Table Of ContentMichelle H. Phillips
Representations of Childhood in American
Modernism
Michelle H. Phillips
Representations of
Childhood in
American Modernism
Michelle H. Phillips
Fairfax, Virginia, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-50806-5 ISBN 978-1-137-50807-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942629
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A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as my doctoral dissertation, and each member of my
committee, including Marianne DeKoven, Cheryl A. Wall, Harriet
Davidson, and Patricia Crain, has shaped this project in ways both defi nite
and indelible. It was my enormous good fortune to have Pat as a mentor
throughout this process. She answered questions for me that I did not
know to ask and opened doors for me that I never knew were there. One
of the luckiest days of my life was when I signed up to take a class with
Marianne. She is not only a renowned scholar but also a gifted teacher, an
uncommonly devoted advisor, and a trusted friend.
I also owe many thanks to Michael McKeon for his meticulous feed-
back on earlier drafts of Chap. 4 of the book and for organizing a work-
shop where I received crucial encouragement and words of wisdom from
Natalie Roxburgh, Sonali Barua, and Shakti Jaising. And I also must
thank the Graduate Literatures in English Program at Rutgers University,
including Cheryl Robinson, Courtney Borack, John Kucich, Rebecca
Walkowitz, and Stacy Klein, for providing consistent and unwavering pro-
fessional and fi nancial support and for making Murray Hall one of the best
places to learn and work.
I published versions of two of the chapters contained herein in T he
Henry James Review and in P MLA . I am grateful for the suggestions and
revisions made by these journals’ readers and editors, including Susan
Griffi n, Eric Wirth, and Nancy Bentley. I have also been fortunate to
receive feedback at various conference presentations along the way. I
would like to thank Katharine Capshaw for her encouragement in this
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
context and Marah Gubar for taking the time to retool my brain in regards
to nineteenth-century children’s literature.
For many of these chapters, it has been my privilege to conduct
research at a number of wonderful institutions and libraries. The librarians
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I studied W.E.B. Du
Bois’s papers, went out of their way to provide me with access to materi-
als for Chap. 6 . Similarly, I have rarely met more knowledgeable librarians
than those at Yale’s Beinecke Library who helped guide my research on
Gertrude Stein.
Last, but always far from least, none of this would have been possible
without the shared sacrifi ces of my family. My mother, Debra, is the most
patient and generous person I have ever known and extended me more
than my fair share of both during this process. Tesla Miller came to my
rescue on more than one occasion. Her humor and her research assistance
were equally vital. Vicky and Zdzislaw Pacholec were angels who regularly
took over my household so that I could work. More inspiration than I
ever needed came from my daughter, Katherine Reese, who helped me, as
much as anyone, to understand Gertrude Stein’s children’s fi ction. Most
of all, I want to thank my wife, Michelle, who survived with me the loss of
our fi rst born and who holds my hand each and every day.
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 American Modernism, Childhood, and the Inward Turn 13
3 The “Partagé Child” and the Emergence of the
Modernist Novel in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew 37
4 An Innocence Worse than Evil in The Turn of the Screw 65
5 Nightwood: A Bedtime Story 91
6 The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls
of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book 119
7 Drowning in Childhood: Gertrude Stein’s
Late Modernism 163
Works Cited 211
Index 227
vii
L F
IST OF IGURES
Fig. 5.1 Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910. Courtesy of The Museum
of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY 102
Fig. 6.1 The Crisis Children’s Number 16.6 (October 1918) 282 132
Fig. 6.2 The Crisis Children’s Number 8.6 (October 1914) 273 133
Fig. 6.3 The Crisis Children’s Number 12.6 (October 1916) 275 134
Fig. 6.4 The Crisis Children’s Number 12.6 (October 1916) 287 136
Fig. 6.5 The Brownies’ Book 1.9 (September 1920) 272 149
Fig. 6.6 The Brownies’ Book 1.12 (Dec 1920) 378 151
Fig. 6.7 The Brownies’ Book 1.12 (Dec 1920) 379 152
Fig. 6.8 The Brownies’ Book 1.3 (March 1920) 76 153
Fig. 7.1 Facsimile from Gertrude Stein’s manuscript, Geographical
History of America 184
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
By the turn of the twentieth century, childhood was in vogue. The idyllic
child at the heart of poetic, Romantic discourse resurfaced in the work
of twentieth-century reformers and scientists who dedicated themselves
to understanding and bettering the lives of actual children. As Sally
Shuttleworth observes, the child-study movement, which thrived in the
early years of the twentieth century, had its roots in the core values of post-
Romantic discourse (2). In promoting the belief that the entire history
of human evolution recapitulates itself in the lifespan of each individual,
child-study scientists validated the importance of childhood as the origin
of both personal and social progress. 1 By 1930, Herbert Hoover spoke
for many reformers when he argued that interventions in the problems
of poverty, health, and education for just “one generation” of children
would cause those problems and “a thousand other[s]” to “vanish” (qtd.
in Smuts 140). Even Freud, whose theories of infantile sexuality seemed to
threaten Romantic ideals of childhood innocence, underscored the essen-
tialist line on childhood as the epicenter of the self.
Childhood played a foundational role in modern visions of individual
and human history, but in many of these narratives childhood itself had
no history. In the mind, childhood became a permanent fi xture, a place
solidifi ed by Freud into what Carolyn Steedman calls the “timeless interi-
ority of the unconscious” (93). For Freud and other child-study theorists,
the child also served as an accessible agent of man’s otherwise inaccessible,
primitive past. And for reformers, childhood was the impressionable point
at which and through which future history would be made.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1
M.H. Phillips, Representations of Childhood in American
Modernism, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2_1
2 M.H. PHILLIPS
In her 1900 treatise, T he Century of the Child , feminist and socialist
Ellen Key railed against the use of corporal punishment, factory work for
both women and children, and the “idiotic” model of public school edu-
cation, which, in her view, churned out (like a factory itself) identically-
minded, unquestioning, and (above all) obedient children. The book
became an international bestseller. Through it, Key sought to make the
cultivation of the child along with its mother the centerpiece of social and
political reform efforts across Europe and America (330). And, in so many
respects, the early years of the twentieth-century were already en route
to making Key’s vision of a child-centered society a reality. Anxious par-
ents, eager to incorporate the spirit of reform at home, enjoyed a robust
body of child-rearing literature, including P arents’ Magazine which made
its debut in 1926. The psychological study of children boomed. Alice
Boardman Smuts tells us that in 1918 there were only fi ve psychologists
and psychiatrists who studied childhood full time, but by 1930 there were
more than 600 (1–2). 1912 saw the creation of “The Children’s Bureau,”
which devoted its fi rst years almost entirely to the problem of childhood
mortality. In the 1890s children accounted for 40 % of all deaths; by the
1920s that number had fallen dramatically to 21.7 % (Zelizer 29). To help
move children out of danger zones, such as the streets and the facto-
ries, public spaces were created for the child’s cultivation and protection.
Kindergartens grew alongside a more progressive educational model that
emphasized children as active rather than passive learners. Playgrounds
were beginning to become regular features of urban centers like Chicago,
which built its fi rst in 1893 (Kinchin and O’Connor 43). In the key area
of child labor, however, Hugh Cunningham observes that progress in
the United States was slow. Nearly all countries had passed laws regulat-
ing child labor by the end of the nineteenth century, except for the U.S.
(180–181). Nonetheless, the number of child laborers in America was on
the decline, from nearly 2 million in 1910 to around 667,000 in 1938
(the year the fi rst federal regulations fi nally took effect) (Zelizer 65; 56).
The turn of the twentieth century was also the time of the so-called
golden age of children’s literature in which such classics as J.M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan (1902), L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908),
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T he Secret Garden (1911), Kenneth Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows (1908), Margery Williams’s T he Velveteen Rabbit
(1922), and A.A. Milne’s W innie the Pooh (1926) appeared to work along-
side Anglo-American progressives to sentimentalize childhood as a beloved
space set apart from the disenchanted adult world of labor, materialism,
