Cradle Near the Grave: Emotional Responses to Death

     This is an exhibit about the affect of death through works of children's literature from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature at the University of Florida. Perceiving death can come with an array of different emotions. For children who are learning about and encountering death for the first time these emotions are highlighted. Both childhood and death cover discourses that carry tensions because of a societal view that children should be pure and innocent. When children experience and contemplate death – a concept and experience that society has proclaimed to be dark, forbidden, and impure – they push against societal doctrines. Emotions that children feel in the forbidden space of death then become another place for critical analysis. What are the emotions that children feel on the intersection of death and childhood? This exhibit ponders this question. In this exhibit we take on the task of analyzing the different emotions that children feel when they come into contact with death and metaphors for death. Grief and acceptance, fear and anxieties, and comfort and joy are emotional spaces that children find themselves in when confronted with death. These emotional spaces that reside in death are tools that give children (which are precious to society and should remain so) agency in a place that is forbidden and denied. The University of Florida Smathers library is home to the Baldwin special collections library. There the children’s archive allows for an in depth analysis of our themed exhibit. Texts from the Baldwin used to analyze these emotional experiences include Harry and Hopper, That Place, Just a Minute, If Nathan Were Here, My Father’s Arms are a Boat, and The Dark. These texts were chosen because they colorfully illustrate as well as narrate the emotions children feel when they come into contact with death.