Jeunesse: Young People, Texts,
Cultures
Volume
12, Issue 2
Winter
2020
Posthumanism,
Parenting, and Agency: A Review of Naomi Morgenstern’s Wild Child
Morgenstern, Naomi. Wild
Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics.
U of Minnesota P, 2018. 280 pp. $25.00 pb. ISBN 9781517903794.
Posthumanism
and the posthuman have become increasingly popular theoretical lenses in
children’s literature and culture studies with their growing focus on embodiment,
which Maria Nikolajeva identified in 2016. Scholars
such as Zoe Jaques, Victoria Flanagan, and Elaine Ostry have all produced convincing arguments for “the
child” as a symbol of both human embodiment and humanist values, and as a site
for the contestation of that symbolism. Of particular concern to such studies
has been the depiction of “the child” in various historical and contemporary
works of fiction and the reading of such interpretations as symptomatic of a
growing social, critical, and philosophical disillusionment with humanist
ideals. Wild Child, therefore, enters a discourse which is already
producing rich and provocative material. Morgenstern takes parenting and the
parent-child relationship as the focus for her study, arguing that the depiction
of “wild” children within extreme parent-child relationships in literature
works to contradict humanist ideas about autonomy and agency. Such depictions,
Morgenstern argues, help to “precipitate a posthumanist
encounter with the ethics of reproductive choice and with the figure of the
wild child” (2). The lack of clearly conceptualized definitions, norms, and
perspectives for key concepts such as “wild,” “child,” “extreme parenting,” and
“parenting ethics” as they relate to posthumanism limits the scope of this
fascinating contribution to current discourse.
Morgenstern builds specifically on Cary
Wolfe’s work, which blurs the demarcation between humanism and posthumanism to
posit the child as a liminal figure in humanism, hovering between the “animal”
state of uncivilization [end of page 168] and
the ideal, rational humanist subject. She argues throughout the volume for an
understanding of the child as “situated precisely in [the] unstable, or wild,
terrain” theorized by Wolfe to lie “between the humanist and the posthumanist” (6) and uses both psychoanalytical and
deconstructive theory alongside posthumanist theory
to argue that this liminal child figure serves as a locus for textual
explorations of posthumanist parenting fears.
Interestingly, the collection engages with ideas of the posthuman as well as posthumanist theory, exploring how modern political and
technological complications—from the “designer babies” famously described by
Francis Fukuyama to changing conceptions of who and what can be a parent, which
Morgenstern explains is fundamentally dependent on ideas about
agency—contribute to a destabilization of humanist ideologies.
The volume begins with a long
introduction, laying out the theoretical framework for the application of
posthumanism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction to representations of
reproduction, parenting, and ethics. Five theoretical chapters then provide
close textual analysis of representations of posthuman reproduction and
parenting: Emma Donoghue’s Room (chapter 1), Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road (chapter 2), Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (chapter 3), Lionel
Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (chapter 4), and Denis
Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (chapter
5). An afterword works to pull these close analyses back within the theoretical
framework and explain the theoretical significance of the “wild child” as a
focus for representations of extreme parenting.
The fundamental weakness of this volume
appears immediately in the introduction. This long, multi-section chapter draws
on a range of theoretical frameworks, from feminist writers like Judith Butler
and posthumanist feminists Rosi
Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad to Derridian deconstruction and the psychoanalysis of Laplanche and Winnicott, to support an exploration of
parent-child relationships within posthumanist
contexts. The introduction attempts to cover the basic tenets of these theories
and how they work together in the analysis, while simultaneously exploring
their application to the primary texts analyzed in the rest of the volume. With
its focus not only on the posthuman and posthumanism, but also on
psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, and Levinasian
ethics, [end
of page 169]
the theoretical framework informing the analysis of these texts can be
difficult to follow—both in the chapters themselves and in the explanatory
subsections of the introduction—and at times the argument about posthumanism
becomes lost. Even more problematically, there is no clear articulation of the
concept of the “wild child,” and the introduction would benefit from a clear
discussion of how these multiple theoretical frameworks come together in this
one concept. The result is instead a series of highly perceptive and intriguing
textual analyses which lack a clear theoretical perspective to give them
coherence and significance.
In chapter 1, Morgenstern analyzes Emma
Donoghue’s Room and the position of women who choose or are forced to
become mothers in twenty-first century Western society. The discussion centres around the idea of relational ethics, arguing that
“the wild child—every child—must take a parent hostage in order for it to come
into being” (40). This opening chapter provides a starting point for the
discussion of ethics outside of existing humanist ideological frameworks and
suggests that depictions of violent dependency such as that found in Room
may signal a growing social concern with maternal roles and rights. This
discussion seems particularly apt in light of current controversies surrounding
women’s reproductive rights within the United States; while Morgenstern does
not directly engage with these debates, her analyses suggests fruitful
possibilities for future critical engagements with the impossibility of
responsible parenting in a posthuman age. Nevertheless, the chapter leaves the
reader wondering how posthumanist ethics in
particular come to bear on this dilemma.
Chapter 2, which focuses on Cormac
McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road, continues the discussion of
relational ethics, this time with reference to death and the demise of
patriarchal authority. This chapter shifts the focus of discussion from the
maternal to the paternal, reading the role of the father in The Road as
symbolic of the role of patriarchal authority in a posthumanist
society. With its focus on the extreme conditions of a post-apocalyptic world,
this chapter is the one most explicitly focused on the posthuman as well as
posthumanism. She argues, for example, that “the novel inscribes a distinctive
ethics of abandonment and self-mourning linked via the child—the
post-apocalyptic wild child—to the relinquishment of patriarchal grandiosity”
(77). Her discussion addresses how the release of the child figure from patriarchal
strictures as a result of the post-apocalyptic dissolution of [end of page 170] society in turn precipitates a
re-evaluation of the patriarchal roles that posthuman scholars, such as Rosi Braidotti, have identified
as central to humanist ideology.
Chapter 3 shifts the discussion to the
maternal, engaging Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and the thin line between
maternal love and maternal violence that is particularly visible in the context
of slavery. In analyzing A Mercy, Morgenstern tackles the difficult
subject of wildness as it relates to the early American history of slavery,
showing how the binary opposition between “wild” and “civilized” was
historically codified both socially and legally as a means of justifying racial
subjugation. In doing so, she suggests historical antecedents for current
social and legal uncertainties: by demonstrating how this legalized “wilding”
of racially Other children has robbed parents of non-violent options,
Morgenstern suggests that racially motivated violence may be a generational
inheritance. In this chapter, Morgenstern crystallizes the argument that has
been building through the preceding chapters, that “ethics emerges . . .
precisely when and where established legal and moral codes fail to comprehend
and protect” (103), suggesting that posthumanist
ethics emerge in the spaces where humanist moral and legal codes falter. In
other words, humanist legal and moral codification of racial difference denies
subjectivity and parental agency to racial Others, which in turn allows for the
emergence of a “wild” or “posthuman” ethics of violence, where only violent
parenting can provide the gift of subjectivity (104).
Chapter 4 extends the argument in chapter
3 even further, looking at the connections between responsibility and rights
that emerge in the extreme conditions of parenting a child criminal. In this
chapter, Morgenstern uses Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin
to explore twenty-first century anxieties about the conflicting rights of
parents and children that emerge from a growing culture of reproductive choice.
The novel tells the story of a woman whose lifelong ambivalence about
motherhood is eventually tested to the extreme by her teenaged son’s decision
to murder his classmates, teacher, father, and sister. Arguing that the novel
explores ambivalence about the increasingly blurred line between the
responsibilities of motherhood and the right to motherhood, Morgenstern
identifies a central question to posthumanist
parenting: “If I have a right not to be a parent, do I also have a right
to be one?” (123). In other words, Morgenstern asks whether increased rights
and access to [end
of page 171] choice
have a concrete impact on absolute parental responsibility. Once again,
however, the thread of posthumanism becomes somewhat lost in this chapter as
Morgenstern turns to psychoanalytical theory to support the argument.
Finally, chapter 5 rounds off the volume’s
thesis by examining questions of protection, rights, and consent as they relate
to children, through a comparison of Denis Villeneuve’s film Prisoners
and Alice Monroe’s short story “Miles City, Montana.” This chapter returns once
again to the idea of posthumanist ethics, by tracing
the breakdown in “liberal humanist models of individual right and
responsibility” (160). The chapter concludes the volume by reminding readers
that the posthuman ethical dilemmas of the twenty-first century are uncanny
echoes of those that have haunted previous generations: the questions of
ethics, reproduction, and parenting are not new, and they are unlikely to go away
anytime soon.
An afterword attempts to bring the
disparate threads of these chapters together, reminding the reader of the
connection between ideas of the wild (human/animal) child, and the murkiness of
parental rights and responsibilities. Morgenstern writes that “the classically
humanist (wild) child functions . . . as a way to cordon off the wild animal
from the civilized, rational adult, who is also a subject of language” but
“[t]he posthumanist wild child no longer functions to
conceal or disavow the ethical and ontological uncertainty that haunts” the
humanist subject (192). While this conceptualization of the wild child helps
somewhat to bring into focus the many different perspectives on ethical
parenting that the volume has covered over five chapters, the overall
relationship between this idea of the posthuman wild child and the posthumanist, deconstructivist, Levinasian, and psychoanalytic framework remains murky.
Overall, despite many interesting angles of exploration, the volume remains
limited by the wide range of approaches it attempts to weave together.
Of the many different strands explored in
this volume, one in particular is likely to be of the most interest to scholars
of children’s literature and culture: the exploration of changing social and
political interpretations of parent-child relationships in an increasingly
technological and global environment. Morgenstern’s observation that the
progressive blurring of the line between child and adult raises questions about
parental rights, agency, and authority is in line with many different current
discourses within children’s literature and cultural studies, from [end of page 172] arguments about digital media and culture
for young people to considerations of embodiment and intersectionality. The
volume raises a number of interesting questions for posthumanist
studies as well, bringing theoretical considerations about the future of
humanist politics and ideologies into the concrete realm of the family and
parenting. Of particular value for readers who are interested in the
application of posthumanist ideas is the discussion
of the child as a symbol of the potential for uncivilized, animal, irrational
wildness in every adult. These ideas appear in the work of Zoe Jaques, Victoria Flanagan, and others, and this volume
offers a fresh perspective by turning attention toward perceptions of parenting
as well as childhood.
In spite of its limitations, Wild Child
remains a valuable and intriguing contribution to current discourses
surrounding posthuman and posthumanist representations
of childhood. This is the only volume currently available which addresses the
representation not only of children but also of parents and parenting, thereby
stepping away from traditional examinations of the child in isolation. In fact,
the focus of this volume on texts specifically intended for adult readers
offers fresh insights into the analysis of representations of childhood more
generally. By reading these representations as symptomatic of shifting
perceptions of the child-parent relationship in a global, digital,
technological context, the volume extends these discourses in an interesting
new direction and offers much food for thought.
Works Cited
Flanagan, Victoria. Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction:
The Posthuman Subject. Palgrave, 2014.
Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the
Biotechnology Revolution. Picador, 2003.
Jaques, Zoe. Children’s
Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg. Routledge, 2015.
Nikolajeva,
Maria. “Recent Trends in Children’s Literature Research: Return to the Body.” International
Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 9, no. 2, 2016, pp. 132-45, doi: 10.3366/ircl.2016.0198.
Ostry, Elaine. “‘Is He Still
Human? Are You?’: Young Adult Science Fiction in the Posthuman Age.” The
Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 28, no. 2, 2004, pp. 222-46, doi:
10.1353/uni.2004.0024.
Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? U of Minnesota P, 2009.
[end of page 173]
Dr. Jen Harrison currently teaches writing and
literature at East Stroudsburg University. She also provides freelance writing,
editing, and tuition services as the founder of Read.Write.Perfect. She completed her Ph.D. in
Children’s and Victorian Literature at Aberystwyth University in Wales. After a
brief spell in administration, Jen then trained as a secondary school English
teacher and worked for several years teaching secondary school English, working
independently as a private tutor of English, and working in nursery and primary
schools. She is an editor for the peer-reviewed journal of children’s
literature, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, and publishes
academic work on children’s non-fiction, YA speculative fiction, and the
posthuman.
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of page 174]