Perpetual Childhood: Mental Disability and the Representation of Childish Women

Perpetual Childhood: Mental Disability and the Representation of Childish Women Allison Giffen Western Washington University Seminar: “Childhood Teleologies: Climates of Growth”If childhood is indeed a site in which... [ view full abstract ]

Perpetual Childhood: Mental Disability and the Representation of Childish Women

Allison Giffen

Western Washington University

Seminar: “Childhood Teleologies: Climates of Growth”

If childhood is indeed a site in which time unfolds teleologically, working ineluctably toward adulthood and power, what happens when that progress is represented as troubled, stalled, or even reversed? Such representations flirt with the precariousness of this teleology, and through that flirtation, respond to and, potentially, alleviate anxieties about that precariousness. In Elsie’s Children (1880), volume six of the Elsie Dinsmore series, Martha Finley offers just such a representation, in her depiction of Enna Dinsmore Johnson. Largely responsible for a fall that cripples her daughter Molly, Enna, too, takes a tumble and suffers a head injury in which she loses her memory, leaving her with the “reasoning powers scarcely equal to those of an ordinary child of five or six.” After her accident, “[t]he poor lunatic,” becomes a figure of horror and pity, wandering about the estate cooing gibberish to her dolls upon whom she dotes extravagantly. With a kind of Dante-esque symmetry, Enna is punished for her bad mothering with a rehearsal of motherhood, consigned to a perverse, perpetual childhood.  I argue that the character of Enna encourages interesting questions about the relationship between what Gillian Brown terms “the contingency of childhood” and the ways childish behavior is variously read as either endearing or horrific. Finley’s reliance on childhood to represent mental disability is not isolated, and images of women as children appear intermittently throughout nineteenth-century literature, perhaps most obviously in the creeping, crawling narrator of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” This paper will explore with ways such representations potentially challenge or reinforce progression narratives that naturalize childhood.