Toy Stories

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This study examines the recurring depictions of children's violent and damaging play with objects in nineteenth-century literature. Vanessa Smith highlights how these scenes of aggression contradict the typical portrayal of domestic childhood during that era. Instead, they reflect infant distress typically associated with post-psychoanalytic modernity, influencing literary texts that intertwine regressive developmental narratives, reassess wooden characters, and challenge Realism’s portrayal of solid objects. This work is the first to seriously consider these expressions of anger and overwhelm, questioning established notions about the nineteenth century and its literary forms. By radically reinterpreting childhood and its literary representations, the study connects them to early child analysis, fostering a shared understanding of child’s play that informs both the evolution of the novel and the British reception of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s contributions to child therapy. In doing so, it reframes the work of Klein and Freud, exploring their contentious views on the child’s interior life and its object-mediated expressions.