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In Western society we tend to think of childhood as a discrete stage of life, separate and different from adulthood. However, historians tell us that the way we view childhood is not the way other cultures in other times and places have viewed it. In his classic work Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariés examines childhood in seventeenth-century France, and he makes the rather astonishing claim that in medieval society, childhood did not exist; instead, children were considered to be small adults and were depicted as such in the art of the period (33-34, 128). However, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this view began to change. During this time, two views of childhood emerged, both of which emphasized the child as being different from the adult. One view considered children to be sweet and simple and thus a source of amusement for adults (129). The other view considered children to be "fragile creatures of God who needed to be both safeguarded and reformed" (133). In the years since the publication of Centuries of Childhood, Ariés's thesis has been largely discredited by medieval and early modern scholars as a misreading of late medieval culture; what Ariés took to be the lack of a concept of childhood was actually a view of childhood radically different from ours (Adams 2-3). Nevertheless, Ariés's contribution to childhood studies lies not so much in the validity of his thesis as in his recognition of childhood as socially constructed and constantly reconstructed (Adams 2; Jenkins 16).
As Henry Jenkins says, "[O]ur modern sense of the child is a palimpsest of ideas from different historical contexts," including medieval, Romantic, Victorian, and modern (15). In the eighteenth century the concept of childhood was strongly influenced by the writings of John Locke, who held that young children were essentially blank slates on which the tenets of morality and reason could be inscribed (West 3). With the advent of Romanticism, the idea of the innocent child was resurrected. This view, as propounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth among others, considered the child to be innately good and in need of protection from the corruptions of adult society (West 4). This view of childhood as a time of innocence and goodness exerted a strong...