Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Post-Bellum Boyhood Citizenships in Our Young Folks and The Story Of A Bad Boy

"This is the Story of a Bad Boy. Well, not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy; and I ought to know, for I am, or rather I was, that boy myself."

—Aldrich, The Story of A Bad Boy, 1869

In the United States during the last years of the twentieth century, many non-fiction texts about boys were published. Best-selling titles included Michael Gurian's The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors, and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men (1996), William Pollack's Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), and Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (1999).¹ Insisting that boys are "wired differently" (Gurian 45) and that they are in "serious trouble" (Pollack xix), these arguably misogynistic texts critique the presence of women in the workplace and blame feminism for boys' violence in schools and for their "bad" behavior in other social arenas. In "Boyology in the Twentieth Century," Kenneth Kidd finds that in the early twentieth century there was a similar proliferation of manuals that addressed, much as do their late twentieth-century counterparts, the nature/nurture makeup of boys and the best methods of raising them.² "Naturally bad" boyhoods seem to be one of the most prevalent late twentieth-century constructions of boyhood. Often, these texts embrace "literary" and "cultural" myths and use them to provide evidence for society's crimes against boys.³

How did these "bad" American boy constructions get put into place, and in what ways are the best-selling manuals connected to the American boyhoods of children's literature? Partly because of the use of the literary bad boy to construct narratives about American boyhood and partly because of how these narratives resist the progress of the feminist project, it is important to examine the history of these literary bad boys and to find out about their links to ongoing constructions of boyhood citizenship. The history of inquiring into the nature of boys goes back further than the early twentieth-century and some of this history can be found in texts written, not for parents, but for boys.

Conventionally, overviews of American children's literature have defined boyhood as ahistorically stable. Histories of children's literature provide some records of how American boyhood has been "textually" constructed, but well-known works about American boys such as Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have become the definitive sites for explaining literary American boyhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴ In Rediscoveries in Children's Literature, Suzanne Rahn notes this problem when she argues, "[t]he effect of focusing all serious attention on a small number of books and authors is to diminish awareness of the richness and variety of children's literature. It becomes impossible to grasp the development of children's literature, or the context in which individual books were written" (xv-xvi). American bad boyhood then has a history that is tied to literary histories and, specifically, to histories of children's literature. From Hawkeye to Huck Finn and from Holden Caulfield to Newcharlie in Jacqueline Woodson's award winning Miracle's Boys, bad boy characters continue to construct powerful versions of boyhood in the United States.⁵

Using an interdisciplinary approach informed by post-structuralist, feminist, and cultural theories, this article investigates Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy, a lesser-known boys' text that was serialized in a children's periodical during the 1860s, as a location to begin to uncover the complex construction processes behind the ongoing packaging of American boyhoods as bad. Aldrich's text focuses mostly on white, middle-class boyhood, and it constructs American boyhood as arising from this limited group. During the post-bellum era, there were, of course, many other kinds of boyhoods being lived and experienced in the United States. The bad boy, in its white middle-class permutation, however, has influenced ongoing constructions of boyhood and has spread this influence to...