The Victorian Childhood of Manga

The Victorian Childhood of Manga: Toward a Queer Theory of
the Child in Toboso Yana's Kuroshitsuji
Anna Maria Jones
Criticism, Volume 55, Number 1, Winter 2013, pp. 1-41 (Article)
Published by Wayne State University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/495128
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The Victorian Childhood of Manga:
Toward a Queer Theory of the
Child in Toboso Yana’s Kuroshitsuji
Anna Maria Jones
He seems to be a very mature little fellow.

—Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord
Fauntleroy (1886)1
The turn taken was away from a good boy’s book—

the “escape” was left on their hands.
—Henry James, “The Pupil” (1891)2
I start this essay from the premise that we ought to read a contemporary
young adult Japanese manga (comics) series about a Faustian contract be-
tween a boy and his demon butler, Toboso Yana’s Kuroshitsuji (Black But-
ler),3 as a literary descendant of Henry James’s “The Pupil,” a fin-de-siècle
tale of a doomed love relationship between a tutor and his pupil. I sug-
gest, moreover, that we ought to read them both as queer texts that self-
consciously play with the sentimental cultural and literary tropes of the
child—as exemplified in works like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 sac-
charine bestseller Little Lord Fauntleroy—in order to foster in their read-
ers a perverse resistance to, in Lee Edelman’s words, “the Ponzi scheme of
reproductive futurism.”4 Edelman has drawn fire for creating an overly
rigid binary opposition between, on the one hand, future-oriented politics
centering on the figure of the child, which he reads as inescapably hetero-
normative and fantasy driven, and, on the other hand, a queer rejection
of that fantasy, which he links to the death drive. However, I contend not
only that his model provides a useful framework for reading a darkly
nihilistic text like Kuroshitsuji, but that the manga itself offers a rebuttal
of sorts to Edelman’s “utopian” critics, like José Muñoz and Tim Dean
(whose rejection of Edelman’s rejection of futurism I discuss in more
Criticism Winter 2013, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 1–41. ISSN 0011-1589. 1
© 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
2 Anna maria jones
detail presently).5 Indeed, Kuroshitsuji is a sophisticated meditation on the

figure of the child and the social order that is maintained through that
figural child’s fetishization, sentimentalization, and even eroticization.
The manga explores our desires for a paradoxically knowing-innocent
child: a being who can, impossibly, embody the potentiality of a future,
not-yet-realized social order and also give its full consent to that suppo-
sitious future, maintaining both childish purity (ignorance) and mature
selfhood (knowingness). I argue, moreover, that Kuroshitsuji does so with
self-conscious reference to the late-nineteenth-century Victorian (1837–
1901) British and Meiji (1868–1912) Japanese cultural encounter, in which
the child featured prominently in a shared, and vexed, discourse about the
individual’s relation to the social order, particularly as figured through
the social contract. Not only does the manga invite a critical reading of
this historical trajectory in the production of the child, but it maintains
a self-referential awareness of reading, of the power of narrative invest-
ments, one might say, in doing the work of that cultural production.
My analysis of Kuroshitsuji starts with a couple of premises that in-
tersect with queer theory, childhood studies, and literary studies. First,
following a well-established, if not uncontested, tradition in scholarship
over the last several decades, it assumes that queer theory has a lot to say
about the child and, conversely, that the child has a lot to say back to queer
theory. In other words, I respond to Kenneth Kidd’s recent challenge to
theorists to “unsettle what we claim to know about children’s literature”
by asking “What if we were to think of children’s literature not simply as
a field of literature but also as a theoretical site in its own right?”6 I argue
that Kuroshitsuji does indeed offer a sort of theoretical apparatus for read-
ing its own deployment of the knowing-innocent child. Second, following
from the landmark work of critics like Jacqueline Rose, James Kincaid,
and, more recently, Katherine Bond Stockton and Marah Gubar, I as-
sume that in our contemporary fraught relationship to the child we are
the inheritors of nineteenth-century discourses and structures of feeling.
Or, as Kincaid puts it in Erotic Innocence (1998), “[O]ur culture has enthu-
siastically sexualized the child while denying just as enthusiastically that
it was doing any such thing,” and in so doing has engaged in a “reckless
expenditure of [a] dangerous nineteenth-century inheritance.”7
I am keenly aware of the risks of talking about “our culture” when dis-
cussing a text that is written in twenty-first-century Japan, set in Victorian
England, and read in multiple languages, in official and amateur transla-
tions by a global audience. However, while our academic disciplines in the
humanities remain to a largely bound by geographic, chronological, and
linguistic demarcations, a text like Kuroshitsuji richly rewards consideration
The victorian childhood of manga 3
across those disciplinary boundaries, both because of its status as a global

commodity and because of its own sense of cross-cultural history of the cul-
tural and intellectual exchanges among Japan, Europe, and North America
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As critics like Gregory
Pflugfelder, Mark McLelland, Jennie Holt, and Kawana Sari have ably
demonstrated, these exchanges involved complex, two-way conversations
in which a wide array of “experts,” thinkers, artists, writers, and translators
worked to articulate the very modern theories of social order and norma-
tive identity that in large part produced the “dangerous inheritance” of our
contemporary representations of the child.8
The answer, then, to the question of why a text like Kuroshitsuji would
appeal to English-speaking readers despite some very different visual and
narrative conventions (not least of which being read from right to left
instead of left to right) might be in part because it speaks to social and
rhetorical constructs of the child with which those audiences are already
cozily familiar, if also fundamentally uneasy.9 Thus, in the sections that
follow, I discuss the contemporary cultural and theoretical contexts for
Kuroshitsuji before turning to two of Toboso’s Victorian antecedents—
strange bedfellows (though they were acquaintances), children’s litera-
ture author Frances Hodgson Burnett and literary lion Henry James—in
order to think through the ways that Kuroshitsuji engages the enduring
representations of the child with which we are still burdened.
Some Preliminary Discussion of the Manga and Its Contexts
A supernatural/gothic manga series written and illustrated by Toboso

Yana, Kuroshitsuji debuted in 2006 and, at the time of the writing of this
essay, continues to appear serially in Monthly GFantasy magazine. Square
Enix publishers began reprinting the manga in trade paperback volumes
in 2007. It was turned into a TV anime series in 2008, with a second sea-
son airing in 2010, and both the anime and the manga were licensed for
English translation under the title Black Butler. The manga continues
to enjoy an avid following both in Japan and in the United States, with
volumes’ sales consistently ranking in best-seller lists in both countries.10
It has also spawned a live musical, a drama compact disk (CD), a video
game, and a booming industry of cosplay costumes and props, as well as
various other cell-phone charms, key chains, notebooks, jewelry, T-shirts,
action figures, plush toys, pocket watches, playing cards, and the like.
The manga follows the angst-ridden, heavily eroticized relationship
between a young boy and his demon butler. Toboso sets her mystery/
4 Anna maria jones
adventure story in late-Victorian England and frames it around the ex-

ploits of the improbably named Ciel Phantomhive: a twelve-year-old or-
phan, an earl, a Captain of Industry, and also Queen Victoria’s “watch
dog,” a ruthless scourge who solves mysteries and punishes crimes outside
the purview of the law. Several years prior to the beginning of the story,
his parents are murdered, and he is kidnapped and tortured by persons
unknown (represented in flashbacks as some sort of cult or secret society
that sacrifice children to their depraved tastes). At this nadir of his young
life, he enters into a Faustian contract with a demon who agrees to serve
him faithfully as his ultracompetent butler until Ciel can discover and
exact revenge on his parents’ killers. This demon is Sebastian Michaelis,
and he will consume the child’s soul at the conclusion of their contract,
which will presumably also conclude the series.
Kuroshitsuji makes liberal use of Victorian historical and literary story
lines and references to play out this vexed relationship against a lurid back-
drop of human trafficking, sex crimes, and murder. Ciel and Sebastian
solve mysteries adapted from real life like the Jack the Ripper murders and
the child prostitution scandal exposed in W. T. Stead’s 1885 “The Maiden
Tribute of Modern Babylon,” as well as from fictional sources like Arthur
Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band” (1892). Kuroshitsuji also frequently al-
ludes directly and indirectly to British and American works whose authors
have a long history in Japan, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1845).11
And, it makes self-referential jokes about cross-cultural appropriation, as
when we see Sebastian’s “library research” on Japanese culinary arts to pro-
duce a traditional donburi (rice bowl) dinner or when Toboso draws herself
in the omake (extra) at the end of volume 2 as a devilish stick figure with
horns, complaining from beneath a pile of Victorian books collected for
research for her manga, “So heavyyyy! So biiiiiiiig! So priceyyyy!”12
Whereas the main characters’ relationship is not explicitly sexual, it
is suggestively so, with the narrative providing numerous “eroticizable”
scenarios between Sebastian and Ciel (bath scenes, dressing scenes, cross-
dressing scenes, rescues, dancing lessons, etc.). Kuroshitsuji, therefore, can
be understood in the context of boys’ love manga—that is, manga that
focuses on male-male romantic and erotic relationships. Boys’ love (BL)
manga first emerged in Japan in the 1970s as a subgenre of shoˉjo manga
(girls’ comics) and quickly became a robust subgenre of that market.
Often compared to slash fiction in the West, BL manga is written mostly
by women and read primarily by (straight) women and girls.13 And al-
though Kuroshitsuji is serialized in an ostensibly shoˉnen venue—that is,
one geared toward a young male demographic—it unquestionably skirts
the line of BL, garnering a following among the predominantly female
fans of BL and more sexually explicit yaoi stories of male-male relation-

ships.14 Its male characters are drawn in the bishoˉnen (beautiful boy) style
common to shoˉjo manga in general and BL manga in particular: ultra-
slender, androgynous, or sometimes feminized with graceful lines, and
often presented in highly stylized, fetishizing tableaux, which, to borrow
Laura Mulvey’s cinematic terminology, emphasize their “to-be-looked-
at-ness.”15 Moreover, like many BL as well as mainstream shoˉnen manga
and anime, Kuroshitsuji has an active international online community of
predominantly female readers, so-called fujoshi, or “rotting girls,” pro-
ducing and consuming scanlations (amateur translations of scanned cop-
ies of the original manga) and fan-subtitled and fan-dubbed versions of
anime episodes, as well as amateur art, various kinds of tribute videos,
and doˉjinshi comics, much or even most of which dwells on the romantic
and sexual possibilities of the relationship of the boy and his butler.16
Finally, it is worth noting that the juxtaposition of Kuroshitsuji with
Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and James’s “The Pupil” is not as per-
verse as it might appear. Burnett’s novel, in which a poor but lovely and
lovable American lad becomes heir to an immense British estate and title,
was first translated into Japanese and appeared in serialization as Shoˉkoˉshi
in 1890, after which it became widely adopted for reading in primary
schools.17 It was adapted for a TV anime series, Shoˉkoˉshi Cedie, in 1988.
While James’s story was not translated into Japanese until 1989 (though
James was read and translated in Japan as early as the late 1800s), when
“The Pupil” did appear in Japan it was within the context of manga. Ac-
cording to Hitomi Nabae, “The Pupil” was first translated into Japanese
in the anthology Taisei shoˉnen-ai tokuhon (Favorite stories of Western
boys’ love).18 Certainly the tragic-melancholic tone of James’s short story
would resonate with many of the angst-ridden stories of classic BL manga
like Hagio Moto’s Toˉma no shinzoˉ (Heart of Thomas).19
And Now for the Theory
I invoke Lee Edelman’s argument in No Future (2004) in part as an expla-

nation for the affective appeal of a narrative like Kuroshitsuji that focuses
on a futureless child and, thus, rejects notions of forward progress and fu-
ture hopes. But, whereas Edelman posits that a queer social critique must
oppose itself to the insistent teleology of the child as future, I would like to
suggest that, like James’s “The Pupil,” Toboso’s manga deploys the child
as queer cultural critique in a way that pulls at the frayed edges of social
order and thus does the ethical work that Edelman imagines as separate
6 Anna maria jones
from “the Child” and sentimentality. As he claims, “Queerness attains its

ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to . . . its figural status as resis-
tance to the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance
from every social structure.”20
Edelman’s argument is essentially this: In our contemporary political
discourse, as the outgrowth of nineteenth-century liberalism, the figure of
the “Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics,
the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.” He argues, con-
versely, that that which opposes this heteronormative, future-oriented fe-
tishization of the Child signifies the death drive, or as he puts it, the queer
“embod[ies] the [social] order’s traumatic encounter with its own inescap-
able failure.”21 However, rather than seeking to rescue queerness from its
abject relationship to the social order—which would be to reinvest in that
“coercive universalization of the image of the Child”—Edelman calls for
queer theorists to imagine the political possibilities of embracing that anti-
identity of the death drive and thereby resisting “a Symbolic reality that
only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourselves in it, clinging
to its governing fictions, its persistent sublimations.”22 In other words, to re-
ject sentimental investments in the Child-as-future is to refuse to be bound
to a narrative logic that persistently sacrifices real, present people for the
“good” of imaginary, always-never-quite-arrived future subjects.
Edelman’s “antisocial thesis” has been criticized by writers like Muñoz
and Dean, who endorse instead a utopian version of queer politics that
embraces futurity. In Muñoz’s words, the future is “the realm of potenti-
ality that must be called on, and insisted on, if we are ever to look beyond
the pragmatic sphere of the here and now, the hollow nature of the pres-
ent.”23 Dean argues, similarly, that “‘becoming queer’ is an interminable
enterprise not of negation but invention, an adventure in becoming other
to oneself independently of gender or sexual identity.”24 And Judith Hal-
berstam points out that Edelman’s argument partakes of a particularly
privileged, white, gay male sensibility that ignores or rejects women and
people of color: “[T]he gay male archive coincides with the canonical ar-
chive.”25 I don’t quite mean to set myself squarely in the antisocial camp
or to dismiss altogether these valid criticisms. Dean in particular offers a
useful corrective, suggesting nuances that Edelman’s polemic dispenses
with; likewise, his critique of Edelman’s “melodramatic” use of the death
drive is a point well taken:
Edelman’s critique of futurity launches a would-be psycho-

analytic thesis concerning “the Child” that paradoxically
requires him to suppress every psychoanalytic insight about
children. In his effort to stabilize a dubious opposition be-

tween the image of the child and the figure of the queer,
Edelman tends not only to schematize but to essentialize
the terms of his argument.26
However, while I agree that the division between Edelman’s “image of the
child and the figure of the queer” does not sustain itself, I also want to side-
step the debate somewhat by suggesting that, whether or not his argument
works as a call to political action, it works very nicely indeed as a descrip-
tion of a particular kind of queer aesthetic and ethical readerly investment
encouraged by a text like Kuroshitsuji. Indeed, insofar as No Future appeals
precisely because “it generates a jouissance” based in its “rhetorical style and
the irrational passion that the style conveys,” we might read both Kuroshit-
suji and No Future as offering similar aesthetic and affective pleasures, as
well as similar theoretical stances.27 And, given Kuroshitsuji’s popularity
with a female (and international) readership, it is safe to say that this “death-
driven” jouissance hails more than just white, gay male intellectuals.
Quite a lot of critical work has been done to theorize female read-
ers’ and viewers’ investments in the male homoeroticism of BL narra-
tives, slash fiction, and yaoi. The mystery to be solved is why a largely
female, and predominantly heterosexual, demographic would produce
and consume romantic and erotic stories in which women have little or
no place. Much of this work posits implicitly or explicitly that women’s
pleasure in such texts is premised on some version of Freud’s notion in
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that Woman is hostile to civilization
because it is hostile to her, and so she seeks ways to escape its strictures.
Matthew Thorn’s comment about “yaoi and slash-style fan productions”
is characteristic: “[W]hat these fans share in common is discontent with
the standards of femininity to which they are expected to adhere and a so-
cial environment and historical moment that does not validate or sympa-
thize with that discontent.” Or, as Midori Matsui puts it, “[T]he apparent
contradiction of the female ego masquerading as a boy in such comics . . .
reflect[s] Japanese girls’ rejection of their sexuality as a commodity in the
patriarchal structure.”28 As the theories go, these discontented female
readers use BL to fantasize about men who are nicer than real-life men,
more emotionally available and reliable, and so they project themselves
into the relationship as the recipient of that ideal man’s affections. Or they
fantasize about having the phallus and, thus, project themselves onto the
more active or powerful of the men of the same-sex romance. Or, uncom-
fortable with seeing female bodies objectified, they objectify male bodies,
playing out more or less extreme fantasies (including violent, sadistic, or
8 Anna maria jones
masochistic ones) that would be too disturbing if represented “too close to

home” in female characters.29
Interestingly, much of the discussion of BL fan culture, both by critics
and by fans themselves, invokes utopian language that sounds very much
like Muñoz’s and Dean’s emphasis on “potentiality,”30 “invention,” and
“adventure.”31 As Mark Isola puts it, “As pop culture narratives that are
widely read on the Internet, yaoi and slash form and frame a multime-
dia community that transcends linguistic, national, and cultural borders,”
the members of which are engaged in a “shared act of imagining.” Mari
Kotani, speaking of Hagio Moto’s classic shoˉnen-ai vampire manga Poˉ no
Ichizuki (The clan of Poe, 1972–76), argues that the beautiful adolescent
boy vampire is “not a symbol of monstrosity but a beautiful imaginary
being” within a story “of social deviants who destroy existing categories
of sexuality and embody their own categories of utopia.” Mark McLel-
land argues more broadly that “the bishoˉnen can be read as a figure of
resistance: both to the notion that biology is destiny and to the correla-
tion between biology and gender role.” James Welker ends his analysis
of classic BL manga of the 1970s with a similar claim: “Ultimately the
beautiful boy can be read as a symbol of liberation. . . . Constrained only
by the limits of the pen and the imagination, the ambiguous form of the
beautiful boy shows readers that neither the body nor the psyche need be
shackled by norms.”32
It would be hard to deny that the Kuroshitsuji encourages readers to
do some collective fantasizing and imagining, given the range of fan re-
sponses, from doˉjinshi comics to online fan forums to cosplay events at
comic conventions. However, although I find the discussions of fan psy-
chology and demographics compelling, I think that close attention to the
text as text suggests ways in which the “unshackling” theory is not quite
adequate to explain what Kuroshitsuji does. Not only does the manga en-
courage a much less utopian and more antisocial sensibility, but it operates
on the delicate balance between readers’ affective investments in the very
child-fetishizing, future-oriented norms it so gleefully undermines and in
critical resistance to those norms. The narrative’s pleasure, in other words,
resides neither in affirming nor escaping norms, but in maintaining an un-
comfortable tension between collusion with and critique of those norms.
Reading Kuroshitsuji
Both narratively and visually, Kuroshitsuji creates a constant tension be-

tween the innocent child-as-victim and the knowing child-as-agent,
presenting Ciel as both at the same time and encouraging the reader to
view Sebastian, likewise, simultaneously as sinister predator, powerful
protector, and abject servant. Thus, for example, in figure 1 (read from
top right to bottom left), we see Sebastian rescuing the boy from bad men,
criminals who have kidnapped him because he has interfered with their
plans. The child is bound and bloody, and the butler, too, is injured, his
clothes tattered from fighting his way to the child. Judging by his smile,
however, he is also enjoying the various pains inflicted by and upon him-
self. He also enjoys his master’s suffering. As he says to the boy earlier in
this same scene, suspending the rescue to appreciate the boy’s predica-
ment, “You look just like a caterpillar . . . it is so hideous and wonderful
all at once. It befits one as small and weak as yourself. I thought it would
be lovely to take in that view a little longer.”33 Sebastian’s enjoyment is
mean spirited, as one might expect of a demon, but the child was ab-
ducted some sixty pages earlier, and his abuse at the hands of his kidnap-
pers has taken up a fair number of those intervening pages.
Taking it as a given that readers are enjoying the manga, then surely
our pleasure has something of Sebastian’s sadism in it, too. Or, if the
reader is identifying with the boy, then perhaps the chapter and a half
of suffering provide masochistic pleasure as we wait in suspense for the
payoff: the punishment of the child’s captors. Ciel’s comment to his res-
cuer suggests, in any case, that pleasure has been the goal if not the actual
result: “This game wasn’t all that interesting either.”34 The “play” with
the child’s pain, and our enjoyment of it, are further complicated by the
visual impact of this final frame, in which the butler, eyes closed and smil-
ing beatifically, tenderly cradles the bound child. Throughout the manga,
even in scenes of violence like this one, the main characters are rarely
drawn other than to be visually appealing, so here the pair together create
a graceful “S” curve that is set against a contrasting background and in
contradistinction to the more jagged drawings of the villain in the other
frames.35 This image of Sebastian and Ciel may be read both as a kind
of grotesque parody of a Madonna-and-child tableau and as an amorous
embrace, inviting an uncomfortable conflation of the erotic and the filial
that is pervasive in the manga.
Part of the appeal of gothic narratives of child endangerment,
James Kincaid argues, is “they have about them an urgency and a self-
flattering, righteous oomph.”36 And this narrative structure enables the
reader to indulge in the prurient enjoyment of scenes of suffering, eroti-
cized children while also distancing himself or herself from any sense
of guilt or affiliation with the “monsters” who abuse children. Argu-
ably this is part of what produces the “coercive universalization of the
10 Anna maria jones
Figure 1. Sebastian rescues his master from bad men in Kuroshitsuji, volume 1, written and
illustrated by Toboso Yana. Copyright © Yana Toboso, Black Butler (Tokyo: Square Enix,
2007).
image of the Child” that Edelman points to in contemporary political

discourse, wherein it is unthinkable to articulate a position that is not
“for the children.”37 In other words, these gothic narratives also discour-
age any critical discussion of their terms because, if one is not “for the
children,” then one is monstrous. Therein, I think, resides the “jouis-
sance” that Tim Dean identifies in Edelman’s book. When Edelman ar-
rives at his conclusion that the right response to the coercive teleology
he has been describing is to say, “Fuck the social order and the Child in
whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” one feels the giddy, guilty
pleasure of transgression.38 He has said the unsayable. Yet, Edelman’s
formulation does not, after all, dispense with the Gothic. He only reas-
signs the roles of the narrative so that the Child, with a capital “C,” be-
comes the monster that “terrorizes” the social order’s real marginalized
victims. In a sense, then, Kuroshitsuji goes one better because, while it
fleshes out a similarly defiant critical sensibility, it also never generates a
“self-flattering, righteous” position from which to enjoy its critique, but
rather demands that the readers maintain an uncomfortable awareness
of their dubious investments.
For example, in the opening pages of chapter 8 in volume 2 (chapter
7 having ended in a cliff-hanger with Ciel captured seemingly by Jack
the Ripper), Toboso shows us a scene in which a child appears to be get-
ting fucked (see figure 2). In a page that looks much like BL manga, Ciel
is shirtless and covered in sweat, face flushed and hands clenching. The
dialogue, likewise, is suggestive, with the child protesting in broken sen-
tences, punctuated with panting and “mysterious” sound effects. The but-
ler, standing close behind Ciel, urges his compliance:
Ciel: “Se– . . . Sebastian . . .”

Sebastian: “Now, please place your hands on the wall,
and . . . relax your muscles a bit further.”
Ciel: “I can’t—! Take it anymore! . . . No! It hurts—!”
Sebastian: “Do bear with it a little longer, sir. You will find
your body becoming accustomed to it soon.”
Ciel: “Ah! Coming—”39
The following page reveals the punch line that what we have seen is not
sodomy but the child’s flashback to being corseted for his undercover
investigation. On this page, the characters are rendered comically, with
Ciel’s hyperbolic complaint, “They’re coming out! My guts are on the
verge of coming out of my body, I say!!!!” and Sebastian’s impassive re-
sponse, “No lady has yet had her innards squeezed out by a corset!”40
12 Anna maria jones
Of course, corseting itself carries plenty of sexualized, fetishized freight,

so the punch line cannot be said to mitigate the previous page’s impact.
Moreover, the comic frame is immediately followed by frames that rees-
tablish the child’s real, dangerous predicament. He awakes, bound with
rope and, as will be revealed on the next page, he is in a cage at a black-
market auction, the next item up for sale to the same kinds of wealthy
predators who abused him originally.
The scene encourages the reader to conflate the main characters’ re-
lationship with the child exploitation that make up both the backstory
and much of the content of the series’ gothic story arcs. In the child’s
waking/dreaming state, the butler’s ministrations with the corset are
like his captive bonds. Similarly the reader’s vantage point in the corset-
ing scene, in which we are looking through the wall upon which Ciel
has placed his hands, is reversed uncomfortably two pages later when
we view the smirking, masked faces of the auction attendees from the
child’s perspective through the bars of his cage. Thus, Kuroshitsuji both
invites complicity with the child’s suffering—indeed, the child’s suf-
fering is the premise for the narrative—and prevents any disavowal
of that complicity. It also reveals our attachment to the paradoxically
knowing-innocent child, which, as we will see, has a particular Victo-
rian provenance.
Kuroshitsuji’s Victorian Childhood: The Maiden Tribute of Little

Lord Phantomhive
I am sure he is trying to help me in his innocent way—I

know he is. He looks at me sometimes with a loving,
wondering little look, as if he were sorry for me, and
then he will come and pet me or show me something.
He is such a little man, I really think he knows.
—Frances Hodgson Burnett,
Little Lord Fauntleroy41
When he tried to figure to himself the morning twi-

light of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it
was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the
instant he touched it, was already flushing faintly into
knowledge.
—Henry James, “The Pupil”42
Figure 2. Sebastian prepares Ciel to go undercover in Kuroshitsuji, volume 2, written and

2007).
14 Anna maria jones
The figure of the child, Edelman argues, “enacts a logic of repetition that
fixes identity through identification with the future of the social order.”
But if this is liberalism’s “governing compulsion,” as Edelman claims,43
then the child itself is also the inescapable reproach to that social order
founded on the social contract. If the social order requires the consent
of those it governs, then it cannot be an order for the future citizens who
are by definition barred from giving legal consent. This is in part what
Katherine Bond Stockton is getting at when she describes the child as “a
kind of legal strangeness.”44 This critique of classic liberalism, however,
has a history going back much further. For example, late-eighteenth-
century philosophical radical William Godwin observed in An Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice (1793), “But if the [social] contract must be re-
newed in each successive generation, what periods must be fixed on for
that purpose? And if I be obliged to submit to the established government
till my turn comes to assent to it, upon what principle is that obligation
founded? Surely not on the contract into which my father entered before
I was born?”45 The uneasiness that Godwin articulates here regarding the
social contract explains why the ideal of a knowing-innocent child should
become so compelling in the nineteenth century, concomitant with the
rise of liberal society: this fictional being with the qualities of both child-
ish helplessness and adult agency, if it were really possible, would be the
only one who could both embody the future social order and legitimately
give its consent to that impending order.
This is the context in which it makes sense, for example, that a demon
butler in the business of corrupting souls would feel compelled to protect
his “botchan” (young master) from viewing a violent crime scene (see fig-
ure 3). One might ask what of Ciel’s “morning twilight of childhood,” to
borrow James’s turn of phrase, is left to shield from the horrors of Jack
the Ripper’s slaying of prostitute Mary Jane Kelly that has not already
been destroyed by the sight of his parents’ gruesome murders, or his own
imprisonment and torture, or the carnage he himself instigates when he
orders the demon to kill his enemies? Yet, on this page, we see Sebastian
hauling Ciel back from the threshold of Kelly’s room, shielding his eyes,
pulling the boy back against himself, and crying “You must not look!”46
The scene has it both ways: a close-up of the child’s transfixed gaze in
the top frame shows that he has already seen, so the protective gesture is
a hollow one, but it is a hollow gesture that creates yet another tableau
of unsettlingly blended erotic and filial affect. It is clearly a moment of
intense emotion in which the butler is uncharacteristically emphatic. And
the reader is invited to linger over Sebastian’s protective ministrations.
Not only does the final frame on the page dwell on a disembodied shot of
Figure 3. Sebastian prevents Ciel from seeing Jack the Ripper’s final victim in Kuroshitsuji,
volume 2, written and illustrated by Toboso Yana Copyright © Yana Toboso, Black Butler
(Tokyo: Square Enix, 2007).
16 Anna maria jones
the child’s boots standing between the butler’s boots, emphasizing their
physical closeness, but for another eight pages in ten different frames—
throughout the initial confrontation with Jack the Ripper—the butler is
shown thus cradling Ciel, with one arm around his waist and one hand
covering his eyes, until Ciel finally removes the butler’s hand from his
eyes on the ninth page. The child is represented both as canny contractor,
dictating his and the butler’s actions in the investigation (Ciel describes
himself as moving the butler and others as his chess pieces on board) and,
simultaneously, as the helpless innocent who must be protected from the
sordid realities of the murders; his protector is, at one and the same time,
corruptor/predator, guardian, and instrument.
In fact, I would argue, the paradox is what makes the scene work af-
fectively. The reader needs to value the child’s innocence and to want the
demon to be the champion who protects that innocence, yet we are at no
time allowed to forget that these are not the terms of their relationship.
In the pages immediately preceding this scene, for example, we are pre-
sented with a flashback in which Ciel realizes that the demon has tricked
him, withholding information that might have prevented another Ripper
murder. Sebastian reminds the child, “Young master, I thought you kept
me by your side knowing full well what I am like.” To which Ciel replies
angrily, “Shut up! I am well aware!”47 The juxtaposition brings to the
reader’s attention the cognitive dissonance that our contradictory invest-
ments in the knowing-innocent child ought to cause, asking us to read
ironically our own affective attachments to the solicitous adult’s protec-
tion of childish innocence.
As I have been suggesting, the “Victorian-ness” of Kuroshitsuji is fun-
damental to understanding its critique of these affective investments in
the child. In other words, it matters that this vexed scene between Sebas-
tian and his botchan on the threshold of Kelly’s lodgings takes place in
London in 1888. It places Ciel Phantomhive in the context of a couple of
watershed moments for the Victorian child. If we use Kuroshitsuji’s own
timeline for its backstory, Ciel is kidnapped and sold to his tormentors in
1885, the year that W. T. Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Baby-
lon” was published in the Pall Mall Gazette, exposing the trafficking in
underage girls and leading to the passage of the Criminal Amendment
Act, which raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen (and also,
with the infamous Labouchere Amendment, criminalized “gross inde-
cency,” making it easier to prosecute homosexuals). This was the same
year that Little Lord Fauntleroy first appeared in serial form in the St.
Nicholas magazine for children. To put it another way, at the very mo-
ment that children were being defined legally and rhetorically as those
beings who must be protected from their own ignorance, as well as the
predatory desires of villainous adults, one particular child, little Lord
Fauntleroy, was becoming an international sensation precisely because of
the appeal for adults of his “mixture of maturity and childishness.”48
Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” was explicitly not concerned with regulating
vice “so long as the persons contracting are of full age, are perfectly free
agents, and in their sin are guilty of no outrage on public morals,” but
rather with protecting “girls of thirteen, fourteen, and even fifteen, who
profess themselves perfectly willing to be seduced, [but] are absolutely
and totally ignorant of the nature of the act to which they assent.”49 As
Catherine Robson notes, Stead’s representation depends on his idealiz-
ing of the preseduction girl, and that idealization rests on “the combined
qualities of her immaturity and her innocence,” terms that are “always
collapsed together: a girl is innocent because she is young.”50 Ironically,
the loss of innocence, the advent of knowledge and understanding, is
what creates the adult, the being who should, by definition, have con-
tractual rights to its own self. In other words, one consequence of “The
Maiden Tribute” scandal was to tie the transition from minor to adult ex-
plicitly to sexual knowledge. This is what James Kincaid describes when
he writes that the definition of the child in the nineteenth century came to
be “dominated by sexuality.” As he explains, “Innocence was filed down
to mean little more than virginity coupled with ignorance; the child was,
therefore, that which was innocent. . . . The irony is not hard to miss:
defining something entirely as a negation brings irresistibly before us that
which we’re trying to banish.” It also, as Kincaid points out, inevitably
pushes this ideal of the innocent (sexually ignorant) child into “the literary
territory of the Gothic.”51
Given the intense anxiety that we see in and around “The Maiden
Tribute” about innocent children being inveigled or coerced into adult
behavior they do not understand, it is all the more striking that little Lord
Fauntleroy’s charm should reside precisely in his innocent aping of adult
actions and mannerisms. As the narrator describes, “One of the many
things which always delighted the people who made the acquaintance of
his young lordship was the sage little air he wore at times when he gave
himself up to conversation;—combined with his occasionally elderly re-
marks and the extreme innocence of his round, childish face, it was irre-
sistible.”52 Indeed, Scribner’s publishers deployed descriptions of Cedric’s
childish maturity explicitly as one of the selling points of the novel for
adult readers. As one advertisement promised, “‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’
though a book for children, is certainly not a ‘juvenile’ in the common use
of the word, paradoxical as the statement may seem. The hero is a manly
18 Anna maria jones
little fellow, a child, but with all the elements of a man.”53 And, although
“irresistible” is Burnett’s own word for her “manly” little hero, to judge
from effusive contemporary reviews of the novel, which often describe
Cedric himself and the novel in general as irresistible, Scribner’s was not
off the mark in highlighting Cedric’s appeal to adults.54
Perhaps we are not meant to take Kuroshitsuji’s earl, Ciel Phantomhive,
as a parodic reinterpretation of Burnett’s hyperfetishized young hero, but
the similarities are suggestive. For one thing, their names, “Ciel” and “C.
Errol,” are strikingly similar and would be more so in their Japanese ad-
aptation in which ‘L’ and ‘R’ are both rendered as ‘R’ (hence, “Ciel” is
“Shieru,” or シェル in katakana). Secondly, their aristocratic titles, to say
nothing of their penchants for decadent velvet-and-lace garments, make
Cedric and Ciel at least passingly similar. Moreover, given the merchan-
dising blitz of playing cards, chocolates, toys, stationary, etc., that fol-
lowed the original Little Lord Fauntleroy’s success, as well as its Japanese
interpretations—from its late-Meiji translation to its resurrection as an
anime series in the late 1980s—one might, with very little exaggeration,
call Fauntleroy a Victorian prototype of the bishoˉnen hero.55 Supernatu-
rally beautiful, “manly” yet feminine, innocent yet knowing, Burnett’s
seven-year-old hero represents a particularly adult fantasy of childish
desirability and compliance. As we see in the quote with which I began
this section, “Ceddie” is a comfort to his widowed mother, whom he calls
“Dearest,” precisely because “he is such a little man” that he can intuit
and, therefore, of course, meet her needs for companionship: “He was so
much a companion for his mother that she scarcely cared for any other.”56
In New York City, he provides business capital to Dick the bootblack
and the unnamed apple-woman, and charitable assistance to Michael the
Irish bricklayer, talks politics with Mr. Hobbs the “republican” grocer,
and, after his transplantation to England, fascinates his grandfather the
Earl of Dorincourt by playing at being an earl himself:
Contradictory as it may seem, there was nothing which en-

tertained and edified [the Earl] more than the little fellow’s
interest in his tenantry. He had never taken any interest in
them himself, but it pleased him well enough that, with
all his childish habits of thought and in the midst of all his
childish amusements and high spirits, there should be such
a quaint seriousness working in the curly head.57
Indeed, throughout the novel, it is the childish innocence that particularly

fits Fauntleroy to administer estates wisely, to heal rifts between landlord
and tenants, to reform sanitation, and to perform various other social and
political miracles.
It is also possible that, post-Kincaid, one is attuned to the erotic reg-
isters in the lavish descriptions of little Cedric in Burnett’s novel that
were neither intended nor apprehended by Victorian readers, but they
are hard to miss. For example, when the Earl’s agent, the lawyer Mr.
Havisham, first meets the future earl in New York, he recognizes that
“his beauty was something unusual. He had a strong, lithe, graceful
little body and a manly little face.”58 And, for a story that records the
adventures of a robust, active little boy, there are a surprising number of
descriptions of Cedric “taking his ease luxuriously” on various fur rugs
and satin cushions, looking more like a recumbent beauty in a Sir Law-
rence Alma-Tadema painting than the hero of a children’s novel.59 For
example, when his mother—who, be it remembered, appreciates how
her “little man” will “come and pet [her]”—admires him reclining with
a cat on a tiger-skin rug in her new English home, Burnett gives us this
description (see figure 4):
Mrs. Errol glanced down at Cedric. He was lying in a

graceful, careless attitude upon the black-and-yellow skin;
the fire shown on his handsome, flushed little face, and on
the tumbled, curly hair spread out on the rug; the big cat
was purring in drowsy content,—she liked the caressing
touch of the kind little hand on her fur. Mrs. Errol smiled
faintly.60
The faint smile and the shift to the feminine pronoun tellingly conflate
the mother’s and the cat’s pleasure, while the tiger-skin rug offers an ex-
oticized and eroticized backdrop for the little boy. Here, as throughout
the novel, Reginald Birch’s illustrations, which were much admired by
contemporary reviewers, emphasize the tactile and sensuous. As Anna
Wilson remarks wryly, Birch’s illustration “takes the text in the direction
in which it seems most to want to go.”61
But, in case the reader skimmed over this passage and its illustration,
the suggestive image is reemphasized four pages later, and in very similar
language, from the lawyer’s point of view when he is quizzed by the earl
about the “quality” of the future Lord Fauntleroy:
“Healthy and well-grown?” asked my lord.

“Apparently very healthy, and quite well-grown,” re-
plied the lawyer.
20 Anna maria jones
Figure 4. Little Lord Fauntleroy reclines in Little Lord Fauntleroy, illustrated by Reginald
Birch for Frances Hodgson Burnett (New York: Scribner’s, 1886).
“Straight-limbed and well enough to look at?” de-

manded the Earl.
A very slight smile touched Mr. Havisham’s thin lips.
There rose up before his mind’s eye the picture he had
left at Court Lodge,—the beautiful, graceful child’s body
lying upon the tiger-skin in careless comfort—the bright,
tumbled hair spread upon the rug—the bright, rosy boy’s
face.62
This is an erotic investment in the child, but it is, moreover, an erotic in-
vestment in the child as future adult. Cedric is perfectly formed for, and
cheerfully assents to, his future role as the inheritor of the Dorincourt
estate and title. That Cedric’s assent to the inheritance—which becomes
his through the accidents of birth and premature death—is unnecessary
is a reality that the novel is at great pains to gloss over. Rather, it lingers
lovingly over the pleasures that Cedric’s compliance offers to the adults
around him (see figure 5).
Figure 5. Cedric appeals to the Earl of Dorincourt in Little Lord Fauntleroy, illustrated by
Reginald Birch for Frances Hodgson Burnett (New York: Scribner’s, 1886).
Of course, little Lord Fauntleroy is a fictional character, and a boy, so

we might expect Victorians to read his innocence and knowingness and
his attractions for adults differently from, say, Stead’s representation of real
little girls’ vulnerability and purity in “The Maiden Tribute.” But it bears
remembering that Burnett’s version of idealized knowing innocence was
one that crossed both fictional and gender boundaries. Whereas little Lord
22 Anna maria jones
Fauntleroy (who was himself supposedly based on Burnett’s son Vivian)

was unquestionably an effeminate version of the ideal little boy—as op-
posed to rougher versions of that article in Stevenson’s Kidnapped! (1886)
or Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899), for example—he was one who was widely
emulated and reproduced in the decades following the novel’s publication.63
And the combination of childishness and maturity was one that Burnett
would rework a few years later for her ideal little girl, Sara Crewe, in A
Little Princess (1905). First serialized in 1888, that novel introduces its seven-
year-old heroine as a “queer old-fashioned” child who has an expression
that “would have been old for a child of twelve,” and who has been the sole
domestic companion for her “young, handsome, rich, petting father.”64
But, the most telling evidence, perhaps, for the force of the appeal of
the knowing-innocent child is Stead’s 1908 eulogy of his own son, Willie,
whom he remembers in language very Fauntleroyian:
One excellent lady was scandalised at the presence of

the dear boy at the meetings held in connection with the
“Maiden Tribute.” . . . It was a somewhat fiery ordeal, but
Willie passed through it without even the smell of fire upon
his garments. He knew everything, he heard everything,
he understood everything. But a more virginal soul I never
knew, either in man or in woman, down even to the day of
his death.65
That was Willie at eleven. Stead remembers him four years older thusly:
“He was by my side hearing everything, knowing all my aspirations, my
hopes, my fears, and seconding me in everything as few could imagine
was possible to a boy of fifteen.”66 In other words, though certainly gen-
der matters, then as now, in the cultural representations of the knowing-
innocent child, the ideal was one that could, apparently, coexist, even,
as in Stead’s case, with an ideal of unspoiled purity and innocence. It is
also a screen onto which a range of significations and adult desires can
be projected. If the innocent child solicits adult attention on its behalf
(what must we do for the children?) then the knowing-innocent child
also invites more unabashedly selfish questions (what can children do for
us? What perfect sympathy, companionship, understanding, “second-
ing” of schemes, etc., can the child provide?). And, if texts like Little Lord
Fauntleroy and Stead’s “Character Sketch” demonstrate little self-aware-
ness of the extent of the emotional and cultural work that they asked real
and fictional children to do, then Henry James’s fiction about children
seems much more cognizant of the costs of that child labor.
Six years after little Lord Fauntleroy’s debut, James’s “The Pupil”
would strip the sentimental patina from the erotic investment in a “manly
little fellow.” Beverly Lyon Clark, comparing the works of Frances Hodg-
son Burnett and Henry James, reluctantly credits James with a sensitive
portrayal of child psychology in What Maisie Knew (1897) before arriving
at the astonishing conclusion that James is guilty of “literary child abuse.”
She argues that, unlike Burnett, for whom “the rhetorical deployment of
childhood enabled one to bridge gaps in age, class, gender, nationality,”
James “used Maisie to quash childhood and family connection,” and, like
Maisie’s reprehensible parents and stepparents, James “ultimately abuses
childhood.”67 Setting aside the questionable claim that a literary depiction
of a child could constitute abuse, I would argue that James’s child fiction
like The Turn of the Screw (1898), What Maisie Knew, and “The Pupil” is
remarkable precisely because it questions the validity of the fantasies of
“bridging gaps” in the social order with adorable little children.
James reproduces those same knowing-innocent, aesthetically and
erotically charged children with which his culture was so enamored, but
he adds an interpretive layer to the destructive fetishization of the child.
While unquestionably inviting the reader to enjoy the poignant beauty of
an erotic, exploited, or doomed child, James also builds a critique of that
aesthetic and erotic enjoyment into his plots. As Kevin Ohi puts it, speak-
ing of his innocent characters more generally, “James’s texts consistently
undermine any simple opposition between these characters’ innocence
and the experience they encounter in antagonists and lovers; each one, in
various ways, forestalls reducing an ethical account of its drama to a mor-
alizing gloss on victimized innocence.”68 The stories offer readers oppor-
tunities to contemplate their own attachments to the destructive fantasies
surrounding the figure of the child, as when Pemberton contemplates un-
easily the shimmering, shifting border of ignorance, “never fixed, never
arrested,” that he himself is chasing in his pupil: “[T]here was nothing
that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn’t know.”69
James’s sacrificial children, in other words, do not let their sacrifices pass
without critical comment.
As Kenneth Kidd notes wryly, queer theorists of the child eschew ac-
tual children’s books and “seem more drawn to canonical writers who
are preoccupied with beautiful, erotic children but who do not write for
children: Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov. Of these, James
is the clear favorite.”70 Certainly there have been a number of intrigu-
ing queer readings that have explored the vexed relationship between
Pemberton and the “little companion” to whom “against every interest
he ha[s] attached himself.71 I don’t wish to re-cover that ground here but
24 Anna maria jones
rather to focus on James’s explicit attention to children’s literature. To

return to a longer version of the quote from “The Pupil” with which I
began this essay,
He had a moment of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the

reflexion that with this unexpected consecration of his
hope—too sudden and too violent; the turn taken was
away from a good boy’s book—the “escape” was left on
their hands. The boyish joy was there an instant, and Pem-
berton was almost scared at the rush of gratitude and affec-
tion that broke through his first abasement.72
In this, the final scene of James’s tragic story, Pemberton and his beloved
charge, Morgan, have been essentially thrown into each other’s arms at
last by Morgan’s impecunious parents, who, facing a financial crash, urge
the tutor to take the child off their hands for good. This “unexpected
consecration” will be too much for Morgan’s weak heart, and he will drop
dead, as only a James child can, in another dozen or so lines. The passage
is typical of James’s evasive style. Whose boyish joy is it? Is Pemberton ex-
periencing the joy or watching Morgan experience it? Whose gratitude,
affection, and abasement are these?
But, another ambiguity in this passage speaks directly to the reader
as a reader: “the good boy’s book.” Previously we have learned that little
Morgan, like Cedric Errol, is possessed of a mixture of childishness and
maturity. Despite having an adult understanding of his own family and
his circumstances, he is nonetheless susceptible to influences of children’s
fiction. Morgan has been fantasizing about escaping with Pemberton
in such literary terms: “He talked of their escape—recurring to it often
afterwards—as if they were making up a ‘boy’s book’ together.”73 Pre-
sumably this “boy’s book” is one that, unlike James’s own fiction, provides
a plot with clear oppositions between good and evil, in which manly little
fellows navigate through their adventures in a “generous, innocent, hon-
est way.”74 That Morgan romanticizes their predicament in such terms is
one of the poignancies of the story, underscoring that, despite the “critical
sense . . . quite without precedent in a juvenile nature,” with which he
views his shabby family and Pemberton’s and his prospects, he is also pos-
sessed of a childish desire to read that situation in narratively simplistic
terms. As he says to Pemberton, “My dear chap, you’re a hero!” In fact,
we are told, this conflicted combination of childishness and adult acuity
is precisely what encourages and checks Pemberton’s desire to “sound the
little cool shallows that were so quickly growing deeper.”75
But, at the conclusion of the story, what is James doing with the re-
turn to the childish literary sensibility? When the heroic rescue (escape)
is at hand, what does it mean that “the turn taken was away from a good
boy’s book”? Is this an aesthetic or a moral judgment? Is the escape too
contrived to satisfy a mature or sophisticated literary taste? Is James
“abusing childhood” here in rejecting the innocent delights of a book for
children, as Clark argues? I would suggest that James invokes the “good
boy’s book” here to encourage us to imagine a bad boy’s book: a book for
boys (and girls) that will not end “just exactly as we should desire,” as
the unnamed reviewer in the Spectator remarks with satisfaction of Bur-
nett’s “charming tale,” but will instead peddle other, darker pleasures.76
It may be that James’s story was not written for children, or at least it
is not a good child’s story, but it may be that it is a bad child’s story that
encourages a queer readerly resistance to the sentimentalized child. It is
a story the narrative satisfactions of which reside in acknowledging the
catastrophic consequences of the fantasies of the innocent-knowing child
we have ourselves invested in for the tale’s duration. “The Pupil,” finally,
invites, to borrow Edelman’s language, the reader’s “traumatic encounter
with . . . [the] inescapable failure” of a social order sustained by that para-
doxical innocent-knowing child.77
The Contract
Kuroshitsuji employs some very Jamesian imagery to convey a similar

sense of the sexualized, destructive nature of the contract between the
boy and his demon butler: the soiled glove (see figure 6).78 The manga’s
first explicit articulation of their Faustian pact, at the conclusion of the
first volume, is combination striptease and exposition. As he removes his
bloodstained glove to reveal the mark of the contract, Sebastian explains
to the villain from who he has just rescued Ciel (and whom he is about to
kill), “So long as the young master possesses the ‘mark of the covenant’ I
am his faithful dog. ‘A Sacrifice,’ ‘a wish,’ and a ‘covenant’ bind me to my
master until I claim his soul.”79 Although Sebastian’s supernatural pow-
ers have been clearly evident in the first chapters, this is the scene that
first reveals the terms of the contract unambiguously to the reader, thus
setting the terms by which we read the rest of the series. Whereas only a
few pages before we have seen the child as passive victim (see figure 1),
here the close-up of his eye in the upper middle of the page stresses his
role as agent and possessor of the gaze. Conversely, Sebastian, his own
gaze half-obscured, becomes the object simultaneously of the child’s, the
26 Anna maria jones
Figure 6. Sebastian explains the terms of the contract in Kuroshitsuji, volume 1, written and
2007)
kidnapper’s, and our own rapt attention. Most of the bottom two thirds
of the page is taken up with a head shot of Sebastian, his hand with the
matching mark of the covenant covering his left eye. In this final frame,
once again, he has been removed from the realistic background of the
room and is surrounded instead by shadows and stylized black shapes
that might be the fragments of his clothes, black wings, or flames—a frag-
mented image that, in Mulvey’s terms, “destroys the Renaissance space”
of the scene, inviting the reader to fetishize the bishoˉnen butler.80
The complex affective investments that the contract demands, both of
its parties and of the reader, are highlighted in the original Japanese text
by the wordplay in the dialogue, common in manga in general and in this
series in particular. For example, in the foregoing quote, in describing
himself as his master’s “dog,” Sebastian’s dialogue is written using the
kanji 下僕 (geboku), which means humble servant, but the furigana gloss
of the kanji is written in katakana as イヌ (inu), the word for dog, thus
calling attention to the masochistic resonances of their contract. This sort
of connotative combination (or in some cases opposition) provides some-
thing like a Shakespearean aside, offering extra interpretive material
and inviting an actively engaged, attentive reader.81 Likewise, although
Ciel’s dialogue also sometimes includes the servant/dog conflation, some-
times a different juxtaposition reveals other desires, as when the child
tells his demon “. . . I command you. Do not betray me. Always stay by
my side . . . no matter what!”82 Here the furigana is written as おまえ
(omae; the child uses an adult, masculine, and familiar form of “you”),
but the kanji is written as 騎士 (kishi), which means knight. Thus, Ciel
echoes Morgan’s childish desires in “The Pupil” (“My dear chap, you’re
a hero!”)—that the demon will be his chivalrous champion and protec-
tor; that he himself is a free agent, an adult, equal or even superior to his
contractual partner—while also keeping to the forefront the impossibility
of those desires. A demon can only be a demon; a child cannot be both
helpless and a free agent.
Kuroshitsuji returns again and again to the contract, underscoring the
paradox upon which the entire narrative depends. The child’s power is a
function of the contract—that is, the demon serves as his instrument as
one of the conditions of their contract—but as a child he should have no
contractual rights. In the scene represented here in figure 6, as through-
out, the affective pull of the narrative works only if one simultaneously
buys the child’s childishness and buys his status as consenting agent. In
other words, if the child were only a helpless innocent in his relation-
ship with the demon, then we would have to read this situation with the
same horror we view his previous abduction and the other victimized
28 Anna maria jones
children’s exploitation, but the entire story is premised, narratively and

visually, on our finding the demon-child relationship attractive, if also
painful. The child must, therefore, have agency in having chosen his de-
structive contract with the demon. Yet, again, much of the appeal to the
reader is presented in the demon’s loyal, solicitous protection of his help-
less charge. Just as the wordplay of text layers “dog” with “humble ser-
vant” and “knight” in describing the demon’s relationship to the child, so
the narrative consistently demands that we acknowledge our contradic-
tory affective investments.
Think of the Children?
Of course, while the series is still being written, it is impossible to say

whether Toboso may not invent a hopeful conclusion that would rescue
her damaged little contractor from the terms of his agreement. Perhaps the
demon will prove to not really be so demonic as to consume a child’s soul.
Perhaps there is some unforeseen loophole that will free Ciel and rob Se-
bastian of his quarry (though, given that the reader’s affective attachments
are also engaged by the demon, this would, perhaps perversely, not be an
entirely satisfactory resolution).83 In any case, in the absence of that sup-
positious happy ending, I consider one final meditation upon the untenable
knowing-innocent child that, to my mind, encapsulates the manga’s most
stringent critique of the fetishization of the child-as-future. In what I am
calling the “Maiden Tribute” story arc, Ciel is called by Queen Victoria to
investigate the disappearances of some children that have been linked to the
movements of a circus (a setup that, naturally, demands undercover work
that places the two in a variety of interesting and sexually suggestive situa-
tions). Behind the front of the circus, however, is a wealthy philanthropist
(ironically named Lord Kelvin) known for rescuing and protecting poor,
orphaned children, and behind his façade of benevolent public service is a
grotesque scene of human trafficking, abuse, and murder.84
This story arc, which gets under way in volume 6 and concludes in vol-
ume 8, is much more graphically violent than the previous chapters and
is seldom leavened by the comic relief that mitigates the angst of earlier
arcs. This narrative reaches its climax when, discovering a dungeon full
of tormented children in cages that reproduces the very one in which he
himself was imprisoned, Ciel has a flashback to his torture. The flashback
is represented in four frames that cut horizontally across the page and
replicate the child’s point of view, thus encouraging the reader’s painful
identification with his suffering: The top frame shows an image, from the
child’s perspective, of his own hand reaching out through the bars of a cage
while masked, smirking adults loom over him. The next frame, bring-
ing the reader back to the present action, shows only Ciel’s outstretched
hand, slightly larger, gloved but covered in vomit from the trauma of
the flashback, whereas the third frame shows the butler’s white-gloved
hand grasping the child’s with his torso moving into frame, replacing the
masked figures of the first frame. Only in the final frame does the reader
move out of the child’s perspective to view his terrified face (also covered
in vomit) in profile. Sebastian’s dialogue in the bottom two frames reads,
“Young Master. What have you to fear?”85 The following page shows the
butler drawing the child to him in a close embrace that looks almost like
dancing (and indeed is compositionally similar to earlier scenes in which
the two actually do dance together). Untying the strings of Ciel’s eye patch
in a sort of striptease to reveal the mark of the contract, Sebastian says,
“You are outside the cage now . . . My Lord. Now . . . call my name.”86
This scene, like so many in Kuroshitsuji, blends past and present, suf-
fering and erotic titillation, and invokes the contract as the response to,
and narrative payoff for, the child’s abject suffering. The butler’s per-
suasive appeal and the child’s command in response, “Kill these guys!!”
echoes the inauguration of their relationship, and, as with previous res-
cue scenes, the “monsters” are dealt a satisfyingly violent comeuppance.87
So far, so good. But then Toboso gives the narrative a really horrifying
twist when the child orders Sebastian to burn everything to ash, including
the poor little caged children he has been charged with saving, and the
demon, of course, obeys.
That suffering children justify any amount of violence in response
to their victimization and ostensibly “on their behalf” is, as Kincaid and
Edelman demonstrate, one of the main problems with a culturally perva-
sive and uncritical sentimentalization of the child. Toboso’s undermining,
then, of the narrative payoff when Sebastian makes short work of the bad
men who have preyed upon so many helpless innocents is all the more
striking. What are we to make of this childish murderousness that super-
sedes the “righteous oomph,” to borrow Kincaid’s phrase, of Sebastian’s
meting out of justice?
The scene makes it difficult to read Ciel as either wholly childish or
wholly possessed of his own agency. In the first place, the demon ques-
tions his directives, and so we are given a conversation in which the child
must assert his authority and reaffirm his command:
Sebastian: “Burn it? You mean this place?”

Ciel: “Yes.”
30 Anna maria jones
Figure 7. Ciel commands Sebastian to destroy everything in Kuroshitsuji, volume 8, written

and illustrated by Toboso Yana. Copyright © Yana Toboso, Black Butler (Tokyo: Square Enix,
2007).
Sebastian: “But, young master, Gathering from Her Maj-

esty the Queen’s correspondence this mission consists of
finding the perpetrators and rescuing the children, does it
not? The perpetrators have already been—”
Ciel: “Quiet! Shut your mouth!! Don’t leave any trace
behind. Turn everything here to ash. Have you forgotten
your duties as my servant? I command you!!”88
This assertion of the child’s agency is followed by a very strange sequence

(see figure 7) that juxtaposes a small inset frame of the doomed children,
drawn in faint outline, with a series of frames across the two pages that
show the demon’s reactions. Sebastian’s expressions morph from wide-
eyed shock to reluctant compliance, eyes closed, sighing. On the follow-
ing page, he again removes his blood- and vomit-stained glove with his
teeth and, regaining his usual mildly pleasant expression, complies with
the order. One might say that if a fundamentally evil creature is shocked
by your course of action, it is time to consider whether you have gone too
far. Sebastian’s reactions, along with the inset image of the caged children,
make it impossible to gloss over the awfulness of the child’s command.
Yet, throughout the scene of annihilation, as in previous scenes that play
with his sentimentalization, Ciel is represented as particularly small and
helpless, and thus sympathetic: Sebastian holds him in the crook of one
arm, and the boy, looking and acting like a much younger child, clings to
the demon.
The image that concludes chapter 34 (see figure 8a) is a single frame of
the butler, striding out of a vortex of flames, carrying the clinging child
in one arm. The only text is his stock response to Ciel’s commands, “Yes,
My Lord,” which he offers with a faint smile.89 This image is both in ac-
cord with and in defiance of the social order; the binding contract is that
which guarantees civil society—the individual instantiation of the social
contract—yet this contract is a grotesque parody of that instrument of
social order, not merely because its terms require the employee to destroy
his employer, nor because it leads, in this instance, to the destruction of
the very innocents for whom the social order is held in trust, but because
it underscores the impossible fiction of the assenting child-as-future.
Emphasizing the futureless child, the destructive climax is bookended
by flashbacks, narrated by one of the pitiful victims-cum-accomplices of
Lord Kelvin, that portray the hopeless case of urban London’s street chil-
dren (see figure 8b): homeless, jobless, and physically broken.90 This life-
long, widespread misery, the narration suggests, defies comparison with
Ciel’s (heretofore highly sentimentalized and sensationalized) suffering.
32 Anna maria jones
Figure 8a and b. (a) Sebastian complies. (b) The victims narrate in Kuroshitsuji, volume 8,
written and illustrated by Toboso Yana. Copyright © Yana Toboso, Black Butler (Tokyo:
Square Enix, 2007).
Toboso’s style of illustration, significantly, changes from the end of the

chapter 34 to the beginning of chapter 35, temporarily dispensing with
the dramatic curving lines, stylized tableaux, and fetishizing close-ups in
order to portray something like Dickensian realism: two frames showing
scenes of an urban slum, where starving dogs, rats, and filthy, ragged chil-
dren subsist together. The framing, with the images bleeding off the right
side of the page, emphasizes the pervasiveness and persistence of the chil-
dren’s misery. The images provide a grim reminder that this suffering is
the social order. In the face of this systemic exploitation of children, what
would have been the right response? In fact, there is no right response
that will fit within the framework of the gothic child-endangerment nar-
rative. There is not one monstrous villain who can be punished, and there
is no supernatural intervention that might save all these victims. As Ciel
says to Sebastian when the demon asks him why he chose to destroy the
children: “I myself was only able to recover because I happened to be able
to summon a creature like you back then . . . . . . But the lone devil there
in the Kelvin manor was you. And you belong to me.”91
If the conclusion of the “Maiden Tribute” story arc serves to un-

derscore the failure of the social order and the future-oriented “Ponzi
scheme” upon which it depends, then this image of the butler and child
engulfed in the flames with which they have incinerated victims and vic-
timizers alike highlights the jouissance that results from acknowledging
that failure (children have, without a doubt, been fucked in this fiery con-
clusion). Notwithstanding its sordid context, however, the image itself is
a beautiful, exultant one, both aesthetically and affectively satisfying. The
nihilism expressed here, I argue, is a graphic illustration of what Edel-
man means when he invites his readers to partake of the “corrosive enjoy-
ment” of a “figural identification with the undoing of identity,” the death
drive.92 In other words, the pleasures that Kuroshitsuji offers to its readers
are the painful pleasures of demolition rather than escape, of dismantling
the comforting fantasies of “manly little fellows” looking forward to a
bright future of social progress and harmony that would affirm and repay
all of our deep investments in them.
Anna Maria Jones is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida. She
is the author of Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Ohio
State University Press, 2007). Her recent work has appeared in European Romantic Review,
Victorian Literature and Culture, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture, and
The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction.
Notes
1. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (New York: Scribner’s, 1886), 26.
2. Henry James, “The Pupil,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 11 (1891; repr.,
New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 509–77, quotation on 576. Unless otherwise indicated, all
text citations are to this edition, which James altered from the original published in
Longman’s in 1891 and the version reissued in The Lesson of the Master in 1892.
3. Throughout the essay, I maintain the Japanese convention of writing surname first for
authors publishing in Japan or writing in Japanese. For English-language publications,
names are written surname last. Japanese words are italicized except where, as with words
like manga and anime, they have been adopted into English vocabulary.
4. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Series Q (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004), 4.
5. Tim Dean, “An Impossible Embrace: Queerness, Futurity, and the Death Drive,”
in A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy, ed. James J. Bono,
Tim Dean, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008),
122–40; and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity,
Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
6. Kenneth Kidd, “Queer Theory’s Child and Children’s Literature Studies,” PMLA 126,
no. 1 (2011): 182–88, quotation on 186.
34 Anna maria jones
7. James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1998), 13, 7; Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility
of Children’s Fiction, New Cultural Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1992); Katherine Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the
Twentieth Century, Series Q (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Marah
Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009); see also James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child
and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Tison Pugh, Innocence, Sexuality,
and the Queerness of Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature and Culture (London:
Routledge, 2011). Gubar in particular offers a useful complication of prevailing notions
of the “Romantic child.” As she argues,
Even when they detach child characters from home and school,
classic Victorian and Edwardian children’s books do not represent
young people as untouched Others, magically free from adult influ-
ence. On the contrary, they generally conceive of child characters
and child readers as socially saturated beings . . . precisely in order
to explore the vexed issue of the child’s agency: given their status as
dependent, acculturated beings, how much power and autonomy
can young people actually have? (4–5)
8. Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese
Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Mark McLel-
land, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age, Asian Voices (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 18–19; Jennie Holt, “Japan as Exemplum of Social Order
in Turn-of-the-Century British and American Educational Literature: Filial Paradise,”
ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 52, no. 4 (2009): 417–39; Kawana Sari,
“Romancing the Role Model: Florence Nightingale, Shōjo Manga, and the Literature
of Self-Improvement,” Japan Review 23 (2011): 199–223; see also Jim Reichert, In the
Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2006). Holt demonstrates how educational reformers in Japan,
Great Britain, and the United States, like Nitobe Inazō, G. Stanley Hall, and Robert
Baden Powell, borrowed from one another to construct images of the ideal child and to
promote educational methods that would most efficiently produce those ideal children
for the good of the social order and nation (417). Gregory Pflugfelder makes a similar
argument about late-nineteenth-century sexological discourse (a discourse, in fact, closely
related to the child-study movement), in which “Japanese sexologists . . . engag[ed] in an
ongoing and creative dialogue with their non-Japanese colleagues, active participants in
a global network of sexual knowledge in which they were not only tutees but mentors as
well” (13). Kawana’s discussion of the translation history and continuing popularity in
Japan of Samuel Smiles’s 1859 best seller Self-Help is particularly interesting.
9. For a discussion of the differences between Western comics and manga, see Scott Mc-
Cloud, Understanding Comics (1993; repr., New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 74–81. Even
when translated into English, manga most often preserves its right-to-left orientation.
And, as McCloud notes, it tends to employ what he calls aspect-to-aspect transitions, in
which adjacent frames represent associated images rather than chronologically or caus-
ally linked action, far more frequently than Western comics.
10. As of the 28 April 2012 Web edition of the New York Times Bestseller List, volumes of
Black Butler had been, all together, eighty-seven weeks in the top ten since its debut.
Volume 1 alone stayed twenty-six weeks on the list (New York Times, accessed 10 May
2012, http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/manga/list.html#viaann). Toboso
ranked twenty-sixth out of the top fifty manga creators in Japan since 2010, with total
sales for Kuroshitsuji listed at 2,358,000 (“Top 50 Manga Creators by Sales since 2010,”
Anime News Network, 5 August 2011, accessed 10 May 2012, http://www.animenews

network.com/news/2011-08-05/top-50-manga-creators-by-sales-since-2010). Kuroshit-
suji ranked thirtieth in manga series sales in Japan for 2011, with 1,426,621 copies sold
(“Top-Selling Manga in Japan by Series: 2011,” Anime News Network, 30 November
2011, accessed 10 May 2012, http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-11-30/
top-selling-manga-in-japan-by-series/2011).
11. Some of Kuroshitsuji’s many other cultural references include Arthur Conan Doyle’s
A Study in Scarlet (1887), Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire novella Carmilla (1872), Shake-
speare’s Romeo and Juliet (ca. 1595), and John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia (ca. 1852),
as well as Japanese touchstones like Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s short story “Kumo no ito”
[“The Spider’s Thread,” 1918] and Katsushika Hokusai’s wood-block print Kanagawa-
oki name-ura [Under the Wave, off Kanagawa, ca. 1830–33]. “Kumo no ito” has a complex
translation and adaptation history that some sources trace from Tolstoy, by way of Ger-
man American author Paul Carus, to Akutagawa. For a discussion of the provenance
of Akutagawa’s tale, see J. Scott Miller, Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan
(New York: Palgrave, 2001), 1–3. For a discussion of the influence of Edgar Allan Poe
and Doyle on Japanese fiction, see Jeffrey Angles, Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of
Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011).
12. “Omoi yo dekai yo takai yo,” in Toboso Yana, Kuroshitsuji, 14 volumes to date (Tokyo:
Square Enix, 2007– ), 2:189; translated by Tomo Kimura as Black Butler, 9 volumes to
date (New York: Yen Press, 2010– ), 2:187. Throughout, I provide the English versions of
quoted material in text with the original text from the Japanese volumes in notes written
in rōmaji using Revised Hepburn conventions.
13. For an interesting discussion of BL (boys’ love [boizu rabu]) reader demographics, see
Dru Pagliassotti, “Reading Boys’ Love in the West,” Particip@tions 5, no. 2 (2008), ac-
cessed 15 August 2011, http://www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%202/5_02_
pagliassotti.htm Web; see also Andrea Wood, “‘Straight’ Women, Queer Texts: Boy-
Love Manga and the Rise of a Global Counterpublic,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34,
nos. 1–2 (2006): 394–414. Slash fiction is amateur fiction that creates an alternative erotic
or romantic narratives out of pairings between two (usually) male characters in a main-
stream narrative (e.g., the Harry Potter series or popular TV shows). The term originates
from the description of the pairing, as in “Kirk/Spock” from the original Star Trek,
which provided the romantic fodder for some of the first slash fictions.
14. A number of terms are used to refer to male-male romantic and sexual relationships in
manga and anime, including BL, yaoi, and shōnen-ai. Often these terms are employed
differently by Japanese and Western readers, and some of them are contested. BL is per-
haps the most commonly used term in Japan. Whereas BL is usually intended for female
audiences, the terms gei and bara refer to comics written for a gay male audience. Yaoi
has connotations of more graphic/pornographic representations (although in the United
States it is sometimes used as a more general term, like BL). Shōnen-ai is an older, some-
what outdated term that carries connotations of mismatched ages (older man/younger
boy) in Japan. In the United States, however, shōnen-ai is sometimes used to mean BL
stories that are not as sexually explicit as yaoi, and it does not always carry the connota-
tion of age difference. The term shotacon or shota, which is used to describe an attraction
to prepubescent boys, can also refer to manga or anime that features preadult males in
more or less explicitly sexual ways. In short, it pays to be aware of the slippage among
these terms and to recognize that they may be used to describe very different kinds of
texts, ranging from mildly suggestive to pornographic.
15. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminism and Film Theory,
ed. Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 57–79. As she writes of classic
36 Anna maria jones
Hollywood’s “exhibitionist” heroines, “[T]heir appearance [is] coded for strong visual
and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (62).
16. The term fujoshi means, literally, “rotting girl” and is used to describe female fans
of yaoi and BL. Like the term otaku, which describes overzealous fans of any stamp,
fujoshi is sometimes applied pejoratively and sometimes appropriated by fans to describe
themselves. Dōjinshi refers to amateur or self-published comics. Although these can be
any kind of self-published manga, the term very often refers to yaoi productions depict-
ing characters from mainstream manga or anime in sexual encounters. For example,
YouTube houses thousands of fan videos from all over the world for Kuroshitsuji that
compile compelling images or clips (which is often to say, ones that highlight the ro-
mantic or sexual registers of the characters’ relationships) from the original manga and
anime. Hundreds of these videos also feature more or less romantically and/or sexually
explicit images from fan art and dōjinshi. For an interesting account of fujoshi culture,
see Daisuke Okabe and Kimi Ishida, “Making Fujoshi Identity Visible and Invisible,” in
Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World, ed. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe,
and Izumi Tsuji, trans. Elissa Sato, Mizuko Ito, Jonathan E. Abel, and Shion Kono
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 207–24.
17. For an interesting discussion of the translation and reception history of Little Lord
Fauntleroy, see Melek Ortabasi, “Brave Dogs and Little Lords: Thoughts on Translation,
Gender, and the Debate on Childhood in Mid-Meiji,” in Translation in Modern Japan,
ed. Indra Levy, Routledge Contemporary Japan Series (New York: Routledge, 2011),
186–212; see also Yoshiko Takita, “Wakamatsu Shizuko and Little Lord Fauntleroy,”
Comparative Literature Studies 22, no. 1 (1985): 1–8.
18. Hitomi Nabae, “Translation as Criticism: A Century of James Appreciation in Japan,”
Henry James Review 24, no. 3 (2005): 250–57, quotation on 257. Nabae provides a fascinat-
ing discussion of Henry James’s history in Japan, including a timeline of his translations.
19. For a discussion of the beginnings of the BL genre and of Hagio Moto’s work, see James
Welker, “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: ‘Boys’ Love’ as Girls’ Love in ShÔjo Manga,”
Signs 31, no. 3 (2006): 841–70.
20. Edelman, No Future, 3. See also Robert L. Caserio, “Anti-social James,” Henry James
Review 31, no. 1 (2010): 7–13. Caserio employs Edelman’s argument to make a very
similar argument to mine in regard to Henry James, claiming that James’s “dramas of
same-sex love and aesthetic practices cultivate . . . a profound rejection of the ontology of
social being” (7). See also Kevin Ohi, Henry James and the Queerness of Style (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 15–16.
21. Edelman, No Future, 11, 25–26.
22. Ibid., 11, 18.
23. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 21.
24. Dean, “Impossible Embrace,” 140. For a summary of this debate, see Robert L. Caserio,
“The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–21; see also Mari
Ruti, “Why There’s Always a Future in the Future: The Antisocial Thesis in Queer
Theory,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 13, no. 1 (2008): 113–26.
25. Judith Halberstam, “The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory,” PMLA 121,
no. 3 (2006): 819–28, quotation on 824.
26. Dean, “Impossible Embrace,” 129.
27. Ibid., 126.
28. Matthew Thorn, “Girls and Women Getting Out of Hand: The Pleasure and Politics of
Japan’s Amateur Comics Community,” in Fanning the Flames: Fans and Consumer Cul-
ture in Contemporary Japan, ed. William W. Kelly, SUNY Series in Japan in Transition
(Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 169–86, quotation on 180; and Midori Matsui, “Little
Girls Were Little Boys: Displaced Femininity in the Representation of Homosexuality in
Japanese Girls’ Comics,” in Feminism and the Politics of Difference, ed. Sneja Gunew and
Anne Yeatman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 177–96, quotation on 179; see also
Fujimoto Yukari, “Shōjo manga ni okeru ‘shōnen ai’ no imi” [The meaning of boys’ love
in girls’ comics], Nyū feminizumu rebyū [New feminism review] 2, no. 2 (1991): 280–84.
29. I’m barely scratching the surface of the critical discussions of BL fandom in English-
language and Japanese-language scholarship. Accounts of BL fans range from the
celebratory to the pathologizing. For a good overview of the phenomenon, see Kumiko
Saito, “Desire in Subtext: Gender, Fandom, and Women’s Male-Male Homoerotic Paro-
dies in Contemporary Japan,” Mechademia 6 (2011): 171–91; see also Dru Pagliassotti,
“Better Than Romance? Japanese BL Manga and the Subgenre of Male/Male Romantic
Fiction,” in Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom
of the Genre, ed. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2010), 59–83.
30. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
31. Dean, “Impossible Embrace,” 140.
32. Mark John Isola, “Yaoi and Slash Fiction: Women Writing, Reading, and Getting
Off?” in Levi et al., Boys’ Love (see note 29), 84–98, quotation on 84; Mark McLelland,
Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan (Surrey, England: Curzon, 2000), 78; Mari Kotani,
“Techno-Gothic Japan: From Seishi Yokokizo’s The Death’s-head Stranger to Mariko
Ohara’s Ephemera the Vampire,” in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary
Culture, ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1997), 189–98, quotation on 192; and Welker, “Beautiful, Borrowed,” 866;
see also Wood, “‘Straight’ Women,” 404; and Patrick W. Galbraith, “Fujoshi: Fantasy
Play and Transgressive Intimacy among ‘Rotten Girls’ in Contemporary Japan,” Signs 37,
no. 1 (2011): 211–32. Although Kotani employs utopian language similar to these other
critics, it is worth noting that her description of Hagio’s adolescent vampire also suggests
a reading closer to my own “antisocial” characterization of the knowing-innocent child:
“[T]he ultimate brilliance of Moto Hagio lies in her representation of vampire as a physi-
cally immature but mentally hyper-mature adolescent boy who determines to become
neither an adult nor a female in the orthodox sense” (192). Although my own focus is on
Kuroshitsuji’s “Victorian-ness,” it certainly can be read vis-à-vis its classic shōjo manga
antecedents as well.
33. Ellipses in the original. Unless otherwise noted, all ellipses in subsequent quotes from
Black Butler are in the original (“Imomushi no yōde totemo buzama de suteki desu yo.
Chıˉsaku yowai anata ni yoku oniai da. Nakanaka ii kakkou o sareteiru jarimasen ka”
[Toboso, Kuroshitsuji, 1:167]).
34. “Konkai no gēmu sashite omoshirokunakatta na” (ibid., 174).
35. This style will resonate with readers familiar with the European fin-de-siècle Decadents.
One might think, for example, of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé (the androgynous and aestheticized figures of which were influenced by Japanese
wood-block prints and, in turn, have been influential on Japanese manga artists), which
render scenes of violence, like Salomé with John the Baptist’s severed head, in elegantly
stylized, graceful lines.
36. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 9.
38 Anna maria jones
37. Edelman, No Future, 11.

38. Ibid., 29.
39. Ciel: “Seba . . . Sebastian . . .” Sebastian: “Sā kabe ni te o tsuite motto chikara o nuite
kudasai.” Ciel: “Kore ijō . . . muri da! . . . Nai– Kuru . . .” Sebastian: “Mō sukoshi
gamanshite kudasai sugu naremasu” Ciel: “A– de . . .” (Toboso, Kuroshitsuji, 2:112).
40. Ciel: “Deru naizō ga te itteru darō ga!!!!” Sebastian: “Korusetto de naizō ga deta josei
wa imasen yo!” (ibid., 113).
41. Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy, 6–7.
42. James, “The Pupil,” 547.
43. Edelman, No Future, 25, 15.
44. Stockton, Queer Child, 16.
45. William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and
Happiness, 3rd ed. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), 1:144; available online in
Google Books.
46. “Ikemasen!” (Toboso, Kuroshitsuji, 2:157).
47. Sebastian: “Botchan wa watashi ga sōiu mono dato go shōchi no uede osoba ni okare-
teiru no dewa?” Ciel: “Urusai shitteru!” (ibid., 154).
48. Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy, 61.
49. W[illiam] T[homas] Stead, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, Pall Mall Gazette,
10 July 1885, 6–8.
50. Catherine Robson, The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton, NJ: Princ-
eton University Press, 2001), 171; see also Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight:
Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Women in Culture and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81–134.
51. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 55, 10.
53. This ad ran in a number of places. See, for example, The Book-Buyer: A Summary of
American and Foreign Literature 3 (February 1886–January 1887), n.p.; available online at
Google Books.
54. See, for example, anonymous reviews in Current 7, no. 153 (1886): 366; Overland Monthly
8, no. 48 (1886): 670; and Spectator 59, no. 3050 (1886): 1664; available online at Hathi
Trust Digital Library.
55. For a discussion of Little Lord Fauntleroy’s reception in the United States, including
the popularity of Fauntleroy-related products, see Beverly Lyon Clark, Kiddie Lit: The
Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003), 18–19. For its Japanese provenance, see Ortabasi, “Brave Dogs,”
and Takita, “Wakamatsu Shizuko.”
57. Ibid., 138.
58. Ibid., 25.
59. Ibid., 205. See, for example, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Cherries (1873).
60. Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy, 158, 6–7, 56.
61. Anna Wilson, “Little Lord Fauntleroy: The Darling of Mothers and the Abomination of
a Generation,” American Literary History 8, no. 2 (1996): 232–58, quotation on 244.
63. See Clark, Kiddie Lit, 18–19. Clark notes that Vivian was supposed to have served as the
model for Reginald Birch’s illustrations (19). For a discussion of popularity and effemi-
nacy of Fauntleroy, see Wilson, “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” 232–58. Wilson argues inter-
estingly that “little Lord Fauntleroy represents a boy functioning as a female substitute.
This position renders him attractive to some readers and loathsome to others” (235).
64. Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now
Told for the First Time (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 3–4. The novel version was an
expansion of the 1888 serialization, Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s
Boarding School, also published in St. Nicholas.
65. W[illiam] T[homas] Stead, “Character Sketch: II. My Son,” Review of Reviews 37, no. 217
(1908): 23–33, quotation on 26; available online at HathiTrust Digital Library. The meet-
ings that Stead is referring to here are for his own trial for having abducted and assaulted
an underage girl as research for “The Maiden Tribute” articles, the so-called Eliza Arm-
strong Case (see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 106–34).
66. Stead, “Character Sketch,” 27.
67. Clark, Kiddie Lit, 42, 47.
68. Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov
(New York: Palgrave, 2005), 135.
69. James, “The Pupil,” 547.
70. Kidd, “Queer Theory’s Child,” 184.
71. James, “The Pupil,” 526–27; see also Caserio, “Anti-social James,” 7–13; and Katherine
Bond Stockton, “The Smart Child Is the Masochistic Child: Pedagogy, Pedophilia, and
the Pleasures of Harm,” in Queer Child (see note 7), 61–88. For other interesting readings
of queer James, see Jonathan Flatley, “Reading into Henry James,” Criticism 46, no. 1
(2004): 103–23; Ellis Hanson, “Screwing with Children in Henry James,” GLQ: A Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 3 (2003): 367–91; Eric Haralsan, Henry James and Queer
Modernity, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003); Ohi, Henry James; and Leland S. Person, Henry James and
the Suspense of Masculinity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
72. James, “The Pupil,” 567–77. Leon Edel returns to the original 1892 book version for his
Complete Tales of Henry James, and, as the differences in this passage are significant, I
include Edel’s edition here:
He had a moment of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the reflection
that, with this unexpected consecration of his hope—too sudden and
too violent; the thing was a good deal less like a boy’s book—the “es-
cape” was left on their hands. The boyish joy was there for an instant,
and Pemberton was almost frightened at the revelation of gratitude
and affection that shone through his humiliation. (Henry James,
“The Pupil,” in The Complete Tales of Henry James, vol. 7, ed. Leon
Edel [Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963], 409–60, quotation on 459)
Although Edel dismisses the later revised version as having “no relevance” for a chrono-
logically organized collection (461), it seems to me that the changes that James introduces
upon reflection and along with his oft-quoted preface bear consideration. These are,
40 Anna maria jones
he explains in the preface, his ongoing efforts to write children who “wonder . . . in a
critical spirit” (James, preface to Novels and Tales [see note 2], 11:v–xxii, quotation on xx).
73. James, Novels and Tales, 570.
74. Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy, 39. For an argument regarding the source for James’s
“boy’s book,” see Adeline R. Tintner, “James Writes a Boy’s Story: ‘The Pupil’ and
R. L. Stevenson’s Adventure Books,” Essays in Literature 5 (1978): 61–73. Tintner argues
convincingly that James is responding specifically to Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped
(1886).
75. James, “The Pupil,” 546–47.
76. Spectator (see note 54).
78. This too might remind us of “The Pupil.” Michael Moon argues that we ought to read
the opening scene of “The Pupil,” in which Morgan’s mother sits “drawing a pair of
soiled gants de Suède through a fat jewelled hand . . . at once pressing and gliding” as a
coded communication in which, through the play of the soiled kid gloves, the mother
promises to give the tutor her own “soiled kid” Morgan in payment for his services (see
“A Small Boy and Others: Sexual Disorientation in Henry James, Kenneth Anger, and
David Lynch,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Mod-
ern Text, ed. Hortense H. Spillers, Essays of the English Institute [New York: Routledge,
1991], 141–56, quotation on 150). Whether one wholeheartedly endorses Moon’s reading
of the gloves as metalepsis for the beautiful but tainted child (and I find his reading aw-
fully persuasive), gloves, soiled and otherwise, were unquestionably objects of fetishized
and sexualized significance for the Victorians. Think, for example of Pre-Raphaelite
William Holman Hunt’s 1853 painting “The Awakened Conscience,” in which the soiled
glove, discarded on the floor, signifies the young woman’s lost virtue in the scene of
seduction, or even of Max Klinger’s disturbing 1881 Symbolist etching series Paraphrase
on the Finding of a Glove.
79. “Botchan ga ‘seiyakusho’ o motsu kagiri watashi wa kare no chōjitsu na geboku. ‘Gisei’
‘negai’ soshite ‘seiyaku’ ni yotte watashi wa shujin ni shibarareru sono tamashi o hikitoru
made” (Toboso, Kuroshitsuji, 1:178).
80. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 63–64.
81. Similarly, Sebastian’s catchphrase depends on the reader’s close reading to catch the
joke. “Aku made shitsuji desu” makes use of a pivot word to read as both “I am merely
[akumade] a butler” and “I am a demon [akuma] and [de] a butler,” which Tomo Kimura
translates into the more idiomatic “I am a devil of a butler” (see Toboso, Black Butler,
1:192, translator’s note).
82. “. . . Meirei da. Kishi dake wa boku o uragiruna. Boku no soba o hanareru . . . zettaini!”
(Toboso, Kuroshitsuji, 3:142–43).
83. In fact, the anime plays with this issue cleverly in its conclusion.
84. Lord Kelvin (aka William Thomson), a physicist and mathematician, one of the nine-
teenth century’s most respected men of science, perhaps best known for his work in
thermodynamics.
85. “Botchan nani o osoreru koto ga aru no desu” (Toboso, Kuroshitsuji, 8:60).
86. “Anata wa ima ori no soto ni iruno desu yo watashi no goshujin-sama. Sā watashi no
namae o yonde” (ibid., 61).
87. “Koitsura o koroseee!!” (ibid., 62).
88. Sebastian: “Moyase? Koko o desuka?” Ciel: “Sōda.” Sebastian: “Desuga botchan
joō heika no otegami kara sassuru ni konkai no ninmu wa jiken no hannin sagashi
to kodomo-tachi no kyūshutsu de wa? Sudeni hannin wa.” Ciel: “Urusai damare!!
Nanimo noko suna koko ni aru subete o hia hi shiro. Omae no shigoto o wasureta no ka.
MEIREI DA!!” (ibid., 65–66).
89. “Gyoi goshujin-sama” (ibid., 68). This is also another instance of the text providing its
own gloss, as the furigana beside the kanji (御意ご主人様) spells out “Yes, My Lord” in
katakana (イエスマイロード), arguably emphasizing the “British-ness” of the story.
90. Ibid., 72.
91. “Boku wa ano toki tamatama akuma o yobideseta kara tachiageru chikara o ten irerareta
dake da. Kerubin yashiki ni akuma wa omae shika inakatta sono akuma wa boku no
mono da” (ibid., 122).

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The Victorian Childhood of Manga: Toward a Queer Theory of

the Child in Toboso Yana's Kuroshitsuji

Anna Maria Jones

Criticism, Volume 55, Number 1, Winter 2013, pp. 1-41 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 16 Apr 2020 22:35 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

He seems to be a very mature little fellow.

The turn taken was away from a good boy’s book—

detail presently).5 Indeed, Kuroshitsuji is a sophisticated meditation on the

across those disciplinary boundaries, both because of its status as a global

Some Preliminary Discussion of the Manga and Its Contexts

A supernatural/gothic manga series written and illustrated by Toboso

adventure story in late-Victorian England and frames it around the ex-

fans of BL and more sexually explicit yaoi stories of male-male relation-

And Now for the Theory

I invoke Lee Edelman’s argument in No Future (2004) in part as an expla-

from “the Child” and sentimentality. As he claims, “Queerness attains its

Edelman’s critique of futurity launches a would-be psycho-

children. In his effort to stabilize a dubious opposition be-

masochistic ones) that would be too disturbing if represented “too close to

Both narratively and visually, Kuroshitsuji creates a constant tension be-

image of the Child” that Edelman points to in contemporary political

Ciel: “Se– . . . Sebastian . . .”

Of course, corseting itself carries plenty of sexualized, fetishized freight,

Kuroshitsuji’s Victorian Childhood: The Maiden Tribute of Little

I am sure he is trying to help me in his innocent way—I

When he tried to figure to himself the morning twi-

Figure 2. Sebastian prepares Ciel to go undercover in Kuroshitsuji, volume 2, written and

Contradictory as it may seem, there was nothing which en-

Indeed, throughout the novel, it is the childish innocence that particularly

Mrs. Errol glanced down at Cedric. He was lying in a

“Healthy and well-grown?” asked my lord.

“Straight-limbed and well enough to look at?” de-

Of course, little Lord Fauntleroy is a fictional character, and a boy, so

Fauntleroy (who was himself supposedly based on Burnett’s son Vivian)

One excellent lady was scandalised at the presence of

rather to focus on James’s explicit attention to children’s literature. To

He had a moment of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the

Kuroshitsuji employs some very Jamesian imagery to convey a similar

children’s exploitation, but the entire story is premised, narratively and

Think of the Children?

Of course, while the series is still being written, it is impossible to say

Sebastian: “Burn it? You mean this place?”

Figure 7. Ciel commands Sebastian to destroy everything in Kuroshitsuji, volume 8, written

Sebastian: “But, young master, Gathering from Her Maj-

This assertion of the child’s agency is followed by a very strange sequence

Toboso’s style of illustration, significantly, changes from the end of the

If the conclusion of the “Maiden Tribute” story arc serves to un-

Anime News Network, 5 August 2011, accessed 10 May 2012, http://www.animenews

37. Edelman, No Future, 11.

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