Murderous child characters disrupt norms – and get away with it

Modern images of the child often emphasize qualities such as innocence and vulnerability. Nevertheless, the second half of the twentieth saw an upswing in representations of dangerous, frightening children in literature and popular culture. This apparent paradox has inspired a growing field of research on narratives about monstrous children.

My dissertation seeks to add to this field by examining one strand of these narratives: the murderous child novel. Rather than attempting to ascertain why some real-life children commit acts of violence, the motivation behind this project was to consider what representations of “deviant” children might reveal about normative expectations regarding childhood, adulthood, and the family more broadly.

Whereas existing research often focuses more on supernatural texts, this project examines stories written in a more realistic mode. My hypothesis was that an absence of supernatural causes and solutions in these novels might create a unique challenge to idealized images of the child. The study therefore consists of close readings of the five most well-known murderous child texts of the second half of the twentieth century: William March’s The Bad Seed (1954), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984) and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003).

Children behaving badly

The dissertation is the result of a long-standing interest in the figure of the unruly child in adult literature. I am interested in cultural investments in the figure of the child, and in the ambivalent reactions that children who misbehave elicit. My master’s thesis was on gender-nonconforming child characters in American literature. For my doctoral project, I turned to child characters who cause trouble in other ways: through acts of violence.

In my work, I take a social constructionist perspective view of the child. By this I mean that I focus on the ways in which we create “the child” and “childhood” through how we treat and talk about children in a specific historical and cultural context. While social constructionist perspectives on gender and sexuality have become relatively mainstream, categories such as “child” and “adult” are more often taken for granted as natural and inevitable. By representing children who behave in frightening and unpredictable ways, narratives about monstrous children make visible norms that we ordinarily might not notice.

The inaccessible child

In my approach, I have been particularly interested in questions relating to literary form. This means looking not just at the thematic concerns of each novel, but how the stories are told and structured. This perspective has often been absent from existing research on monstrous child narratives, which tends to take a more socio-historical approach.

Through close readings informed by narrative theory, I argue that the child character is consistently made inaccessible in the texts. We either have little access to their fictional minds, or what we do know is wholly unreliable. Through various narrative strategies, the murderous child remains an unsolvable mystery.

In the dissertation, I call this the “unaccountable” nature of the murderous child and ask what it would mean to read in a way that accepts, rather than tries to resolve, that which is unknowable in these texts.

Building on these formal insights, I suggest that rather than being explorations of factors that might make children resort to violence, the novels point to the inscrutability of the child more broadly. Though we often view children as open books in no need of explanation, the world of childhood is also foreign to adults. It is this fundamental tension in the adult-child relationship that I suggest the novels play on.

Dismantling identities

In addition to identifying this sense of unreadability, I show how the murderous child disturbs established categories of identity. One way the novels do this is by upsetting binary divisions between childhood and adulthood. Murderous child characters are often constructed as unusually mature for their age, or permanently childlike. In this way, they disrupt expectations of linear growth.

Another thread that I trace through the novels is the ways in which they challenge conventional ideas of gender and sexuality. Again, this is achieved in different ways in the different texts.

The two novels written and published in the 1950s – The Bad Seed and Lord of the Flies – seem especially interested in conformity. They feature child characters who are excessively normative in their gender expression. Through exaggerated displays of femininity and masculinity, they point towards the performative nature of “girlishness” and “boyishness”.  The later novels – We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Wasp Factory, and We Need to Talk About Kevin – all feature murderous adolescents who are characterized as androgynous or ambiguously gendered. The Wasp Factory, for instance, features a protagonist who has been raised as a boy, but who discovers at the end of the story that he was assigned female at birth.

In terms of sexuality, the novels are notably lacking in heteronormative couplings, and instead explore queer or transgressive desires, lingering particularly on the connections between sex and violence.

The murderous child as a queer figure

Paying attention to the ways in which the figure of the murderous child challenges norms, the dissertation draws on queer approaches to the child. These theoretical perspectives consider how our constructions of the child are intertwined with our understandings of gender and sexuality.

In his book No Future (2004), Lee Edelman considers the symbolic function that the child performs in modern culture. Edelman argues that we conceive of the child as an idealized future citizen, and that this image of the child is used in turn to regulate adult behaviour. That which might threaten the child’s innocence – including, but not limited to, non-reproductive sexualities – is oppressed or erased. As a current example of these mechanisms, we can note the role that accusations of “grooming”, that is to say the corruption or sexual abuse of children, play in anti-gender rhetoric.

While Edelman views the child as a heteronormative force, other theorists have viewed the child as a potentially queer figure. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s study The Queer Child (2009) explores the fundamental strangeness of modern conceptions of the child. Stockton points to a series of paradoxes, including the fact that we typically conceive of the child as non-sexual and heterosexual, and both a future adult and the opposite of an adult. These contradictions might help explain why the figure of the child seems to generate so much cultural anxiety.

With these queer perspectives in mind, we can read monstrous child narratives as disturbances not only of the ideal of the innocent child, but also as interrogations of other forms of identity.

Getting away with murder

Another transgressive feature that I find across the primary texts is that the murderous child is seldom punished or reformed. This other form of being “unaccountable” distinguishes my selected texts from supernatural narratives, that often offer conclusions in which the monstrous child either dies or is somehow cured.

Typically, the ending of a narrative is where the conflict or problem that has driven the story forward gets resolved. The murderous child novel, however, challenges this type of conventional narrative closure.

The dissertation suggests that these non-resolutions are the result of an ideological impasse. On the one hand, there is the impetus to destroy that which threatens the image of the child. On the other, the threat to the image of the child is itself a child, and therefore cannot be harmed. Supernatural narratives can avoid this deadlock, either through paranormal resolutions, or because the child is no longer a child per se, but another kind of creature, such as a vampire or zombie. Stories that take place in worlds that look more like our own, however, do not have this option. We thus see how literary form and ideology intersect; these novels can be read as destabilizing not just romanticized images of the child, but also narrative convention.

All in all, I propose that the murderous child novel pushes at the borders of the narratable, asking which stories we can tell about children, and which may be untellable.