In that framework, we focused on loss of inocence and I asked myself if is the loss of inocence necesserily imply badness ?

Introduction : This year, we studied among other themes of Exile, Travel and rite of passage. In that framework, we focused on loss of inocence and I asked myself if is the loss of inocence necesserily imply badness ?

is the loss of innocence the opposite of growth?

Growing implies that experience take over from innocence → not perceived as a loss ; positive process

Loss is a negative process, something lost that cannot be retrieved.

Why did we focus on loss of innoncence ?

→ Because litterature is interested in the process of growth like the Bildungsroman tradition.

→ But litterature is also interested, particulary in short forms loke short storis or poems, in critical junctures → spotting and staging the exact instant in a life when childhood ends, or when innocence is lost.

In this file, we have a short story and a tale → short forms, favouring critical junctures.

Doc 1 : The badness Within him is a short story written by Susan Hill and published in 1975. Susan Hill is a contemporary English writer. The badness Within him is the story of a boy, Col, who struggles against his badness. He growing, but is not yet fully grown, he have around 12 or 13 yo. He is in the full sway of his teenager crisis and thinks he is bad because he fells angry and frustrated.

Col feels he does not fit in with his environnement any more, he’s not « the right size » → he is too bif for this summer house where he’s spent all summer as a child.

→ and he is too small yet to belong to the adult world is elder sister seems to have already accessed.

But one day a tragic event occurs which seems to confirm his « badness » ; his father dies accidentally and Col will be conviced that he is responsible for his death.

Col loses his childhood and innoncence because of father’s death. Col feels responsible and guilty. He feels he has been punished for his « badness ». But Col didn’t have any badness. Col is a teenager in depression, and this story related how young adolescent feel in the society.

LOSS OF INNOCENCE : Col believes he is responsible for his father’s death, that his father died because of « the badness within him », that his badness is a form of power. So he loses his innocence without gaining a real experience. He cannot be a child any more, but he cannot grow, because his experience is fake.

Doc 2 : it’s an extract from the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carrol and published in 1865.

In this extract, Alice too is undergoing a crisis and reaches a critical juncture, but only in a dreamworld (= at a symbolic level).

At the beginning of the tale, Alice falls through a pit who symbolises the passage from the waking world to the world of dreams.

Then, she find herself in a room with many locked doors. She finds a key on a glass table : and she tries it in all doors → only opens a small door she’s too big to pass through. She sees through it the most beautiful garden.

Then she finds a little « drink me » bottle, drinks the contents, shrinks, she is now small enough to go through the small door.

But she has closed the door again and left the key on the glasse table : key now too high to reach. After that, she finds a little cake and eats it, grow up, can reach the key but now she