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September 04, 2004
Growing pains
The Devil in short trousers
On the 50th anniversary of Lord of the Flies, Felipe Fernández-Armesto ponders childish evil
“Life is scientific,” proclaims Piggy in Lord of the Flies before becoming a martyr to his own mistake. William Golding’s novel terrifies readers with a story of our alternations between science and savagery. It is crueller than any of the barbarities its characters commit. It is frank about a subject we have made taboo: childish evil. It makes explicit what our hearts deny: childhood is a state to be feared, beyond adult comprehension.
This was a typical 20th-century neurosis, aroused by Freud, who convinced adults that the childish mind seethed with unconscious horrors, occluded by the defects of memory and the psychology of escape. But Golding also activated deeper, older anxieties: adults have always been equivocal about their offspring, unsure whether to class them as imps or angels. Education hovers between two mutually contradictory options: should we draw children’s natures out, or fence them in? The murder of Luke Walmsley, 14, by his schoolmate Alex Pennell, 16 — Pennell was detained for life last month — is the kind of news story that taps into our worst fears of what the young are capable. The charity ChildLine, which has announced a drive to raise £1 million to enable every child who calls to speak to a counsellor, recently said that calls to its helpline about bullying had reached record levels: more than 31,000 children and young people spoke to a ChildLine counsellor about bullying in the 12 months up to March, compared with just over 21,000 in the previous year.
In Western tradition, debate about this has been acute and unresolved since the 18th century, when ethnographical data collected by European explorers first excited the confusion that Golding so brilliantly exploits: between childish and “primitive” minds. Really, there is no such thing as a primitive mind, because all human beings are the products of equally long evolution. But 18th-century science classified some highly traditional societies as inherently infantile, partly to justify imperial paternalism and partly because of unwarranted inferences about ways in which “natives” really did resemble children: they were, after all, often pre-literate, uninhibitedly imaginative and easily impressed.
One of the great projects of the period was the quest for “natural” man. Interest in such problems as the origins of society and the effects of civilisation stirred savants’ anxiety to examine specimens of unsocialised primitivism. “Wolf-children” seemed, for a while, to be likely to supply the raw material. Linnaeus — the botanist who devised the modern method of classifying species — supposed that wild children were a distinct species of the genus Homo. Plucked from whatever woods they were found in, wrenched from the dugs of vulpine surrogate-mothers, they became subjects for experiment in language and manners.
All the experiments failed. Boys supposedly raised by bears in Poland continued to prefer the company of bears. “Peter the Wild Boy” whom rival members of the English Royal Family struggled to possess as a pet in the 1720s, hated clothes and beds and never learnt to talk. The “savage girl” kidnapped from the woods near Songi in 1731 preferred fresh frogs to the viands of the kitchen of the Château d’Epinoy and was for a long time more adept in imitating birdsong than speaking French. The most famous case of all was that of the “Wild Boy of Aveyron”. Abandoned in infancy in the high forest of the Tarn, he survived by his own wits for years until he was kidnapped for civilisation in 1798. He learnt to wear clothes and to dine elegantly, but never to speak or to like what had happened to him. His tutor described him drinking fastidiously after dinner in the window of the room, “as if in this moment of happiness this child of nature tries to unite the only two good things which have survived the loss of his liberty — a drink of limpid water and the sight of sun and country”. In practice, the feral child and the noble savage proved equally disappointing, equally intractable.
In the 19th century, the data assembled by science armed intellectual warfare between optimists and pessimists. Believers in human perfectibility favoured freedom; sceptics sanctified order. Education became a crucible of politics. Dialogue between Mr Midshipman Easy and his father over the relative merits of reward and repression caricatured the collision. Optimistic parents, who invested love in their children, produced revolutionaries. Bakunin’s father, for instance, smothered his children in affection and indulged them unfailingly. Lenin and his siblings were their father’s “constant” chess partners.
Commonly, however, repression worked its intended effects and the maxim “teach them or beat them” passed from one generation to the next. “Punish with real severity,” advised a French theorist of 1890, on the grounds that children had no instinct beyond the fear of suffering. When repression failed, generation gaps gaped. Naturally, children and servants became allies in the little wars of family life. The young Baron Wrangel, who distinguished himself as a general in the Crimean War, pledged that when he and his sister grew up “all our serfs will be freed and we will never treat them or our children unjustly”.
The re-evaluation of children was like that of women: an effect of industrialisation. The exploitation of women’s and children’s labour was one of the scandals of the early Industrial Revolution, but the gradual effect of mechanisation was to take these groups out of the labour market and into fairyland. While womankind ascended a pedestal erected by men, children were treated as a distinct rank of society — almost a subspecies of humankind. Artists and advertisers deified them and confined them to special shrines within the home. These were uniquely Western cults, barely intelligible in places where women and children were still men’s partners in production.
Images of delicately nurtured femininity or cherubically curly-haired childhood looked enviable. But there were disadvantages. Chimney sweeps did not naturally become water babies, nor street urchins turn into Jesus’s sunbeams without assiduous modification along the way. The romantic ideal of childhood was more often coerced than coaxed into being. Societies that freed children from the workplace tried to corral them inside schools. The “doll’s house” and the “secret garden” proved, in practice, to be oppressive pens from which the women and children of the 20th century struggled to escape.
As disease spared more of them for longer lives, children absorbed more time, emotion and, of course, study. In 1909 the Swedish feminist Ellen Key proclaimed the rediscovery of childhood: children were not just “little women” and “little men”. They were different from adults; by implication, according to the doctrine of “mental development”, they were intellectually inferior. This was almost certainly a false insight, which children deeply resented. Particularly unhelpful were the still-enduring consequences for Western education. Schoolchildren were deprived of the challenge of hard work because psychology said that they were unequal to it. Schools classified children according to age, prescribing the same lessons, at the same levels of supposed difficulty, for everybody at each stage, with retarding and sometimes alienating effects. Typically, children’s literature of the era defiantly proclaimed children’s moral and cerebral superiority. Free of adult company, they cracked crimes, saved lives, reversed disasters.
On the face of it, Golding, who, as a schoolmaster, knew the best and worst of children, set out to traduce the tradition. His castaways revert to pre-social chaos, in which life is nasty, brutish and short. “What are we?” asks Piggy, longing for rescue by adults. “Humans? Or animals? Or savages?” But we know that Piggy’s question applies just as much to grown-ups as to boys. Grown-ups “would be” different, some castaways hope: they “wouldn ’t set fire to the island” or quarrel or break Piggy’s specs. But we know they would. They do. Golding realised that the psychologists were wrong. It is not children’s merit or misery to be unlike adults: it is their tragedy to be all too much the same.
Lord of the Flies: 50th Anniversary Edition by William Golding is published by Faber & Faber (£12.99; offer £10.39)
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TV Alert: Lord of the Flies (UK) on TCM (Read 2,761 times)
