THE MASOCHISTIC CHILD AS DEPICTED BY HENRY JAMES

Henry James as a boy

I’m back to reading “The Queer Child” by Kathryn Bond Stockton.  The title of the chapter I just finished is “The Smart Child is the Masochistic  Child: Pedagogy, Pedophilia, and the Pleasures of Harm.”  The text to be analyzed is Henry James’ novella, “The Pupil”, which I haven’t read.  Evidently it is very subtle but loaded with dynamite that has exploded in our modern times.  The story dates back to a period when wealthy people engaged same-sex tutors, usually highly educated but impoverished, expected them to develop affection for their pupil but also to impose discipline by beating.  The two are assigned a room and then pretty much ignored.  

Socially they both occupy an ambiguous status that is pre-adult — indeed meant to delay adulthood for the child — but barely post-child for the tutor who is assumed to be sexless since there is probably no appropriate equal partner in the household.  They’re often young men.  The most explosive word in the chapter, used sparingly, is the acronym NAMBLA.  When I first heard that word and asked about it, I got about the same reaction as I got as a pre-teen asking about sodomy.  Not the guilty defense that I got when I asked about masturbation, but a mix of confusion and censorship.  This, of course, made me only more curious.

The idea proposed by Stockton is that the pair learn to “enjoy harm,” when harm is defined as growing up (losing protection) and initiating through enlightenment.  I accept this definition — even see how it could lead to actual sex — but I think it mostly applies to the situation above, the tutor.  It is very hard to enlighten a class of 36 defiant teens who think they know everything.  Only a masochist would try.

Of course, the story, in typical Jamesian style, is subtle, merely tinted skin (blushing) rather than full penetration.  Intercourse CAN be considered as conversation, but the shadow of coitus is in the background, pulsing.  Relationships are tied into social status, family status, wealth, and health.  So the tale resolves when the family (the FATHER) goes broke, the tutor will have to be dismissed, the child proposes to go with him (imitating marriage), and then the child dies of a heart attack.

I’m not sure that the Stockton chapter defends man/boy relationships as much as it tries to explain them.  Is the boy made into a wife?  Is he pressed take a female gender-role, accommodating the wishes of his tutor?  Women in our culture are pressed to be lesser, to accept constraints and harm (child-bearing), to expect punishment, abandonment and broken hearts.  Might as well enjoy all this, dramatize it, glamorize it, imply magical spells, and willing sacrifice.  It worked for Mother Theresa.

Me in 1962

In real life my choice, not quite conscious, was to be a woman/boy companion to a charismatic man.  (This won’t work if the man is “lesser” though lesser men will look for a women or boy who will take this role of squire, absorber of harm, defender of ego.)  I loved the mix of protection (no one messed with me because I “belonged” to this man) and the shared learning I hoped would make us closer.  It didn’t, partly because people sometimes interpreted him as “belonging” to me and as I grew from his tutoring, it made him look lesser.

Women have wrestled with this stuff for millennia but the terms have never been what they are now with modern amelioration for childbirth (even the capacity to contract for someone else to gestate), and industrial warfare so that even the wounded become bionic.  Our whole culture is masochistic, taking harm.  Even the sea has our harm forced onto it, let alone the polar bears.  But we are careful to study.

Delaying maturation, esp. because of having the privilege of wealth, is a status marker, so rich kids are “spoiled” or “immature” in the eyes of those who serve them.  On the rez I was childish and my mother-in-law was even more childish, having been prevented from ever working.  But I was an observant child and she was only a conforming child.  Around us was a community of people who were neither, who survived by growing up early and sticking together as a group.  If they were lucky, that meant extended family.

In order to discuss man/boy, man/man, woman/woman, and woman/man in terms of one big and one little, there has to be a pair of people. Being solitary would seem to jump over the subject, but when I was small and miserable (maybe six) and no adult would talk to me, I learned to fantasize myself as middle-aged (I thought forty would be about right) and tried to imagine what I would say to myself. It was a good mind-stretching exercise. It did not relieve me from the idea that sacrifice for a greater being (future self) would make even a small and lesser being (imagining self) become valuable.  (That damned “Giving Tree” idea.)  

I had a fantasy of a little girl consoling a big weeping man, a plot point that I see in media many times.  Or sometimes it’s about a boy-soldier with a veteran.  Once coitus is pushed out of the concept of intercourse, the whole question of who’s the top and who’s the bottom and what that means remains but the terms are set by the culture and often are just about money — but that’s a later chapter in this book.  Sex for money can make a child into a man who can pay his way.  The trouble is that now sex is as dangerous as childbirth used to be and more expensive in consequences (HIV requiring lifelong medication).  Both are as dangerous as poverty.

Stockton says that NAMBLA presented two motifs: a child’s right to design its education and its privilege to divorce its parents.  Nothing necessarily to do with sex between man and boy or with an older male mistreating a boy.  Except that in America the child’s idea of an education is being a good enough athlete to “get a scholarship to college” though some sports will destroy their brains and their degree will mean less and less as it becomes something to buy.  As for divorcing parents, it will be much easier if you know who they are and where they live.  Maybe the people who are afraid of NAMBLA don’t want kids to know these things.  But it doesn’t sound to me as though having an older same-sex partner will inevitably lead to rape, whipping, starvation and the other things that some parents do to their children.  On the other hand, where is the powerful older man willing to attach to a kid, even the one they helped make?

Analyzing a taboo subject is a good way to attract harm, which is also a good way to create higher priced products.  In a climate where the number of comments one attracts for a post, it will be arousing to say something obnoxious enough for people to comment as objections, thus (they think) topping the original post and being more powerful.  But the guilty bottom has achieved better statistics.  It works for Trump.  It’s like a national catastrophe that drives up the Gross National Product through insurance payouts.  Harm pays.

My fav counseling joke:  The masochist says, “hurt me!”  The sadist says, “no.”