ABSTRACT
Childhood is, and has always been, an unstable concept, variously interpreted and represented according to historical, social, cultural, political and economic contexts as Philippe Ariès shows in his ground-breaking work, Centuries of Childhood (1962). Ariès’ work is regarded as a fundamental text informing study on representations of childhood, as it opens up discussions about the concept of childhood in history as well as in the contemporary period. By examining representations of childhood in visual media, Ariès showed that childhood is a relatively new idea, and that the concept of childhood changed and developed over time. Social and economic changes led to the development of a theory of childhood innocence; depictions of children as miniature adults in the sixteenth century were eventually replaced with depictions of children as distinct from adults. Children, then, came to be assigned a “special” status. Although such pictorial representations of children established a standard for what children were expected to look like and contributed to certain idealized conceptions of childhood, the idea of childhood innocence is now being questioned by some and contested by others. Images of children appearing more recently demonstrate an ideological shift as they interrogate the earlier taken-for-granted ideas about childhood innocence by presenting children as knowing, adultified, and sometimes menacing. This chapter explains how representations of children and childhood are historically and culturally situated, both reflecting values and contributing to their continual change and renewal. In her historical overview of the emergence of the concept of the modern child in America,
Viviana Zelizer (1985) explores how this “special status” led to “sacralized” images of children (objects invested with sentimental or religious value) in the media that consequently affected their economic market value. Profound changes in the modern family and the rise of industrial capitalism contributed to the cultural process of “sacralization” of the child as seen, for example, in the way that child deaths in the nineteenth century took on more emotional value, evident in consolation literature and funerary art during that period-although portraits and triptychs of dead children appeared as early as the sixteenth century (Avery and Reynolds 2000). Childhood, constructed as a vulnerable state in need of adult protection, was consequently domesticated. The endurance of this domesticated middle class childhood is evident in its visual representation in reading primers of the early twentieth century, although these images were few and were limited to line drawings. The Scott Foresman Dick and Jane series used by public schools for
decades until the 1970s perpetuated this idealized childhood in its rich colorful depictions of a white middle class American family. Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman (1996) argue that “Dick and Jane were meant to represent Everyboy and Everygirl” (p. 21). Millions of American children became literate and acculturated with these images that mapped onto the modern cultural imaginary about what constitutes the American Dream and the associated place of childhood and children. Anne Higgonet (1998), who focuses on an analysis of childhood through an examination of
paintings and photographs, argues that an ideal of innocence is presented in the (Western) Romantic conceptions of childhood as feminine, passive, and associated closely with nature and the belief that these images somehow captured the essence or “truth” of childhood. She, however, points to a significant social change under way in which images of the traditional innocent child are morphing into “knowing images” that “endow children with psychological and physical individuality at the same time as they recognize them as being distinctively childlike” (p. 12). Whereas paintings like Joshua Reynolds’ The Age of Innocence (1788) and John Everett Millais’ Cherry Ripe (1879) and Kate Greenaway’s illustrations portray the Romantic innocent child, Anne Geddes’ photographs exploit the irrational fetishization of this image by drawing attention to the disconnection between childhood and its associations in dragging babies “into the realms of the bizarre and grotesque” (Holland, 2004, p. 25). Higgonet also points to the issues of consent, commercialization, and child pornography that are bound up in the photography of real children as in the work of Sally Mann who portrays her own children as knowing or adultified. Child pornography has as much to do with the ways in which children are presented in the media as the ways in which these representations are perceived and produced, as Patricia Holland (2004) argues. By focusing on contemporary popular visual images of childhood and arguing that “there has been a growth in imagery that deliberately sets out to shock,” she attempts to make sense of the resultant pleasure and the contemporary “crisis of looking” (p. xiii). These ephemeral but persistent images of children-such as Christmas cards portraying the Virgin Mary and Child, children’s clothing advertisements, and Save the Children posters-are publicly available and “feed comfortably into the consciousness of the age” (p. 1). This imagery reveals “an abstract, shifting and heavily ideological concept” (p. xiv) which tells stories, mythologizes, and recreates the dream of childhood for adults.
