“The Child Is Father of the Man”

“The child is father of the man.” Whether William Hickey ever read these words of William Wordsworth, many of his recollections of his childhood uncannily express them in personalized narrative form. The episodes Hickey chooses to recall from childhood lay the foundation for the adult he will become. Hickey assumes that there is a consistency to personality and that his was shaped during childhood. Hickey’s recollections of his childhood had a purpose: the textual construction of his self and identity. During Hickey’s lifetime, the idea of the child had come to provide a means for creating and thinking about the self. Childhood was now understood as a component of selfhood, an identity expressed in self-narration. People believed that a life was already latent in the child and emerged through the happenings of life experience. These ideas, in turn, informed child-rearing practices among middle-class parents, who expressed an increased degree of sensitivity to children and raised them with free rein to develop the unique individuality of each child. Childhood was thought of as a time of natural innocence, often portrayed as the opposite of adult sexuality. And yet this notion of natural innocence did not always square with the equally embraced emergent romantic notion that the child is the seed of the subsequent adult. This ambivalence, even paradox, can be seen in Hickey’s memories of his childhood, for the latent adult in Hickey, the young boy, particularly when it comes to sexual awareness, is anything but innocent.