Gross or sweet, inconvenient or cherished – the way society views and responds emotionally towards children does not avert their presence in the films and literature society members indulge in for personal entertainment. In the scope of early Victorian literature; however, this was not the case. For instance, in Dracula, by Bram Stoker, the only children to be seen were the infants whom were the victims of poor procreated vampire, Lucy. Children were not a particular matter of interest and were not created as important characters in Victorian works, presumably due to the high infant mortality rate of the time veiling the significance of children. As time progressed, more and more fictional children characters were introduced into literature and film, playing stereotypical roles such as the troubled adolescent, the sexualized girl, the rebellious teenager, and so on. Even more so, these children characters undergo turning points in their lives. The evolution of children as characters in literature and film from Dracula by Bram Stoker to the 2012 film, Hotel Transylvania, demonstrates the development of cultural concern of childhood.
In Hotel Transylvania, the personal and emotional relationship between parent and child is the foundation of the plot and is highlighted throughout the entire movie. In Dracula’s parenting practices, he keeps his daughter close and safe: “I promised your mommy I would protect you forever” (Hotel Transylvania). Culturally, the child has become valued and protected. Childhood requires following certain rules set by the parents in order to protect and teach the children the morals they need in life – something historically left for the servants, maids, etc. to accomplish in the rare occasions children survived to toddlers and to adolescents. Parent and child spend quality time together and share a connection based on trust and love, seen in application through the relationship of Dracula and Mavis from the start of the film as he tells her bedtime stories to the end where Dracula pays attention to his daughter’s emotions and works to make her dreams a reality. This connection is applied into society in that children are tucked into bed by their parents, read bedtime stories, and then supported through pivotal moments of their lives like breakups, going away to school, etc.
Children provide parents with a source of emotional fulfillment and permanent attachment, and parents serve as a child’s source of personal happiness and meaning. Close parent-child relationships affect childhood resulting in children that have more sympathetic and compassionate views towards others. According to Hendrick in “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to Present, “Nature wants children to be children before they are men. Thus, children could be valued as children and not merely as little adults in the making.” Childhood adapted to be viewed as an opportunity to morally educate children as opposed to the traditional assumption that children were merely little adults. Dracula is constantly giving Mavis advice and allowing her to learn from her mistakes as a child.
In conjunction with the coming of age construct in Hotel Transylvania, childhood has evolved into a state that is absent of perpetuity. Early Victorian fantasies involving a child character obligated “for child characters to die in this world in order to be reborn or to stay as children forever” (Palgrave) with the classic story of Peter Pan as an example. The novel, Dracula, even suits this claim in the sense that the infants eaten by vampire, Lucy, are not given the chance to survive past childhood but are instead stripped the opportunity to exist. Seen in the character of Mavis, it is demonstrated how childhood ends at a certain point and that society is culturally aware of this difference between childhood and “adulting”. Dracula is anxious but also enthusiastic towards his daughter’s coming of age. He even throws her a party, hence “Sweet Sixteen”, celebrating becoming eighteen and legal, and the celebration of the ability to drink legally.
In Hotel Transylvania, childhood is associated with positive views of freedom, innocence, spontaneity, and emotion – all characteristics of young Mavis through her desire to explore the world and find her “zing”. Before mid 18th century, people in Britain viewed childhood as a perilous period where children were born sinful and were souls in need of saving (Alanamu). Today’s western culture views children as innately innocent, only corrupted through their experiences in the world evident by Dracula’s anxieties towards Mavis’ interest in adventuring into the human village. Historians “agree that ideas like parenthood and childhood are socially constructed” (Hendrick). Childhood is culturally a state of vulnerable dependency with faith and trust as characteristics of children such that they are given the opportunities to play and use their imaginations whilst being protected from the harsh realities of life instead of being expected to take their place in the world as young working adults and to survive without constant care.
The positive characteristics of childhood that Mavis embody herself are what make also allow her to embody all children. She is given an identity through her characteristics and is given a name as a character – a concept we can relate back to realistic children. Children in the Victorian Era were hardly ever given names until they reached a certain age. However, in today’s era, children are expected to live long healthy lives. There is immediate attachment between parent and child and children are therefore given names and identity within their families and communities. The cultural norm has evolved such that literature objectives “provide children with an identity, not just full of “naturalness”, but of significance for the evolution of humanity itself” (Hendrick). The shift to childhood from child wage-earning labor manifested by giving identity to children in western culture politically and through age-graded conditions where the children go through chronological constructions of school education.
There is a focus of the child, Mavis, as a victim in the film. With her coming of age comes her independence, sexuality, and her father’s blessing to adventure out into the human world. His anxieties accompanying her coming of age, for example, “If you really went out there and something happened to you I just could not live with myself” (Hotel Transylvania) provide evidence of the cultural fears surrounding the development and activities of young adults. Parents, including Dracula, fear for the experiences young adults encounter whether that be leaving home, relationships, drugs, etc. This opposes the ideology during the time of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, where children were materialized and less humanized. Children were not perceived as victims due to the reality that the majority of children were not expected to live past 2 years old and were not exposed to societal dangers.
The cultural concern for childhood among Britain was ultimately not an initial matter of interest, but was developed in later works and also in the American progeny culture through the evolution of children as characters in literature and film, specifically from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the 2012 film, Hotel Transylvania. The character Mavis, in Hotel Transylvania, and her relationship with her father provides adaptation of childhood and validates cultural claims of modern western childhood. Personal and emotional relationships between children and parents, a neglect for traditional religious views of childhood in exchange for positive views, and the perception of children as victims are evident manifestations of this cultural sensitivity towards children.