ABSTRACT
This chapter explores those questions, with Robert Bulkeley serving as a springboard for consideration of literary children who, like him, pose educational and disciplinary challenges. Children such as Pearl Prynne, Topsy, Jo March, Dan Kean, and Huckleberry Finn test the limits of Romantic pedagogies with their willfulness and energy. In the cases of unruly childhood, the chapter discusses that, the emperor without clothes is the Romantic notion of childhood itself. Society, unsure how to interpret behaviors of children unwilling or unable to comply, responds ambivalently with zeal, aggression, avoidance, and sometimes exclusion. Literary plots involving such problematic children may end with child's reform and compliance or with removal. Theories of Romantic pedagogy espouse children's free play and exploration of nature with unstructured time to learn and inquire on their own, in the spirit of Rousseau; but to be practical, these freedoms are integrated with more systematic learning and socialization, often in a domestic sphere run by women or kindly men.
