Children's Literature

Vicious Infants is not a book that discusses children's literature. However, scholars who take a childhood studies approach will find that this book enriches our understanding of how childhood was viewed and used in the early nineteenth century in the US. In four dense chapters, Soderberg pairs literary and extra-literary texts to examine childhoods that were viewed as threatening to social stability, that is, texts that depict children in ways that reveal social and political anxieties. While this idea is not new or radical, challenging the assumption that all childhoods were White, protected, and pastoral continues to be necessary.

In the first chapter, "Bound Children: Sidestepping the Social Contract in Apprenticeship Literature," Soderberg reads William Apess's autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and Harriet Wilson's semi-autobiographical novel, Our Nig (1859), through apprenticeship contracts. Soderberg traces the history of legal minority back to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in order to highlight the status of the child as unable to control one's body and therefore unable to enter into contracts, with the exception of indenture, in which the future adult retrospectively agrees to the terms of the contract (a kind of prolepsis). Soderberg suggests that this same prolepsis is characteristic of the bildungsroman, using this similarity to juxtapose the literary texts and the apprenticeship documents. The ostensible goal of both the bildungsroman genre and apprenticeship documents is to move individuals from dependence (public dependence in Soderberg's examples of apprenticeship indenture and in the situations Apess and Wilson depict) to independent, socially assimilable adults. Yet Soderberg highlights the ways in which indenture both in the apprenticeship documents and the narratives by Apess and Wilson prevented independence, forcing the eventual adults to remain dependent on public welfare. In the cases of Apess and Wilson, the indenture that both protagonists experience does not result in the conventional ending of a bildungsroman—an independent self fully integrated into society. Instead, due to their racial identities, both protagonists exist outside the social organization.

The second chapter, "The Incorrigible Child: Juvenile Delinquency and the Fearful Rise of the Child Self," examines records from the New York House of Refuge (essentially juvenile prison) and child-rearing [End Page 192] advice from domestic manuals by Amos Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Heman Humphrey, and John A. Gere. Soderberg again traces back the use of the phrase "incorrigible child" to Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and further posits that in antebellum America, the term became an assertion "beyond interrogation by any other parties" (51). She concludes, "Under this model, criminalized children defy scrutiny because their bodies have been marked as unreadable" (51). Soderberg's argument in support of this conclusion illustrates a weakness that pervades the work: though Soderberg references specific sources, her discussion is too cursory to be convincing. More useful, though unsurprising, is her observation that inscrutability was most often ascribed to immigrant children and urban child laborers in factories who were beyond the reach of parental oversight.

Of most interest in this discussion is the analysis of the distinction between a child's interiority and exteriority. Drawing on the domestic manuals, Soderberg shows that corporal discipline, when necessary, was designed to shape the child's interiority. However, the profiles of inmates in the House of Refuge repeatedly describe the interiority of "incorrigible" children as "inscrutable," consequently out of reach of any disciplinary influence and therefore dangerous.

In the third chapter, "Prodigious Births: Black Infancy, Antebellum Medicine, and the Racialization of Heredity," Soderberg juxtaposes Sir Jonah Barrington's "Skinning a Black Child" (1827) and Henry Clay Lewis's "Stealing a Baby" (1843), comic stories that circulated widely within medical discourse and which sought to separate White paternity from Black bodies, with Susan Paul's The Memoir of James Jackson, the Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months (1835), thought to be the first biography by an African American author and the first biography of an African American child. Soderberg also weaves into this chapter discussions of Pip from Melville's Moby Dick as a third text that introduces and comments on the idea of "prodigy," which she defines as "the white tendency to treat Blackness as unpredictable and, more pointedly, as existing outside of genealogy" (83). Soderberg explains that contemporary medical practice was in a quandary regarding how to establish heredity when racial identity was primarily determined by skin tone. The various skin tones of Black infants confounded this practice. Soderberg also discusses how the practice of removing Black infants with congenital disabilities from their mothers for study by physicians also disrupted kinship relationships. Such practices denied a social future for Black [End Page 193] people, defining them as freakish. In contrast, Paul's biography follows the conventions of saintly child deaths best known in James Janeway's A Token for Children (1671–72). Paul's account of Jackson's life and death reorients the reader away from biological genealogy to spiritual kinship. Soderberg concludes her discussion of The Memoir of James Jackson by noting that Paul "outlines a system of care for children that does not value them for their potential as future citizens or parents or national saviors, but as the people they already are" (116).

The fourth chapter, "Too Many Children: U.S. Malthusianism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Novel-Ending Births," investigates the influence of Malthus on Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). Soderberg's argument establishes a contrast between the effects of sentimentalism and Malthusianism on understandings of childhood:

The child seen by sentimentalism and the child seen by proponents of Malthusianism prompt dramatically different orientations toward history. The former's insistence on childhood as a separation from the social order of the "adult" world establishes the basis for liberal individualism's singular forgetfulness of the past by suggesting that each new individual arises from a vacuum. The latter, as grim and potentially dehumanizing as it can be, is able to imagine birth as the index of an accumulating time. In short, it lets us see children not as retreats into either domestic bliss or sentimental catharsis, but as products of and participants in their social world.

(143)

Soderberg begins this chapter by discussing the marriage plot as a means by which an author signals a specific future, both for the individuals and the society they inhabit. However, Soderberg posits, "alternative models of childhood circulating in the period create different types of plot resolution and irresolution" (127); she uses Malthusian principles to highlight how reproduction can threaten social stability. Soderberg explains Stowe's adoption of Malthusian principles in reference to her little-known memoir, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, in which she takes the position that the Highland Clearances (violent enclosure of open land and removal of Scottish citizens) were justified by Malthusian principles of surplus population. Such principles, Soderberg argues, are also evident in the resolution of Uncle Tom's Cabin, with its advocacy for Liberian colonization.

When Soderberg turns to analysis of Dred using the lens of Malthusianism, she notes the ways in which White nuclear families are depicted [End Page 194] as predatory, alternately "piteous and monstrous" (144). Even in sentimental scenes, children are often marginal or the cause of suffering. Further, Soderberg argues that White childhood depicted in the novel is dependent upon the violence of slavery, concluding that Stowe recognized the historical and geographical limitations to reform efforts.

In the conclusion, Soderberg notes that after the Civil War, ideas about childhood evolved: responsibility for child welfare shifted from family and commercial interests to the state; the Fourteenth Amendment stabilized citizenship, while Darwinian ideas helped explain heritability. Wild (White) childhoods became something to be managed rather than a threat to a stable society. But this does not mean that childhoods were equal. Soderberg also notes that even into the twenty-first century, children are treated unequally due to race, ethnicity, or social class. In her brief discussion of Pauline Hopkins's Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), Soderberg emphasizes the sociability that supports the development of the two children, Judah and Winona, though that sociability does not serve as a synecdoche for citizenship. Instead, the characters "transform exclusion into new ways of being" (161).

I appreciated the interdisciplinarity of Soderberg's investigation and analysis. Drawing on texts from beyond the literary sphere enriches the discussion of how children were imagined and how ideas about childhood were used in multifaceted ways. However, the organization of the book as a whole, as well as the individual chapters, makes for a challenging read. The wide variety of texts from different discourses requires a developed argument that carefully establishes the connections between literary and extra-literary texts. In Soderberg's discussions, though, logical connections are often ambiguous, implied by juxtaposition rather than explicitly argued, and sometimes misdirected by unfortunate word choice. Too often Soderberg's editorializing about the extra-literary texts prompted skepticism in this reader rather than assent. I also found Soderberg's conclusions about the depiction of childhood—children who are marginalized due to poverty, race or ethnicity, and sometimes gender, remain marginalized as adults—remarkably predictable. Nonetheless, by juxtaposing literary and extra-literary texts, Soderberg is able to document how ideas about childhood circulated in antebellum culture and opens further gateways of investigation for children's literature scholars into the ways in which literary representations for children may participate in larger cultural patterns. [End Page 195]