Strange, deformed, and piercingly beautiful, the child acrobat
Mignon sprang onto the public stage in 1795. No child at all, but a
figment of Goethe's fiction, Mignon appeared and reappeared in
countless forms and guises over the next century. The meaning of
this compelling creature is at the center of Carolyn Steedman's
book, a brilliant account of how nineteenth-century notions of
childhood, like those expressed in the figure of Mignon, gave birth
to the modern idea of a self. During the last century, a change
took place in the way people in Western societies understood
themselves - the way they understood the self and how it came into
being. Steedman tracks this development through changing attitudes
about children and childhood as these appear in literature and law,
medicine, science, and social history. Moving from the world of
German fiction to that of child acrobats and street arabs in
nineteenth-century Britain, from the theories of Freud to those of
Foucault, she shows how the individual and personal history that a
child embodied came to represent human "insideness". Particularly
important for understanding this change is the part that Freudian
psychoanalysis played, between 1900 and 1920, in summarizing and
reformulating the Victorian idea that the core of an individual's
psychic identity was his or her own lost past, or childhood. Using
the perspectives of social and cultural history, and the history of
psychology and physiology, Strange Dislocations traces a search for
the self, for a past that is lost and gone, and the ways in which,
over the last hundred years, the lost vision has come to assume the
form of a child.
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