The naturalized changeling in Victorian literature of childhood: Fairy raids on realism

The Naturalized Changeling in Victorian Literature of Childhood: Fairy Raids on Realism examines the use of the folkloric changeling motif in British literature for and about children from 1850 to 1911. In the changeling legend, a human child is abducted and replaced by a supernatural being, usually a fairy, which bears a discernibly different temperament and appearance from the "real" child. On the basis of these alterations in appearance, behavior, or ability, the child is deemed a changeling substitute, "not ours." At its deepest level, the changeling narrative is a normative tool that defines the normal by negative exception: the changeling substitute is everything that a human being and a "real" child is not.; The body of this dissertation examines what I term the literary "naturalization" of the changeling, a process whereby the folkloric changeling is accommodated to the conventions of realism and used to explore a particular "otherness"---bodily or mental, class or socio-economic, and racial or national---that the folkloric changeling already embodies. Each of the body chapters engages on some level with one of the recognizable "othernesses" that the changeling represents: The Impaired Changeling examines the impaired body or mind of the changeling in the works of Dinah Craik and Lucy Clifford; The Street-Changeling posits an intense connection between descriptions of the folkloric changeling and nineteenth-century street children in the work of Henry Mayhew, Charles Kingsley, and Arthur Morrison; and The "Colonial" Changeling explores the similarities between the changeling and the cultural hybrid (Anglo-Indian) in the best-known works of Rudyard Kipling and Frances Hodgson Burnett.; The reason for our enduring interest in the changeling story, I argue, lies in its use as a vehicle for defining cultural notions of the "normal" child, notions that are surprisingly similar across time and place. The non-child status of the changeling constitutes the imaginative core of the legend in all its forms; it explains the deeply ambiguous reaction to the changeling that allies these diverse Victorian and contemporary texts, and the barriers to the changeling's incorporation into "normal" life that exist even in the naturalized retellings of the tale.