The Bethel Boys Motif at the Dawn of Modernity

Abstract

If Ariès is at all correct in his account of the evolution of the modern, sympathetic idea of childhood, which he does not find fully developed until the eighteenth century, there are two complicating facts he does not take into adequate account. First, the old, Augustinian wariness towards children never disappeared. It persisted as a competing attitude, as reflected in the popularity of the tale of Elisha’s mockery and the Bethel boys motif among moralists and literary artists from the sixteenth century on. Ariès acknowledges a ‘continuance of the archaic attitude to childhood’ up to the time of Molière, qualifying only that ‘this survival, for all that it was stubborn, was precarious’. However, the ‘archaic attitude’ Ariès has in mind is not the Augustinian view of children as wicked, but the view of them as constituting part of ‘adult society’, and the notion that any ‘infant who was too fragile as yet to take part in the life of adults simply “did not count” ‘.1