Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik (review)

Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s latest book, Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction, focuses on a collection of examples of urban children and the “fantasies of neglect” that inform the urban child archetype, as well as shifts in that representation throughout history. She samples texts across target audience ages, genres, and traditions of boys’ and girls’ stories.

Although scholarship on representations of urban children exist, most have been more general explorations of filmic children, such as Childhood and Cinema by Vicky Levbeau (2008) and Karen Lury’s The Child in Film (2010), or explored childhood through the lens of motherhood, as in Lucy Fischer’s Cinematernity (1996). Texts focusing on childhood in literature often divide into the era-specific, such as Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers (2009) and Lara Saguisag’s more recent Incorrigibles and Innocents (2018), which examines childhood as depicted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century comic strips.

Wojcik’s book achieves a rare bridge; it is useful for scholars of literature, film, children’s studies, and urban studies, and it maneuvers a coherent intersection between the fields. In addressing a variety of urban spaces, Wojcik also explores socioeconomic class: the characters examined include Harriet M. Welsch (of Harriet the Spy), who lives in luxury, and the poverty-bound Dead End Kids and urban black boys of “racial impasse” films. Wojcik also notes that urban child narratives—particularly those of girls—often suggest a dramatic class mobility that mirrors the child’s sense of freedom of movement within the city. Thus, according to Wojcik, Shirley Temple’s characters frequently transitioned between wealth and poverty (sometimes multiple times within the same narrative), and Little Orphan Annie’s comic strip was sustained through the unreliability of Daddy Warbucks, who would “vanish repeatedly, ‘re-orphaning’ Annie over and over again” (87). These initially disparate-seeming areas of focus converge in Wojcik’s overarching purpose: an historical examination of the figure of the “urban child” and the transformation of the trope as a reflection of shifting American ideals in parenting and children’s texts.

Fantasies of Neglect is divided into thematic chapters. Representations of boys are particularly addressed through Universal Studio’s “Dead End Kids” of the 1930s and 1940s, while the girls include Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, and Little Orphan Annie. Wojcik bypasses a focus on these child stars themselves, noting that much of what has been previously written on the topic explores the labor of child actors, stage parents, or autobiographical nature of some directors’ child-focused texts, specifying that she is less interested in the “labor of the child star herself” and more in how the “filmic representations of children engage issues of labor and economics” (39). A chapter on the class-focused portrayals of “neglect” is followed by an examination of consistently problematic portrayals of black urban boys. Wojcik ends with reflections on neglect and failure, particularly in the shift in attitudes on children’s freedom and the often-imagined dangers that have led to contemporary “helicopter parenting.” Throughout the book, Wojcik includes examples from film and literature, primarily American texts.

Wojcik’s final, most fascinating (and potentially provocative) chapter digs further into the concept of helicopter parenting and the way much of American parenting culture has shifted from “a model of largely benign neglect to one of total supervision” (171). The chapter provides a gloss of the birth of “stranger danger” culture in the late 1970s and early 80s following several high-profile child abductions and “Satanic Panic” hysteria. Aside from intensifying the mommy wars, Wojcik notes that this cultural shift also generated a noted change in representations of the urban child, highlighting the example of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (and the 2011 Stephen Daldry film adaptation) and the foregrounding of our cultural transition through the protagonist Oskar. Although Wojcik demonstrates that earlier urban boys’ stories tended to focus on groups while urban girls were solitary...