The Children

The Children repeatedly connects artistic creation with extraction, raising questions about what artists are entitled to use and who owns the stories they create from other people’s lives. This conflict operates both literally and metaphorically. The supernatural entity known as Mother can transfer the creative “light” of one person to another, but Edith also builds her celebrated Ninth City series from the identities and experiences of her children. Guin and Ennis therefore grow up confronting two forms of exploitation: the supernatural theft that fuels their mother’s creativity and the more ordinary violation of having their childhoods transformed into material for public consumption.

Mother makes the relationship between creation and exploitation literal. As Ennis explains, she requires someone with a “particular kind of light” to empower another person (369). Llewellyn’s artistic vitality disappears as Edith begins producing the Ninth City books, while other creative people who enter the Farmhouse suffer similar losses. However, the novel distinguishes this stolen creativity from creative ability itself. Guin possesses the “bright” quality Mother seeks naturally, and Ennis eventually tells her that she has “what Edith had to take” (379). The horror lies not in creativity or artistic ambition but in acquiring creative power through the consumption of others.

Edith’s treatment of her children extends this dynamic beyond Mother’s supernatural system. She gives the protagonists of the Ninth City books Guin’s and Ennis’s names and likenesses, turning her children into characters before they’re old enough to understand or consent to that exposure. As adults, both siblings remain trapped by the public identities that Edith created for them. Fans approach Guin as if they know her personally, while Ennis experiences the public’s continued access to his childhood self as a profound violation. He tells Guin that readers continue to “take from [them]” (378), expressing his sense that Edith made parts of them permanently available for strangers to possess. The siblings’ conflict with their mother’s legacy is therefore also a struggle to reclaim ownership of themselves.

Ennis nevertheless reproduces a version of the system he resents. After becoming bound to Mother, he devises a method of feeding her through his artwork, placing supernatural “doors” in his installations that allow her to take small “tithes” from receptive viewers. He considers this more ethical than Edith’s sacrifices because Mother ordinarily takes only a small portion of a person’s creative hunger, but Marla Kaufman’s death demonstrates that he can’t fully control the consequences. His solution exposes the moral compromise underlying his art: He condemns the exploitation committed against him while finding ways to justify exploiting others.

Guin ultimately embraces a similar contradiction. Throughout much of her adult life, she has suppressed her own desire to write while making a career from managing Edith’s literary legacy. Reuniting with Ennis forces her to recognize both her genuine creative ability and the appetite she has tried to deny. She comes to see children and artists as figures who “hoard and […] steal” from the world around them and transform what they take into something new (381). Rather than resolving the ethical problem, the novel ends with Guin and Ennis taking control of the Ninth City series and preparing to use it for their own purposes. Their decision leaves the boundary between artistic creation and exploitation deliberately unsettled: Art inevitably draws upon lives, memories, and experiences, but The Children repeatedly asks what happens when treating the world as material becomes treating other people as material.