Victims, Bodies, Playthings: Child-Animal Relations in François Boyer’s Forbidden Games

Abstract Children’s abuse of nonhuman animals in literature has not received much attention from Western literary studies. This paper examines child-nonhuman animal relationships in François Boyer’s (1947/1950) French, post- WWII novel, Forbidden Games . It discusses images of childhood in late 19th- and early 20th-century culture, investigating connections between maltreatment of nonhuman animals by children and ideas of childhood as a phase of becoming “human.” Teleological images of children learning to distance themselves from nonhuman animals inform narratives of “human” phylo- and ontogenesis. The following analysis traces these concepts in Forbidden Games , outlining trajectories of child-animal relationships depicted in the novel. While Boyer shows increasingly violent treatment of nonhuman animals by children, he uses it to criticize chauvinistic and restrictive ideals of “growing up” to become “human.” Building on Bond Stockton’s term “growing sideways,” the analysis investigates how Boyer’s children and their play with nonhuman animals might destabilize anthropocentric value systems surrounding them.