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The Naughty Child in Nineteenth-Century American Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Jadviga M. Da Costa Nunes
Jadviga M. Da Costa Nunes
Affiliation:
Jadviga M. da Costa Nunes is Assistant Professor in the Art Department of Muhlenberg College, Allentown Pa. U.S.A. 18104.
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Extract

During the first half of the nineteenth century many Americans began to promote the visual arts as a means of defining and fostering national identity. One highly significant consequence of this new aesthetic was the rise of a native genre art which depicted uniquely “American” customs and characters. Focussing upon and interpreting the daily world of average citizens in an emphatically optimistic and ideal manner, these works of art celebrated the virtue, vigor, simplicity, resourcefulness and republicanism of American society. They tended chiefly to represent rural American activities – maple sugaring, quilting frolics, scenes of harvest and the like – and to rely upon a standard cast of characters – the farmer, the housewife, the peddler, the trapper, for example – each of whom exemplified a particular trait or traits that seemed distinctly “American.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , August 1987 , pp. 225 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 The literature on the history of both European and American childhood over the last couple of decades is impressive. Philippe, Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert, Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962)Google Scholar, originally published in 1960, was the landmark study which broke important new ground in attempting to reconstruct the social history of childhood through the ages. Other significant overviews are: George, Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London: The Warburg Institute, 1966)Google Scholar; Lloyd, de Mause, ed. The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974)Google Scholar and Greeneaf, Barbara K., Children Through the Ages: A History of Childhood (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978)Google Scholar. More specific to the discussion of the history of the child in America in the nineteenth century are the following: Michael, Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social Historical Perspective 2nd edn (New York; St. Martin's Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Philip, Greven Jr., The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar; Joseph, Kett, Rites of Passage, Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar; Mary, Cable, The Little Darlings, A History of Child-Rearing in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975)Google Scholar; Elizabeth, George Speare, Childlife in New England 1790–1840 (Sturbridge: Old Sturbridge Village, 1973)Google Scholar; Bernard, Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Oscar, and Handlin, Mary F., Family Life; Youth and the Family in American History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)Google Scholar; Robert, Bremner, ed. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; McGlone, Robert, Suffer the Children; the Emergence of Modern Middle class Family Life in America 1820–1870, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971Google Scholar; and Slater, Peter Gregg, Views of Children and Child Rearing During the Early National Period, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1970Google Scholar. One of the earliest studies on the subject which is still very useful is: Calhoun, Arthur W., A Social History of the American Family 1776–1865, 3 vols. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1917).Google Scholar

2 For a discussion of images of children in American art see: Heininger, Marylynn Stevens et al. , Century of Childhood 1820–1920 (Rochester: The Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, 1984)Google Scholar; Brant, Sandra and Cullman, Elissa, Small Folk: A Celebration of Childhood in America (New York: E. P. Dutton and the Museum of American Folk Art, 1980)Google Scholar; Humm, Rosamund Olmsted, Children in America: A Study of Images and Attitudes (exhibition catalogue) (Atlanta: The High Museum of Art, 1978)Google Scholar; and Fink, Lois, “Children as Innocence from Cole to Cassatt,” Nineteenth Century, 3 (Winter, 1977), 71–75.Google Scholar

3 Wishy, , The Child and the Republic, 22Google Scholar. See also: Heininger, “Children, Childhood and Change in America 1820–1920,” in Century of Childhood, 1–32Google Scholar. An example of the older attitude is revealed in John, Wesley, Sermon on the Education of Children published in 1780Google Scholar (quoted in Philip, Greven Jr., ed., Child-Rearing Concepts: Historical Sources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 61–62)Google Scholar. Wesley instructed parents to “teach your child that they are fallen spirits; that they are fallen short of that glorious image of God, wherein they were first created; that they are … more ignorant, more foolish, and more wicked than they can possibly conceive. Shew them that, in pride, passion, and revenge they are now like the devil.”

4 Quoted in Heininger, , “Children, Childhood and Change in America, 1820–1920,” 2Google Scholar. For further discussion, see Wishy, , The Child and The RepublicGoogle Scholar, Chapter I.

5 Quoted in Scott, Donald M. and Bernard, Wishy, eds., America's Families A Documentary History (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 200.Google Scholar

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7 Greven, Protestant Temperament, provides an excellent analysis of this issue.

8 Abbott, Jacob, Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young (New York: Harper and Row, 1871), 103, 142Google Scholar. While the older Calvinist desire completely to “break” the child's spirit still continued to exist, that attitude increasingly lost support, and people who upheld such a point of view were on the defensive after 1830.

9 Ackerley, George, On the Management of Children (New York: Bancroft and Halley, 1836), 61.Google Scholar

10 Quoted in Cable, Mary, The Little Darlings, 101, 153.Google Scholar

11 This trend was also greatly encouraged in the second quarter of the century by the developing “Cult of True Womanhood” that accentuated the mother's role in child-rearing and concentrated the female sex's activities and identity solely around domestic and maternal responsibilities. The vast majority of middle class women found child-bearing and rearing the central and only socially respectable activity in their lives. As a result, the methods and success of their efforts in raising children was a constant and pervasive pre-occupation for a large segment of American society. For further discussion see McGlone, , Suffer the ChildrenGoogle Scholar; Barbara, Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” in Michael, Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social–Historical Perspective, 313–33Google Scholar and Nancy, Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

12 von Huebner, Baron, Promenade au Tour de Monde (Paris: Hachette et cie., 1871)Google Scholar. Quoted in Handlin, Oscar, This Was America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 304.Google Scholar

13 Quoted in Cable, , Little Darlings, 153.Google Scholar

14 Gurowski, Adam G., America and Europe (New York: D. Appleton, 1857)Google Scholar. Quoted in Calhoun, , The American Family, II, 70.Google Scholar

15 Wyse, Francis, America: Its Realities and Resources (London: T. C. Newby, 1846), 295Google Scholar. Conversely, some in America noted with little envy the more restrictive child-rearing methods abroad. Larcom, Lucy wrote in A New England Girlhood (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1889), 104Google Scholar: “We did not think those English children had so good a time as we did; they had to be so prim and methodical. It seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were allowed to romp and run wild.”

16 Quoted in Calhoun, , The American Family, II, 64.Google Scholar

17 William, Bridges, “Family Patterns and Social Values in America 1825–1875,” American Quarterly 27, 1 (Spring, 1965): 3–11Google Scholar, and Rapson, Richard L., Britons View America: Travel Commentary 1860–1935; (Seattle and Washington: University of Washington Press, 1971).Google Scholar

18 MrsDuncan, Mary G. L., America As I Found It (London: J. Nisbet and Company, 1852)Google Scholar. Quoted in Calhoun, , The American Family, II, 67Google Scholar. McGlone, Suffer the Children, 245Google Scholar, similarly notes that what the British criticized as “precocity” in a child, the Americans admired as “smartness.”

19 It is to be taken for granted that they refer primarily to the male child. It was presumed that the female child whose adulthood would ideally be contained within the domestic realm had little cause to develop similarly strong individuality or resourcefulness or to exhibit an “unladylike” degree of spirit and audacity. Accordingly, the general absence of “naughty” female child imagery reflected precisely the prevailing contemporary stereotypes regarding sexual roles and identity. For further discussion of the history of the young American woman, see: Berkin, Carol Ruth and Norton, Mary Beth, Women of America: A History (Boston: Houghton, Mifilin, 1979)Google Scholar and MacLeod, Anne Scott, “The ‘Caddy Woodlawn’ Syndrome: American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century,” in Century of Childhood, 97–119.Google Scholar

20 Sangster, Margaret E., The Art of Homemaking (New York: Christian Herald Bible House, 1898), 174.Google Scholar

21 Wishy, , The Child and the Republic, 32–33.Google Scholar

22 Mount had explicitly stated, “Paint for the many, not for the few.”

23 New York Mirror, “The National Academy,” Saturday (17 June, 1838), 407.Google Scholar

24 Hills, Patricia, The Painter's America: Rural and Urban Life 1810–1910 (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1974), 21, 23Google Scholar, also noted this fact. She stated: “At a time when the collective strength of black men loomed as a potential to be reckoned with, his reduction to an impotent plaything of children must have been a reassuring motif. Through the distribution of popular prints, moreover, the image of powerlessness received wide currency.”

25 Quoted in McGlone, , Suffer the Children, 267.Google Scholar

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29 Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar discusses these issues at length. See also: Griflin, Clifford S., Their Brothers' Keepers; Moral Stewardship in the United States 1800–1865; (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960)Google Scholar and Hawes, Joseph M., Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nznteenth Century America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

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31 The children of the urban lower classes were a prominent and troublesome issue for the many members of the middle class throughout the nineteenth century. The growing problem of juvenile delinquency and street-gang violence was an alarming and emotional situation that frightened many citizens. Middle-class society feared for the souls of these children, but such spiritual concern was combined with more materialistic worries regarding potential harm these classes might inflict upon their property and persons. Blythe shared and dwelled upon these darker notions in his imagery. For further discussion of contemporary attitudes regarding urban youth see Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America.

32 William, and Robertson, W. F., Our American Tour: Being a Run of Ten Thousand Miles from the Atlantic to the Golden Gate in the Autumn of 1869 (Edinburgh: W. Burness, Printer, 1871), 10.Google Scholar

33 This is a complex issue that I am merely summarizing. For a more complete discussion of the transformations in aesthetic taste and style see: The Museum, Brooklyn, The American Renaissance 1876–1917 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979)Google Scholar and Morgan, H. Wayne, New Muses; Art and American Culture 1865–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978).Google Scholar