The Richest Boy in the World (Queen's
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The Richest Boy in the World COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVE HEATH, FROM HIS COLLECTION EROS AND THE WOUNDED SELF , . J. MARK SMITH For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath. gospel of mark , 4:25 hen word got out to polite society that Jean-Jacques Wrousseau had, starting in the late 1740s, placed the infants born to his mistress Thérèse levasseur with the paris foundling Hospital, the philosophe and inventor of modern childhood supposed he’d better explain himself. He later wrote (in Volume II of his Confessions ) that he had, contrary to appearances, acted to save his offspring – five in total – from “their father’s fate”: I will content myself by saying that in handing over my children to be brought up to the public authorities, for lack of means to bring them up myself, and by making it their destiny to become workers or peasants rather than adventurers or fortune-hunters, I believed myself to be acting as a citizen and a father would act, and I looked upon myself as a member of Plato’s republic. Though it has a place of note among the Western world’s more perverse rationalizations of indefensible behaviour, rousseau also strikes, as he often does, a vein of true self-awareness. some historical context first. In the year 1746, when rousseau was 34 and he and levasseur had their first child, 3,274 parisian children were – according to biographer maurice Cranston – abandoned in the streets by their parents, and roughly a thousand of these were (like rousseau’s) actu - ally delivered to the “public authorities.” paris had a population of close to half a million in the mid-1800s. In a typical year, more than two thirds of the infants taken in by the city’s foundling Hospital died from disease of one sort or another. even though he later made inquiries about them, rousseau never found out what happened to his and levasseur’s children. In private, he felt “remorse” for having taken no measures at the time of giving them up to make it possible to track the infants’ later fate. QUEEN’S QUARTERLY 011/0 (SPRING 1/03) orphanages on the european model went out of favour in Canada (with the exception of Newfoundland) in the 1920s. The first Children’s aid societies, later to become in most of the provinces Child and family services agencies, were set up in the late 1890s. since the late 1920s these bodies have had the power – so long as a judge approves – to seize neg - lected or abused children from their parents or kin: to “apprehend” such children and place them under the temporary or, if circumstances warrant it, permanent guardianship of the province. The children are then mostly cared for by foster families. sometimes they go to adoptive parents. Instead of foundling hospitals, we have the legal, bureaucratic, and interpersonal complexity of a child welfare system. Not that louis XV ’s france wasn’t a formidable early bureaucracy. Its centralized record-keeping of child deaths, if not its policies and instru - ments for preventing those deaths, seems to have been superior to that of the province of alberta in the digital age. 1 Nor were rousseau’s actions typical. The middle class of that time and place had strong moral codes concerning paternal responsibility. There is little reason to feel morally superior. still, we can pinpoint with much greater accuracy now the harm that would have been inflicted by the author of Émile upon his abandoned children – supposing any of them survived infancy. QUEEN’S QUARTERLY Children, especially between the ages of one and four, but after this cru - cial developmental period as well, need more than the food, shelter, and hygienic living conditions that a well-run orphanage can provide in order for their brains and psyches to grow in a healthy way. Children can survive deprivation of most every sort, but what they will become without love and attention is another matter. ave heath’s 1956 black and white photo “Vengeful sister” shows Da boy of about eight curled up in pain on a concrete landin g, as though he’s just been hit, while a slightly older girl runs away from him, howling or (possibly) laughing. The photo is from A Dialogue with Solitude (1965), which former National gallery curator James Borcoman once called “undoubtedly the most important book by a photographer to appear in [the 1960s].” Heath is also known for the photos of american and south korean infantrymen he took during an uncertain ceasefire that stretched through the winter months of 1953–54. (To mark the fiftieth anniversary of A D A N A C F O Y R E L L A G L A N O I T A N © Dave Heath Korea , 0632 THE RICHEST BOY IN THE WORLD ! their creation, lumiere press of montreal in 2004 came out with a limited edition fine reprint of the portfolio, entitled Korea .) some of the soldiers look no older than eighteen or nineteen. Their faces are marked by anguish and grief. The pictures in A Dialogue with Solitude were taken in american cities. some are of children; many are of women in their twenties or thirties. Heath’s central thematic preoccupation arises out of the fact that he was abandoned when he was a toddler by a biological mother – and father – he would never know. according to Borcoman, “[Heath] spent the rest of his youth until he was sixteen in foster homes and an orphanage.” A Dialogue with Solitude is a book haunted by loneliness, unknown women, the anguish of missed crossings, and by distractedness (what we might now call “dissociation”). Born in philadelphia in 1931, Heath has lived much of his life in southern ontario. He returned to his theme in 2010 with a book of colour photos, Eros and the Wounded Self , dedicated to the mother he never knew. figures of anonymous women hurry to unknown destinations or pause, absorbed in caring for children, in emotionally intimate or merely physical proximity to other adults, in solitary contemplation. The photos, presented in unrelated QUEEN’S QUARTERLY sequence, allude to the power of the mother (and, by implication, of the lover) to wound by turning away, and her power – perhaps – to resuscitate. Though they lack the grain and texture of his darkly finished work of the 1950s and 1960s, these remarkably disabused images combine warm depths of colour with a cool formal precision. ( Eros and the Wounded Self , which has not yet found a publisher, can be purchased at blurb.ca.) round the time Heath was serving as a combat infantryman in A the korean War, an upper-middle-class londoner named John Bowlby (1907–1990) was beginning to formulate the psychological the - ory of attachment. Bowlby’s father was court physician to edward VII , his mother a society lad y; the children of this family were largely cared for by domestic servants. John Bowlby would later write that the per - son he “attached” most strongly to was a nanny who left the family’s service when he was four. as a man he became one of a group of psy - choanalysts (which included anna freud, melanie klein, and Donald Winnicott) working out of london’s Tavistock Institute during the second World War years and afterwards. THE RICHEST BOY IN THE WORLD The World Health organization, working to help children whose lives had been disrupted by the war, commissioned Bowlby’s groundbreaking report Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951), which concluded that, even if the exact psychological mechanisms were not understood at that time, “the prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life.” In the ensuing three decades, Bowlby parted ways with his freudian teachers, skirmished with behaviourists, and linked the con - cept of attachment to evolutionary biology, ethology, and systems theory. Bowlby’s University of Toronto-trained colleague mary ainsworth (1913– 1999) devised the experiments in the 1950s and 1960s to test attachment that have been repeated by hundreds of researchers since. In the “strange situation” experiment, both a one-year-old’s behaviour towards her mother and a mother’s behaviour towards her one-year-old are observed through a one-way window. Baby explores the room. mother slips out while baby is playing. stranger enters the room. Baby reacts. mother returns to the room and reunites with baby. The experiment differentiated between three sorts of responses: one indicating “secure” and two others insecure – “avoidant” and “ambivalent” QUEEN’S QUARTERLY – attachment. (ainsworth’s successors later added a fourth category: “dis - organized” attachment.) a securely attached infant will be distressed by the mother’s absence and stranger’s presence, but upon reunion soon per - mits his mother to comfort him. He pulls himself together, as the english say. He shows that near mythic quality: resilience. But ainsworth found that even among middle-class British or North american test groups, only about 70 percent of infants are securely attached. attachment, in the child developmental sense, doesn’t have anything to do with biological kinship. after the 1960s, Bowlby drops his emphasis on maternal as opposed to parental care. The bond of attachment comes into being as a result of the mutual attentiveness over time between a In the ‘strange child and the person or persons situation’ experiment, who parent him. In the third vol - “both a one-year-old’s ume (1980) of his Attachment tril - ogy, Bowlby defined “attachment behaviour towards her behaviour” in this neutral way: mother and a mother’s “any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining or retaining behaviour towards proximity to some other differen - her one-year-old are tiated and preferred individual.” observed through a one- mostly this involves “little more than checking eye or ear on the way window.