The Cult of the Child-Poet: Interpreting Elsa García Novo with Reference to L'Affaire Drouet

Abstract

So as to consider the ways in which women may engage in the act of writing childhood, it is important to pause for a moment and undertake a review of what investments are made into the term childhood as well as the act of writing itself. This article proposes that to examine the cult of the child as poet affords a glimpse into the cherished beliefs about the act of writing and creativity as well as into children, in particular the voice of the child. In the 1950s, Roland Barthes dedicated some of his writings to deconstructing the myths of capitalist and bourgeois society, two of which were poetry and childhood. Barthes understood that these myths, coupled together, burdened the figure of an eight-year-old French child called Minou Drouet. This article revisits the responses made to the poetry written by this little girl in order to reflect on the work of another girl hailed as a prodigy across the Pyrenean border, Elsa García Novo, in the same time period.