Mapping the Cultural Geography of Childhood or, Performing Monstrous Children

This past holiday season, I received a Christmas card with an illustrated map on the front labeled "the Geography of Christmas" (Hanson). I had recently finished reading Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday, and was struck by how succinctly this one illustration graphically represented Nissenbaum's 381-page book. The illustration locates both the real (the North Pole, Bethlehem, 34th Street, and Vermont) and the unreal (Toyland, Bedford Falls, Y's Men, and Where Fruitcakes Come From) within metaphorical space. Juxtaposing cultural references (a dotted line travels from "Our House" over an icon of a river and through pictured woods to "Grandmother's House") with unabashed consumerism (F.A.O. Schwartz and Nieman Marcus are both represented), the graphic illustrates the American, public construction of the holiday. The map does not pretend to be a "real" representation, nor does it even touch upon the religious substance of Christmas, although the artist does include tongue-in-cheek religious references. The card does not present a particular Christmas, nor any one individual's experience. Instead, using the rich metaphor of geography, the ilustration explores common constructions and understandings of a cultural event. It maps the contiguity of Christmas-the juxtapositions and mixtures of images and icons-- arranging seemingly unrelated objects within the performative space of the holiday. This essay can be understood much in the same manner-as an exploration of the geography of childhood, with a specific focus-evil, infected, and monstrous children. Stories of "bad" children, children who steal, rape, sell drugs, or perform multiple murders fill today's news media. Indeed, the construct of the "evil" child occupies a prominent space within the performative geography of childhood. Childhood is not universal. Humans, indeed most species, must necessarily experience biological immaturity, but childhood is the manner in which a society understands and articulates that physical reality. Viewed in this light, the child becomes a metaphor-a pattern of meaning-and childhood can be conceived of as "culturally specific sets of ideas and philosophies, attitudes and practices" (James and Prout 1). Unlike gender or race, childhood is a temporary and temporal classification; however, it can be understood in much the same manner-as sets of power relationships revolving around different axes. Much in the way that early feminists separated gender from sex and deconstructed understandings of "natural," the diverse ways in which American culture shapes and understands the child can be unpacked and explored. This essay explores the dark side of the construction of the child: as Goya declared, "the sleep of reason produces monsters!" (qtd. in Jenks 118). I approach this research from the perspective of a performance theorist with a focus in children's theater and educational drama, and with the central thesis that childhood exists as a type of performance space-a cultural geography-in which identities are performed on, in, and through child bodies. As Joseph Roach states, "The social processes of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as culture, may be carried out by a variety of performance events, from stage plays to sacred rites, from carnivals to the invisible rituals of everyday life. To perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit" (xi). I am concerned here with the manifestations of evil children through and in cultural performances. First, I turn my attention to the character of Rhoda Penmark in Maxwell Anderson's Bad Seed. Anderson's play and the later movie contain a narrative of the child as pure evil, highlighting the "social tendency of parents to view their children as alien intruders" (Kincheloe 164). This xenophobic response to childhood can be seen elsewhere, including Children of the Corn, The Exorcist, and Lord of the Flies. …