Childhood imagined: The exploration and exploitation of childhood in Spanish-American literature
Description
This dissertation examines the ways in which childhood is exploited and explored in a number of Latin American literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We return repeatedly to the manner in which authors connect the nation to childhood. They often do this on a rhetorical level, equating the child's potentiality with that of the nation, or drawing an analogy between the parent-child and state-citizen relationships. Chapter one examines two nineteenth-century works in which childhood is emphasized in an effort to privilege horizontal, fraternal relationships over biological families. In these works by positivist authors, parents are easily replaced by father-like figures. Chapter two traces the battle for the mind of the child between the family and the state in mid- to late-twentieth-century works. The state utilizes familial rhetoric and sees itself as a replacement for the biological family, seeking the allegiance of children, even as it claims to protect the family. The third chapter is an exploration of the child as representative of marginalized sectors of society in the mid-twentieth century. These authors utilize children to represent the effects of racism, industrialization, sexism and civil war on the marginalized. Often, a protagonist's recapitulation of his or her childhood, or the author's exploration of the characters' childhoods, is meant to parallel--indeed to inspire--a reexamination of the current situation of the nation as a whole, or the plight of a particular sector of society. Finally, in chapter four we examine works in which the status of the artist in society is equated with that of the child. While the myth of the child as medium for the artist persists in some of these works, in others it is the vulnerable status of the child which is emphasized. The artist and the child are endangered and pursued precisely because their creativity threatens the established order. We conclude that such a utilization of childhood is a dehumanization of the Latin American child, not unlike that performed on literary Amerindian figures in the name of constructing a national identity