Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (review)

Strange Dislocations is a work of many virtues. It is wide-ranging and erudite, clearly written and free of jargon, likely to direct our attention as readers to connections and circumstances that we may not have considered before. Its author, Carolyn Steedman, is a historian (she is Reader in the Centre for Social History at the University of Warwick and the author of an impressive array of books, most notably a 1990 study of Margaret McMillan, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain), and Strange Dislocations is perhaps more immediately useful for historians than for specialists in children’s literature. While it would certainly be possible and potentially fruitful to trace in fiction intended for children the ideas that Steedman explores here, her own focus is squarely on commentaries and theorizings aimed at adults. She notes near the beginning that she hopes her work “will have serious . . . implications for social histories of children” yet to be written (7); its implications for literary studies merit consideration as well.

Indeed, Steedman’s starting point is a literary work: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–96). Wilhelm Meister introduces a child acrobat, Mignon, who is figured as exotic, “other” by virtue of her Italian ancestry, her mysterious past, her body deformed in the service of her calling. Strange Dislocations traces ways in which Mignon—who dies in Goethe’s narrative—has been resurrected and rewritten, not only over the 150-year span delineated in Steedman’s subtitle, but into the present as well. Steedman employs the Mignon figure to personify what she sees in the Western culture of the last two centuries as an ongoing fascination with personification itself. Specifically, she argues that Mignon and her kin (the children of melodrama, child performers, children “on view” to the public eye, and ultimately childhood in its largest sense) have lived a dual life. On one level they are individuals with their own consciousnesses; on another they have long been made to embody changing adult beliefs about such cosmic questions as the nature of selfhood, of the past, of life and death.

Steedman, then, is concerned with the perennially interesting question of the Romantic and post-Romantic fixation on childhood, in which children are both children and “children,” symbolic and often feminized figurings of adult obsessions. One virtue of Strange Dislocations, however, is its fresh angle of approach. While Steedman is by no means the first scholar to suggest that in talking about children, adults in and around the nineteenth century were really talking about themselves, she covers comparatively untrodden ground in equating the understanding of childhood during this period with a developing understanding of interiority. The tendency has been to link Victorian representations of childhood with Victorian reactions to a rapidly changing outside world; Steedman usefully reminds us that the inner world was (and is) undergoing a radical reshaping of its own.

Thus her study, which begins by tracing Mignon’s provenance and “extra-textual afterlife” (21), quickly moves into a discussion of elements still smaller and more inward-tending than Mignon herself, namely cells. Examining Goethe’s understanding of cell theory and physiology, together with the nineteenth century’s rewriting of that understanding to fit newer ideas, Steedman focuses on the development of an important image, that of “the smallest place within: the fundamental unit of life” (59). Mignon, or the child in general, could thereafter be seen as the encapsulation of “notions of growth and development (and thwarted development)” (61), change and death merging into one.

Physiological theorizing quickly found its way into child-care manuals and medical texts, which encouraged a new level of interest in the child’s body and in how exterior appearances might reflect more important processes within. Steedman examines such writings to discuss how “children became the problem they represented: they became the question of interiority” (76). She then turns to a discussion of Freudian theory as an outgrowth of evolutionary and physiological thought in which the...