Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture (review)

Ellen Pifer's wide-ranging study of twentieth-century novels adds valuable insights to the study of the novel and to the growing body of critical work on the child and childhood. Since the 1965 publication of Philip Ariès's landmark study, Centuries of Childhood, which postulated the now widely held notion that childhood is socially constructed, the child has been a fertile site of cultural and literary inquiry. Pifer's project is to explore how "past and present formulations of childhood both shape and are reflected in figures of the child in recent fiction" (1). Pifer begins with a historical overview that lays the foundation for her thesis that contemporary writers inherit and refashion in diverse ways romantic theories of childhood. Extending the work of James Kincaid—which finds in the Victorian insistence on the blankness or innocence of childhood an opposing tendency on the part of adults to make the child prey to invasion, manipulation, and eroticization—Pifer probes dichotomous views of childhood, as suggested by the phrase "demon or doll" in her title. At the same time, however, she works assiduously to show the complexity, self-reflexivity, and ambiguity that result from contemporary novelists' meditations on the child.

Pifer's close readings begin with Henry James, whose portrayals in What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898), she argues, permanently shattered myths of childhood innocence yet bear traces of a romantic sensibility. Informed by Freudian psychology, James's fictions register both conscious and unconscious awareness of the sexual self. Maisie—vigorous, full of wonder, and resilient—rejects the image of herself as "sacred icon or divine innocent" (40) and embodies instead those "contradictions and paradoxes" intrinsic to our current understanding of human nature (33). Miles and Flora similarly defy their governess's attempt to inscribe them in myths of sexual purity, but the governess's loss of faith in original innocence and the tale's ambiguity also work to keep this romantic sentiment alive.

If James articulates a contemporary drive toward ambiguity and self-reflexivity, Vladimir Nabokov takes that impulse to a new level in Lolita (1955). Adroitly evoking Frankenstein's betrayal of the creature he fashions, Pifer both holds Humbert accountable for destroying Dolores Haze's childhood and attributes his obsession to a romantic longing springing from "the paradox of ideal vision wedded to sheer impossibility" (68). In Nabokov, as in James, Pifer explains, restoring sexual vitality to the image of childhood rescues it from dissipated conceptions of innocence. Recent novels that Pifer also places within a romantic tradition include Ian McEwan's The Child in Time (1987) and Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985). Both these writers rework their romantic inheritance, however. In McEwan's novel, the child represents not simply a nostalgic escape from time but also a vehicle for growth and self-understanding. In DeLillo's novel, the child embodies hope, healing, and awe but without the firm religious base to which these discoveries are traditionally anchored.

In more than half the novels she examines, Pifer finds radical challenges to romantic conceptions of childhood. In a provocative reading of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1965), Pifer argues that the orphaned and victimized protagonist is crushed by his experience of war. Culture does not transcend the savagery of nature: "there is simply no original source of innocence or existence to which the human being can return" (93–94). William Golding, writing within a Christian framework in Darkness Visible (1979), similarly describes a collective identity insufficient to account for humanity's cruelty and injustice. The young Matty fulfills his destiny as an emissary of love, but the redemption of those for whom he sacrifices himself is ambiguous at best. The chilling depiction in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child (1988) of a monstrous...