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Knowing Children: Romanticism, Education, Childhood
Cathy Collett
I am curious about children; I am particularly curious about the ways in which children are
curious. What forms of knowing and knowledge are specific to children? How are knowing and notknowing intertwined in the experience of children? What problems ensue when adults attempt to
negotiate the child’s often ambivalently felt desire for knowledge, a desire that is as much the child’s as
their own, because they too were once a child and because that psychic past inevitably inflects
themselves and their relationships with others? Most important: what is the cultural history of curious
children, and of the “difficult knowledge” that makes them both fascinating and problematical? These
are the questions that form the nexus for my doctoral project, which focuses on the complex
representation of the curious child in Romantic literature and culture. “Difficult knowledge” – a term
coined by the eminent cultural theorist, Deborah Britzman – is a key concept in my project. Difficult
knowledge encompasses what children desire to know, but do not; what children do know, but resist;
and what children half know, but cannot articulate. While Britzman’s discussion of difficult knowledge
focuses on twentieth-century material, my thesis – entitled “Knowing Children: Romanticism,
Education, Childhood” – will explore the discussions of childhood education that are so prevalent in
Romantic literature; in particular, the work of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley.
In exploring childhood knowledge I will focus specifically on the tension between a child’s
desire to know and a desire not to know. The latter desire is not mere indifference but is itself a form of
knowing in a negative mode, in roughly the same way that, for Freud, forgetfulness is not necessarily the
antithesis of memory but instead a special kind of remembrance called “repression.” The wager of my
doctoral project is that Romantic literature and culture is strewn with and energized by affectively rich
scenes in which adults must confront the knowledge and non-knowledge of children or child-like
figures. In keeping with centrally Romantic preoccupations, my project will address a range of
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questions including gender, sexuality, pleasure, mortality, and loss; questions that have a particular
resonance in relation to children, as an unawareness (or at least a limited awareness) of such issues is
often presumed to be a defining characteristic of what makes knowledge “childish.” Steven Bruhm
argues that “there is currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and should stay)
innocent of sexual desire and intentions” (Bruhm and Hurley ix). This narrative is often responsible for
creating the difficulty of childhood knowledge, as my analysis seeks to demonstrate through a careful
consideration of a range of Romantic texts. In other words, my work will challenge this narrative of the
child’s indisputable innocence and question the ways in which “children” and “childhood desire” are
forms of difficult knowledge that adults ambivalently negotiate and seek to resist–and never more so
than in that strange and amorphous space that we call the “classroom.”
While many scholars (Ariés, Kamuf, Kincaid, Foucault) have demonstrated how contemporary
conceptions of childhood can be traced back to significant cultural shifts that occurred in the years
leading up to and including the Romantic period, little work has been done specifically on the role of
children in Romantic conceptions of knowledge. My dissertation addresses that gap by bringing together
psychoanalytically inflected cultural theory with Romantic and eighteenth-century critical texts. This
conjunction is supported by recent work by Faflak (2006), who argues that contemporary psychoanalysis
owes its origins to Romantic era writings. Britzman, Sedgwick and Bruhm speak directly to the question
of what children can, should, and do know, and it is their work that helps me investigate the articulation
and exploration of analogous queries in Romantic treatises on education. To that end, my first chapter
will focus on the question of difficult knowledge in the pedagogical writings of Mary Wollstonecraft
and her great predecessor and rival, Jean-Jacques Rousseau –cultural theorists in their own right who
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occupy antithetical positions vis-à-vis children and pedagogy. Although Rousseau wrote Emilé, his great
narrative on education, prior to the Romantic period, his radical ideas surrounding the instruction of
youth greatly influenced Romantic thought. Indeed, Kamuf and others argue that Rousseau’s text laid
down, “if not for the first time, then in the most forceful fashion up to that point, many of the principles
that remain touchstones of modern pedagogy” (Kamuf 244). Wollstonecraft certainly understood the
importance of Rousseau, problematical as it was, for the cultural policing and production of “boys” and
“girls.” But her impatience with the gendered politics of her French predecessor sparks other questions.
For example, to what extent is the pedagogy developed in Rousseau’s wake devoted to the mastery of
difficult knowledge, leaving a legacy–still with us today–in which education means, precisely, providing
students with the tools necessary to sublate the desires, losses, and knowledges born in childhood and
bourn by children? In what ways is Romanticism not an extension of Rousseau’s view of education but
in fact a complex critique of its principles, a critique rooted in the affirmation of difficult knowledge,
and the roles it plays in the psychic and social lives of adults?
While the beginning of my dissertation merges contemporary and Romantic theories addressing
the Child’s capacity for knowledge, resistance to knowledge, and the conflict of knowledges that
characterizes the Child’s pedagogical relationships, subsequent chapters will examine the ways in which
Romantic literature provides answers to the theoretical questions I tackle in the first section. Building on
preparatory work I did during my MA thesis, my dissertation will include a chapter on Mary Shelley’s
fiction – in particular Matilda and Frankenstein. Both Shelley and her parent’s (Wollstonecraft and
Godwin) work is rich with scenes of pedagogy and raise important questions about boundaries of youth
and childhood knowledge.
Works Cited
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