Conceptualising the nonchild: rereading the relationship between parental responsibility and the formation of the nineteenth-century literary child

Abstract

This thesis examines childhood as a culturally contingent construct, shaped by ‘ever-changing’ societal perceptions, and explores how this notion informs the relationship between parental responsibility and the literary child in the nineteenth-century novel (Frijhoff 11). During this period, new understandings of childhood as both a developmental stage and a social construct, encouraged by the eighteenth-century “discovery of childhood”, prompted a reconfiguration of parental roles and expectations. Consequently, literary depictions of children became increasingly varied, as authors sought to navigate the bounds of past and present views. As such, this thesis integrates critical frameworks from James Kincaid’s Erotic Innocence and Susan Honeyman’s Elusive Childhood, which argue that childhood is imposed based on adult nostalgia and desire rather than objective reality, alongside contemporary developmental theories, including Rousseau’s theory of parental reciprocity and emerging heredity science.

Rather than analysing the ‘default-value’ idealised nineteenth-century child, who meets ‘the imaginative and nostalgic demands’ of their caregivers, this thesis focuses on literary representations of the nonconforming child, or “nonchild” (Morris 9, Erotic Innocence 144). The creation of this nonchild disrupts the anticipated reciprocal duties between parents and children, initiating a cycle wherein the failure of the child to embody the characteristics of a ‘real child’ culminates in parental refusal to fulfil the role of ‘real’ parent (Émile 18). These mismatched expectations shape the parent-child relationships in the three nineteenth-century novels examined in this thesis: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1802), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Each novel places parenthood at the narrative forefront and interrogates different aspects of nineteenth-century parental responsibility, including evolving societal views of female children, the consequences of erroneous creation and parental neglect, and the intersection of heredity, mental illness, and genetic parental responsibility. While the novels address parental responsibility from distinct perspectives, they converge in their treatment of reciprocal duty and love as requisites to healthy child development: ‘[t]he child ought to love his mother before he knows that it is his duty to love her’ yet he may only do so if the prerequisites of parental responsibility have been met (Worthington 18).

The primary intention of this thesis is to evaluate how mismatched reciprocity in parent- child relationships shapes the depiction of children in the nineteenth-century novel and ultimately results in the creation of the literary nonchild.