| Throughout the United States, countless students enrolled in college and high school English courses today are reading short stories, novels, and plays that feature the abuse, mistreatment, and even murder of children. Child literary characters often experience trauma as a result of the obsessive natures of the main characters of the works in which they appear; however, the varieties of psychological pain to which these young characters are subjected are not usually considered significant enough to deserve sustained critical discussion either in the classroom or in the pages of literary criticism. Unless the child is actually a major character in a particular work, events that take place are analyzed primarily in terms of how they affect or are affected by the major adult character(s) in a work. Moreover, while our culture values children more than ever before and often takes into account the effects of trauma on them, there is still an overall lack of understanding---and in some instances, serious misunderstanding---about both the short and the long-term effects of trauma on children.; Along with literary critics, secondary school teachers and professors of English will often evade discussion of childhood trauma in literature, either because it is an uncomfortable subject for them personally or because it is still unrecognized as an area that merits critical investigation. However, by employing the theories of child psychoanalysts such as John Bowlby and D. W. Winnicott to support my assertion that children must experience contact comfort if they are to grow into emotionally healthy adults, this dissertation investigates how children who serve as characters in literary works have been traumatized by the adult characters in the works in which the children appear. Included in this dissertation are a comparative treatment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and Herman Melville's Pierre: Or the Ambiguities, and individual treatments of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita . |
