The Victorian obsession with the child is also often, in the world of literary criticism at least, an obsession with death, whether the death of the child itself or simply the inevitable death of childhood as a seemingly Edenic state of being. This study seeks to consider the way in which the child figure, in texts by four authors published at the end of the nineteenth century, is aligned with an inversion of this relationship. For Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, George MacDonald, and Henry James, the child is bound up instead with un-death, with a construction of death which seeks to remove the finitude, even the mortality, of death itself, or else a death which is expected or anticipated, yet always deferred. While in “The Child in the House” (1878) and “Emerald Uthwart” (1892), Pater places the child at the nexus of his construction of a death which is, rather than a finite ending, a return or a re-beginning, Lee's interest in the child figure's unique access to a world of art, explored in “The Child in the Vatican” (1883) and “Christkindchen” (1897) culminates in a dazzling vision of aesthetic transcendence with “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child” (1906). MacDonald, for whom death is already never really death, uses the never-dead child figure in At The Back of the North Wind (1871) and Lilith (1895) as an embodiment of his own distinct engagement with aestheticism, as well as a means by which to express the simultaneous anticipation and depression he experienced in contemplation of death. Finally James, in What Maisie Knew (1897), explores the child's inherent monstrosity as he crafts the possibility of a childhood which consciously refuses to die. This study explores a trajectory in which the child’s place within such reconsiderations of death grows increasingly intense, reaching an apex with MacDonald’s fantastic worlds, before considering James’s problematisation of the concept of the un-dead child in What Maisie Knew.

Scholarship on the cultural status of the child in America has taken diverse and fruitful forms, yet there exists a significant ellipsis within theories of filmic spectatorship regarding cinematic children. This study engages the child figure's relation to the cinematic apparatus and analyzes spectator responses to the child's presentation as a desiring subject and desired object. Within contemporary American culture, the child figure generates at once a mise-en-scène of desire and a mise-en-abime of potential stigmatization, self-abjection and shame. The vexed relation to the image of the child that characterizes the contemporary adult citizen and, more pointedly, the adult spectator, is a symptom of the contradictory discourses of childhood at play in contemporary American media and within its political bodies. The Columbine shootings, the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, the Catholic Church scandals, many well-publicized child abductions, and countless occurrences over the past decade have produced a climate of moral panic over children's endangerment. Yet, more than ever, the eroticization of children's bodies has inundated cinematic and other media productions, generating anxieties within the adult spectator concerning the propriety of gazing at children. Juvenile desires suggests that the dissonances produced by the contradictory signposts of moral panic and sexual objectification have too often given rise to a homophobically polarizing model of the adult spectator: one the one hand, the ostensibly heterosexual spectator whose relation to the child image is aesthetically distanced, moral, and nostalgic; and on the other, a perverse, likely homosexual spectator whose relation is libidinal, regressive, and genitally oriented. As a theoretical intervention and a reception study, this dissertation examines the term pedophilia as one both culturally over-determined and critically under-investigated. The deployment of the term pedophilia has the rhetorical effect of reducing the complex relations sustained among adult spectators and children to a space of inarticulate abjection or criminality. The dissertation proposes that a deconstructive queer theory can unsettle the recalcitrant association of pedophilia with homosexual pathology, and thereby afford a complex and nuanced account of the roles cinematic children play in generating visual and narrative pleasure across gendered and sexually oriented subject positions. / text

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