The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

Childhood as Performance

203 The relationship between young people (“children”) and the cultural construct of “childhood” constitutes a central problem in the field of childhood studies. Is childhood a category of historical analysis that produces and manages adult power, as Caroline Levander, Lee Edelman, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Jacqueline Rose, James Kincaid, Anne Higonnet, Carolyn Steedman , and many others have argued? Or do the complicated lives of young people constantly deconstruct and reconstruct the abstract idealizations of childhood, as is suggested by the work of Karin Calvert, Howard P. Chudacoff , and Steven Mintz, among others? Literary scholars who study “the child” conjured in texts as well as historians and social scientists who focus on the lived experiences of young people have reached an unsatisfying détente with a model in which “imagined” childhood shapes the lived experiences of “real” juveniles, who respond by unevenly colluding in or resisting their construction as “children.” Childhood, in this model, is abstract and disembodied, while children are tangible and fleshy. The model may declare superficially, with the requisite nod to Judith Butler, that “real” children cannot preexist “imagined” childhood; however, the model persistently suggests that constructed childhood and juvenile humans exist in tension with if not opposition to one another. Because this model embeds opposition into the very foundation of childhood studies, the field has had difficulty accounting for the simultaneity and mutual constitution of children and Childhood as Performance Robin Bernstein 204 Robin Bernstein childhood. The field struggles to narrate the processes by which children and childhood give body to each other. That act of embodiment—the historical process through which childhood and children coproduce each other—is, I argue, a performance. Childhood is best understood as a legible pattern of behaviors that comes into being through bodies of all ages. The process of constructing childhood, of imagining childhood into being, occurs not only in literary and visual texts but in the collaborative performances, the bodily practices, of people of all ages. As this chapter shows, this paradigm clears space for thinking about the simultaneous, mutual construction of childhood and children’s bodies as well as adulthood and adults’ bodies. The process by which childhood is performed into being is best described as surrogation, which Joseph R. Roach defines as the process by which “culture reproduces and re-creates itself.” Roach notes that the common definitions of performance (including the famous formulation, “repetition with a difference”) “assume that performance offers a substitute for something else that preexists it”; a performing body “stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace.” This practice of standing-in defines surrogation, and the body that stands in is called an “effigy.” A performer’s body is an effigy, as it bears and brings forth collectively remembered, meaningful gestures and thus surrogates for that which a community has lost. Children often serve as effigies that substitute uncannily for other, presumably adult, bodies and thus produce a surplus of meaning. For example, four-year-old Shirley Temple engaged in surrogation when she adopted Mae West’s swagger and purr to play a prostitute in the 1933 short “Polly Tix in Washington.” Children’s ability to surrogate adulthood is well noted, often with dismay. Childhood itself, however, is best understood as a process of surrogation, an endless attempt to find, fashion, and impel substitutes to fill a void caused by the loss of a half-forgotten original. In this form of surrogation, the lost original doubles on the construction of childhood itself as a process of loss and forgetting. The Wordsworth-influenced romantic and later sentimental child was defined by its experience of being catapulted, through birth, out of God’s presence and hurtled toward a lifetime of increasing separation from God. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth declares that “heaven lies about us in our infancy!” but immediately laments the loss of that aura: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Childhood as Performance 205 Boy.” That growing boy travels from the light of heaven but remains within its radiance: he “still is Nature’s Priest.” Only the onset of adulthood blunts the senses to God’s light: “At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.” It’s all downhill from the first breath: to grow is to lose sacred childhood innocence, and each day the...