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Chapter 5 The Birth of the Virtual Child A Victorian Progeny JOHN R. GILLIS Needing the idea of the child so badly, we find ourselves sacrificing the bodies ofchildren for it. -james Kincaid, Child-Loving (1992) The Victorians taught us not only what to think about the child but also how to think with the child. They created the concept of "the child" and then used it to symbolize the meaning of life itself. People have always cared and thought about particular children, and not just their own, but it was the Victorians who constructed what James Kincaid has called that "wonderfully hollow category, able to be filled up with anyone's overflowing emotions, not least overflowing passion" (1992, 12). And we have become even more dependent on the child as a master symbol and image, so dependent that we are nearly incapable of seeing how central it is to our sense of ourselves and the world we inhabit. The Victorians were also the first to make the child a presence in the absence of real children. They supplied Western culture with a plethora of beloved child figures-innocent, pure, timeless-but also gave us a gallery of eroticized, seductive, even savage children (Kincaid 1992). These split images have outlived not only their progenitors but also the media that first gave them life. Figures born of books and theater multiply in contemporary film and on television, taking on ever more fantastic forms over time. Victorian imaginings first colonized every segment of Western society and were then exported to the rest of the world. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the West finds itself haunted by images of children that were its own creation (Stephens 1995). TerrifYing tales of street children, which were first produced in London's East End and New York's Lower East Side, The Birth of the Virtual Child 83 are beamed back by satellite from the slums of Brazil and the Philippines to their now gentrified places of origins. In a global economy, commodified as well as politicized images ofthe child circulate with ever greater velocity, contributing to one of the great paradoxes of our times, namely, that Western society has become an extraordinarily child-centered culture, even in the absence of children . Never have children been so valued, yet rarely have so many adults lived apart from children. The childless couple is no longer a rarity, and, given the longevity revolution, parents spend a smaller fraction of their lives actually living with their children. Rates of biological reproduction have been falling since the Victorian era, but what I want to call the rate ofcultural reproduction has moved in exactly the opposite direction. Never have the symbols and images of the child been so pervasive. Our politics, commerce, and culture all depend on them (Holland 1992). We are extremely attentive to these virtual children , even as we neglect, even abuse real children. The virtual child has become so luminous that it threatens to blind us to real children. While fewer adults are having children, the desire for children, often amounting to desperation, has increased. This is not at all surprising , because, beginning in the Victorian era, to be "in the family way" has meant to be expecting a child. In contemporary Western culture it is birth that transforms marriage into family, while it is said of older couples that "their family has left them" (West and Petrick 1992). Childless couples feel anomalous, but to lose a child of whatever age is an event so devastating that even very strong marriages often do not survive it (May 1995; Finkbeiner 1996). In an era when children occupy less and less real time and space, they are an ever larger presence in the land- and timescapes of our imagination. They have been the most photographed and are now the most videoed members of our species (Spence and Holland 1991). Childhood has become the most memorable age, and children are central to all our major commemorative rituals. Childhood has become modern society's central myth of origins, our explanation of who we are and what we will become, and in the process children have assumed an iconic status, demonized as well as idolized. As Marina Warner observes , "children have never been so visible as points of identification, as warrants ofvirtue, as markers of humanity." They have become our image of origins, but, as Warner notes, "origins are compounded of good and evil together, battling." As the screen...

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