Search

This article investigates the metaphorical representation of child sexual abuse (CSA) in contemporary children's and young adult gothic works, focusing on the popular Series of Unfortunate Events and Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series. It argues that because of the upsetting nature of the issue and the numerous myths surrounding it, cultural production often uses the gothic figure of the monster who preys on children to address CSA indirectly, and identifies this strategy in the above series. It reveals a distinctly sexual charge to the monsters' victimisation of the children in both sets of narratives and explores their tendency to perpetuate CSA myths such as that of the perpetrator as a monstrous stranger. In conclusion, it considers how these narratives also challenge CSA myths and offer models of resilient child survivors, and it draws on cognitive cultural theory to theorise potential reader/viewer responses. Through its metaphorical imbrication of real-world brutality and dark fantasy, the Gothic is ultimately theorised as potentially affording more scope than realist treatments for touching on issues of transgression for wider and younger audiences, and sometimes in affirmative ways that move beyond merely recirculating myths and panic.

In the late-nineteenth century the origins of the modern concept of child sexual abuse (CSA) started to emerge in a set of intersecting medical and legal theories concerning the notion of sexual harm to children, especially in the new science of sexology. The concept was also shaped in sensational journalism and popular fiction which dramatically exploited the medico-legal theories in works that reached a wide audience. Within this set of overlapping discourses, this article identifies the developing characterisation of the abuser, or ‘paedophile’, as an outsider or stranger in order to provide distance from the uncomfortable reality that CSA is typically perpetrated by family members or others well known to the victims. The article also argues that much writing about sexual harm to children, including the factual treatments, often drew on the dark metaphors of gothic writing to avoid addressing this difficult subject explicitly. In this way the figure of the monster came to stand in for the perpetrator of sexual crimes against children, with the result that the paedophile was portrayed not just as a social outsider, but as a monstrous stranger – creating a persistent, detrimental myth which kept social attention away from the most common types of abuse. Royal Irish Academy (RIA) 2021-04-08 JG: Unpublished when uploaded -- double-check citation info and issue date on check date; DOI; set -text.

The epigraph is from M.P. Shiel’s novel of global catastrophe, The Purple Cloud (1901), in which a massive volcanic eruption produces a cloud of lethal gas that wipes out humanity down to a single remaining man. As the lone survivor, Adam Jeffson, wends his erratic way through what has become a planetary necropolis, he notices that not only has the volcanic cloud annihilated all living creatures, it has also stopped all the clocks — symbolically ending time. Thus the ‘thousand weird fore-fingers’ are the clock hands all frozen concurrently with the moment of extinction, ‘keepers of the end of Time’.1 Nor is this macabre synchronicity coincidental; rather the text exhibits a thematic preoccupation with the nature of time and its putative end that engages with late nineteenth-century thinking and debate on the subject. As Stephen Kern observes, ‘From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new ways of thinking about and experiencing time.’2 These ranged from new technologies such as the telephone and phonograph to social developments such as the global standardization of time, from scientific theories debating the age of the earth to philosophical speculation about the experience of human subjectivity in time.