This thesis examines the remarkable range of farcical prints that were marketed for 1
children in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Evoking controversial theatre plays, these
prints picture slap-stick, sexually nuanced comic scenarios that do not seem in keeping with
contemporary' convictions that the up-bringing of children was a key means to secure the future
of the state. Yet there is evidence to indicate that this printed imagery did play a role in the
education of middle-class children. Such contradictions open up significant questions about the
reshaping of middle-class identity at a crucial moment in the emergence of the capitalist state.
Indeed, the problem that this study investigates emerges from late seventeenth-century
debates about the didactic function of comic prints and plays. Defenders of these forms argued
that they effectively inculcated social norms-particularly mercantile ethics, gender roles, and
class distinctions—in young viewers. Those who attacked the social role of this material, on the
other hand, stated that it provided viewing pleasures that actually subverted these pedagogical
intentions.
Through an analysis of the prints themselves, I examine the ways in which the visual
pleasures of these forms lured viewers in order to trap them within moral meanings. While this
may have been their intended function, however, I also found much evidence that the
enjoyment of farcical forms could, and did, overflow didactic restraints.
It was this subversive potential that made comic forms particularly threatening to civic
and church leaders of the day. In fact, a number of children's prints were linked to a series of
farces that were banned from Amsterdam's theatre in the 1670's. With this, children's prints can
be situated in historically specific contests about the control of urban spaces and populations.
Throughout this thesis, the function of children's prints is not discussed solely in terms
of either discipline or subversion, however. Rather, I argue that it is precisely the unresolved
tension between comic pleasure and didactic instruction that characterizes these prints and their
uses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10127 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Vanhaelen, Engeline Christine |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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