One of the foundational gestures of the disability rights movement was the rejection of the common description of people who live with physical or mental impairments as "eternal children." This paper argues that the contradictions inherent in applying this trope to adults amplify the contradictions inherent in applying it to children themselves. From its heyday in in the 19th-century "Golden Age" of children's literature to its afterlife in 20th-century disabling rhetoric, the fantasy of childhood as stasis requires denying the fact of growth.
In her novels and didactic writing Maria Edgeworth links moral and financial credit in an attempt to turn a traditional idea of the corporate personality of the family into the foundation of commercial agency in a credit economy. Rejecting the individual as incapable of surviving in a credit-based market, Edgeworth's novels about the marriage market are fantasies of the larger marketplace, attempts to shape the kind of person required by England's credit-based market. The "charm of probability" with which Edgeworth enchanted her reviewers was both a formal device of realism and the foundation of the informal credit economy that she inhabited and advertised. Edgeworth's emphasis on rationality and predictability, however, excludes the irrationality inherent to consumer desire, one basis of the market itself. In Belinda, therefore, Edgeworth splits the commercial world into two separate and radically contradictory systems of representation-realist and Gothic. The marketplace is a benign and rational place governed by Adam Smith's laws, rules of probable behavior that are both moral and economic, and, at the same time, it is a realm of improbable behavior and insatiable consumer desires that are depicted through the conventions of the Gothic.
Although Philippe Ariès and the historians who followed him have made us familiar with the “invention of childhood,” we may still think of adulthood as a natural category. But that is not the case. Rather, around the turn of the nineteenth century, adulthood becomes the object of the kind of specialized cultural attention that childhood had become over a century earlier. One place where we can see this change happen is the work of Henry James. The adult is not a fact of nature that James exploits but rather an idea that he helps to construct, both through the way he talks about the people who read his novels and through the way he constructs characters within them. As twenty-first-century readers, we may assume that there have always been adults-only books, and that we recognize them when we see them because they foreground things like sex and formal complexity while minimizing things like didacticism. This article questions this assumption both through looking at some of James's arguments for age-leveling fiction for adults and through considering some representations of adulthood in his own fiction. Reading an “adult” novel such as What Maisie Knew in the context of works by contemporary authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, who did not write for an age-leveled audience, reveals how Henry James constructs a notion of what it means to be an adult and, by extension, what it means to write for adults. In his work, “the adult” is constituted, counterintuitively, through the gaze of the child.
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