The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children: Essays on Anomalous Children From 1595 to the Present Day

By Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns.

This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil.

The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785275227

Book preview

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children

Essays on Anomalous Children from 1595 to the Present Day

Edited by

Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2020 Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940783

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-520-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-520-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1Fabric image used to perform a curse

1.2Woodland at Huntroyde where Edmund Hartlay performed his circle ritual

1.3The Devil with his dog

1.4The Seal of God from The Sworn Book

1.5A belief in contact with spirits was an essential part of magic

2.1The house inhabited by Family A

4.1Kaspar Hauser, not wild anymore?

4.2Has any other feral child ever been honoured with a monument?

4.3Two adolescent microcephalic boys made up as the last surviving Aztecs

4.4In remembrance of the smallest ladies duet in the world

9.1A man collecting a mandrake root with the help of a dog

Table

12.1Tabulation of FBI uniform crime report, 2012

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It has been something of an odyssey to get the important work of the authors involved in this project out into the light of day, and many thanks to those that have helped and encouraged along the way. The most important of these is my always amazing Mrs Mine and our own two little monsters, Seba and Majki, and not least the support of Mam i Tata Bronk.

INTRODUCTION

Simon Bacon and Leo Ruickbie

The linkage between children and horror, or ‘horror-full’ children, would seem an almost natural connection to make given its popularity in contemporary horror films and novels. However, the intersection between the two categories has a long history going back beyond the more obvious Gothic reimaginings of the nineteenth century with its underage ghostly terrors revealing that the idea of the ‘little horror’ is seemingly an inherent demarcation within society between adults and those that are viewed as ‘not adults’. Beginning from the sixteenth century, this collection will consider examples of description and interpretation of little horrors from real life and popular culture to show the construction and consolidation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child which views it as being monstrous, dangerous and just plain evil.

Horror films, literature, games and graphic novels abound with evil babies, children and adolescents, so much so that Steven Bruhm notes, ‘These days, when you leave the theatre after a fright-movie you can’t go home again […] because you’re afraid that your child will kill you.’¹ While this is about twenty-first century horror film, it rather fittingly captures something of the otherness of children even in an age when the ‘rights’ of the child are, arguably, more defined and children themselves more protected, recognized and listened to than in any other historical period. Somewhat contrarily, it seems that although the child and the associated categories of ‘youth’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘young adult’ are ever more controlled and provided with more scope for agency and self-determination in society, popular culture often sees them constructed as being ‘quintessentially inimical to the adult and adulthood, [signifying] alien and absolute separateness’.² This obviously relates to more sensational expressions of youth in popular culture, particularly the horror, Gothic and fantasy genres, but all of which can be seen to be the expression of a deeper cultural anxiety around children, their place in our current historical moment and what kind of future they might embody. But it also points to a certain ambiguity and liminality within the construction of the child as a nexus of many conflicting terms and ideals imposed upon it by adults, from an idyllic (nostalgic) innocence to be cherished and protected to a manipulative, consuming predator to be exploited and broken.

The ongoing ambiguity in the attempts to define and regulate the child is partly seen in what might be termed the medicalization of the child’s body in terms of biological and mental growth and educational and development goals. Yet even this does not collapse the all-enveloping air of an unregulatable designation as the age one stops being considered a child is continually being reassessed with more recent studies identifying the upper limit as being 24 or even 29 years.³ The resultant anxiety caused by this resistance to categorization is, in part, due to the problem of trying to fit the child, and more specifically the problematic child, in a world meant for adults. Here, the youth or adolescent is defined by the qualities that make a ‘non-adult’, with the latter being the signifier of prudence, responsibility and accountability, that is, legal signifiers of being part of society (within patriarchy, part of the society of men). Consequently, childhood, and even more so adolescence, is a liminal space where the occupants are on their way to being adults – some closer than others at least age-wise – and so attempt to occupy both categories; they look and act like an adult but are not legally accountable in the same way. In a sense they are figures, ‘blanks’, as James Kincaid calls them, that are haunted by the adults they will become; at times innocent, inexperienced and naive and at others possessed, manipulated and traumatized.⁴

The child then becomes a nexus of positivity and hope but equally one of negativity and danger; the embrace of a past that will never grow old and a future that will destroy and consume the old. This makes them prime material within the popular imagination to be configured as problematic, naughty, deceitful and/or the agents of darker forces. While the cultural imagination is most likely to express itself via cultural artefacts such as film, novels and so on, it can also apply to real world, therapeutic and legal, often reinforcing the same tropes and revealing how much such associations have become entrenched in Western, and indeed other, societies. More interestingly, as seen in some examples given in this collection, specifically from sixteenth-century England, this has occurred in societies before the idea of children as a separate category was largely conceived. While class and/or wealth has always played a large part in the upbringing of those not old enough to be considered adults, children were generally allowed (forced) to work as soon as they were physically able to. However, from the 1800s, something of this began to change, and as noted by the historian Phillipe Aries, ‘youth [was] the privileged age of the 17th century, childhood of the 19th, adolescence of the twentieth’.⁵ Even as more categories of not-adults came into focus, the more anomalous members of that designation concentrated the anxieties felt by wider society over how to handle these others in their midst, unsurprisingly seeing them become central characters within contemporaneous popular culture, whether it be folklore, urban myth, novels or cinema. In the light of this, it is unsurprising that with the rise of popular fiction in the nineteenth century children have become increasingly important elements of more sensational stories. It should be noted here that this collection will largely consider examples that feature children as central protagonists rather than works or texts that are produced by children or specifically for children, mainly because the anxieties of a given group or society are more clearly seen in cultural productions about the focus/object of those insecurities than in the works/texts produced by or for those that cause said anxieties.

This process then reveals how the stereotypes associated with troublesome or anomalous youth and the cultural anxiety they produce not only find expression through literature and film but in the interpretation and understanding of everyday situations that centre on children and problematic or unexplainable (supernatural) situations that they find themselves associated with. This might sound like a statement more applicable to the sixteenth century than the twenty-first, but the connection between adolescents and online creepypasta phenomena, such as the Slender Man,⁶ seems not dissimilar to children communing with spirits in Elizabethan England. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, it is the driving impetus of this collection to show how the construction and representation of the monstrous childat the start of the twenty-first century, while being specific to our times and culture, has not been created from an historical vacuum, but is built upon a long history of generational stereotyping. This actually posits the anomalous child as an almost transhistorical manifestation whose core characteristics remain fixed with only the superficial details provided by particular cultural moments suggesting they are different. This is quite clearly revealed by the interdisciplinary nature of this collection where historical and contemporary studies centred on sociology, anthropology, psychology and media studies all demonstrate the intersection of children and horror/monstrosity.

1. The Anomalous Child

In considering anomalous youth, it is worth looking more closely at the idea of the child and why it might have been a category especially open to being viewed as different or monstrous in some way. The nineteenth century in general and the Victorian period in particular are often cited as being the period when childhood became a more clearly defined stage of the human life cycle. Before then, as observed by Margarita Georgieva, ‘child’ could denote many things that were largely separate from physical age, such as ‘persons of unstable perception and understanding’, those ‘lacking of affective maturity […] vulnerable or helpless […] under legal guardianship […] [or] parental will’.⁷ Equally, a child is one who is innocent, lacking knowledge, has a potential for development and is intellectually pliable.⁸ One’s sexual maturity and/or ability to work does not always affect this categorization, and Thomas Rutherforth went as far to claim, in 1754, that childhood lasts until someone’s parents are no longer alive.⁹ The notions of innocence, vulnerability and lack of knowledge – not to be confused with guile or the ability to deceive – grouped those considered as children alongside women, the mentally impaired and outsiders in general, all considered as other to the society of adult white males. Consequently, the child was viewed as a point of potential societal weakness and pollution¹⁰ and open to outside influence and moral corruption.

In many ways the Victorian period focused this otherness more tightly, just as it increasingly defined the child and its place under the intellectual and moral stewardship of adults. With increased industrialization the use of children in factories also grew as families moved from the countryside to the cities for work. While the moves to regulate this and protect the young from the unacceptable working conditions is seen as a largely philanthropic endeavour initiated by certain wealthy individuals such as John Fielden and Lord Ashley, the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, it can equally be seen as a way to separate and control a part of society. Thus, while such protection can be viewed in terms of preventing exploitation (psychologically, physically and sexually) by outside forces, it also becomes a way of enforcing controls and conditions upon humans of a certain age group or maturation whether they want them or not. Alongside this, the prioritization of parental control over the agencyof the individual child allows for the society of adults to project their hopes, desires and anxieties upon the ideological body of the young. Nostalgia forms much of this projection and is very much seen in the work of the golden age of children’s literature and authors such as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling (and the slightly later J. M. Barrie) highlighting how the category of the child is not one that is defined by those that are actually contained within it, but by those who impose ideals upon them. This, of course, is not just in terms of social position, but also in regard to sexuality and the sexualization of children. As noted in the work of James Kincaid, the child on the cusp of puberty becomes the figure upon which patriarchal society could project all its repressed sexual desires and fantasies. Simultaneously, as Andrew O’Malley observes regarding Victorian society:

If the ideal figure of the age was the productive, moral, self-disciplined, healthy, male adult governed by the faculty of reason, the child came to be viewed in many regards as its opposite.¹¹

Here the child, whether male or female, embodied everything that the adult male was not. In this way, childhood, as previously mentioned, becomes an ambivalent category, supposedly embodying all that is ‘good’ in a society, while also simultaneously becoming a dark mirror, revealing what is purposely kept secret. From this, Kincaid sees the child as an unformed or undecided individual, inevitably becoming radically ambivalent, even dangerous, and whose socialization becomes ever more imperative, not only for its own safety, but for society at large. Simultaneously then, what is represented as a means of protection for a nation’s most valuable asset can also be seen as a way of maintaining a culture’s universal sense of self-innocence and goodness above and beyond an individual’s personal choice (gender/ethnicity/geography). This has further wide-ranging implications for the way in which other categories are increasingly defined and controlled through the ways in which they are allowed to interact with and influence the child. Consequently, the protection of the child can also be a way to influence and regulate certain categories of adults, parents, businesses and even politico-legal systems in the kinds of relationships – emotional, physical and economical – that they are allowed to engage in with children.

Following on from this, the child is simultaneously the repository of all society holds dear about itself and something which is at once unrestrained and monstrous – not totally removed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s nature child¹² – not to be loved and cherished but feared and expelled. One could infer a psychoanalytical interpretation to this where the child becomes something of a receptacle of societal repression. Indeed, Jacqueline Rose, in the middle of the twentieth century, leans towards such a reading via Sigmund Freud, but one where the child’s own sexual development points to a questioning of its own origins (‘where did I come from?’) and its identity (rather loosely read as ‘sexual orientation’ as to whether it is male or female).¹³ However, she sees this process as one of reflection rather than projection, and so the indeterminacy within the state of the child mirrors that of the adult audience considering it as opposed to being a means of eventual reintegration into the social body.¹⁴ Kincaid’s view of the child as ‘hollow’ and as a ‘receptacle waiting to be filled’¹⁵ comes closer to capturing the forces at play in this process explaining social constructions of youth. Within this, whether configured as supernatural or just plain wicked, the child becomes a liminal being, caught outside of normalized categorization; not mature, not socialized, not wholly accepted, not recognized as autonomous, not under the rule of law and not conforming to adult nostalgia and idealism over what they should be.¹⁶ The Victorian period, in particular, defined a view of the prepubescent child that was simultaneously nostalgic and savage; a time of unparalleled freedom, but also one in which the child had to be quickly socialized to be able to enter the adult world. Consequently, childhood becomes a site of the ongoing tensions between cultural ideals and collective guilt and repression, producing a fetishized body intimating social anxiety and what the future might hold if such hidden desires become manifest.

In this way it is possible to see that the more the category of the child is defined and controlled, the more strongly it represents cultural anxieties, however contradictory they might be. This is brought into a very specific focus at the start of the twenty-first century where childhood is believed to be an almost sacrosanct stage of life embodying all that is good and hopeful in a society that largely sees itself as corrupt and/or trapped in ultimately meaningless lives. Simultaneously, however, and more so within capitalism, children are a resource and a commodity to be exploited and often manipulated, sexualized and abused. Commenting on this, David Buckingham observes that not all aspects of this are necessarily negative: ‘Commercialization is seen to cause harm to many aspects of children’s physical and mental health, as well as generating concerns about issues such as sexualisation and materialism’,¹⁷ but, he continues, ‘the media seem to have erased the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, and hence to have undermined the authority of adults,’ where ‘children’s expertise with technology gives them access to new forms of culture and communication that largely escape parental control’.¹⁸ Indeed, new technology and communications is a particular point of anxiety allowing children far greater autonomy, ‘opportunities for creativity and self-determinism’,¹⁹ but often in areas that are viewed as unregulated or uncontrolled. As pointed out by Bex Lewix, the idea of ‘risk’ has largely been part of childhood and growing up, but this same risk, in the twenty-first century, is seen as unacceptable and to be avoided at all costs.²⁰ In this sense, the conditions that created the forms of otherness that once kept the young in check now become the ones which allow it to exceed and evade regulation. This goes in the face of global organizations such as UNICEF and Save the Children who promote the sanctity of childhood as a fundamental human right and enforcing innocence on those in cultures that do not necessarily want it. Indeed, oftentimes, popular culture, empirical and sociological data, and even ecological survival intimate something else. Here children are not necessarily configured as the wealth of the family and the community but can be seen as a luxury or even an economic and environmental burden; no longer the bearers of the future, but a never-ending death knell for the world as we know it. This begins to delineate the dichotomies and oppositional tensions within the idea of childhood and adolescence in the twenty-first century where adults not only fear the transitional nature of youth, but also of humanity itself. It is a development that is inherently anxiety inducing as it can never offer a reproduction of what has gone before but is a new creation made to continue without the adults of today.

2. The Anomalous Body of the Child

The idea of the child, and more specifically the body of the child, as a transitional subject is of key importance here as is the way it further resonates with instability, liminality and becoming. All of these can be seen to inform the idea of the body’s Gothicization, that is, its ability to become something other than what it seems to be, to become the body of the other. In terms of the child, this is interesting as youth is often utilized to bring the family together (paternal and maternal (domestic Gothic));²¹ yet it also contains the notion of change and/or transcendence. It is a body in turmoil, starting as one thing but in a state of flux as it moves on to become something else. Kelly Hurley, speaking of the performative qualities of bodies within the Gothic genre, specifically the revival of the late eighteenth century going into the nineteenth, describes them as ‘abhuman’ and specifically where ‘abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other’.²² Here it is possible to replace ‘human’ with ‘adult’, and indeed ‘adult male’, as that would be considered the essential example of what constitutes normative mankind. As such then abnormal can speak of the body that is not quite adult and is constantly on the verge of change. Hurley further explains the term where ‘the prefix ab- signals a movement away from a site or condition, and thus a loss. But […] is also a move towards […] a site a site or condition as yet unspecified – and thus entails both a threat and a promise’.²³ Again this can be read as the child’s body (virtually of any age that is not considered adult) that moves away from the adult body and towards something other, an other that is inherently anxiety inducing.

While Hurley very much sees such a definition in terms of Gothic fiction and its legacy, examples such as John Starkey from the late sixteenth century, as seen in this collection, show how historical accounts use similar language and establish stereotypes that have then inherently adhered to problematic or ‘naughty’ children. In relation to this, it is worth noting that Hurley sees the transformative qualities of the abhuman body in often almost supernatural terms where the subject, in Gothic texts, is often one that sometimes becomes something monstrous, such as a vampire or werewolf. This is a supernatural transformation that resonates with the kinds of human becomings laid out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, where vampires, wolves, magic and the supernatural describe more the human and subjectivities other than those offered by ‘mankind’.²⁴ In the light of this, it is maybe not surprising that the supernatural, or at least the cloak of it, hangs around examples of the abhuman body of the child. Consequently, many of its problematic, anomalous qualities/gifts – bad or transgressive behaviour, violence, deceitfulness – are designated as being supernatural, evil or alien (not of this world) in nature.

The Gothic and the abhuman become very useful terms to describe the anomalous body of the various stages of not-adult in this collection, from the very young to those on the cusp of adulthood and/or sexual maturity. In fact, one could argue that the category covers all those that are ‘not yet’ adult no matter what their age – this is distinguished from those who are ‘no longer’ adult which could conceivably be applied to those no longer in command of their bodies or entering a ‘second’ childhood – and this collection leans towards that homogeneous reading, partly due to the limited size of the current volume. It is also worth mentioning that the anomalous, abhuman child’s body does also suggest elements of queerness in its configuration many of which will become apparent in the examples discussed in the book.

That said, sexual maturity and gender are featured within this application of the abhuman as an instigator or catalyst for anxiety in the social milieu around the child – something that is often imposed upon the anomalous body rather than a quality inherent to it. This can take the form of physical or psychic monstrosity caused by a form of becoming-womanhood but can equally signal a marked move away from masculinity and femininity into a queerness beyond gender categorization. This last is often configured as the child moving into a form of otherness that will never mature into an adult, a defined sexual orientation or gender categorization and remaining essentially ‘other’, or queer, forever, essentially exacerbating its propensity to be used as a site of adult projection and desire. As such, the child is sexually blank, queer, until adult fantasies are protected upon it. This queerness does not feature in many of the examples in this collection but is rather superseded by their anomalous state of otherness, the kind of monstrosity which is equally designated by adult society and similarly filled with its anxieties and, often transgressive, desires. Queer, as non-normative, is then an inherent part of the character of the abhuman child as are terms such as the abject, deviant, anomalous and even naughty as all of them describe a body that refuses to become adult, or even mature, under anything other than its own terms.

3. Anomalous Investigations

The chapters in this collection will be divided into four parts, with the middle two being two parts of a whole for reasons explained here. The division of the sections will largely follow the order established earlier with historical case studies at the beginning to set the stage for what is to follow. These precursors of the establishment of the category of childhood show societies trying to contain and control situations, and specifically ‘non-adults’, that they do not totally comprehend and so apply the default categories of their respective times. Consequently, this is rarely configured as simple bad behaviour or not following the rules as laid down by the adult population around them, although these features are inevitably involved, but are often explained through an association with dark, necessarily evil, forces. This creates an aura around all of them which sees them as equally vulnerable and contagious; a weak point open to the temptations of Satan and the supernatural but one that might also allow the evil to spread further and ‘infect’ others.²⁵ Alongside this and as the occurrences that happened during the nineteenth century, there are attempts to temper such superstitious interpretations with more rational explanations, either via the law and legal judgement or the budding science of psychology and analysis. However, as described later, reason has similar recourse to stereotypical language of the dangerous, deranged or just plain ‘naughty’, who are equally monstrous and estranged from adult society. The first part, ‘Historical Case Studies’, consists of four chapters that cover this change from overly demonic interpretations to those that attempt to apply reason and science yet fall into very similar traps of monsterizing the child.

‘The Possession of John Starkie’ by Joyce Froome investigates the 1595 case of Nicholas Starkie and his children, John and Anne. Starkie was a wealthy man and when his children fell ill, he employed the services of Edmund Hartlay to help make them better. However, on spotting a way to ingratiate himself into the Starkie household, and make a considerable amount of money, Hartlay produced such conditions that Nicholas came to regard his son’s perfectly normal misbehaviour as something deeply sinister. At the heart of this matter is the purposely skewed interpretation of John’s behaviour, and rather than seeing it simply as a child ‘playing up’, it was given a far more ominous meaning – one which was in line with the anxieties of the society of the time. The 1590s were still a time of religious tension in England and had begun with the most notorious witch trial of the times – the ‘Witches of Warboys’. Here the 10-year-old daughter of Robert Throckmorton, the Squire of Warboys, accused the 76-year-old Alice Samuel of being a witch and causing the fits from which she suffered. In 1593, Alice and her family, a husband and daughter, were found guilty of witchcraft and were later hanged.²⁶ The Starkie case plays directly into this rising fear of witchcraft, one that would see the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1604. So rather than searching further for the real reasons for John and Anne’s anomalous behaviour, necromancy provided a more ‘obvious’ answer.

This is followed by Renaud Evrard’s ‘The Naughty Little Children: The Paranormal and Teenagers’ which shows how these same tropes work in the mid-nineteenth century and the ways in which societal development actually reinforces certain themes rather than diminishing them. The Victorian period was particularly ripe for cementing the bonds between children and the supernatural, as the author observes:

At the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emerging field of psychology developed critical tools to explain somnambulistic states, behavioural automatisms and double consciousness. Several psychopathologistsrelied on teenagers to demonstrate the mechanisms behind the occult and the dangers it represents.²⁷

Evrard’s study deals with the case of Jeanne, a teenage girl from France, who was at the centre of a series of disturbances in a dwelling in the South of the country. The interpretations of the events that ensued are particularly interesting as they provide both scientific and paranormal explanations for the same phenomena. Jeanne was simultaneously seen as a hysteric, a gifted medium, the victim of an evil curse or a spoilt brat looking for attention. What they all have in common, of course, is that they portray the adolescent as something ‘other’ than normal; the levels of monstrosity involved might vary, but Jeanne is someone, or something, that needs to be controlled. Again, this shows how these various threads of the supernatural, cultural environment, science and medicine not only intersect at various points in time but become entangled so that the connections made at that nexus reverberate long after the original encounter.

Leo Ruickbie’s ‘I Was a Real Teenage Werewolf: The Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trial of Jean Grenier’ continues and develops the themes of cultural environment and individual agency. Jean Grenier was a teenage boy who confessed to being a werewolf and was subsequently imprisoned for life, actually a rather lenient sentence given the times. Convicted of witchcraft, murder and cannibalism, he can equally be seen, Ruickbie notes, as

a pubescent boy, mentally disabled, psychologically troubled, in a distressed condition, cast out from a broken home to fend for himself, with a difficult relationship with his father (to say the least), with unfulfilled romantic longings and a fantasy life that he could not distinguish from reality.²⁸

Unusually, Grenier continually confessed his own guilt, but in so doing he took some measure of agency over the situation unfolding around him. Unfortunately, in taking control of the narrative that the society around him was writing, he can be seen to have lost any sense of what was real or fictitious, and therefore, only reinforced the trope of childhood monstrosity that was placed upon him. Equally interesting here is the fact that many of the accusations were made by other children, not unlike that seen in the Starkie case and the Witches of Warboys mentioned earlier. Children ‘outing’ other children as monsters is something that continues in many such occult events up to the present day. As noted by Ruickbie, ‘The case also bears comparison with child-led witchcraft accusations, such as at Salem, Massachusetts, and so-called survivor accounts of satanic cult involvement in the modern period.’²⁹ This resonates with Kincaid’s idea of the child as a blank, and where different kinds of monstrosity can fill the ‘container’ of the ‘bad’ child.

The last chapter in this part, ‘Deviance on Display: The Feral and the Monstrous Child’ by Gerd H. Hövelmann, approaches the problems of categorization from a very different perspective – one that determines the exact nature of the child’s monstrosity. Of course, an integral part of determining how one type of monstrosity differs from another also inherently contains the criteria for how they are both unlike the ‘normal’ child, or as Hövelmann observes:

The following presentations and discussions focus on the kinds and extent of the respective abnormalities as compared with the ‘normal’, unobtrusive or average child and on the ways these children used to be presented to, and sometimes hidden from, an expectant public.³⁰

The notion of ‘presentation’ here is one that picks up on Kincaid’s idea of the ‘horror show’ child which is ‘the object of our gaze […] given little to do but enact the same old roles for our pleasure: the monster or acknowledged victim’.³¹ Seeing it as that is created, captured and gazed upon, one might even say consumed by ‘normal’ society. This highlights an important aspect of the monstrous child and one that is seen in all the historical cases mentioned earlier – that they all need to be observed to demonstrate or warn what is abnormal or not normal to the rest of society.³² Taking into consideration some of the earlier observations into the meaning of the monstrous child, we can then see how a culture needs to present its own ‘badness’ to itself, as a form of self-governance.³³ Interestingly, in ‘Deviance on Display’ a difference is made in how each type of monstrosity can be observed and the ‘freak’ of the deformed child is displayed ‘in circuses, in sideshows and specifically in freak shows’, while the feral child was more likely to be ‘presented by scientists to fellow scientists only, and in small private or semi-public academic circles’.³⁴ There are comparisons here with Evrard’s study and the explanation of monstrosity being controlled by either the realms of science – psychoanalysis and psychology – or more populist religious or spiritual interpretations. However, while one is more rational than the other, both constitute control and containment, with the medicalization of the monstrous child providing a more institutionalized system of othering.

Parts II and III, ‘Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Undead Child’ and ‘Factual Anxiety in Fictional Representations: The Monstrous Child’, respectively, are concerned with fictional representations of anomalous children, giving a more obvious form to the anxieties caused by youth and ‘non-adults’ in the society at large. More obviously, these sections describe the openly Gothic qualities of youth and the worrying qualities of the abhuman body that not only bother adult society but also threaten to literally consume it. Part II deals with