Transatlantic Elegies for Boyhood: First-Person Adventure Narratives After 1865

Perhaps no authenticating gesture is more disingenuous in children's literature than the assurance that the adult writer speaks for or to a real child.¹ The ethical implications of such a gesture have been a major concern for scholars in the field: Perry Nodelman's famous essay of 1992, for example, describes the domination at work when adults speak on behalf of children as akin to imperialism. In Thomas Bailey Aldrich's professedly autobiographical The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), the narrator identifies the eponymous protagonist as a past version of himself and thus claims knowledge of this representative "bad boy." Aldrich, however, corrects his initial assertion of absolute identification by acknowledging a chronological fissure: "I am, or rather I was, that boy" (1). As Maria Nikolajeva has considered specifically in relation to children's literature, all "first-person narratives demonstrate a dialogical nature by the very fact that subjectivity is split between the experiencing and the narrating self" (201), drawing on a distinction that Dorrit Cohn notes was first identified by Leo Spitzer.² Aldrich's novel has been described in similar terms as part of the nineteenth-century genre of the "boy book": "an autobiographical form essentially defined by a separation of narrator and protagonist" (Jacobson 21). In this essay, I argue that the temporal split between the "I" that experiences and the "I" that narrates in retrospective accounts of boyhood like Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy, particularly when the latter asserts his "cognitive privilege" (Cohn 151) as an adult over a child, necessarily structures the text as an elegy for a lost state. The elegy is usually regarded as an occasional genre, mimetic of mourning after the death of an actual person: we might think of Milton's "Lycidas" or Shelley's "Adonais" as canonical examples. Yet these very titles suggest that the deceased is a poetic construct and that loss becomes detached from the contingency of death: W. H. Auden thus described "Adonais" as a poem in which "both Shelley and Keats disappear as people" (qtd. in Ramanzani 18). The narratives of boyhood from the latter part of the nineteenth century that I address in this essay share this property of elegy: the remembered and mourned for object recedes from reality into an unrealizable ideal, an imagined boy whom no real boy could become.

In defining the genre of boyhood elegy by its formal structure of retrospective first-person narration, I am continuing a tradition that acknowledges the elegy's origins as formal rather than occasional: the Greek term elegeia designated a poem in elegiac couplets (Braden and Flower 397; Brogan and Braden Cole 396). The elegy has continued to attract formal definitions as it has lent its name to other metrical and stanzaic forms, such as the alternately rhymed quatrain of iambic pentameter popularized by Gray and Wordsworth in the late eighteenth century, known as the "elegiac stanza" (Brogan and Fogle 397). I suggest that narrative as well as poetic forms can be described as elegiac, especially those that invoke a temporal disjunction that, as Coleridge remarked of the elegy as a genre, "presents everything as lost and gone" (qtd. in Kennedy 4). By designating late nineteenth-century accounts of boyhood as elegiac, I am also emphasizing what David Kennedy has described as the "highly fictionalized" mode of the elegy as a "rhetorical strategy and cultural performance" (125).³ While the scope of my own study is limited to the latter part of the nineteenth century, the elegy offers the potential to consider the texts under consideration as part of a transhistorical continuum—there are, as Jahan Ramazani notes, "transhistorical tendencies long embedded in the form" (9)—as well as a specifically Victorian phenomenon in which the supposedly lost and mourned for object is a particular brand of adventurous boy.

Paradoxically, in telling their own tales from the grammatical position of the subject of their narratives, I argue that boys such as Jim Hawkins and Huckleberry Finn are exposed as the subjects of fictions presented by adults. However, the predominant mode of reading these...