The Swing

CHAPTER TWO

The Swing
From the maternally erotic to the sexualised child

“Is she like me?” Alice asked eagerly, for a thought crossed her mind, “there's another little girl in the garden, somewhere!”
“Well she has the same awkward shape as you'” the Rose said: ”but she's redder - and her petals are shorter, I think.”
“They're done up close, almost like a dahlia,” said the Tiger-Lily:” not tumbled about like yours.”
“But that's not your fault,” the Rose added kindly: “you're beginning to fade, you know - and then one can't help getting one's petals a little untidy.”

from 'Alice Through the Looking Glass', Lewis Carroll, 1872

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) took hundreds of photographs of little girls between the late 1850s and the late 1870s, including many pictures of Alice Liddell, the girl for whom he wrote the Alice books. With the hindsight of a modern perspective these images appear highly suspect, but to his contempories his photographs were seen purely as pictures of natural innocence. Indeed, Alfred Lord Tennyson said that the portrait of Alice Liddell as a Beggar Maid (see plate 6) was the most beautiful photograph he had ever seen. Jennifer Milam writes that: “Crucial to the concept of childhood as a state of innocence was the notion that sexuality is dormant, even non-existent in the pre-pubescent child” . This view has its roots in the 18th century, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau, amongst others, identified childhood as a separate state from adulthood and as a time of sexual purity. The Victorians consolidated this view with their cult of childhood, which was reflected in Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' and Kate Greenaway's books amongst others.

Awareness of children's natural sexuality is often denied or not recognised. Sigmund Freud wrote about this contradiction: “To suppose that a child has no sexual life - sexual excitations and needs - but suddenly acquires it between the ages of twelve and fourteen, would be as improbable, and indeed as senseless, biologically as to suppose that they brought no genitals with them into the world, but only grew them at the time of puberty. What does awaken in them at this time is the reproductive function. You are committing the error of confusing sexuality and reproduction and by doing so you are blocking a path to an understanding of sexuality.” Although many of Freud's theories about childhood sexuality have been quite rightly questioned, I feel that, just as some children may display violent tendencies, there are undeniably some children in whom one can see a more obvious sexual nature.

In Sally Mann's photograph of her daughter, 'Jessie at Five', (see plate 7) we see a young girl posing with her friends. She thrusts her bare chest towards the camera with a provocative twist of the hips. She is wearing lipstick, a pearl necklace and earrings in mimicry of an adult women, her gaze is direct, inviting, and defiant. The other children wearing smocked and gingham frocks appear childish in comparison. It seems to send out mixed messages. Can this child really be unaware of her sexual power? One feels uncomfortable looking at this image. Is it really OK to celebrate the sensual nature of a child's body or should we be afraid of its power? Children may not be conscious of adult sexual desires, but they can certainly be aware of the power that their sexuality can have in the adult world. Little girls use flirtatious behaviour to get what they want from their fathers. For example, a daughter who sits coquettishly on her daddy's knee trying to wheedle something from him is using her sexuality, although she would not call it that.

Part of the attraction of the child is that they are not actually sexual beings in the sense that they are not yet sexually active or capable of reproduction. Literary historian, James Kincard has written that: ”The child is the embodiment of desire but also it's negation, just as the child embodies sexuality but also negates it.“ The body of the little girl is seen as both sexual and not sexual - woman but not woman, safe but not safe. Roland Barthes describes this as a 'neuter', he says: “the 'neuter' is not passive, but a never-ending play of oppositional space between the sexual and the non-sexual, a back and forth oscillation.”

Children's bodies have become one of the great taboos of our age. How can innocence be portrayed today the minefield of different adult interpretations? The concept of childhood innocence, as defined as the opposite of adult sexuality becomes enticing, almost alluringly opposite. Innocence can suggest violation.

It is difficult for artists wanting to make work about children and for particularly for parents who take an innocent pleasure in images of their children's bodies. In Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, Carol Mavor discusses the concept of the maternally erotic . Describing Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph of 'The Shumanite Woman and her Dead Son' (see plate 8) she says: “Looking even closer at this picture, the voyeurism of our gaze at this child is doubled by the sensuality of the child: shirt rumpled up, a slightly arched back that gives way to a lovely rounded belly, delightful thighs that have fallen open in complete disregard.” She then goes on to compare this image to a contemporary photograph by the artist Sally Mann, The Wet Bed (see plate 9). In this we see Mann's daughter Virginia asleep, naked, legs splayed, the wet stain spreading out and with rumpled sheets pushed aside. The eroticism of the image is fiercely evident. Both Julia Margaret Cameron and Sally Mann, as mother-artists, speak a 'mother- tongue' that “enlarges our view of the relationship that motherhood, sensuality and sexuality share”.

Julia Kristeva speaks of the process of maternity as a graft - the child is always connected to its referent: “What connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft, once the umbilical cord has been severed?” In Stabat Mater, Kristeva presents not only a traditional account of the Madonna but also an almost poetic eulogy about her own experience as a mother of a newborn son. She constructs the article in two pieces that are typographically fragmented from each other. Placed alongside her academic discussion, in a bold type, is the passionate expression of her own maternality: “Head reclining, nape finally relaxed, skin, blood, nerves warmed up, luminous flow:


stream of hair made ebony, of nectar, smooth darkness through her fingers, gleaming honey under the wings of bees…”

Kristeva 's sensual description of her newborn child could just as easily be a lover's ode. It illustrates the difficulty we have with the language of love and sex, and the fine line between the erotic, the sensual and the sexual.

As we have already seen, the sexuality of children cannot be ignored. It demands to be noticed. Whether or not we are drawn to these images because they are erotic or because they unsettle us or because the seesaw between our feelings of desire and the discomfort that causes us, the fact is that they have an effect on us that cannot be denied.

Anna Freud said that adolescence was a 'developmental disturbance' - an alternation between contradictory behaviours - a kind of 'stop -start' coping mechanism. When children cross into that liminal space which is adolescence, the awareness of their sexuality is at its most poignant stage. Now the child becomes a sexual being, capable of reproduction, but still their sexuality is troubling, difficult for adults to accept. One minute they seem to be a child, the next an adult. It is a time full of contradictions. The idea of Lolita, the 14-year-old girl who wields sexual power over a grown man is both terrifying and horrific to adult audiences, because at the same time as she flaunts her sexuality she also displays such childish behaviours as sucking lollipops, throwing tantrums etc.

In 1997 there was an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called 'My Little Pretty' in which six female artists explored this subject. These artists acknowledge “the little girl within” at the same time as considering how both girls and women are treated in visual culture and the pressures that society brings to bear on females of any age. One of the artists in the show was Nicky Hobberman.

Using over-exposed Polaroid film to distort the colours, Hobberman takes portraits of young girls in strangely contorted poses; they twist and turn their bodies for the camera like adult fashion models. From these she paints the girls on to canvas giving them larger than life heads and faces that don't seem to fit with the distorted bodies. She enlarges their features - especially the eyes that stare directly out of the canvas and into the eyes of the viewer with a frankly disturbing gaze. The girl's clothes are painted as colourful patterns and the backgrounds are blanked out with flat vibrant colour. The girls are dressed as 'sweet confections' as the names suggest: 'Prune Whip' (see plate 10), 'Truly Scrumptious' or 'Peppermint Creams & Angel Dreams'. She presents the girls like mannequins in a shop window, the names inviting the viewer to taste the wares.

In an article entitled 'Children and Sexuality in the Visual Arts', Anna Burns, celebrating the representation of children's sexuality in art, suggests that Hobberman “rather than rejecting the image of the girl as a male sexual fantasy, has embraced it in an effort to subvert the message that it presents, no longer keeping it in the domain of the illicit”.

Freud often related the question of sexuality to that of visual representation. The stress falls on the problem of seeing. The sexuality lies less in the content of what is seen than in the subjectivity of the viewer. When John Everett Millais painted Cherry Ripe in 1879 (see plate 11), it was seen as the picture of innocence. Indeed when it was reproduced as the centrefold of the Graphic Christmas Annual it sold 500,000 copies. Didn't anybody notice how provocatively the girl was posed - her hands positioned in her lap where they cover her genitals, in such a way that they form the shape of a vagina? Even the title alludes to the cherry, a sexual metaphor for virginity, ripe for picking. To today's audience it seems impossible that this was viewed as an image of sexual purity. To our 20th century eyes, with our modern awareness of paedophilia, this image seems shockingly provocative.

As I have shown, the way we view the eroticised child is so full of contradictions.
In Sexuality and Field of Vision, Jacqueline Rose writes: “Artists engaged in sexual representation… draw out an emphasis that exists in potentia in the various instances they inherit and of which they form a part. Their move is not therefore one of (moral) corrective. They draw on the tendencies they also seek to displace, and clearly belong, for example, within the context of that post-modernism which demands that reference, in its problematical form, re-enter the frame”.