Infantilisation, minoration et régionalisation dans Lark and Termite de Jayne Anne Phillips

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze how the novel Lark and Termite (2009) seems to encapsulate Jayne Anne Phillips’s vision of childhood. Through the marginal figure of Termite, a nine-year old orphan child suffering from hydrocephalia, the author denounces the “appalachanisation” of her native region as a phenomenon of infantilization. If the withdrawn, abject figure of Termite seems at first sight to symbolize the exclusion of Appalachia as a bastard, illegitimate region, it is also explored as a romantic setting of nostalgia and lost innocence symbolizing the nation’s doubts and ambivalences about its own identity. Just like Emerson’s trope of “the child as poet,” Termite shows extraordinary poetic powers when observing and absorbing the world around and testifies to an original vision likely to undermine major modes of perception. Through Termite’s sensory breakthroughs and prophetic visions, Phillips explores the transgressive figure of the child as a means of re-centering Appalachia (a regional space that has been historically marginalized, perceived in the popular culture as an illegitimate offspring of the nation), of reasserting and rehabilitating it by exploring phenomenological difference as an endless source of poetic creation rather than as a weakness to stigmatize.