The Imagined Child
Date
2016
Authors
Richards, Jo-Anne
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Abstract
This PhD comprises a work of fiction and a dissertation, both of which explore childhood, children and parenthood.
The Imagined Child, the novel, closely examines the nature of parenthood, the expectations
inherent in the parent-child relationship, and the responsibilities that society imposes on
parents. It explores the strains of guilt and blame that surround all primary relationships:
every child is damaged in some way – through nature and nurture. How they deal with that
damage determines the kinds of adults – and ultimately the kinds of parents – they become.
The dissertation approaches childhood as a literary device. It explores the ways in which four
novelists from different historical periods have characterised and thematised childhood. It
presents ‘childhood’ as a social construct and considers the ways in which childhood and
parenting have changed in recent, Western history. It then focuses on the research into and
literary representations of children in Africa to explore the versions of childhood inherited by
African, and particularly South African, children and how this differs from American or
European models.
Textual analysis was employed to examine the representation of childhood in four texts:
Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), Harper
Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day (2002).
An examination of research and literature shows a very different trajectory for childhood in
Africa than in Europe, and reveals that childhood on the continent has never been consistent,
in life or literature. There is, in other words, no universal “African childhood”.
The literary children of South Africa are examined not only to show how differently
childhood is experienced in diverse segments of society, but also to measure the temperature
of the times.
The differing versions of literary childhood, and their varying treatments, provide a gauge for
the zeitgeist in South African society from the 1990s. The dissertation argues that an
examination of literary children provides insight into the development of a new democracy.
The dissertation and the novel, taken together, suggest that through the real and imagined
children of literature can be gained a sense of ourselves.
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Citation
Richards, Jo-Anne (2016) The imagined child, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/19674>