Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory

2. Consuming Childhood: Buying and Selling the Autobiographical Child

43 chapter 2  Consuming Childhood buying and selling the autobiographical child A dominant modern discourse of childhood continues to mark out “the child” as innately innocent, confirming its cultural identity as a passive and unknowing dependent, and therefore as a member of a social group utterly disempowered—but for good, altruistic reasons. —Chris Jenks, Childhood If you perused the autobiography or nonfiction section of any bookshop during the 1990s and 2000s, you would inevitably meet the child’s gaze. An autobiography of childhood characteristically contains a photograph of the child on its cover. Often smiling, sometimes frowning, the child is commonly attractive but often shackled with a hairstyle and clothes that are unfashionable—underlining the child’s place in history. The child gazes down upon you from the well-stocked bookstore shelves, imploring you to pick the book up and share in this story of childhood. In chapter 1 I explored the ways in which the autobiographical child has become a socio-cultural, even political, construct upon which memory struggles are contested. I offer this as one explanation for the voluminous production and consumption of autobiographies of childhood. In this chapter I offer a further context for interpreting autobiographies of childhood : the autobiography’s initial, visual presentation, which manifests in its cover image. The consumption of the autobiography’s cover image involves the consumption of the child who adorns the book’s cover and whose story lies within its pages. The cover image—its construction and containment of the child image—is crucial to an understanding of how the autobiography is produced and read. I am interested in the ways in which an autobiography of childhood’s photographic cover, imbued with meaning by the conventions of autobiographical writing (and what it promises to the reader), intersects with other photographic images of children that are circulating concurrently in 44 contesting childhood the public domain. How do these photographs engage with cultural memory to tell stories about childhoods past and present? Within autobiography, childhoods are commodified. Childhoods are produced and sold (by writers, publishers, and booksellers) and bought and consumed (by readers). Autobiographies of childhood pledge to offer experiences and stories of childhood for adult consumption, allowing adults to fantasize about their collective pasts and futures. Childhood lives are presented as available, desirable, and consumable for adult readerships. As I have previously argued, within autobiographies of childhood, the child figure is ideologically mobilized to tell stories about childhood—to confirm or challenge particular childhood histories. In doing so, however, autobiographies are inevitably bound by existing cultural templates for representing childhood within Western culture. Within this discussion I offer an analysis of a number of book covers of autobiographies of childhoods (which are reproduced in this text) to suggest how and why the child image gives meaning to the autobiographical text, projecting particular representations of childhood, and creating relationships between reader and text, and between the text and cultural history. I interrogate the trope of childhood innocence and explore its utility within the circulation and reception of contemporary autobiography—for example, by looking also at the jacket copy and the ways in which it fleshes out and complicates the image presented on the cover. I read these representations of childhood in light of the theories of childhood introduced in chapter 1 and also consider visual culture theories on childhood and family photography. Judging a Book by Its Cover: Childhood Photography Book covers are often the first meeting place between reader and book and play a key role in mobilizing certain interpretations.1 One of the autobiographical genre’s most arresting and persistent features is its use of photographs on its covers and within its pages. A passing glance at the shelves of any bookshop instantly reveals where the fiction section ends and the nonfiction shelves begin.2 Fictional books tend to use artistic images for their covers, whereas nonfictional texts such as autobiographies and biographies commonly signal their subject/s on their covers. In autobiography the cover functions as another part of “the autobiographical pact,” to use Philippe Lejeune’s term, with a photograph providing as significant a guide to interpreting the text as autobiography as the author’s name. For example, cover photographs on autobiographies commonly assert that the person in the photograph is the same person whose story will be contained in its pages. The photograph consuming childhood 45 and the autobiography combine...