Modern understandings of the child generally emphasize its innocence. Yet from the 1950s onwards we see a proliferation of stories about malevolent children in literature and film. This dissertation examines one strand of these narratives: novels about murderous children.
Through close readings of five British and American novels – 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) – the dissertation shows the tensions that arise when the child is represented as a killer in non-supernatural literary narratives.
Young highlights what she calls the unaccountable nature of the murderous child. That is, these characters remain unknowable, and they are neither punished nor redeemed when the novels end. This distinguishes these stories from supernatural narratives about malevolent children, which tend to offer paranormal explanations, and endings in which the child is destroyed or “cured”. The murderous child novel can therefore be understood as a particularly subversive type of narrative. By representing the dangerous child as an unsolvable problem, these novels underscore the ways in which the child more generally is constructed as familiar and obvious, but also as alien and inscrutable. Furthermore, by destabilizing our image of the child, the novels also disturb the things that the child has come to represent, such as reproduction, growth, and futurity.
Anna Young successfully defended her dissertation on March 24, 2023.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: "Choose one or two literary texts to consider that the question of the child is also a question of the adult: how has the twentieth-century use of the child served to define adulthood—its self-knowledge, its sense of sexuality, its understanding of self-determination and ethics?"
Evaluation committee
Dr. Jen Baker, University of Warwick (first opponent)
Professor Kevin Ohi, Boston College (second opponent)
Professor Rebecca Lynne Scherr, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
Professor Tina Skouen
Supervisors
Dr. Monica Pearl, University of Manchester
Professor Nils Axel Nissen, University of Oslo
Professor Emerita Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, University of Oslo