‘I can’t stand the noise of it’: the figure of the child and the critique of colonialism in Jennifer Kent’s the Nightingale

ABSTRACT

The presence in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale of children, and of violence against them, has so far been little commented upon, as much commentary has focused on the film’s depiction of rape and colonial gender relations. Yet key plot points are articulated through violence against a child — and the exclamations at these points by the film’s antagonist, Lt. Hawkins, of “shut it up” and “I can’t stand the ... noise of it,” indicates a critical role played by representations of children that may be turned against colonial power. This article examines the-role of the child as a site of immanent critique of colonial violence in The Nightingale, in the context of the use of representations of childhood in settler-colonial film and culture more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Jennifer Kent
• the Nightingale
• childhood
• Jacques Rancière
• settler-colonialism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the issue editors, Michelle and James, and the anonymous reviewers, for their valuable comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowships funding scheme (project FT170100210). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes on contributor

Joanne Faulkner is an ARC Future Fellow in Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. She is author of Young and Free: [Post]colonial Ontologies of Childhood, Memory and History in Australia (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), among other books and articles on the cultural significance of childhood. She is currently working on a book manuscript, the working title of which is Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia.

ORCID

Joanne Faulkner http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5694-181X

Notes

1 Charles Dickens exemplifies this tradition, by mobilising his child characters to shine a light on the poor law, debtors’ prison, and the criminalisation of working-class children that saw many transported to Australia. In Great Expectations, a relation is drawn more directly between the child’s perspective and the drivers of colonisation in the convict Abel Magwitch.

2 The line in the film, but which does not appear in Stephen King’s original novel: ‘The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.’

3 I thank Kate Gleeson for drawing my attention to the mythic significance of the Irish mother in her reading of this film.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number FT170100210].