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Coda Physical Trauma, Childhood Embodiment, and Children’s Literature Some the most popular and critically acclaimed children’s books increasingly promote an ethic of renunciation that is represented as critical to melancholic maturity. In her introduction to the special forum on “Trauma and Children’s Literature,” Katherine Capshaw Smith refers to “the contemporary upswing in trauma narratives for children” (117). The increasing use of this particular narrative might be related to the prizing phenomenon described by Kidd, since, as I argue, the narrative of melancholic maturation is useful for constructing a work’s seriousness and literariness, which become especially important in the age of literary prizes. Moreover, while we can find examples of this narrative of renunciation and melancholic maturation in a broad range of children’s literature published over the past two centuries, Zelizer’s history of childhood provides an explanation for why it becomes more frequent or prominent in the mid-twentieth century. To the extent that the image of the protected, sacred child is successfully disseminated as a cultural ideal by the start of World War II, by which point the struggle against child labor in the United States was mostly won (at least on an ideological level, if not always in reality), childhood had become a period of life and an experience that was now something to miss, even if what one missed was the ideal experience that was never had. In other words, if childhood is increasingly constructed as sacred and ideal—a period of blissful ignorance, innocence, leisure, play, imagination, comfort, and safety—then its loss will consequently be experienced as increasingly traumatic. While for the vulnerable, laboring child childhood might be a hell to escape from, for the contemporary reader with access to the ideology of the sacred child it is something to cling to, and its inevitable loss will be experienced as something painful. This is precisely the experience of Jody in The Yearling, Gene in A Separate Peace, Ponyboy in The Outsiders, and most of the children in the works I have examined. x Physical Trauma, Childhood Embodiment, and Children’s Literature 128 Even for those who were or are quite happy to leave the disempowerment of childhood behind, we now live with the knowledge of an ideal whose impossibility occasions regret, sadness, or loss. I began this project by invoking a comparison between contemporary children ’s literature and physical discipline, and I have shown how literature might workto(re)formchildprotagonistsandreadersbytriggeringidentificationswith lost and disciplined objects. However, I believe there is more to the easy analogy between contemporary children’s literature and physical discipline and to the increasing prominence of children’s trauma literature that relates to the distinctly twentieth-century conceptualizations of the sacred child. In tracing the history of child rearing in the United States, historian Peter Stearns follows Zelizer in finding evidence of mounting parental anxiety about the well-being and vulnerability of children over the course of the twentieth century. The early decades of the century witnessed the growing prominence of the child expert, those physicians and psychologists who drew attention to children and adolescents, and the increasingubiquityoftheautomobileandotherhouseholdtechnologiesthought to pose dangers to children. These conditions created a stronger impression of the child as a fragile object, both physically and mentally. Stearns notes that, along with these trends, the greater public awareness of germs and their role in illness heightened the sense that children were under assault from both within and without, physically vulnerable to microscopic pathogens, psychologically vulnerable to parental missteps. The 1920s seems to be a flashpoint in Stearns’s account: the practice of regular visits to pediatricians increased; more attention was being paid to street accidents involving children; and the National Safety Council, which had formed in 1914, was routinely issuing reports on the dangers to children found in the household. The campaign against child labor, begun in the United States in the 1870s, gained ground in the 1920s as well. Zelizer notes that “as the standard of living steadily improved between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, child labor declined simply because families could afford to keep their children in school” (62). Along with the need to displace children from the workforce in favor of immigrant and other adult workers, the improved standard of living and rise in real incomes meant more children were attending school rather than working (Zelizer 62). In the context of these economic motives , the rhetorical construction of children as unfit for work helped effect the cultural shift that made...

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