Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim

CHAPTER FOUR. The Revolutionary Child: Slavery, Affective Contracts, and the Future Perfect

125 chapter four The Revolutionary Child Slavery, Affective Contracts, and the Future Perfect the previous chapter discussed how pregnancy functioned as a potent site for exploring the possibility of white women’s consent in two popular late eighteenth-century seduction novels. Ultimately, the fatal pregnancies of protagonists Charlotte and Eliza infantilized the women themselves, rendering them utterly at the mercy of bodies they could not control. Infantilizing narratives also helped to articulate the nightmarish loss of control that accompanied slavery. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, seduction and slavery were linked rhetorically in both political and literary discourse. The first American seduction novel opens with the libertine Harrington calling to“the gentle God of Love”whose formidable powers “rivetest the chains of thy slaves.” In the case of both,the slave and the victim (or, in Harrington’s case, the perpetrator) of seduction cannot fully control their own actions; their bodies are held captive by forces beyond their control . As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the rhetorical connection between slavery and seduction—a comparison that made allowances for the will, albeit the often unruly will, of the victim—was supplanted by a visionof thechildlikeslave.Inthislaterversion,theallegedchildishnessof the slave evoked not unruly and untamed desire,but rather complete dependence and elaborate vulnerability that would forever demand the care of paternalistic whites. As writers on both sides of the slavery debate linked the slave with a childlike victim, the revolutionary potential Locke saw in childhood had to compete with a vision of the child as extravagantly vulnerable—as a 126 chapter four victim needing constant protection —rather than a potential adult in need of encouragement. Undoubtedly, infantilizing depictions of the black subject have worked to deny black people the privileges of adulthood and citizenship. Scholars and activists who have worked to untangle the metaphorical skeins linking the black subject to the helpless child have done critically important work. This chapter moves beyond charting the damage infantilization has done to parse the mechanics of how the metaphor worked by paying respectful attention to the historical experiences of enslaved children themselves. I hope to foreground the experience, and the words, of enslaved people to return to the child/slave analogy in a way that doesn’t force either the slave or the child into an illusory position either of unresisting victimhood or of unmediated authenticity and autonomy. Instead, I look to black writers to reinstate their own conception of personhood as a flexible, engaged, mutable subject, whose power lies not in some mythic adult detachment from the social and political environment, but rather in the ability to incorporate their own interdependence and vulnerability into a position of supple adaptability and resilience. Rather than categorizing the literary relationship between blacks and whites as one of power and subordination , I want to rethink it in terms of largely unacknowledged debt. In sum, instead of simply describing how white writers infantilized blacks, this chapter seeks to chart how the terms of infantilization themselves became toxic. The equivalence of child and slave that gained considerable cultural purchase throughout the nineteenth century actually represented a startling departure from Enlightenment representations of childhood that defined the child in terms of an inalienable (if yet unrealized) right to freedom and independence—a definition that was central to revolutionary ideology . Even as the popular American seduction novels of the era infantilized their protagonists, they did so within a framework that engaged the questions of consent and control that dominated revolutionary rhetoric. Writers wrestling with the paradox of slavery in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War would ultimately alter that framework, realigning the child’s primary metaphorical valence from the embodiment of unfairly repressed potential to the epitome of a perpetual victim. Children, who were co-opted to represent slaves by writers on both sides of the slavery debate, were transformed from young people destined to grow up and assume the The Revolutionary Child 127 mantle of reasoned consent to orphans in need of endless care—victims in the making. In the late eighteenth century, revolutionary pamphleteers, rhetoricians, and philosophers made their case by building on Locke’s insistence that children were not subjects for life, but merely future citizens who deserved careful nurturance. Writers increasingly aligned the rebels’ cause with the figure of a child denied the fundamental right of creating a future of his or her choice. Jay Fliegelman, Gillian Brown, Caroline Levander...