Thinking about childhood through fictional narratives: what do they tell us?

Abstract

Childhood can be expressed in different ways. We can speak of it through chronology, through history, but we can also speak of it through art, through narratives that offer us images of childhoods. Here, the notion of narrative is broadened, as found in Squire (2014), not limited to a specific medium or “semiotic matrix,” and thus including film as a form of narrative. The choice of film, instead of a literary work, was made due to the common accessibility of this medium through which we experience narratives. Our work aims to investigate the representations of childhood in three distinct narratives: Kirikou and the Sorceress, The Little Prince, and Alice in Wonderland—with the first being a narrative, albeit in a different medium. What can these portrayals of childhood tell us? What do they allow us to think about this initial stage of human existence? Through bibliographic research and analysis of the selected narratives—chosen for their shared imagery of childhood—we seek to uncover what these fictional childhoods can reveal, in dialogue with experts and scholars in the field of childhood studies. In our analyses, we adopt an affirmative perspective on childhood, aligned with theorists such as Kohan (2011) and Friedmann (2020). Across the three narratives, we identify three main characteristics that can be affirmed about childhood: curiosity, questioning, and provocation—traits that can be enhanced through the educational process.