NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

At the Crossroads of Children's Studies and American Studies:

Intersections, Possibilities, Challenges

Childhood Studies at the Crossroads: Childhood and Early American Studies

Anna Mae Duane

I’d like to make a brief case for where I see childhood studies creating a natural point of intersection with early American studies, and to think about how cultivating these crossroads might provide new ways of approaching early American literature and culture. I’ll begin with a contradictory statement: the child is both everywhere and nowhere in early America. Placing the child at the foreground of our analysis forces us to confront the space in between—the space between the material and the figurative, between a symbol and the person whose experience was marked by having that symbol imposed upon him or her. More precisely, juxtaposing childhood studies with early American studies doubles down on methodological problems of evidence—and the authenticity such evidence promises. Acknowledging these problems, I’d like to suggest that pausing at the crossroads of childhood and early American studies offers opportunities to wrestle with the rejected, yet still remarkably persistent, binary of dominant and subordinate, with its concomitant elicitations of either accommodation or resistance, that frame what we see when we look at early America.

My first assertion—the child is everywhere, figuratively. The child had powerful political, social and emotional resonances in early America. Figuratively, as colonists struggled to transport power relations from the Old World in a form that would function in a New World context, metaphors of parent-child relations proliferated. Materially, children were key points of encounter—between Europe and the New World, between the past and the future, and between Native and English cultures as children functioned as cultural emissaries. And not surprisingly, material children were interpolated in the process of narrating such encounters. From John Winthrop’s obsession with Anne Hutchinson’s allegedly deformed still-born infant as the manifestation of its mother’s dangerous delusions, to his willingness to see the salvation of his own children as evidence of God’s pleasure, to the Salem villagers’ willingness to see young girls as prophetic voices crying out in the wilderness, the child in early America emerges again and again as a symbol of the colony’s status in relation to the wildness around it. Later, as Caroline Levander, Jay Fliegelman, Shirley Samuels and others have illustrated, the figure of the oppressed child created a key template for articulating revolutionary grievances against a mother country.1 Philosophical and epistemological developments in the eighteenth-century rendered the child a touchstone upon which questions of human nature were explored. The work of Holly Brewer and Gillian Brown have taken different tacks about whether Lockean theories of consent—a foundational structure in early American theories of governance—were ultimately beneficial to the children who figured so largely in Locke’s rhetoric.2 Both scholars agree, however, that the child is central to understanding concepts of meaningful consent that continue to structure much of current legal and philosophical rights theory. The work of Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Caroline Levander, Carol Singley, and Lucia Hodgson has illuminated how rethinking the child can help us rethink the structures of social contract theory, consent and autonomy so central to the development of an American cultural and political identity.3

I also suggested that children are nowhere in early America. While we have figurative children everywhere and even material children in abundance, finding and reading children’s voices, always a methodological challenge, is particularly difficult in early America. The dearth of what we might like to call “authentic” children’s voices keeps us from articulating either a fully resistant or compliant child. Scholars such as Paula Fass and Anya Jabour have done much to excavate and circulate texts that teach us more about what childhood was like.4 Historians such as John Demos, James Marten and others have sought to reconstruct the world of early American children by focusing on the historical documents and material artifacts pertaining to their lives.5 Yet if the goal is to hear children speak, studying childhood in early America, and arguably anywhere in American studies, requires a process of creative listening to mediated, half-submerged, often overlaid subjects. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler has written eloquently, the study of children pushes us to reimagine “dependency as an issue both of personal agency and of national or institutional relationships.”6

Here is one place that the methodological crossroads—or, to be more precise, the methodological problems that overlap in both childhood studies and early American studies—can lead us to fruitful new ways of reading early American literature and culture. For early American studies, particularly in this past generation, is the study of mediated, half-submerged, often overlaid subjects. From the debate over the authenticity of Olaudah Equiano’s recounted childhood, to worries over the clerical editorializing of female authors of captivity narratives, to efforts to locate Native American subjectivity in William Apess’s anglicized story of hardship and conversion, scholars remain unsure how to read the heavily mediated voices of many early American authors.7 Joshua Bellin, among others, has argued that in order to engage these difficulties meaningfully we must move beyond the well-worn framework of dominant and subordinate. For Bellin, even the more nuanced construction of hegemony fighting off stealth infiltrations of influence and resistance does not adequately address the complex exchanges between cultures in early America.8 Early American literature, Bellin argues, is always the product of encounter. Childhood studies forms a critical crossroads with this perspective in two ways. To begin with, children in early America are literally producing and processing encounter as they grow up in the midst of the rapidly changing cultural and political landscape, making them a natural site for studying how these moments of encounter worked. More tentatively, I suggest that foregrounding the child as a point of early American study in itself necessitates a shift in perspective that can fully attend to the complex reciprocity of encounter rather than the straightforward transmission of dominance. To render children worth listening for, and listening to, we are pushed to listen creatively in ways that respect, and even privilege, a form of subjectivity that can only emerge through encounter.

Finally, I’ll suggest that the intersection of children’s studies and early American studies can offer a turning point to another, often controversial and contested crossroads—between postcolonial study and early American studies. A study of how the child functions as both the emblem of the colony’s strength (as it does for New England Puritans and Revolutionary rhetoricians) and as an emblem of the dependency and insufficiency of the non-citizen (as it did in infantilizing narratives aimed at slaves, Native Americans and others) offers a particularly useful vantage point for revisiting Laurence Buell’s controversial assertion that the U.S. literary emergence was a "postcolonial phenomenon."9 The work of the child, particularly the work of infantilization in the deployment of power in early America, offers a good deal of insight into the constructions of power and citizenship particular to the United States. It also provides a particularly useful point of comparison with other colonial regimes. As Ann Laura Stoler’s work has so eloquently illustrated, the tender ties of domestic arrangements, including reproduction and childrearing, “are not the “microcosms of empire, but its marrow.”10 The difficult and contested crossroads between childhood and early American studies offers a means for revisiting the questions of power and subordination, empire and colony, parent and child that cut across colonial regimes, and offers a way of finding common points of conversation across disciplines and national boundaries. That conversation won’t lead to easy answers. Rather the conceptual difficulties and methodological uncertainties raised by the study of the child in early America can lead us to ask better questions.

Endnotes

1. Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority 1750-1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1985), Caroline Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois (Durham: Duke UP, 2006).

2. Holly Brewer, By Birth Or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: UNC Pres, 2005), Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

3. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2005), Caroline Levander and Carol Singley, eds., The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2003), Lucia Hodgson, "Little Subjects: The Lockean Child and Race in Transatlantic American Discourses of Slavery" (PhD diss., U of Southern California, 2009).

4. Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason, eds., Childhood in America (New York: NYU Press, 2000), Anya Jabour, ed. Major Problems in the History of American Families and Children (Independence, KY: Wadsworth Publishing, 2004),

5. John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth County (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), Karen Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston, Northeastern UP, 1992), James Marten, The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2000).

6. Sánchez-Eppler, xiv.

7. A small sample of the criticism on these questions: Gordon Sayre, "Defying Assimilation, Confounding Authenticity: The Case of William Apess," Auto/Biography Studies 11 (1996): 1-18, Vincent Carretta, “A New Letter by Gustavus Vassa/Olaudah Equiano?” Early American Literature 39. 2, (2004): 355-361, Gordon M. Sayre “Captivity Canons,” American Quarterly 50.4 (1998): 860-867.

8. Joshua Bellin, The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2000).

9. Laurence Buell “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon,” American Literary History 1992 4 (3): 411-442. For a more recent take on the question, see Paul Giles, “Antipodean American Literature: Franklin, Twain, and the Sphere of Subalternity," American Literary History 2008 20 (1-2): 22-50.

10. Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted Empires: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006), 3.

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