Childhood as a Personal Myth in Autobiography

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown Uni ersity

he single !ost per asi e set of autobiographi"al !yths available to the Victorians
concerns childhood--a fact of central importance because the genesis, conventions, and problems of autobiography are so intimately related to this period of human life. What complicates this subject is that~ as several recent authors have shown, modern conceptions of childhood, immaturity, and the process of maturation are barely two centuries old. Earlier in human history one encounters few of our most basic assumptions about the nature of the child and his relation to the adult. The utch psychologist !. ". van den #erg thus points out that $pedagogic manuscripts of the past do not contain anything on the nature of the relationship between old and young. Even the greatest authors do not mention the subject,$ and, moreover. $before %ousseau, nobody ever mentioned maturation.&& What surprises us about even %ousseau&s discussion of the process of achieving maturity is that he conceives it as e'tremely brief, whereas today we assume it ta(es man~ years. )oo(ing at the historical evidence, van den #erg concludes that $nowadays two separate states of human life can be distinguished* the state of maturity, with all the mature attributes belonging to it, li(e birth, death, faith. and se'uality+ and the state of immaturity, which lac(s all these attributes.$ ,urthermore, the $invention$ of childhood seems to have been occasioned by the same forces which produce autobiography--the need and ability to choose between various roles. Thus, a major reason $for the child&s increasing childishness and for the origin, the lengthening, and the deepening of maturation~ is in $the multivalent pluralism peculiar to modern maturity.& ,or most of the history of civili-ation, the child has followed closely in the footsteps of a parent, adopting the same occupation, social position, se'ual role, and political and religious allegiance. Today, freer to choose--condemned to choose--among many alternatives the adult ma(es a series of decisions which succeed in establishing a $small and relatively simple domain in this comple' society+ to the rest we are blind, we do not see it, and so we can act as if it were not there.$ #ut wandering within a confusing welter of partially comprehended and often competing signsystems, the child has not yet learned to choose and survive. $That is e'actly what being a child means--to be defenceless against this multivalency and to shrin( bac( from it.$ .ositing a relationship between modern conceptions of childhood and the growth of autobiography in the star(est terms, one would state that at that point in human history when choices become so abundant, autobiography, the justification of one&s choices, becomes increasingly important as a literary mode. This relationship does not ta(e the form of simple cause and effect+ that is, the growth of modern conceptions of immaturity did not produce autobiography. ather it seems more li(ely that both the modern notions of immaturity and of autobiography are ali(e responses to a changing cultural situation in which the individual is increasingly re/uired to ma(e choices which earlier were rnade for him which, in other words, did not e'ist before.

0lthough the inventions of both childhood and literary autobiography owe much to modern pluralism, the role of childhood within this literary mode is even more comple' than this historical relation might suggest. 0s )u0nn Walther argues m her essay on $The Victorian 1nvention of 2hildhood,$ part of the comple'ity arises in the fact that many Victorians were able to hold, simultaneously, two contradictory conceptions of childhood* 3n the one hand the child was the source of hope, of virtue, or emotion* along with the angelic wife, he was the repository of family values which seemed otherwise to be disappearing from an increasingly secular world.... #ut at the same time, and of course much less obviously, the child was a hardship, an obstacle to adult pleasure, and a reminder of one&s baser self. "e might be innocent, untainted by se'ual (nowledge, uncorrupted by the world of business, free from the agony of religious doubt+ yet he was also potentially wic(ed and needed constant guidance and discipline. These contradictory attitudes towards childhood create, in turn, two tendencies in the portrayal of youthful e'perience by Victorian autobiographers. $,irst, is the need to emphasi-e childhood adversity, to portray oneself as not having been spoiled by overindulgence, even, in some cases, to have deserved hardship. 4econd, and in conflict with this, is the desire to present childhood as an Edenic, blissful state, a time of past blessedness, a world completely different from the grating present.$ ,rom this recognition follow several important points, the first of which is that one must be verv careful about relying upon such evidence to create a histor~v of Victorian childhood or child-rearing practices. The historian, in other words, must not only determine the accurac~ of such fre/uently harsh pictures of childhood, many of which conform as much to the demands of a literary mode as to actual e'perience, but he must also determine wh~ such stereotypes were culturally necessary. Within literary autobiography the Edenic conception of childhood also had a clear function, since, as Walther points out, $it provided the autobiographer with a wor(able approach to the past and it allowed him to create, in the richness of memory, a place of repose from the harsh &fast-hurrying stream of Time& which threatened him.$