The psychologist, the psychoanalyst and the ‘extraordinary child’ in postwar British science fiction

Abstract

A sudden influx of portrayals of 'extraordinary children' emerged in British science fiction after the Second World War. Such children both violated and confirmed the new set of expectations about ordinary childhood that emerged from the findings of developmental psychologists around the same time. Previous work on extraordinary children in both science fiction and horror has tended to confine the phenomenon to an 'evil child boom' within the American filmmaking industry in the 1970s. This article suggests that a much earlier trend is visible in British postwar science fiction texts, analysing a cluster of novels that emerged in the 1950s: Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) and John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). It will be argued that the groups of extraordinary children in these novels both tap into newer child-centred assertions about the threats posed by abnormal childhood, underwritten by psychology and psychoanalysis, and represent a reaction to an older progressive tradition in which children were envisaged as the single hope for a utopian future. This article will ultimately assert that the sudden appearance of extraordinary children in science fiction reflects a profound shift in assessment criteria for healthy childhood in Britain from the 1950s onwards, an issue that had become vitally important in a fledgling social democracy.

‘We have come to be destroyed’: The ‘extraordinary’ child in science fiction cinema in early Cold War Britain

“…'Extraordinary' children films of the early 1960s made these fears manifest in the groups of uncanny and gifted children that they presented, managing to appeal to both teenagers and their parents in their ambivalent visions of the value and power of the rising generation. Village of the Damned and Lord of the Flies explored concerns about the increasing freedom being permitted to children through the growth of child-centred education and parenting, drawing upon the foundation laid by the novels upon which these films were based (Tisdall, 2016). But Children of the Damned and The Damned asked what kind of inheritance adults were passing down to their offspring, drawing explicitly on anxieties about the annihilation of the world and the curtailing of a generation born only 'to be destroyed'.…”

“…Utopian progressives postulated that setting children free by removing adult influence over their upbringing would create a generation that was better and wiser than the generation that had preceded it, which had caused the futile slaughter of the First World War. However, written after the Second World War, both of their novels display uneasiness with the progressive inheritance, depicting groups of children who are violent and destructive when left to their own devices (Tisdall, 2016). As Golding reflected in 1965:Before the second world war I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society.…”