Enfance volée: Le personnage de l’enfant dans les romans naturalistes français et espagnols

Abstract

Child characters, which had long been limited to pictures of purity and innocence in romantic novels, undergo a dramatic change of status in naturalist novels. Late 19th century writers, inspired by recent research on the theories of heredity, treaties on the influence of environment and child psychology studies, offer portraits of young heroes that are far from the stereotypical ingenuousness they embodied until then. Zola, in The Experimental Novel published in 1880, creates a new literature based on the scientific model developed by Claude Bernard in The Experimental Method. The influence of this literary modernity in Spain explains the interest of Spanish novelists in this new writing that analyses child characters like clinical cases. Children are studied with scientific thoroughness in novels that for the first time reveal the unspeakable by transgressing many taboos.