The Virtual Child, or Six Provocations on Children’s Literature and (Pre-) Digital Culture

Abstract

Anxieties about children and the virtual might feel unique to the digital age, but as this essay clarifies, a longer, pre-digital history of “the virtual child” demonstrates that the child itself has long been “virtual,” not merely—and only recently—confronted by the perils of virtual space. Such a history illuminates the peculiarity of our current cultural moment, wherein worries about the digital virtual collide with the child’s enduring construction (by adults) as a virtual being that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, both promising and threatening. Children’s literature often aims to instill virtue, or moral quality, in the child, while mapping and regulating their Virtù, or power, creativity, and possible lack of morality. The child’s virtuality has been the subject of adult concern for centuries, such that worried attempts to manage the child’s virtuality end up producing virtual spaces for this management to take place. Frequently, these virtual spaces take shape inside imperialist narratives of colonial exploitation that assign distinctly gendered tasks to its participants, grooming them for heterosexual adulthood. Such narratives survive today, yielding not only apprehensions about and hopes for the virtual child in a digital era, but also new forms of resistance to these enduring conventions.