Abstract
The child as an icon of human self-understanding is Janus-faced. Theologically, children may be limbs of Satan, the vessels of Adam’s sin, or they may be the ‘little children’, theirs the Kingdom of Heaven. In the revolutionary year of 1789, William Blake published his Songs of Innocence, which included the poem ‘Infant Joy’:
‘I have no name:
I am but two days old.’
What shall I call thee?
‘I happy am,
Joy is my name.’
Sweet joy befall thee!1
The child in ‘Infant Joy’ embodies natural innocence in a new age of hope, but in ‘Infant Sorrow’, one of the Songs of Experience published in 1794, the year of the Terror, a different child is born:
My mother groan’d, my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt;
Helpless, naked, piping loud
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.2
‘Infant Joy’ and ‘Infant Sorrow’ presage enduring tensions in figurations of human nature and the meaning of innocence in a secular world. The Romantic child is a multifaceted symbol of utopian aspiration and social protest.
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Notes
William Blake, The Poems of William Blake, ed. John Sampson (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 68.
On the Romantic child in German literature, see Angela Winckler, Das romantische Kind. Ein poetischer Typus von Goethe bis Thomas Mann (Berne: Peter Lang, 2000).
James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 54.
See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848—c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Cited in L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 128.
Ruth Florack, Wedekinds ‘Lulu’. Zerrbild der Sinnlichkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), pp. 37–40.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. C. M. Chadwick from the seventh edition (Philadelphia and London: F. A. Davis, 1893), p. 13.
Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1980), p. 283. Later, however, Weininger implies that mothers, too, are essentially whores (see ibid., p. 312).
Karl Kraus, ‘Die Büchse der Pandora’, in Literatur als Lüge (Munich: DTV, 1962), pp. 5–15, this quotation p. 14 (my translation). In Kraus’s 1905 production of the play, Wedekind played Jack the Ripper, his future wife Lulu, and Alban Berg was in the audience.
Simon Winchester, The Alice behind the Wonderland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 5–6.
Patrick McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 134.
Richard A. Kaye, ‘Sexual Identity at the Fin de Siècle’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 53–72, this quotation p. 56.
Oscar Wilde, Salomé, trans. Lord Alfred Douglas, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 583–605, this quotation p. 586.
Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 11.
On virginity and dance, see Adrienne Auslander Munich, ‘What Lily Knew: Virginity in the 1890s’, in Lloyd Davis (ed.), Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 143–58.
See Anna Katharina Schaffner, ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks: Exchanges between Scientific and Imaginary Accounts of Sexual Deviance’, Modern Language Review, 106:2 (2011), 477–94.
See John Margetts, ‘Die scheinbar herrenlose Kamera. Zu Thomas Manns Tod in Venedig und der Kunstphotographie von Wilhelm von Gloeden’, Germanischromanische Monatsschrift, 39 (1989), 326–37. Gloeden’s work was exhibited in London in 1893 and in Berlin in 1899.
For a photograph of Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’un faune, see Germaine Greer, The Boy (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p. 138. That the faun could seem to masturbate was one reason for the scandal provoked by the ballet.
Frank Wedekind, Die Büchse der Pandora. Eine Monstretragödie, in Frank Wedekind, Werke, 3:1, ed. Hartmut Vinçon (Darmstadt: Häusser, 1996), pp. 145–311, this quotation p. 305 (in English in the original).
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010), p. 7.
Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 52.
Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 27.
Henry James, What Maisie Knew, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010), p. 69.
See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 164–6.
Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of lntimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
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© 2012 Elizabeth Boa
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Boa, E. (2012). Innocent Monsters: The Erotic Child in Early Modernism. In: Schaffner, A.K., Weller, S. (eds) Modernist Eroticisms. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030306_2
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