ABSTRACT
Innocence has always been one of the chief attractions of the modern childbut for that very reason, also one of its most signifi cant problems. From the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Romantic poets, a view of the child as a repository of purity in the face of adult corruption and depravity has become hegemonic (Ariès 1962; Coveney 1967). It was certainly a view that infi ltrated literature directed towards children of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ in the work of Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, and especially JM Barrie, whose Peter Pan was so attached to the special quality of childhood that he never wished to grow up (Carpenter 1985). Given that innocence was quickly fetishized in writing about childhood, it became the source of much anxiety concerning the dangers by which the child was beset: the adult world, which was charged with protecting and maintaining this sacred innocence, was too often inclined towards corrupting and desecrating it. Most dangerously, as traced by James Kincaid, much adult interest in child purity was driven by what he calls the ‘culture of child molesting’ (1998), a culture that constructed the child as innocent only to fi nd her all the more sexually desirable. Moreover, while this adult world was loudly proclaiming its belief in the child as angel, an old fear of the child remained, a fear that lurking behind the façade of virtue the child retained the Augustinian stain of original sin and perhaps was inclined towards evil rather than good.
