment?” (para. 31). Along related lines, Kraftl (2020) frames the challenges faced by children today in terms of childhood trauma caused in developed countries by social media pressures, standardized testing, and in all countries by pollution and global warming. He points out that children who forage for food and saleable items in rubbish heaps, as they do in many countries, can hardly be afforded the luxury of innocence. It was not the case in the nineteenth century; it is not the case in the twenty-first century. In first-world countries, all the issues facing humanity—global warming, population explosion, pollution, terrorism, armed conflict, threats to democracy, disease, social media, and mental health problems, all of which appear to be increasing—are at some point rightly framed in terms of what they mean for today’s children and the yet unborn. It is similar for natural resources, all of which are decreasing. For example, in 2021, grandparents demonstrated in London streets, chanting: “Whose Air? Our Air. Whose Planet? Our Planet. Our Future! Whose Children? Our Children!” (Farrel and Adam 2021). The difficulty in addressing these issues is that outrage over contaminated innocence is so much easier and far less expensive. The gross disparity between the conception of the middle-class, innocent ideal and the reality of Black and working-class children during the nineteenth century remained despite knowledge of the disparity and the efforts of activists. The conditions that threaten the children of our own time and the yet unborn are now far greater—they have become existential—but media panics divert social action into the alleged evils of modern life and away from human/child rights. And at the same time that the media incites moral panics in the name of innocence, it offers the very kind of imagery that it claims to condemn. The media denounces the commercialization of children’s culture, while commercial media—meaning most media—is based upon delivering children’s eyeballs to the many enticements of consumerism. The media offers images of violence, sex, and poor adult models all the time playing the innocent card. Crying risk and calling for protection is so much easier and inexpensive than addressing the issues children must face. Innocence monetarizes outrage, and it is easy to monetarize because, however challenged, the conception of children as innocent continues to have us in its grip. It has strong historical roots, and many of the fundamental social conditions inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago are still with us. We remain the heirs of a separation between private and public worlds, a separation between childhood and adulthood, and a deep desire to place aspects of our adult selves out there somewhere in reality. It was deeply ironic that the heyday of the innocent child coincided with both their greatest exploitation through hard labor and, to our eyes, their sexualization. The nineteenth-century middle class held a double consciousness regarding childhood and children’s actual conditions but so does anyone today who invests in children’s innate innocence while millions of children languish in refugee camps, millions even in first-world countries are food insecure, and many children all over the world continue to be abused and exploited in horrible ways (UNHCR 2021). We appear to hold two simultaneous realities in which millions of children suffer and starve while Raphael’s, Rubens’, and

Children as Innocent 243

Bouguereau’s children remain favorites in print shops, Anne Geddes’ photographs have become iconic, and wide-eyed fantasy children like Figure 6.10 proliferate. As this book has shown, children have always been too multifaceted for a single conception, let alone one born of deep desires so utterly unrelated to the physical evidence of real children’s bodies, their easily observed behavior, and their frequently dire circumstances.

Childhood and continuity This book began with an image of the goddess Isis suckling her offspring Horus, an image that had developed from earlier images of fertility goddesses and their children. Little is known about the earliest mother and child images from which Isis and Horus are derived, but it is easy to imagine that they stood for the continuity of the people who made them. Fertility ensured survival, the most basic of human desires. In the case of Isis, she is known to represent the power of love to overcome death. She brought back to life her dead husband and rescued her son from near death. By extension, she asserts that no matter what befalls, life will continue. Today, the pictures we make of children span the full spectrum of concerns: commercial, political, private, religious, medical, entertainment, and so on. But what they all have in common, whether explicitly acknowledged or not, is that they represent ourselves going forward into the future.

Figure 11.16 Anneka, Little 7-Year-Old Angel Visiting a Nativity Scene Reenacted with a Doll, 2021.

244

Images of Childhood

Figure 11.16 captures this desire, in an image recreated once every year in Christian communities throughout the world. It has been recreated ever since the twelfth century (Morgan 1991). The Christmas story never gets old because it is about the renewal of hope, and this photograph freezes the children at a moment they beguile with their sweet charm. Yet they are not innocents. They have all the complex attributes of adults, and it is not any alleged innocence that will save them from the bedeviling forces they face. The sheer number of childhood images today stands in direct inverse proportion to the seriousness of the challenges we are handing over to them.

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Image Credits

Chapter 1 Children as Worthy Subjects 1.1

Anonymous, Isis with Horus the Child, c. 680–640 BCE (Walters Art Museum). (d)

1.2

Anonymous, Children Playing Ball Games. c. 2nd century CE (Louvre Museum). (d)

1.3

Anonymous, Enthroned Virgin and Child, c. 1150–1200 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (c)

1.4

Doccio di Buoninsegna, The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, c. 1308–11 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). (c)

1.5

Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, Madonna and Child, c. 1230 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (c)

1.6

Von Mekenem, Birth of the Virgin, c. 1490s. (j)

1.7

Gerard David, Virgin and Child, c. 1500–23 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (c)

1.8

Alonso Sanchez Coello, King Sebastian of Portugal, 1562 (Kunsthistorisches Museum). (m)

1.9

Bartholomeus Anglicus, Stages of Life, 1486. (l)

1.10 Peter Paul Rubens, Two Sleeping Children, 1612–13 (National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo). (w) 1.11 William Dobson, Family Portrait of Richard Streatfeild, 1645 (Yale Center for British Art). (w) 1.12 William Hogarth, The Graham Child, 1742–44 (The National Gallery, London). (d) 1.13 Joshua Reynolds, Heads of Angels—Miss Frances Gordon, 1786–87 (Denver Art Museum). (a) 1.14 William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Nut Gatherers, 1882 (Detroit Institute of Art). (w) 1.15 Karl Witkowski, Shoe Shine Boys, 1889 (Private Collection). (a) 1.16 Kate Greenaway, Little Miss Moffitt, 1900. (a) 1.17 Baldwin T. Stith, A.B.C. Guide to Photography, 1900. (l) 1.18 Factory.com, Indian Grandfather Taking Selfie, 2021. (b)

Chapter 2 Children as Family Members 2.1

Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Holy Family, known as the “Doni Tondo,” 1506 (Uffizi Gallery). (e)

2.2

Anonymous, An English Puritan Family, 1563. (b)

2.3

Angelo Bronzini, Don Giovanni de Medici, 1551 (Museo Nacional de Prado). (d)

2.4

Arthur Devis, Robert Gwillym of Atherton and His Family, 1745–47 (Yale Center for British Art). (w)

2.5

Nathaniel Dance-Holland, The Pybus Family, c. 1769 (National Gallery of Victoria). (w)

2.6

Anonymous, Gabriel Joseph de Froment and his wife Princess Hermine Aline Dorothée de Rohan with their family, 1825 (Private Collection). (c)

2.7

Anonymous, Five Children of the Budd Family, 1818 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) (r)

2.8

Southworth and Hawes, Unknown Family. c. 19th century. (i)

2.9

Carl Durheim, Postmortem of a Child, c. 19th century (Getty Foundation). (t)

Image Credits 259

2.10 Anonymous, Photograph of C. E. Proctor and Family, 1940 (National Archives and Records Administration). (p) 2.11 Anonymous, Father and Daughter, 2021. (b) 2.12 Jan Steen, The Merry Family, 1668 (Rijksmuseum). (e)

Chapter 3 Children as Gendered 3.1

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding (detail), 1566–69 (Kunsthistorisches Museum). (r)

3.2

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Barbara Sidney with Her Six Children, c. 1596 (Private Collection, Penshurst Place). (c)

3.3

Anonymous, A Boyish Dress for a Boy, 1912. (c)

3.4

Natalia Kirichenko, Happy Little Girl in Fairy Costume, 2021. (b)

3.5

George Rudy, Cute Little Kids in Stylish Jeans Looking at Camera and Smiling, 2021. (b)

3.6

Winslow Homer, Snap the Whip, 1872 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (r)

3.7

William Beechey, The Oddie Children, 1789 (North Carolina Museum of Art). (r)

3.8

Alfie-C, Company Advertisement for Meccano, 1920. (e)

3.9

Standret, Two Children Playing with Colorful Blocks, 2021. (b)

3.10 bc21, Little Boy and Girl Logo Icon, 2021. (b) 3.11 Duplass, Group of Beauty Pageant Girls Fighting for the Crown Wearing Boxing Gloves, 2021. (b) 3.12 Sandy Morelli, Child Zombie Crawling and Growling in Graveyard, 2021. (b)

Chapter 4 Children as Adults 4.1

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games, 1560 (Kunsthistorisches Museum). (r)

4.2

Anonymous, A Boy Bishop Attended by his Canons, c. 19th century. (f)

4.3

Guillaume Dupré, Louis XIII, King of France, 1610 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (r)

4.4

Alonso Sanchez Coello, Portraits of Philip II’s Isabel Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela, 1568–69 (Monastery of Descalzas Reales de Madrid). (f)

4.5

Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, Christ Among the Doctors, 1504 (National Museum of Warsaw). (c)

4.6

Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, The Mozart Family on Tour: Leopold, Wolfgang, and Nannerl, 1763 (Condé Museum). (w)

4.7

Edwin John Prittie, A Puritan Maying, 1873. (y)

4.8

Anonymous, Shirley Temple with James Dunn for “Bright Eyes,” 1934. (m)

4.9

Dmitreva, Little Boy and Girl Wedding, 2021. (b)

Chapter 5 Children as Schooled 5.1

Adebabsinland, Adebabs Kiddies Tower Building, 2018. (e)

5.2

Anonymous, Montessori Class, 2020. (b)

5.3

Anonymous, Title Page from Hornbye’s Hornbook, 1622. (b)

5.4

Motafa Meraji, Shia Muslim Girls Reciting the Koran during Ramadan in Iran, 2014. (q)

5.5

Anonymous, St Jude’s Ragged School, Whitechapel, c. 19th century (Wellcome Collection). (e)

260

Image Credits

5.6

Anonymous, A Victorian Classroom, c. late 19th century. (t)

5.7

Unknown, Elementary Students Raising their Hands in a Traditional Classroom, 2021. (b)

5.8

S dip T, School Assembly, 2011. (d)

5.9

George Cruikshank, February. Cutting Weather—Squally, 1839 (British Library). (c)

5.10 Unknown, School Class with their Teacher, 1964. (t) 5.11 Unknown, A Parade of Girls Using the Hitler Salute and Singing the Unofficial Anthem of the Nazi Party, 1936. (h)

Chapter 6 Children as Aesthetic Objects 6.1

Raphael, Cherubs (detail), 1513 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister). (f)

6.2

Hans Pleydenwurff, Altar of the Magi, c. 1460 (St. Lorenz Church, Nürnberg). (e)

6.3

Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snyders, Christ and John the Baptist and Two Angels, 1615–20 (Kunsthistorisches Museum). (r)

6.4

François Boucher, Putti Composition, 1762 (Fondation Bemberg). (e)

6.5

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Woman with Captive Cupid, 1885 (Private Collection). (c)

6.6

Julia Margaret Cameron, Angel at the Nativity, 1872. (a)

6.7

Creative Angela, A Cute Newborn, 2021. (b)

6.8

Anonymous, Cute Child Couple, unknown date. (s)

6.9

Sunny Chen, New Born Baby Feet on White Blanket, 2021. (b)

6.10 Budi Creator, Chibi Girls, 2021. (b) 6.11 Susan Livingston, Clio as a Baby, 2019. (n) 6.12 Anonymous, Eden Wood at 4 Years of Age, 2009. (b)

Chapter 7 Children as Victims 7.1

Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603 (Uffizi Gallery). (e)

7.2

Adi Holzer, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1997. (q)

7.3

Anonymous, Medea Plans the Murder of her Children who are Playing Knucklebones, 1st century CE (Naples National Archaeological Museum). (c)

7.4

Anonymous, Massacre of the Innocents, c. 10th century. (i)

7.5

Peter Paul Rubens, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1636 (Museo Nacional de Prado). (a)

7.6

Arthur Rackham, Hansel and Gretel, 1909. (c)

7.7

Anonymous, Burying Babies in China, 1865. (c)

7.8

Wolfgang Moroder, Ultrasound Image of Fetus at 12 Weeks of Pregnancy, 2012. (d)

7.9

Anonymous, Children Made Homeless During the Blitz, 1940. (p)

7.10 Anonymous, The Bodies of Two German Women and Three Children Killed by the Soviets in Metgethen, 1940 or 1945 (Library of Congress). (p) 7.11 myUpchar, Depiction of Children Suffering from Two Types of Malnutrition, 2019. (f) 7.12 Lyle Conrad, Starved Girl During the Nigerian/Biafran War, late 1960s (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia). (p) 7.13 Anonymous, Little Solder Boys, 1899 (Library of Congress). (i)

Image Credits 261

7.14 Charles Moreau-Vauthier, Death of Joseph Bara, c. 19th century (Municipal Museum, Nerac). (r) 7.15 Jacob Riis, Sleeping, Homeless Children, before 1914. (c) 7.16 Dorothea Lange, Poor Mother and Children, Oklahoma, 1936. (l) 7.17 Lewis Hine, Children Working in a Mill in Macon, Georgia, 1909. (l) 7.18 Tom Skrinar, Child Labor in Shamwana Katango, Congo, 2009. (f) 7.19 Anonymous, Dove Stele, Young Girl with Pet Bird, c. 450 BCE (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (r) 7.20 Adam Jones, Memorial to Nazi Occupation, Zamos´ć, Poland, 2013. (f)

Chapter 8 Children as Threats 8.1

Anonymous, During Play, Child Zenon Falls off the Roof of a House. Two Jews Accuse Jesus of Having Pushed him, c. 1340 (Schaffhausen City Library). (x)

8.2

Moderno (Galeazzo Mondella), The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpent, c. late 15th—early 16th century (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (r)

8.3

Anonymous, Mug Shots of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, 1993. (u)

8.4

Anonymous, James Bulger, 1993. (u)

8.5

Anonymous, Mary Bell at 11 years old, 1993. (u)

8.6

Anonymous, Norma Bell at 13 years old, 1993. (u)

8.7

William Hogarth, The First Stage of Cruelty, 1751 (Yale Center of British Art). (c)

8.8

Anonymous, A Crowd Gathered to Watch a Procession and a Young Boy Stealing, 1821. (j)

8.9

George Cruikshank, The Artful Dodger Introduces Oliver to Fagin, 1838. (a)

8.10 Karl Witkowski, Newsboy, 1899. (a) 8.11 nafterphoto, Asian Child Soldier, 2021. (b) 8.12 Israel Defense Forces, Picture of a Child Suicide Bomber Found in Hebron, 2002. (f)

Chapter 9 Children as Economic Value 9.1

R. S. De Lamater, Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence, A Redeemed Slave Child, 5 Years of Age, 1863. (l)

9.2

Lewis Hine, 7-Year-Old Newsie, 1910. (l)

9.3

Edwin Mulready, A Street Flower Seller, 1882. (a)

9.4

Charles Victor Thirion, Young Shepherdess, 1878. (a)

9.5

Degan Gabin, Africa on the Move or Transport, 2020. (e)

9.6

suriyahan, Two Children on the Phones, 2021. (b)

9.7

Helen Mortimer Adams, When Mother Lets Us Model, 1916. (l)

9.8

Joseph Charles Sindelar, The Best Christmas Book, 1885. (l)

9.9

Anurak Pongpatimet, Girl Eating Hamburger, 2021. (b)

9.10 Anonymous, L. L. May & Co. Seed and Nursery Catalogue Cover, 1893. (b) 9.11 Anonymous, Advertisement for Pears Soap, c. 19th century. (e) 9.12 Anonymous, Cocaine Toothache Drops, 1885 (National Library of Medicine). (m) 9.13 Monkey Business Images, African School Boy and Girl Hugging Outdoors, 2021. (b) 9.14 Lucian Coman, Young Girl from a Village Near the Kalahari Desert, 2021. (b)

262

Image Credits

Chapter 10 Children as Propaganda 10.1

Author, 2019 Christmas Message from Queen Elizabeth II, 2020. (u)

10.2

Anonymous, The Family of Henry VIII, c. 1545 (Royal Collection). (a)

10.3

Lucas de Heere, Family of Henry VIII, An Allegory of the Tudor Succession, c. 1572 (Yale Center for British Art). (w)

10.4

Miguel Hermosa Cuesta, Gaius Caesar on the Ara Pacis Augustae, 2014. (d)

10.5

Chris Nas, Tellus Mater, the Roman Earth-Goddess, 2007. (e)

10.6

Anonymous, Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler with Children at the Berghof, his Alpine Home, c. 1940. (h)

10.7

Mikhail Mikhailovich Kalashnikov, Stalin with Gelia Markizova, 1936. (k)

10.8

Parliamentary Recruitment Committee, Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?, 1915. (v)

10.9

Oakley Originals, Vietnam Tragedy, 67th Evacuation Hospital, 1967–68. (f)

10.10

Magsi, Orphan Boy in Refugee Camp, 2021. (b)

10.11

Nilufer Demir, Alan Kurdi’s Lifeless Body, 2015. (u)

10.12

Author, Wyta-Amor Rogers Marching and Chanting, 2020. (u)

Chapter 11 Children as Innocent 11.1

Peter Paul Rubens, The Virgin and Child Surrounded by the Holy Innocents, c 1618 (Louvre Museum). (a)

11.2

Anonymous, Children’s Crusade, c 1550–80 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). (c)

11.3

Jean Baptiste Greuze, Innocence, or Girl with a Lamb, c 1790 (The Wallace Collection). (r)

11.4

Charles Turner, An Etching after Joshua Reynolds 1785, The Age of Innocence, 1836 (Yale Center for British Art). (c)

11.5

William McTaggart, Spring, 1864 (National Gallery of Scotland). (e)

11.6

Philipp Otto Runge, The Hulsenbeck Children, 1805–06 (Hamburger Kunsthalle). (a)

11.7

Mary Gibbs, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, 1918. (f)

11.8

Philipp Otto Runge, The Small Morning, 1808 (Hamburger Kunsthalle). (a)

11.9

Jean Baptiste Greuze, A Girl with a Dead Canary, 1765 (National Gallery of Scotland). (w)

11.10

John Everett Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879 (Private Collection). (a)

11.11

Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddle as a Beggar Girl, 1858 (New York Public Library). (c)

11.12

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Before the Bath, 1900 (Private Collection). (c)

11.13

François Boucher, Venus Consoling Cupid, 1751 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). (r)

11.14

Lewis Carroll, Evelyn Hatch, 1879. (a)

11.15

Courier Company, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1899. (l)

11.16

Anneka, Little 7-Year-Old Angel Visiting a Nativity Scene Reenacted with a Doll, 2021. (b)

Copyright Key (a)

Author’s life plus 100 years from a photographic reproduction of the work, licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication

(b) Shutterstock general license (c)

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Universal

Image Credits 263

(d) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) (e)

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

(f)

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

(g) Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication (h) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE) (i)

GNU Free Documentation License

(j)

Wellcome Collection. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

(k)

This work is in the public domain in Russia according to article 1281 of Book IV of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation No. 230-FZ of December 18, 2006. and article 6 of Law No. 231-FZ of the Russian Federation of December 18, 2006 (the Implementation Act for Book IV of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation)

(l)

Library of Congress Print and Photography Division

(m) Copyright not renewed/No known copyright restriction (n) Parental Permission (o) The Author (p) Prepared by an officer or employee of the US government (q) Permission given by the artist (r)

Open Access from the Museum

(s)

Fotolip Copyright Free

(t)

Getty Open Content Program, https://www.getty.edu/projects/open-content-program/

(u) Fair Use because it is a unique historic image where the image itself is the subject of commentary rather than the event it depicts (v)

HMSO declared to be copyright free worldwide

(w) Google Art Project/Google Cultural Institute (x)

Swiss Open Glam Working Group

(y)

Internet Book Archive

Index

abortion 138–9, 241, 247 adulthood 2–4, 6–7, 11, 33–4, 72, 75, 77, 79–80, 88, 158, 185, 242 advertising 33, 47, 61, 67, 94, 108, 179, 181, 189–90, 193–4, 246, 248 aesthetic/aestheticized vi, 8, 28, 33, 45, 77, 87–8, 93, 111–13, 115–28, 141, 215, 228–30, 247–8, 250, 253 aestheticism vi, 111–12, 116, 127–8 ancient 10 Egypt 9–11, 129, 216–17 Greece 9, 11, 112, 129, 155, 216–17, 249, 252–4 Middle East 9, 129 Rome 8–9, 12, 56, 112, 203, 216, 256 angels 14, 24, 27–8, 37, 46, 96, 112–13, 115–16, 118, 218, 222, 235, 254 Anglo-European 27, 236 antiquity v, 7–9, 13, 16, 26, 56, 73, 80, 112, 127, 201, 215, 217, 246 Apocryphal 14–15, 17, 80, 246 Ara Pacis Augustae 200–1 Aries, P. 6, 13, 15, 19–22, 33, 75, 245 Aristotle 56, 108, 132, 217–18, 249 art 8, 10–11, 15–17, 19–21, 23, 25, 27–8, 113, 120, 132, 148, 163, 193, 225, 228, 230, 235, 246–56 fine 5, 7, 33, 87, 153, 235, 237 artist/artists 13–14, 19, 26–7, 29, 74, 77, 79–81, 87, 113, 126, 131, 134, 144, 166, 211, 224, 229, 234–5, 256 artistry 150, 158 Augustus 12, 40, 199, 201–4, 256 Australia 47, 169, 186, 225, 240 baby/babies 8, 11, 31, 32, 40, 43, 52, 56, 58, 62, 78, 118, 120–1, 123–5, 127, 132, 134, 136–7, 177, 193, 211, 216, 228, 235, 246, 249, 255 Jesus 37, 113, 116, 162, 218–19, 228 Zombie 161, 251 ballet 87 Barthes, R. 5, 246 Baudrillard, J. 142, 246 Baumgarten, A. 111 beauty pageants 7, 69, 87, 126, 245, 248 Bell, Mary 150, 168–9, 225

Bell, Norma 168–9 Berger, J. 64, 125, 135, 246 biblical 14, 56, 131, 134, 149, 162–3, 218–19, 226, 256 Big Data 189 birds 24, 86, 155, 217 doves 217 goldfinch 24, 217 Blyton, Enid 83 Bouguereau, Adolphe 29, 116–17, 182, 233–4, 243, 255 Bourdieu, P. 3, 246 Boy Bishop 76–77, 84, 88–9, 232 boys 7, 30, 52, 58–68, 70–1, 74–5, 77, 89, 98, 104–6, 143–4, 146, 150–1, 166–7, 169–70, 172, 174, 177, 184, 186, 190, 199, 201, 203, 217, 219, 245, 252, 256 breeching 59, 78–9 Brownie Box 33 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 58, 73, 75, 250 Bulger, James 166, 168, 245, 247 Cameron, Julia Margaret 117–18, 125, 166, 249 capitalism vii, 29, 71, 148, 196, 226 consumer vii, 8, 107, 181, 187, 189, 252 industrial 8, 98, 100 productive vii, 8, 107, 109–10, 181 Caracalla 12 carnival 75, 88–9 Carroll, Lewis 232, 235, 236, 247, 256 Catholic/Catholics 38, 94, 134, 219, 249 church 36, 75, 134 changelings 161 cherubs 113, 216, 222, 226, 235 chibi 122–3, 126, 129 child abuse 8, 87, 124, 127, 154, 159, 165–9, 216, 230 deceased/dead 24, 45–7, 156 labor 8, 29, 150, 153, 181–2, 184–5, 196, 239 murderers 81, 165–9 pickpocket 172, 174 pornography 8, 87, 154, 211, 234, 235, 238 poverty 29, 151, 158, 182, 230 prodigies 80–2, 84, 251 soldiers 127, 143–6, 158, 175–6, 209

Index 265

stars 33, 84 suicide bomber 176–7, 253 torture 8, 150, 166, 177 within 3–4 Zombie 70 childbirth 10, 74 childish 3–4, 81, 94, 181, 230, 246–7, 251 childlike 4, 11, 13, 17, 19, 81, 169, 179, 201 children nude 85, 111, 233–8, 247 orphan 83–4, 131–2, 139–40, 145, 170, 195, 206, 210 protesting 212–13 refugee 145, 158, 209–11, 242, 245, 246–7, 256 romantic 60, 79, 85, 113, 127, 220, 226, 252, 256 street vii, 21, 89, 100, 158, 170, 172, 174, 180, 186, 232, 248 urchin 2, 232 Christ 14, 37, 81, 115, 144 Christ child 10, 17, 37, 163 Christianity 13–14, 37–8, 56, 94, 96, 134, 149, 162, 216–19, 228, 240, 244 Christmas 17, 134, 187–8, 197–8, 244 clothes vi, 2, 7, 20, 27, 30, 33, 40, 43, 46–7, 57, 59–63, 66, 69, 71, 73–4, 77–9, 84, 88–9, 125, 132, 146, 148, 166, 174, 181, 198, 212, 218, 237, 252, 254 color-coding 60–1, 63, 67, 71 consumerism 33, 242, 250 Covid-19 163, 212, 241 culture vi, 2, 4, 8, 69, 74, 85–8, 105, 121–2, 127, 134, 136, 150, 187, 201, 203, 216, 229, 245–6 children’s 189, 242 high 28, 228 Cunningham, H. 2–3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 27, 38, 42, 60, 70, 91–2, 96, 161, 217, 221, 225, 238–9, 247 Cupid 11–12, 20–1, 112, 116–17, 216, 234–5 cute vi, 8, 61, 63, 71, 87, 112–13, 119–24, 127–8, 191, 247

slave 179–81 third world/subsistence 180, 195 Eden 226, 228, 230, 238, 246 education. See school/schooling Erikson, E. 216, 248 evil 2, 24, 54, 84, 91–2, 96, 136–7, 161–3, 167–9, 178, 218, 242, 248, 254–5 family 2–3, 24, 47, 49, 53–4 albums 32 dysfunctional v, 36, 53–4 Holy 17, 37–8, 137 networked v, 50–1 portraits 11–12, 19–20, 22, 25, 27, 37, 40, 43–4, 51, 53, 64, 199 Puritan 39 single parent 37 snaps 50–1 famine vii, 33, 129, 139–40, 143, 157 feminism vi, 35, 56–7, 62, 68, 245, 247, 253 feminization 57, 60 ferals 161 fertility 9, 15, 193, 202, 203, 243 filicide vi, 54, 132, 134, 137–9, 158 first-world 152–3, 180–2, 184–5, 194–5, 210, 239, 242 fix-it-kids 83–4, 86, 217, 240 flowers 24, 29, 61, 64, 113, 118, 170, 172, 174, 177, 183, 193, 216, 225 Foucault, M. 3, 24, 85, 97, 100, 214, 249 Freud, S. 75, 85, 236, 247, 249, 252

death 11, 19, 20, 39, 45–6, 72, 74–5, 77, 128, 132, 134, 136, 139–40, 142, 144–5, 156–7, 163, 166, 167, 174, 198, 204, 211, 213, 219, 223, 247–8, 251, 253 deMause, L. 70, 248 Derrida, J. 70, 248 digital v, 34–5, 50–1, 251–2, 254 Dionysus 11 disease 8, 129, 139, 142–3, 159, 161, 241, 248 Disney 68, 71, 122, 249, 254 Duncum, P. 5, 111, 120, 131, 248

Gainsborough, Thomas 26 Gaius and Lucius 201–2 games 13–14, 21, 37, 67, 73–4, 150, 170, 189, 212 Geddes, Anne 111, 118, 121, 125, 128, 215, 243, 246, 250 gender/gendered 7, 15, 23, 36, 55–7, 59–69, 71, 74, 106, 137, 189–90, 205, 217–18, 241, 245, 249, 252 Gibbs, Mary 225 girls vi, 3, 52, 56–65, 67–71, 74, 85, 87, 96–7, 104, 106–7, 122, 126, 150–1, 161, 163, 169–70, 172, 174, 177, 182, 184, 190, 193, 203, 217, 221, 223–4, 239, 245, 248, 252, 255 Golden, Andrew 166 Gombrich, E. 19, 249 Greenaway, Kate 30–2, 225 Greene, Graham 86, 215 Greuze, Jean Baptiste 221–2, 230–1, 246

Eagleton, T. 127–8, 167, 248 economy/economies advanced 179, 181, 187, 189, 239 consumer 109–10, 179, 181

hell 24, 229 Hello Kitty 122, 126, 156 Henry VIII 56, 198–9, 200, 248 Hercules 12, 164–5

266 Index

Hermes 164–5 Heywood, C. 1–2, 6, 20, 23–4, 27–8, 36, 56–7, 75, 94, 149, 150, 160, 175, 181–2, 184, 250 Higonnet, A. 27, 29, 30–1, 33, 138, 216–17, 220, 222, 226, 229, 250 Hine, Lewis 29, 150–2, 167, 182–3, 210, 252–3, 256 Hitler, Adolf 106–7, 156, 197, 203–4, 207, 250, 254 Hogarth, William 26, 170–2 Holland, P. 1, 4, 33, 43, 85, 88, 124, 128, 134, 149, 158, 215, 250–1, 255–6 Hollywood 33, 64, 70, 84, 87 Holy Innocents 219, 250 holy terrors 164–5, 246–7, 251 homosexuality 35, 49, 241 horror 72, 129, 131, 134, 136, 141–3, 146, 150, 168, 180, 212, 256 movies 2, 8, 70–1, 89, 160–3 Horus 10, 14, 243 iconography viii, 19, 216, 250, 255 ideology 5, 106, 248 childhood innocence viii, 4, 7–8, 34, 39, 90, 128, 151, 160, 165, 169–70, 215, 234, 237 Ikhnaton 11 individualism 26, 28, 127, 229 Industrial Revolution 27, 33, 127, 150, 179, 181, 216, 242 Infancy Gospels 162, 249 infanticide vi, 132, 134, 137–8, 155, 158, 246, 255 innocence vi, viii, 4–8, 14–15, 24, 27, 29–30, 33–4, 60, 68, 70–1, 75, 77, 85–7, 89–90, 125, 128, 132, 144, 151, 160, 165, 169–70, 178, 197, 212–19, 221–2, 224–5, 228–30, 232, 234–5, 237–44, 247, 249–51, 256 International Labor Organization (ILO) 181 Isis 10, 14, 243 ISIS 211 Jenks, C. 2, 41, 100, 109, 127–8, 165, 169, 250–1 Johnson, Mitchel 166 Kant, I. 112, 124, 229, 251 kawaii 122, 247 Khudi, Alan 211 Kincaid, J. R. 85–6, 127, 134, 215, 229, 230, 235–7, 251 Kodak 33, 46–9, 253, 255 Lacan, J. 50 lambs 217, 223–4 Lange, Dorothea 147–8, 150 Little Orphan Annie 83 Locke, John 91, 98, 109, 252 Louis XIII 75, 78, 250

Madonna and Child 10, 17, 19, 31, 37, 226. See also Virgin and Child Mann, Sally 237, 247, 252, 255 Mao, Zedong 204, 206–7, 251 Marian cult 16 Markizova, Gelya 204, 206–7, 251 Massacre of the Innocents 132–4, 218 medieval v, 13–15, 36–7, 39, 57, 74, 76–7, 80, 84, 88, 97–8, 100–1, 162, 218, 226, 248–9, 252, 255 Middle ages 4, 9–10, 20, 74–5, 216, 255–7 middle class 23, 25, 28–30, 33, 43, 45, 47–8, 52, 57, 75, 85, 87, 172, 174, 182, 186, 196, 221, 224, 230, 239, 241–2, 257 morphology v, 11, 13, 19 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 80–2, 256 Mulvey, L. 64, 253 murder 81, 131–4, 161–2, 165–6, 168–70, 245. See also filicide; infanticide murderer vii, 8, 165–6, 168–70 naked 11, 15, 20, 24, 113, 117, 125, 216 babies 120, 130, 219, 235, 251 children 6, 12, 15–16, 27, 45, 118, 130–2, 146, 157, 180, 234, 235, 257 nativity 14–17, 37–8, 117, 218, 228, 243, 255, 257 nature 4, 8, 11, 19, 27, 45, 77, 81, 118, 216, 222–3, 225–6, 228–30 children 8, 23, 27, 50, 75, 94, 96, 118, 160, 165, 167, 172, 174, 178, 203, 215 divine 113 human 24, 161, 197, 218, 250 Nefertiti 11, 248 nude 20, 85, 111, 113, 125, 144, 233, 247, 255 Oliver Twist 172 original righteousness 218, 247 original sin 94, 98, 161, 218 Oxfam 194 Panofsky, E. 94, 98, 161, 218 paradise 226, 230 patriarchy 35, 56–7, 71, 239 pedagogy 5, 36–7, 52–3, 96–7, 190 pedophiles 189, 233 pedophilia 33, 87, 236, 238 people smugglers 179–80 pets 12, 61 photography 5, 7, 31–3, 44–5, 47–50, 111–18, 139, 143, 147, 150–2 of children 216, 237, 246, 249, 251–2, 254–5, 256–7 Pickford, Mary 84 pickpockets 172, 174

Index 267

picture books 2, 30, 83, 249 play 3, 63, 72, 87, 157, 189, 237, 250 of children 2, 4, 12, 21, 29, 52, 68, 87–8, 92, 99, 123, 151, 158, 161, 164, 174, 187, 189–90, 220, 237 Polaroid 33 pornography 87, 141, 154, 235, 254. See also child, pornography portrait/portraiture 24–6, 50, 56, 65, 78–9, 226, 232–3, 247, 254–6. See also family Postman, N. 33, 128, 254 poverty 132, 137, 141, 147–8, 172, 180, 237. See also child, poverty Protestant/Protestantism 25, 38, 53, 75, 94, 96, 105, 163, 174 puppets 161, 212 Puritan/Puritanism 23–4, 27, 39–40, 83, 94–6, 149, 253, 255 putti 12, 20–1, 27, 112, 115, 118, 120, 216, 218, 235 QAnon 241–54 Queen Elizabeth I 149, 198–9 Queen Elizabeth II 197–8 Raphael 113, 120, 242 Rembrandt, van Rijn 23, 130 Renaissance v, 7, 9, 19, 21, 27, 40, 73, 80, 112–13, 127, 210, 216–17, 253 repression 3, 85, 87 Reynolds, Joshua 26, 28, 222, 224, 252 risk and protection 239–41 Rogers, Wyta-Amor 212–13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 27, 43, 56, 63–4, 92, 96, 108, 220, 237, 247, 252, 255 royal/royalty 11–12, 40, 52, 78–9, 197–8 Rubens, Peter Paul 23, 113, 115, 134–5, 219, 234, 242 Runge, Philipp Otto 224, 226–7, 255 Ruskin, John 255 Saint Jerome 74, 255 sarcophagi 12 school/schooling 2–3, 7, 53, 73, 91–3, 101–9, 149, 151, 153, 157, 162, 166, 170, 175, 178, 185–6, 195, 206, 241, 247, 250, 253–5 Accelerated Christian Education 96–7 children 62, 110, 189–90 Dame 98–100 home 95 Islamic 96 Montessori 91–2, 93–4, 98, 109, 253 Ragged 99–100 uniforms 60, 102–4 universal 100, 103, 175, 186

Schorsch, A. 9, 19, 23–4, 27, 38, 43, 63, 170, 172, 217–18, 233, 255 sentiment v, 6–7, 22, 26–7, 42, 96, 174 sentimental/sentimentality 2, 4, 29, 113, 124, 127, 158, 213, 215, 230 sex/sexual 62, 72, 75, 77, 85–8, 90, 113, 121, 150, 153–4, 158, 161, 166, 180, 216, 230, 235, 237, 239, 241–2, 245, 248, 251–2, 254, 255 sexuality vi, 7, 23, 33–5, 72, 75, 85, 87–8, 96, 233–4, 236, 237–8, 241, 247, 249 social justice viii, 8, 212, 242 Sontag, S. 142, 255 Stalin, Joseph 204–7, 251, 257 Storey, J. 3–4, 255 suicide bomber viii, 8, 212, 242 Tantrums and Tiaras 126 television 2, 33, 52–3, 85, 87, 107–8, 126, 166–7, 170, 190–1, 194, 238 Temple, Shirley 84, 86, 212, 246 theology 37, 218–19 Third world 2, 140, 150, 152, 180, 194–5 Thompson, Robert 168, 250, 251 toddlers 12, 52, 54, 73, 86–8, 113, 118, 154, 166, 216 torture 8, 150, 166, 177 toys 2, 7, 11–12, 61, 67–8, 73–5, 108, 181, 187, 189–90, 213, 246, 250, 252 transgender 241, 246 UNICEF 194, 209, 239 Van Dyke, Anthony 23 Velazquez, Diego 23 Venables, Jon 150, 168 violence 2–3, 7–8, 33–4, 72, 74–5, 77, 83, 146, 180, 203, 207, 213, 218–19, 238, 241–2, 245, 253 Virgin and Child 15, 18, 20–1, 219. See also Madonna and Child war vii, 8, 33, 49, 84, 106, 129, 139–40, 142–7, 151, 157, 176–7, 180, 197, 201, 207–8, 210, 216, 238–9, 249–50, 252–7 Wesley, John 96, 149 Wesley, Susana 96 Williams, R. 5, 27–8, 216, 226, 228, 229, 253, 256 Witkowski, Karl 30, 174–5 Wolff, L. 230, 239, 241, 256–7 Wordsworth, William 220–1, 226, 257 working class 23, 242 World Vision 174 wunderkinds 80

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